Must Do Marketing: Phase Two

There are three primary reasons you must market your writing. Promotions are free, offers name recognition, and helps to sell your books. After the basics of having a blurb, email, web page, and business cards, comes Phase Two of marketing your work.

1.  Start a portfolio. This can simply be a binder with page protectors. Whenever your name or your book appears in print, date it and the source and put it in the binder. You can display this binder at your writer events and presentations.

2.  Take photos. Always have a camera with you to capture you in action. Photos of you with other authors is also a good idea. Take the photo showing the signage of the event or your table display. You want to remember that book fair, book launch, or the meet-and-greet at a writers' conference. How about when someone wins that gift basket you donated?

3.  Write book reviews.  Ask other writers to trade books and both of you agree to read and do a book review on line. If someone mentions they have read and enjoyed your book, ask them if  they would write a review. There are also online author sites where you can request a review and repost reviews.

4.  Make presentations. Offer to speak at libraries, school career day, church groups, book clubs, senior centers, or community organizations.  This is especially worthwhile if your book fits into a season, social need, or community concern or event.

5.  Teach a class.  This can be done informally at a life-long learning organization or a parks/recreation community program. If you have the educational credentials and experience, you can teach a college course or create a short seminar or discussion group.

6.  Offer to speak at local book clubs. You can generate interest in your book by talking about your experiences writing or publishing your work. You can compare your work to similar books. You can discuss what makes your book the same or different from other writing styles.

7.  Make book baskets. Give these as prizes and gifts for all occasions. Put your book, business card, and related items in a basket and keep it on hand for birthdays, house warmings, teacher gifts, hospital visits, charitable events, and so on.

8.  Display your books at out-of-town events. Many conferences and book fairs offer a Display Book Only option for a small fee. This is a great way to reach bigger markets and gain exposure beyond your family, friends, and local community. Some will return your book if you enclose a SASE.

9.  Write a media release. Send this out each time you launch a new book, speak at a library or conference, participate in a book fair, or win a prize. If you win an award, or have a promotional opportunity, unrelated to your writing, be sure to include the fact that you are an author and mention the title of your book(s).

10..Participate in book fairs. These tend to be more intimate learning and selling opportunities. You may begin to meet some of the same writers and form friendships. This can lead to an exchange of editing and critiques of each other's work. Typically authors sell books and related items to attendees and give out and exchange business cards for future contact.

 ~ ~ ~

~ Valerie Allen ~

VAllenWriter@cs.com                                          ValerieAllenWriter.com

Facebook.com/Valerie.Allen.520

Amazon.com/Author/ValerieAllen

Psychologist, author, and speaker writes, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, and children's books. She is a popular presenter at writer conferences and the author of, “Write, Publish, Sell! 2^nd Editon.”

 Beyond the Inkblots: Confusion to Harmony

Write Publish Sell!

Summer School for Smarties

Bad Hair, Good Hat, New Friends

Amazing Grace

Sins of the Father

Suffer the Little Children

'Tis Herself: Short Story Collection, Vol 1

Must Do Marketing: Phase One

There are three primary reasons you must market your writing. Promotions are  free,  offer name recognition, and help to sell your books. Here are 10 quick and easy steps to jump start your book marketing plan.

1.  Create a 25 word blurb. It must sum up the essence of your book. Practice saying it, so you will be prepared when asked what your book is about.

2.  Email tags. After your name, this information should also be in your signature line: your book titles and all of your contact information, email, web page, Facebook, Twitter, and blog addresses.

3.  Create a web page. This can be simple or complex. You can obtain a domain name and use a template that is provided. It's important to have all of your contact information on every page and to update your web page frequently.

4.  Have business cards. Be sure all of your contact information is on your business card.  Do not put your home address or personal phone number. On the reverse side you can list your book titles or put a title with a blurb.

5.  Join a writers' group. This provides networking opportunities with authors, agents, editors, and publishers. You learn invaluable tips and information and become known as an author.

6.  Attend writer conferences/seminars/workshops/presentations. This provides a larger group for networking and learning. You can also find out what successful authors are doing beyond your local area.

7. Always have books available. You should have a minimum of five books in your car. You should always carry at least one of your books when attending a writer event.

8.  Donate your books: They can be given as door prizes, not only at writer events, but also to local charitable organizations or a non-profit that supports a cause related to your content.

