Seventeen-year-old Katherine asks, “Exactly what does it take to get published?”

First-time author Kevin sends me his manuscript and wants me to edit it so it can be publishable.

My response to all three people is, “The best thing to do right now is to create a blog and see if anyone is interested in what you have to say and the way you say it.”

Listen carefully, please: Being an author is not what it used to be!

It doesn’t have to necessarily mean having a print book. Not anymore.

Now it means establishing your authority in a credible way and gathering a following.

You can best do that, these days, by having a blog. One that you write regularly for. One that you drive eyeballs to through other means, such as Twitter, Facebook, articles, teleseminars, the media, and a myriad of other kinds of online and offline connections.

With a blog, you can publish for free.  Sorry, Kelsey, there is no such thing as publishing a book for free. Even if you get a publisher to pay you to publish, as in traditional publishing where they pay the publishing costs and give you an advance against royalties, you will have to invest something sometime in marketing and promotion. And it’s extremely difficult for first-time authors to get published in this way–unless they have a platform, that is, a following. So now we’re back to, How do you get a following? Answer: Create a very successful blog.

You can figure out how to create a decent blog by watching how others do it, and a couple I recommend are Jimmy D. Brown, Seth Godin, Michael Hyatt and Alex Mandossian.  If you have no idea how to start a good blog and want expert help, then I highly suggest you take the Wordpress Workshop with Cathy Perkins, The Wordpress Wizard. It starts TODAY, but sessions will be recorded. Cathy will actually give you a student blog to work on during the course, so by the time you’re done, you will have the kind of blog that will establish your credibility.

When you sign up for the workshop, you’ll get two great bonuses from me: the “How to Choose Your Bestselling Title” Special Report (to help you title your blog and book), and a free 30-minute consultation at the end of the course to make sure your blog is also the most effective it can be for an author. Details and signup here.

Blogging is free, it’s a way to test your market and establish your authority. As I said in previous blog posts, it may be THE current way to become an author.

So get a blog, and get published! (Just remember, “author” is no longer limited to “publishing a print book.”)

However, it can’t be just any blog.

Someone contacted me this past weekend about doing a Virtual Book Tour. His book is about to be published, he has a blog and is doing a lot of things right.

However, his blog is hosted on Wordpress.com, rather than his own site. I learned from my blogging coach, Cathy Perkins a.k.a. the Wordpress Wizard, exactly why you don’t want your blog hosted on that site or blogger.com or any site that isn’t your own.

Simply:

You don’t own the content, and you can’t sell anything.

Read the Terms of Use carefully, if you have your blog hosted on wordpress.com or blogger.com.

In some cases, you can’t sell anything. They retain the right to shut you down, without warning, if you sell anything on the site. (Now, it may take them a while to find out. But if/when they do, they can shut you down.)

Also, you don’t necessarily own the content on your blog when you let them host it. If you’re an author or aspiring author, your content is what you have to sell. You MUST own it.

Do you want to be shut down and lose all your content? It’s worth the $5-10 or so a month to get hosted, and the $10 or so per year to get your own domain name.

Solution: Get your own domain name, host it at a good hosting company, install a Wordpress blog (it only takes a couple of minutes if you host here). If you have a blog now, you can import it, and you’re all set.

Your content is too valuable not to own it and protect it. And, of course you want the freedom to sell whatever you want on your site. A blog can help you “be well heard and well paid for what you know and love to do”–but only if you do it right.

To learn how to not only “do it right” but also ENJOY it and not get bogged down with technical roadblocks, I suggest you check out the WordPress Workshop that is coming up next week. Cathy is my blogging coach and I recommend her to you, too. You want complete control over your blog and your content, and this course will give you everything you need to know to do that.