Acerca de

Context

I wrote this blog post during the summer of 2021, when I was serving as a Social Media/Marketing Intern for Discover Books, an online used book distributor. The other two interns working that summer and I took turns writing a company blog post each week on a book-related topic of our choice. At the beginning of my internship, I browsed the previous blog posts on Discover Books’ website to help me in coming up with topic ideas for my posts, and I noticed a standalone post titled “Authors with April Birthdays.” I thought that featuring authors born in each month could work well as a series, so I pitched the idea to my supervisor and got approval to write posts about authors born in May, June, July, and August. Of those four posts, the one I wrote for the month of July was most effective in terms of content, style, and reach.

Rhetorical Decisions

    Since the post for April had featured ten authors, I researched ten for each of my posts to maintain consistency. When selecting authors to feature, I wanted to appeal to a wide audience, so I tried to find a diverse mix of authors for each month’s list: classic and contemporary, male and female, adult and children’s/young adult, writers of different races and in various genres. However, I also wanted at least half of the authors to be ones that moderate-to-avid readers in the United States (Discover Books has some international customers but mostly appeals to U.S. residents because they only offer free shipping on domestic orders) would easily recognize. For example, I figured that many audience members would have grown up with Beatrix Potter’s stories, read Ernest Hemingway’s novels in their high school English classes, and developed some frame of reference for J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I met most of my goals each month, but my post for the month of July had the widest range of authors as well as the most famous ones.

    Additionally, I had become comfortable with the drafting and revision process that I was using in WordPress by my third post and was able to focus more on optimizing the post for search engine recognition using the company’s Yoast SEO plug-in as a guide. According to the algorithm, making my sentences shorter and my verbs more active would help audience members engage with the whole post. I also included many images for visual appeal (using center alignment for ease of reading on mobile devices and alt text to help readers with disabilities) and both internal and outbound links that search engines could pick up on in addition to their allowing readers to purchase the books mentioned in posts more easily. Finally, longer posts are more search-engine-friendly but not as reader-friendly, so I used subheadings to divide up the post by author, allowing readers to skim more easily and identify authors they wanted to know more about on an individual basis.

Reflection

    This blog post got the most views from audience members and the best feedback from my supervisor and fellow interns of the four that I wrote for the internship at Discover Books. I was genuinely proud of my work and very much enjoyed the writing process—choosing authors, researching fun facts about them, drafting, revising, receiving feedback, and publishing. Two weeks after I published this post, I received an offer for paid contract work from Discover Books to continue my blog series on authors’ birthdays in each month through February 2022.