9. Write an interesting bio: Tell about yourself, your education, credentials, awards, and what led you to write this particular book.  You can offer a brief bit of personal information, such as your dog's name, or you have triplets, or hiked the Grand Canyon. Write several different bios to suit different target groups.

10. Always acknowledge those who support you as an author: Offer to read and review their book for online book sellers. Thank any journalist or media person who gave you a write up. Especially acknowledge those who make referrals to you or give your book to someone as a gift.

Marketing Phase II will be here on WGT on 3/29/15. Watch this space!

~ Valerie Allen ~

VAllenWriter@cs.com                                          ValerieAllenWriter.com

Facebook.com/Valerie.Allen.520

Amazon.com/Author/ValerieAllen

 Beyond the Inkblots: Confusion to Harmony

Write Publish Sell!

Summer School for Smarties

Bad Hair, Good Hat, New Friends

Amazing Grace

Sins of the Father

Suffer the Little Children

'Tis Herself: Short Story Collection, Vol 1

A Writer's Prosaic Drive By

Samuel Murphy

Personally, I believe that the experts finally got something right: As difficult and exhausting as writing can be, nothing compares to the challenges and sheer misery of marketing one's self.

Just the huge numbers of electronic avenues make this experience quite daunting. (I run into that word quite often when I discuss trying to sell one's work). And as many of us have come to realize, it's not just the sheer numbers of Internet sites, it's the TIME you need to spend on them to make yourself credible. That's the REAL killer. I'll spend at minimum, an hour agonizing over THIS composition.

And so we Google, “How do I promote my new book?” Up comes millions of sites with easy sounding names, like “How to Sell a Million Books With One Click of a Button,” or “Make sure you become a member of the following 438 sites you can post on to make your book a bestseller,” and “Here’s a complete list of book bloggers that will review your book and make you wildly successful.”

Of course, The “One Click of a Button” leads you to websites that are impossible to navigate and probably useless, but for the sake of just one sale, for the next day or two down the rabbit hole you go. The 438 sites? Let’s just politely say that it’s not that they are not interested in your life; they are just interested in theirs a little more. And then there’s the bloggers who will review your books - for only $29.99, but it will take about 3 months, and they have so many restrictions, and they always seem to be yelling at you, but that’s OK because most of them no longer exist or let you know that they are not accepting new submissions until the summer of 2015.

So here you are, all excited and duly proud of yourself for having completed something that you devoted weeks, months, even years to and you can't even get your sister to buy one and give it a five star rating. You should be having this HUGE celebration with all your friends. Instead, you're fumbling around like a teenager in the back seat of your old man's Chevy, trying to add some kind of Pin to a Board on a site that you REALLY don't care about, and then Googling one inactive “Will review your book for free” site after another.  And it's TWO O'CLOCK IN THE DAMN MORNING!

But you've checked your numbers and you're 697,364 in Amazon's Best Seller Rank. So you text and you tweet. You create a fan page. You blog. You Skype. You Pin, and you Tumble. You contact every "friend" you have, and have them contact every friend they have, and every friend they have, and so on down the line. "Yes," they say, "I'll get me a copy of that new book you just published. I'm gonna read it, rate it, and give it a whole passel of stars." Two days later and now you're at 798,621.

And so you text and tweet some more looking for support and ideas. But as much advice as I get; I write. I consider myself a writer. Maybe not a very lucid one, but a writer nonetheless. I have stories inside of me. Having them stay there while I attend to other business only makes them fester and this will ultimately lead to some really bad juju.

By nature I am not a tweeter or a texter, a Pinner, or Tumbler. I don't try to StumbleOnto anything. Don't much care for Skyping, and I secretly hate all of my "friends" on Facebook.

And so here I sit, trying to promote my book on one more site, and it's now 3 o'clock in the damn morning. I just keep repeating to myself, "I'm a writer..., this will work..., I'm a writer, this will work..., I'm a writer…

I guess you can consider this some kind of prosaic drive by. I don’t know about you, but for once, I feel better.
                                                          

Samuel Murphy
Amazon
Meet him on Twitter: @swmurf

Detective Visibility and The Mystery of Amazon Categories....

