Your book deserves an international stage — are your blog posts doing the heavy lifting to get it there? Here are the critical success factors you have to get right:
- Be discovered by AI search.
- Be discovered by the search engines that feed AI (SEO).
- Offer content that interests to your ideal reader.
- Guide your ideal reader to your book.
So here’s the secret:
- structure your blogs to be AI-friendly,
- choose your words to be SEO friendly, and
- align your message to be human friendly.
That’s a lot to ask, but if you begin with the goal—a book sale—it’s easier than you think.
How blog posts help discoverability
Writing blogs about your topic means you’re creating content assets that attract search engine traffic via keywords relevant to your book’s theme. This draw readers who aren’t aware of your book, but are interested in your topic i.e. new, pre-qualified ideal readers.
Blogs create entry points from search engines and build credibility and context around your author brand.
How is AI search different from SEO?
AI-powered search offers readers intelligent summaries. That’s what it wants from your website. Since it’s trying to be fast and efficient, you can help it by providing that summary yourself.
Start each blog with a 100-word summary using plain English, highlighting a common question, provide an answer, name your book and give a key insight.
How is AI search the same as good SEO ?
Most of the principles of good SEO, work just as well for AI-Search.
- Use natural language
- Chunk your content with subheadings which is easier to scan for both search engines AND humans
- Structure your post. Your headline must be H1, your subheading H2, your minor headings H3 and H4.
- Use short paragraphs and be concise.
- If you use acronyms, define them in brackets straight after so machines can index.
- Add unique insights or data so you’re not just another fluffy blog. Add value.
Blog strategy for book authors
- Define key blog topics from your book’s themes that have global appeal.
- For each topic, craft a blog post including regional references (e.g., “In Canada, the UK and Australia…”).
- Add a featured image—it’s automatically shown when you share on social media. Image posts get attention.
- Make sure you mention your keywords (but no keyword stuffing).
- Clear headings (H2 → H3 → H4) so AI and human readers can scan.
- Have a call to action (CTA) offering downloads or companion content in exchange for an email address.
- At the end of the post, include a soft link to your book
AND THEN - Share the blog page on LinkedIn, Medium article or a newsletter to amplify reach.
Whats the right blog platform for good discoverability?
WordPress
WordPress (self-hosted) has a domain name (preferably your author name or book title) and offers the most flexibility and SEO control using plugins for metadata, schema markup, speed optimisation. I build SEO into the websites I develop.
Wix
Wix has improved for SEO over the years, and is very user-friendly, but it lacks some of the advanced controls that serious SEO or AI-structured content might benefit from.
Squarespace
Squarespace is good for polished design and moderate blogging, but less flexible for deep technical adjustments.
Shopify
Shopify is primarily e-commerce; for blog-centric content the other platforms tend to rank better.
Substack
Substack is an amazing platform for blogging, and you get email addresses! Google can crawl Substack, but many newsletters are behind login walls or marked “email-first,” so they don’t always get indexed quickly or fully. In reality: Individual Substack posts rarely appear in top search results unless you already have a strong following
AI search tools (like Google’s AI Overviews or Bing Copilot) pull more from open-web, structured sources. Substack’s content is less structured and often not prioritised.
Medium
Medium has credibility, and is good for topic discovery and AI-driven exposure within a large content network. Search access is excellent. Medium articles are fully crawlable, with good technical SEO and internal linking. Medium has high domain authority, so well-written posts can rank fast for niche topics.
AI visibility is even stronger. Because Medium’s content is open and semantically structured, AI models (including Google’s AI Overviews) often cite or summarise Medium articles.
So choose a platform that honours structure and optimisation, and makes it easy for you to add high-value blog posts. If it’s easy, you’ll do it. If you dread it, you won’t!
Ready to take the next step? Let’s get your blog and book working together.
