Good morning Story Empire readers. PH here with you today getting back to using meta-content from your novel development as a way all of communicate to readers about your book. You can read the first post in this series where the concept of creating content with dual-purpose is discussed in more detail.

Today, I wanted to get into the specifics of developing content that you can use while creating your novel as well as later on when marketing your release. One of the more popular ways of marketing at release is to take your book on blog tours. Some authors do quite a lot of these while others may do none at all. I suspect that some of us do fewer or none at all because we don’t have the time to prepare this much content around our busy lives in order to release a book more effectively. My belief, based on experience, is that creating meta-content automatically gives you this material.

Let’s take one step back before we go forward and revisit a few concepts. First, for those who may be wondering what I mean by meta-content in relation to your development, meta-content simply means additional material that you may write up. This content can vary depending on the genre of fiction which you are writing. Using a lot of historical research is automatically rich with information you can use later on and this can be very obvious to use. But other forms of meta-content would include any sort of profile you create about characters, setting, and much more. If you are spending a lot of time on these types of material development in order to better enhance your novel, then this is meta-content that can be very important as a dual use.

Speaking of dual use, this is a concept where you as an author are creating your meta-content with a sense that it will not lie unused or inert, but instead, will also be used in marketing. What this means is A you are writing profiles, it may be good to think in terms of how the information can be used later on and write it for that purpose. Today in discussing blogs, we are approaching how to develop meta-content in such a way to easily convert the information into a blog.

When launching a book, everything becomes a blur. You may find yourself overwhelmed and struggling to come up with viable blog posts to hand out to friendly authors or blog tour services. You might find yourself repeating the same blog over several times and this is not necessarily a problem if you are expecting to reach a different audience at various blog stops. However, it is also important to create some unique, if not related, material for many of these blog tours as well as your own site if you blog.

So let’s get into some of the construction around developing content that can be used as both a blog and an aid for you writing your novel. Those who are more organized will likely sit down and write up quite a lot of information about aspects of their novel including characters. As a fantasy writer I spend a lot of time world-building so there are innumerable topics I can address. Anyone with speculative fiction will develop settings with plenty of information. With the idea of dual use, it makes sense to write profiles on these topics with the idea that you will re-use the as a blog post at some point. This means you can get very creative with your profile regardless of what it is.

If you are using Scrivener, then you will be able to organize these profiles to be easily access this information for blog purposes when you’re preparing for your book launch. As an example here is an excerpt from one of my posts. I actually wrote three of these, one for each of my books in The Bow of Hart Saga, The Bow of Destiny, An Arrow Against the Wind, and The White Arrow. These are based on a character who name is Tordug. They were written in a style to seem like they are news reports at various points in each book. This gives the reader a sense of some intriguing events about each book which hopefully draws eyes to them. This is what I mean by creating content that gives you an idea about your character story-line and much more.

The problem with these is that I wrote these after my books were published. Now I think of these in terms of writing similar content so I better understand my characters, setting and other aspects of world building in such a way that I can take the profile and modify it to match the end result and easily have a blog available

So I hope I’ve been able to convey how to get blog posts easily constructed out of your meta-content from which you are developing your novel content. This dual use idea should be a time-saver and also give you quite a lot of creative flow with your marketing.

What types of information can you reuse for your marketing? Have you ever thought of developing your meta-content for both your novel and marketing content at the same time? Do you think dual use as a concept would be helpful to you?

Thanks for stopping by and reading this post on Story Empire. If you like what you’ve read please share it on social media or re-blog it on your site. Please leave your answers and thoughts in the comments section and I will get back with you as soon as I am able.