By Terry Tyler

...... I've read a bit recently about getting my books more visible on Amazon, because we all know that "discoverability" is one of the best ways to get people reading your books, right? 

I know that genre charts are massively important, probably THE most

important thing in this. The trick is to find categories that will be searched for by book buyers, but are not too extensively populated already. Both my last two books, Dream On and Full Circle, got to about 2000 in the chart at their highest point, but were not in any genre charts because I'd chosen massively over-used things like contemporary fiction, so I knew I had to sort that out before I did the 77p promotion for them this weekend.

Dream On and Full Circle are both centred around two things: musicians wanting to hit the big time, and love relationship/parenthood tangles. In Dream On my character Janice is a single mother; the book features much about her day to day life. In Full Circle, three of my main characters have small children - the fatherhood thing is one of the central themes. In this book the subject of alcoholism is also prominent, but I couldn't find a fiction category that deals with this...

.... and, furthermore, there is, apparently, no such Amazon genre as 'rock fiction'. I researched the subject of categories quite extensively, and eventually found the perfect one for Dream On: lad lit. Dream On has as many reviews from men as from women, virtually all of whom loved the rock band bits, saying that the banter between the men is so realistic (pssst!! - the two other main characters are women!!). Marvellous, thought I - really relevant to my book, and not highly populated - a real "Eureka!" moment! I emailed Amazon. No, can't put it in lad lit. Why not? Because that category exists for Books but not for Kindle Books. Okay.....

Now, this is interesting, and something that might be useful for us all to know: Amazon explained to me that the categories you see books in, on the books' own pages, aren't necessarily their own standard categories from which you can choose to place your book. They are decided by customer search; what the customer put in the search facility, and how often your book is clicked on after such a search. Which explains a lot, I think. Like why my psychological drama You Wish sometimes enters the 'occult' chart.... at no point have I chosen 'occult' as a genre for that book.

You may have read in a certain best-selling book about visibility that all you need to do is identify the category and chain leading to it, and email Amazon to ask for your book to be put in it (eg, Kindle>Fiction>Mystery>Victorian); I don't know if this was ever correct, but it certainly isn't now. Amazon assures me that it doesn't work like this.

After further extensive research I identified two other perfect Kindle fiction categories that would apply to aspects of both books - please note: I made sure they were both for fiction, and specified that the books should be in the FICTION categories first and foremost. Thus: Single Parent for Dream On, and Fatherhood for Full Circle. I emailed Amazon with my requests.

I am happy to say that both books are, this morning, in genre charts.
Dream On is in Non Fiction>Parenting & Families>ParentingFull Circle is in Books>Health,Family & Lifestyle>Families & Parents>Fatherhood

I give up.....

(I just hope that people are intelligent enough to read the blurb before going to purchase a self-help book about parenting and ending up with a philandering wannabe rock star getting hauled onto the Jeremy Kyle show....)

Terry Tyler is author of Full Circle, Dream On, The Other Side, Nobody's Fault and You Wish, and a member of Independent Authors International. Visit Terry Tyler's blog at terrytyler59.blogspot.com.

