You may have already done an online interview, and very likely more than one if you have an author page on Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Pinterest or Google. I’ve even been offered them through messages on Twitter. Did they increase your book sales during the time you were helping the blogger to promote them?

If the answer is no, and you did spend time on all your publicity platforms spreading the word about the interview and providing a link, there are several things you should do before you accept another invitation to spend hours filling out forms.

Ask for a link to the blogger's website, if he or she hasn’t already provided one. Only the owner of a website can see how many people looked at a blog, but a clue that you can see is how many comments were added after an author interview. To reach comments, the visitor has almost certainly read the whole interview and has been sufficiently interested to sign in and write a comment. You can also see if another blogger, or more, has shared an interview and widened the potential audience.

When you find a blogger whose website ticks all those boxes, ask for, or accept, the list of questions. If that list is twenty or more questions long, is there an option to choose which, and how many, the blogger expects you to answer? There are two reasons to consider this. Long interviews, given an author photograph, at least one book cover with the blurb and a buy link, making them longer still, rarely hold attention, and are less likely to be shared. Secondly, answering too many questions at once will leave you struggling to find different but interesting answers next time.

The best author interview that I’ve ever done asked for four hundred words that were “light and fluffy”, and the "interviewer" also suggested that her few questions could be answered by you as the author, as one of your characters, or a combination of both. It was great fun to write, and my pleasure obviously came over to readers, judging by the number and style of the comments, the eager rebloggers who spread my potential audience net, and the sales spike, especially on the book actually featured.

Few bloggers will make an offer like that, but your answers to the relatively standard questions can be interesting, written in a “fun” tone, kept short, and of course proofread, preferably by at least one friend. Bloggers load the answers you send: they don’t check commas for you.

Every author has something amusing, or maybe scary, to say. We all do research, so what happened when you paddled off the Florida Keys? Vital notes were whipped away by a breeze? You wandered so far you couldn’t find your clothes? I joined an online chatroom to research how sex-traffickers might trap victims. I shall keep quiet about the strange emails I’ve received since I can use them in an author interview.