Michele Lessirard of Vero Beach, Fla. writes:
“I have been blogging for more than seven years at New Moon Journal and my blog.
“Now, there’s a high-profile Harry Potter-type author named Stephanie Myers who’s written a series of vampire novels. One best-seller is New Moon. Of course, I am competing now for search engine optimization with her New Moon book and soon-to-be movie. The New Moon Journal is an astrology blog dedicated to creativity and personal growth using the lunar cycles for power, healing and problem solving.
“How can I use this name recognition and ride on the coattails of her book. Is it possible?”
Be very careful of attempting to ride the coattails of a popular hit, especially without knowing what it’s really about.
JKR’s Harry Potter is midgrade (ie age 10-15) Fantasy Adventure fiction — largely a young male readership — while Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight is Young Adult (ie age 14-19) Paranormal Romance or Urban Fantasy — primarily teen female readership. Both JKR fans and Meyers fans would generally take offense at the comparison.
So before doing anything else, find out what it is that you are attempting to leverage off of. See the first movie, at the very least.
From understanding the phenomenon, you can then move to figuring out what products or services you can provide to that demographic.
Next, you can research to create a list of the key words in the Meyers books, obviously including vampire, sparkle, romance, and so on, and figure out to what degree you can use those key words in your own Astrology posts to increase accidental traffic to your site.
You could do mock-horoscopes for the characters just for fun, although that’s a lot of work and might not get you anything in return. The key to doing that well would be to get copies of the books and read them, picking incidents to warn about. You might want to investigate fan sites to do this for you, and get at least one fan local to you to run ideas past and make sure you are not alienating the fan base.
One warning – put a link on your site that goes to the actual Meyers site, and clearly label on your site that you are not related to Meyers. This service does two things – it protects you against any claims of unfair competition (ie copyright infringement), and the popular outbound link incidentally will raise your rank in many search engines. You might also put a link to Amazon to buy the Meyers books, if you already have any Amazon links set up.
Create Google Alerts for keywords that relate to Stephanie Meyer’s topics as well as yours. You can do this at http://www.Google.com/alerts
Set this up so you receive the alerts once a day. Then follow them and see what Google delivers to you in the way of news stories, videos, blog posts, etc. In some cases, if a blogger is discussing Meyers’ books, you can post a comment and you’ll get a link back to your website or blog.
An easy way i think is start doing weekly astrology readings on author but even better do readings of the characters in her books then start tweets about it
Astrology can provide valuable insights into an author’s personality and creativity, but it should not be considered the sole factor contributing to their success. Stephanie Meyer’s accomplishments are the result of her talent and dedication, while astrology adds an intriguing element to comprehending her writing journey.