Marketing Tips

We thought we would share some great tips with you on how a writer can market their work for little or no cost. All of the following tips are from “Guerrilla Marketing for Writers”
1) Content: Publishers waste millions of dollars a year buying and promoting books that fail.
No amount of money or marketing can overcome a book that doesn’t deliver. So your first challenge is to write a book that is the best it can be. The content of your books will determine how you sell them to publishers and promote them to book buyers. Content precedes commerce.
2) Commitment: You must make a commitment to your marketing program.
Talent isn’t enough. You need motivation—and persistence, too. —LEON URIS
Once you decide on the best promotion plan for your books, make the commitment to stick with it.
The only time you can safely stop promoting your books is when you’re ready to stop writing them. Before then, commit yourself to the Rule of Five: do five things every day to market your books. Think of it this way: A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.
3) Investment: You must think of marketing as an investment in your future.
Most best-selling authors don’t strike gold with their first book. Their sales grow with a succession of books until they write the breakout book that catapults them onto the best-seller list, where they stay for the rest of their careers.
Until your promotional efforts pay off and you become a successful author, consider the money you spend on promotion as an investment that will pay for itself many times over.
4) Consistent: Your marketing must be consistent.
You must make your promotion consistent so that, over time, the media and your readers become more receptive to you and your books. One of the weapons in chapter 18 is the marketing calendar that you will create and tweak as needed every year. But once you’re convinced about the most effective way to promote your books, don’t change your approach. Make your promotion, like your books, consistently first rate. Also be consistent about the frequency with which you write your books and when they are published. One book a year is the usual pace.
5) Confident: You must make potential readers confident in you.
Consistency creates familiarity, familiarity builds confidence, and confidence is the most important factor in determining what makes consumers buy. It’s more important than quality, selection, price, and service.
6) Patient: You must be patient with your marketing.
If you’re doing all you can for your books, take two more steps: • Follow up on your efforts. • Have patience with your promotion plan, the sales of your books, and the development of your career.
7) Assortment: You must use an assortment of weapons to ensure the success of your marketing.
Small businesses shouldn’t try to use all the weapons in their arsenals at once, but should unleash them over time with a well-thought-out plan. Unfortunately, this is a luxury writers don’t have. Unless publishers make a commitment to a book, they test-market it with the first printing. To sustain your publisher’s belief in your book’s future, you have to create maximum promotional firepower for it during the crucial four- to six-week launch window when it’s published.
Firing as many weapons as you can integrate effectively into your plan is the best way to accomplish this. If your book doesn’t gain momentum fast enough, your publisher will give up on it and go on to other books. Make it your goal to use at least sixty weapons. The wider the assortment of weapons you use, the wider the grin on your face will be when your royalty check arrives. However, if you can’t use a weapon effectively, don’t use it at all.
A Web site alone will not make your books successful, nor will a media kit. Regard every weapon as 1 percent of your promotion plan. The best way to guarantee the success of your books is to use as many weapons as you can. The more weapons you unleash on publication and the more completely you integrate them, the more powerful each of them becomes. Unity and variety are two of the keys to victory in the publishing wars. The bigger your arsenal, the greater your victories.
A bookseller who was chosen to receive the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year Award was using seventy-four guerrilla marketing weapons (and he was still trying to figure out how to use the other twenty-six!).
Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 No-Cost, Low-Cost Weapons for Selling Your Work – http://www.bookdaily.com/book/1034711
~~We hope this helps you as an author to get your work out there to the waiting reader! K.R. and I are working diligently, daily, to put into practice all the things we read about and learn. The above are some great encouragements that have helped to keep us motivated to move forward. Another great resource, is MasterKoda on Facebook. This author/editor/illustrator/marketing group is full of people who know the real meaning of putting others first. Join us, you won’t be sorry you did.

Tamy Burns

Just what you needed

...another blog post about how to sell your books. I don't want to repeat everything you have seen a hundred times already. Things like "use social media" or "do giveaways".  There's some of that in this post, because those two things are inescapable must do's for anyone who wants to sell more than three books to Aunt Mary and mom and dad. Here is what I do to promote my books. It works well enough that I actually sell some of them.

Use Amazon Kindle Select.

This is number one. Yeah, I know, everyone bitches about Amazon and its policy of exclusivity and so on. But unless you are doing really well on the other platforms and selling a significant number of books, KDP Select is the only way to go. Why? Because you want to take advantage of the many websites that will list your book when it goes free and almost all of them want an Amazon page to link to. You MUST do free promos. You can't list for free on Amazon. Amazon will sometimes match a $0.00 price on another platform, but you can't count on it, you can't plan for it and that means you don't have a plan that includes Amazon. Without Amazon you have eliminated around 80% of your potential market. Therefore, an opinion:

WARNING: OPINION ALERT

You can't reasonably plan a successful free promotion without Amazon.

KDP Select success depends on a lot of things. You need eight or ten or more 4 and 5 star reviews. You plan a promo a month ahead. Many sites want three to four weeks notice of a freebie. Sites change, the requirements change, sites come and go. The whole thing of self promotion is in constant flux. BTW, if you write erotica many sites will not list your promotion, so that might be a consideration for you.

Some sites want three days, some the same day or one day notice. Author Marketing Club  (http://www.authormarketingclub.com) is a good resource, free, and gives an easy way to list promos on many sites.

Plan a 3 day promo Friday-Sunday. Make sure you tweet about it, mention it on facebook (follow the posting rules in various groups) , Goodreads (join), and especially a few select Amazon discussion forums for authors (the only ones that allow self promo and product listing).

