Marketing

21 June, 2013

Which came first: The audience or the book?

By |2023-06-09T11:28:54-07:00June 21, 2013|Marketing, Publishing, Resources|Comments Off on Which came first: The audience or the book?

Last time I revealed what to me was the most significant lesson learned during my last thirteen years running Wheatmark: that publishing success requires actively building an audience. A natural question many authors have about this is: Should I start building an audience for my book before or after I write it?

Ideally you’d write your book and build your audience simultaneously, so that your audience-building activities could inform the content of your book, and you could use your writing as a resource for your audience-building activities. But the deeper answer is: It doesn’t matter, because you’re going to have to do both to achieve publishing success, and you have to start somewhere! Let me illustrate this with two very different publishing success stories:

1. Start with an audience, then write a book: Just over a year ago, when Mark Baker published The Game Changer: A Simple System for […]

20 May, 2013

Book marketing tip: A cheap and easy way to schedule your Pinterest pins

By |2023-06-09T11:29:16-07:00May 20, 2013|Marketing, Resources, Social Media|Comments Off on Book marketing tip: A cheap and easy way to schedule your Pinterest pins

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 […]

17 May, 2013

How to do book research using Google online forms to gather information

By |2023-06-09T11:29:22-07:00May 17, 2013|Marketing, Resources, Writing|Comments Off on How to do book research using Google online forms to gather information

“Content is king.” The statement has been used so much it’s become cliché. Nevertheless, it is still true and creating valuable content means you provide information not available anywhere else.

One way to do this is to do your own research. Collect data online by asking a group of people to provide responses to a question or a series of questions. The information that you collect is uniquely yours so it can be a big selling point for making your book stand out authoritatively.

Let’s say you’re a historical fiction writer and you want to find out what people’s responses are to visiting a particular historical site. You could create a form with a question and then share it with those people who have visited the site by asking on Twitter or Facebook. A better way would be to connect with the historical site and ask for permission to survey their visitors. […]

16 May, 2013

How to grow your author fan club

By |2023-06-09T11:29:29-07:00May 16, 2013|Marketing, Resources, Social Media|Comments Off on How to grow your author fan club

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 […]

4 May, 2013

5 basic tweets for building your author platform

By |2023-06-09T11:29:34-07:00May 4, 2013|Marketing, Resources, Social Media|Comments Off on 5 basic tweets for building your author platform

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 […]

1 May, 2013

How to build a Pinterest research board for your book

By |2023-06-09T11:29:40-07:00May 1, 2013|Marketing, Resources, Social Media, Writing|Comments Off on How to build a Pinterest research board for your book

Whether your book is fiction or nonfiction, you can use Pinterest to create a better book by creating research boards.

What is a “research board”?

Basically, it is a board or series of boards that have images that link to anything related to your book. Take a look at these amazing research boards created by Alexa Chipman who writes young adult fantasy and science fiction.

You can create a board that takes place in the area your book focuses on: a state, city, park, or building.

Create separate boards for different categories of your book, such as: book cover ideas, characters, food, clothes, time period, places, spaces, weather, history, events, and anything else that will get you into the creative mood for writing your book.

For instance, let’s say you’re writing a mystery story that takes place in Corvallis, Oregon. Create a new board called “Corvallis, Oregon.” Now you can pin images, […]

11 April, 2013

How to use hashtags to find your first 100 twitter followers

By |2023-06-09T11:29:50-07:00April 11, 2013|Marketing, Resources, Social Media|Comments Off on How to use hashtags to find your first 100 twitter followers

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, […]

10 April, 2013

How authors can effectively use Twitter hashtags for writing research

By |2023-06-09T11:29:55-07:00April 10, 2013|Marketing, Resources, Social Media|Comments Off on How authors can effectively use Twitter hashtags for writing research

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 […]

18 March, 2013

How to get book reviews for a self-published book

By |2023-06-09T11:30:08-07:00March 18, 2013|Marketing, Publishing, Resources|Comments Off on How to get book reviews for a self-published book

How important are book reviews for new authors?

The best way to sell books is by word of mouth. The primary way to get that word of mouth rolling is to get your book reviewed.

The more important the book reviewer is the greater exposure your book will have. A book reviewed in the New York Times is going to outperform a book review on a small book blog with 200 readers.

Does this mean you should ignore the small ponds and fish for reviews only in the big ones? Not necessarily. If you are a new author, getting your foot in the door of book reviewers of any size might be well worth your while.

Ten reviews from small-sized bloggers will give you exposure to new readers that would otherwise never find your book. Keep adding to the pot and you will slowly build up your readership. Every book review that is posted […]

15 March, 2013

Do you have what it takes to be a self-publishing success?

By |2023-06-09T11:30:21-07:00March 15, 2013|Marketing, Resources|Comments Off on Do you have what it takes to be a self-publishing success?

Deborah L. Jacobs outlined her path to self-publishing success on Forbes in July of last year. It’s a three-page online article that gets into the nitty-gritty, practical details of doing it all yourself. In the comment section, she replies to one reader with this insight. “While I was in the throes of it I used to tell people, ‘It’s not a learning curve—it’s a learning mountain.’”

Deborah’s book, Estate Planning Smarts, is a bestselling book about estate planning for baby boomers and their parents. The mountain that she had to climb for success is daunting. It would scare off most faint-hearted authors with rose-colored dreams in the first paragraph. She states candidly that, “For more than one year after self-publishing my book, Estate Planning Smarts, promoting it was practically my full-time job.”

If you read the article she wrote for Forbes magazine, How My Book Became […]

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