Marketing

Pinterest is an amazing tool for authors but only if used regularly. Unfortunately, pinning can be a major time waster and may gobble up the precious minutes you should be … writing!

One way to get around this is to schedule your pins a week at a time.

There are programs available that will allow you to schedule your pins. The bad news is that the ones I could find are all subscription based, starting at $10.00 a month and going up to $100 for noncommercial users. While that might be affordable for some, it may not be for authors on a limited budget.

The bottom line behind scheduling is planning. Remember the old adage: for every hour you spend in planning you save three in work time. If you take an hour a week to plan your pins, you can then pop in the pins every evening in just three minutes.

The best […]

Behind every successful author is a dedicated group of fans. Let’s call it your author fan club.

This club may not include card-carrying membership with dues, name tags, or annual parties, but it does exist in some form or other. As an author, you need a faithful group of followers to ignite your book sales, show up at your events, and promote by word of mouth everything that comes off the press.

I do realize that when you start out, this fan club consists of your closest family members. They do come to your events, don’t they? No matter how small a fan club you have, the truth is, you do have one, and your task is to make it grow.

The easiest way to get started is to start collecting email addresses from your author website.

Of course, all that is much easier said than done.

Collecting email addresses from casual website visitors with […]

Building your author platform is a daily exercise every author must commit to for a book’s success.

If Twitter is part of your social media routine, coming up with interesting and relevant tweets can be a chore. One way to make this task easy is to create a tweet subject list.

To get started, decide how many tweets a day you will do. Three to five is usually a good number to start with. Leaving it up to whatever happens happens usually means that nothing will happen. So get yourself a piece of paper and let’s get started building your author tweeting program.

For this example, I am going to help you plan for five tweets a day. You can shorten it if you like to three or four.

When tweeting, a good practice is to offer tips, links, and interesting news items that will be of interest to your followers. Obviously, you want […]

Today we’ll look at how you as an author can use hashtags in your tweets in order to attract followers for your Twitter author profile.

Here’s the basic information to compose your first #hashtag tweet.

Use the hashtag # symbol before a word you want to target. This will enter your tweet into a conversation based on that thread. Don’t put a space between the symbol and your keyword or between words in a phrase:

#mickeymouse #donaldduck #baby #author #bookmarketing

For this exercise, we’re going to use a fictional author named Arthur J. Author, who wants to build a Twitter platform to sell his new book, Frugal Retirement.

He has just started his Twitter account and has zero followers. He knows his target audience is over 60 and worried about money.

He has come up with a word list that he thinks will connect with his target audience: retirement, senior, senior living, frugal, budget, retirement savings, […]

Twitter is about making connections in short, snappy bits of conversation. You have 140 characters for each message, which includes text, hashtags (#), private connections (@), links, and photos.

In this post we’ll discuss how to use hashtags in a search to find new contacts, conversations, and information.

Twitter Search

Type in a word or phrase in the Twitter search bar and you will get a list of tweets matching what you have entered, e.g., candy, finances, weather.

Use that same word or phrase but add a hashtag (#) before the keyword or phrase and you get a greatly expanded list. This is because the actual tweet may not be using the keyword specifically in the text, but the author of the tweet thought it was relevant enough to that topic and inserted that keyword with a hashtag.

For instance if you type #scifi, #money, or #cat into a Twitter search bar you will be […]