Follow up with a thank you to the groups, etc. where you posted. Success means a lot of free downloads. To me, that means at least a few thousand. Giveaways work better if the writer has a series. One book, okay, but the idea is to stimulate sales of all books. In my thriller series, White Jade is the first in the series and gets people interested in the series as a whole. It's priced at .99. The other books are 3.99.

Where else except KDP Select can you instantly get ten or fifteen thousand people to discover your book for free? Plus you get borrows that pay, a shot at being on one or two top 100 lists and if you do okay, promo flyers go out from Amazon. Yes! Amazon promotes you!

I rest my case.

Social Media (okay, have to talk about it)

Facebook: you need an author page. Pay FB to promote likes, it's worth it. Figure $60.00/month. Acknowledge the folks who "like" your page.

Twitter: Get an account. Get as many followers as you can. It's simple and free. Follow everyone back, follow the suggestions Twitter sends, don't worry about it. Tweet as often as you feel like it but don't always push the books. (conventional wisdom). Post stuff that's interesting. Retweet anything you find interesting. Support people. Don't spend a lot of time on it.

Twitter has a lot of members who will retweet your free promo post if you follow them and/or let them know about your promo. You can find them by a search on the web (Google) or by looking for "free" etc on Twitter. Learn about hashtags. There's a lot of info out there, but you have to look for it. I'm not going to attempt to put it here.

Amazon forums: pick one or two and join in. On promo days, look for other Amazon author forums (there are many) to post. Again, don't spend a lot of time...maybe a half hour or so.

Goodreads: same thing as Amazon.

There are a lot of other social media sites like Pinterest. If you like them and use them, fine. Don't get caught up in all the social media whirl or you won't have any energy or time to write.

What else should you do?

Ads: Use discretion and don't spend a lot of money. There are a lot of sites that will advertise your promo for $5 or less. Use them if you like. Ads are hit and miss. I don't know what works and what doesn't. Don't worry about it, use your intuition and do your research.

Make a plan. A budget is good (I'm bad at that). DON'T spend hours a day on self-promotion. Write instead. An hour a day is probably right at most for self promo.

Get a professionally designed website. This is your main portal, your contact point, your key exposure on the web. Do it as well as you can.

Get a professionally designed cover. Everyone who knows anything says this. They're right. Use the money you didn't spend on ads to get the design services you need. It doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars.

Use the author page on Amazon. It's important. Make it interesting but not full of your life history.

Write good descriptions for the sales page and the best blurbs you can. Study how the big guys do it and shamelessly copy their style.

Respond to readers, always. Acknowledge people who help you. Share resources.

Help out other authors when you can. That can be an encouraging word, a retweet, a comment in a blog, a shared article or something on your facebook page. It's not hard.

There is no competition. What, you say? Think about it. There are over 30,000,000 readers in the US alone. Enough for everyone. Just write a good book. If you're not thinking about how the other guy is taking sales from you, you are not immersing yourself in resentment and poverty thinking. No one is taking sales from you. Everyone can succeed.

Keep  writing. Get more than one book out there. DON'T fall into the trap of quantity vs. quality. Write the best book you can. Lately I see and hear a lot of talk about "commodity" writing, the idea being that cheap junk will bring in money because a lot of people don't care about quality, they just want something to read. I hate the whole idea of that and I don't agree.

Don't give up and get discouraged. If your book is well written and it's not selling, you need to find ways to get it out to as many people as possible, which brings us back to KDP Select as the best venue.

Be patient. This process takes time. It took Lee Child ten years to be an "overnight success". Figure a couple of years to start making consistent sales, maybe longer, maybe less. But believe in yourself.

Give up resentment about Amazon. I see a lot of that. It's a waste of time. Without Amazon the Indie Revolution would be almost non-existent. Be grateful. It's okay if they make a lot of money.

Set your intention. This is the most important thing of all. By this I mean that you KNOW you are a.) successful b.) going to make a bunch of bucks someday c.) you can trust the universe to back you up d.) your work is good enough to sell and sell well and e.) you're not worried about it, because you are definitely going to succeed AND you can FEEL it. Try it, you'll see.

Now go out there and sell a lot of books.

Alex Lukeman