Professional Development for the Professional Writer

I attended another workshop on marketing and promotion last Saturday run by Holly Roberts, USA Today Best Seller author. We can never get enough of this stuff, right?

In the fall, I attended one at our local Historical Novel Society meeting. I paid nothing for this one and gained a purse full of gold from Marylee McDonald’s stellar presentation.

I buy books on marketing and promotion. I read articles on marketing and promotion. I take classes when I can. Since this is not an area I feel confident in, I seek the information from knowledgeable others. As a professional writer, I have a responsibility to keep learning and growing. It’s my career, so I must assume the bulk of the responsibility for my success while being grateful for support from my publishers.

Every source says first write a good book. Well, I try. I do the best I can, but when I compare myself to Louise Penny, Jaqueline Winspear, Diane Mott Davidson, and others, I can see that my writing is not at that level. Yet. But I’m working on it. Honest.

However, the marketing thing can take over your life. At last Saturday’s Holly Roberts’ workshop, I learned so much about how to create a compelling ad, what I need to do on Facebook, and more. With four Facebook author pages, I need to up my game and post more content on each.

Okaaaay!

To figure out, maybe, how to be more efficient while being more effective with marketing and promotion, I am “attending” a Facebook group’s marketing strategies week-long focus beginning next week. For free! Maybe this one will be the magic bullet. Care to join me? Check out the 12-Minute Book Launch Challenge for yourself. 

I’ll be writing a limited series of what I’m learning/have learned about marketing and promotion. Come back next week for tips on building your mailing list and how to use it.

What are you doing that’s been effective for marketing your books without sucking up your whole life? Please share below.

Facebook: Are you struggling with the book marketing energy-time drain, too? Commiserate with Sharon Arthur Moore at http://bit.ly/2F6ntIO

Twitter: Are you struggling with the book marketing energy-time drain, too? Commiserate with @Good2Tweat at http://bit.ly/2F6ntIO

Branding 101: Promo and Marketing for Writers, Part One

I just had a wonderful long-weekend retreat with writer pals Caryn McGill and Kathy Weyer. We even looped in Sandy Bremser for a “writer gals” lunch. There is something about focused, concentrated time with other writers that is a good contagion. One’s excitement about current and future projects infects the others. One leaves such an engagement with a renewed commitment to write and publish.

But, for a professional writer, that’s not enough. One must also have a business plan, a marketing plan, and promotional activities developed and implemented. That was the focus (though not the whole story) of our weekend together.

At my first writing conference (I’ve shared this before), I didn’t have a clue what a “platform” was. My only connections to “platform” were shoes and train stations. Clearly, that was not what these writing instructors were talking about.

I’m not stupid. I did “get it” pretty quickly, but the individual components of the platform still were unfamiliar to me. The underlying purpose for the platform is branding. You want people to see your name and recognize what you write. They might even buy your books if you’re lucky! lol

So what does a professional writer do when confronted with expectations? She learns what she must, and she implements that learning as quickly and deeply as she can. It’s sort of a spiral with me. The range at the top of my spiral was pretty small, very narrow at first. Then it widened and went deeper. I now have multiple intertwined spirals. And I know I am not done.

I was told, and went home to learn about and implement, that there are four basics or essentials to your writing platform. Get those going, and you can deepen and extend from there.

The four are:

1) Author website,

2) Blog with regular posts (at least once a week),

3) Twitter with regular posts (at least once daily), and

4) Facebook author pages and membership/participation in FB affinity groups.

Check. Check. Check. Check.

Of course, for me, having multiple genres and pen names to brand and market, I ended up with one website with descriptions of my genres, three blogs, three Twitter accounts, and four author pages on Facebook as well as membership in more than a dozen affinity groups.

I will be coming back to this topic in the coming weeks to elaborate these four basics and then how to extend your reach.

If you are interested in how to find me in a variety of places, check out my website and poke around on the links there: Sharon Arthur Moore, Author  

"A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words"

Hmm. As a novelist, I’m not sure I like this old saw. However, it would seem we are becoming an even more visually-oriented society than ever before. And that’s saying something!

Authors know to use Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social media sites, but

a relatively new kid on the block is Pinterest. Think of a virtual bulletin board you have divided into categories. You find pictures that fit your categories and “repin” them to your boards. For some odd reason, people search out your boards and “follow” them, like having “friends” on Facebook.

Pinterest launched as a closed, invitation-only beta site in March 2010. From it’s initial 5K users, after only nine months the site had 10K users. Time magazine, in August 2011 listed Pinterest in its “50 Best Websites of 2011” article. In December of that year, Pinterest became one to the ten biggest social network sites. By July 2013 the site had 70 million users world-wide.

That’s quite a potential audience for authors.

I heard about authors using Pinterest from someone in one of my Facebook affinity groups. She described how she used the boards to post pictures of her books and to promote the books of others. I was intrigued and checked it out.

This particular networking site doesn’t require nearly the same amount of energy as other social networking sites I use. Pinterest is more similar to my relatively-static website than the ever-changing blogs I write. I don’t actively seek followers, but they find me. It’s an interesting phenomenon.

To promote the author side of me, I have storyboards for the two books published (one in 2013; one in 2014) as well as a nascent story board for my current WIPs. I posted pictures of people who look like my characters. I posted pictures of important places, events, and objects in the books. Of course I have my book cover for Streetwalker and just posted the cover for Mission Impastable.

Additionally I have boards related to my books. For Mission Impastable, I have a board on “Food Porn” (luscious pictures of food) and “Kitchen Gadgets”. For Streetwalker, I posted a board for "Sex Toys" and "Carrie's Beauty Secrets". Without any effort, advertising, or soliciting, I have 117 followers. Just think what I could get if I promoted the boards!

It was fun to put my book concepts into pictorial form. It’s actually another sort of summarizing or synopsizing your ideas. Try it for fun! You might get hooked like the other 70 million folks using Pinterest.