Writing things that keep bringing readers
Almost everything authors do to promote a book is a firework. The post, the ad, the price drop, the interview: they run, they produce a spike, and the day after they stop the traffic is gone and the book is where it was.
There is a second kind of work that behaves in the opposite way. You write one genuinely useful page about something connected to your book, and people looking for that thing find it — this month, next year, and in three years, without you doing anything further. It builds up. Authors, of all people, are the ones least likely to try it.
What evergreen means here
Not "content". A page, a post or a video that answers a question people will still be asking in three years, on a subject next to your book.
The test is the date. If a reader would need to know when it was written for it to make sense, it is news. If it reads the same in 2030, it is evergreen. "My cover reveal" expires the week it goes up. "How the 1893 lock system on this canal actually worked" does not, and neither does "what to check before you sign a lease".
Why it suits authors particularly
Writing is the thing you can already do. Every other promotional channel asks you to learn a new craft — video, design, advertising, performing on camera. This one asks you to write a few hundred careful words about a subject you know.
You already did the research. Most nonfiction books leave behind three times what fits between the covers, and most novels leave behind a heap of specifics nobody else has assembled. That material is finished work that currently exists only in your notes.
It compounds instead of expiring. An advertisement costs money every time somebody sees it. A page costs an afternoon once, then answers the same question for everyone who asks it afterward. Ten such pages, four years in, are a steady arrival of people who went looking for something and found you attached to it.
It is not only for nonfiction
For nonfiction the fit is obvious: your book is about a subject, people search that subject, you write about the subject. Do that.
Fiction is less obvious and works fine, as long as you stop trying to write about the novel itself. Nobody is searching for your novel. They are searching for the things it is made of.
The setting. A city, an island, a mountain, a particular street in a particular decade. Write what a visitor or a curious reader would want to know about it.
The period. How people ate, traveled, were treated in hospital, got divorced, sent a message in 1912.
The research. The forensic detail, the sailing terminology, the way a real inquest is conducted, what a farrier actually does.
The craft. How you plot, how you keep a series straight, how you write around a day job. Other writers read this, and other writers buy books.
The thing the book is about underneath. A novel about grief can stand beside a page about grief that helps somebody, honestly written, with no pitch in it.
What to write, in order of how well it works
The questions you keep being asked. At events, in replies, in reviews. A question asked out loud three times is being typed into a search box by a thousand people who never asked you.
The research that did not fit. You cut it for pace. It was not bad, it was just not the book. It is a page.
The adjacent how-to. Not how to write a book. How to do the thing your book is next to: read a parish record, prune the tree, identify the bird, survive the first year.
The resource list nobody has assembled. Every subject has an obvious list that does not exist — the archives, the suppliers, the societies, the reading order, the glossary. Assembling it is dull work and that is exactly why it has no competition, and why it is the page other people link to.
In the tools. Material like this accumulates, and some of it eventually becomes a book of its own — a companion, a collection, a guide to the thing you keep being asked about. My Books can duplicate an existing book, copying its design and settings to a new one, so the second title looks like it belongs beside the first. Start your book → · about the tools
Put it somewhere you own
Your own site. Not a social platform, not a writing community, not a network that may change its rules or disappear — The author website, reduced to what it needs covers how little it takes to have one.
The reason is not sentiment. A page on your own site keeps its address, stays findable by search, can be improved for years, and points at your book in the way you decide. Anything you post elsewhere should be a short version that links back to the real one. Social platforms are good at pushing people somewhere; they are poor at holding anything — see Social media, for authors who would rather be writing.
Every page should carry a plain line at the foot: who wrote it, which book it came out of, where to get the book. Once, at the end. A page that helped someone earns that line; a page that sells at the top has stopped being useful.
The discipline, and the timescale
One good page beats twenty thin ones. Twenty shallow pages compete with each other, satisfy nobody, and make your site look like filler. One page that is genuinely the best answer to its question is worth more than all of them and needs writing once.
Updating usually beats writing new. The page that already gets found is the page worth another hour. Fix what has changed, add what you have learned, and leave it where it is. A better version at the same address keeps everything it had built.
Now the honest part. This works slowly. Nothing happens for months. The first page may never do much on its own, and you will be able to see no result at all for a long stretch during which other people's fireworks look far more productive.
That is not a defect; it is why it works. The slow thing you started two years ago is what makes a quiet month look busy, and it is the opposite of a launch tactic, which is exactly the argument for starting early rather than in launch week. For the fast counterpart — seasons, news pegs, price promotions and listing refreshes — see Promotion after launch week.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Promotion after launch week · More: Asking your readers things · The author website, reduced to what it needs · Keeping your backlist selling