My first introduction to the online romance community happened in about 1999 or so when I found the All About Romance website. Up until then, I’d had no one with which to discuss my love of romance novels, but through the small handful of interactive sites like AAR that existed back then, for the first time people like me had a forum for meeting other romance readers to discuss our favorite topic. Most people still didn’t have much access to the Internet at that point, so these sites were fairly small, but the regulars were talkative, and what they lacked for in numbers were amply made up for by their sheer exuberance.

Fast forward almost ten years (yikes!), and the online romance community has exploded. Readers, authors, and even agents and editors and other industry professionals are connecting with each other on a daily basis, and the websites that allow them to do this are so numerous that it boggles the mind. In the late 90s it was rare for an author to have a website, and the ones that did often had some sort of bare bones, homegrown, and not terribly professional looking site hosted on a free space like Geocities—oh, how we all loved Geocities! Today, however, it’s rare for an author not to have a website. A lot of aspiring authors even have sites, and the published ones that haven’t invested in their own dot com often at the very least have a blog.

Because, well, pretty much everyone these days has a blog. Many people even have more than one blog, and it’s been several years since group blogs were a novelty. And while people still claim that the majority of romance readers aren’t online (at least not in the form of participating in the online romance community), compared to ten years ago, there are an awful lot of us. This is why debut authors today are advised that they must have a website and they must do online promotion. The days of authors ignoring the power of the Internet are long gone.

But here’s the rub. Lately, it’s seemed to me that the number of people in the industry who come online to promote their products (i.e. authors and publishers) has grown far more in proportion to the size of their target audience. Authors these days are facing a pretty tough struggle to get the attention they want. Is it a competition? Hell, yeah. While it’s possible for readers to visit a great number of sites on a regular basis, there are only so many hours in a day. They have work, family, other commitments, and let’s not forget the time away from the computer to actually read the romance novels they come online to talk about.

So we all have to adapt. A few years ago, when my clients asked me what was the best way to draw traffic to their sites, I repeatedly used two words: contest and blog. Run a contest, I said, and readers will flock like pigeons to a pile of bread crumbs. Who doesn’t like winning free stuff? Start a blog, I said, to get readers to come back to your site often, so they’ll keep your name and your books at the forefront of their minds.

These days I sing a different tune. You should absolutely get yourself a professional looking site with content that readers are interested in. Want to do contests or giveaways for fun? Go ahead, but don’t expect it to help your sales numbers in a significant way, and don’t even hope that it’ll substantially increase your traffic, either, because it won’t—unless you offer up as a prize something crazy, something worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. (And even then, you’ll mostly just draw the attention of professional sweepstakes entrants who won’t give a fig about your books.)

Ditto on the blog. Keep it for fun, unless you have that magic touch that brings in the crowds. Some authors do have a huge following on their blogs, but let’s face it, most of them are already fans that would be buying the authors’ books, anyway. The biggest draws for readers seem to be reader blogs, probably because they feel more comfortable talking freely on those sites, and the regular Suzy Author thinking she can compete in such a field is probably being just a tad unrealistic. There are too many blogs out there and not enough of an audience to make more than just a handful of them wildly popular. And as more and more author sites, blogs, message boards, and such are popping up, the harder it will be to get noticed.

I don’t discourage authors from doing online promotion, but I’m also honest when they ask and tell them that very little of it will work the way they want it to. Some investment in making your book visible to the romance community is probably worth it, especially for unknown/debut authors, so do some research into the sites that offer ad space (check their traffic stats, ask author friends for advice, etc.), and pay for as much as you feel you can afford. Heck, even invest in a trailer if you must–but for goodness sake, don’t invest too much, because in my not-so-humble opinion, paying for a trailer is not so much like putting part of your advance into a high-interest savings account as it is burying your $$$ in the ground and hoping it’ll grow into a money tree.

Just do as much as you can without breaking the bank or putting your deadlines in jeopardy. And then you forget about the Internet, and you sit down and write the best damn book you can, because absolutely nothing sells like an actually good book that everyone starts talking about. Word of mouth still works best, even in the 21st century.

So, tell me. Have your romance community surfing habits changed? Do you visit as many blogs as you used to? Do you enter authors’ contests? What does it take for an author to really get your attention? This curious mind would love to know!

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This article was originally posted on Romancing the Blog.