5 Tips to Promotion

These days so many authors get bogged down with how to prmote themselves.  Promotion has become the name of the game.  I don’t know about you, but I have never been overly excited about promotion, especially having to promote myself.  I can promote campaigns or even news stories since I did that job for many years as a TV producer and public relations writer.  But having to say great thing about me as an author, well, sometimes I fear it comes off as bragging.

Still it must be done. So how can you do it without sounding too phony?

1.    Try using a blog. These have been around for a while and a good many writers are now blogging, either personally or with other writers. Blogs are great because you can be very folksy with them and write about your life, or one of your interests or interesting things you learn as you work on your story. Use historical or useful information you learned while researching a story as a basis for a blog. I see some of the most successful blogs for getting comments is when someone lists their top movies, songs or books of all time and then they start a discussion of what others think or what their lists might be. But if you’re going to have a blog, try to make it as consistent as possible. Decide if you are going to blog once or twice a month  or set up a schedule and stick to it as closely as possible.

2.      Answer or comment on other people’s blogs. As I just mentioned, some writers will do those  blogs where they mention their favorite books and movies. What about your own? Why not list those for the group. The more people commenting the better and you might just get noticed. I’ve heard agents and publishers suggest getting your name out by commenting on other blogs as a good way of letting possible readers know you are ut there.

3.      Create your own website. Like blogging websites have been around for a long time and you are advised to have one as an author so that readers can learn about you and about your other books. The best thing about having your own website that you build is that you can do it as a third person, or someone else talking about you, so you can promote yourself without sounding like you’re bragging. Unlike a blog, websites can be static so that you don’t need to update them often.

4.      Be on Social media. That means getting a Facebook account or on Twitter and then making certain you at least join in a few conversations so that it doesn’t look like every time you post it is about your book. It’s also a good way to let readers get to know you better.  I like using Pinterest too because it lets me show off some of my pictures while looking around for other pictures f things that interest me. Again, it can help readers to get to know you.

5.      Check with other writers  on their promotion. See what others are doing and what works for them and why.  It can save you a lot of time. Some authors are betting at various forms of promotion and if you ask enough people, you can come up with a variety of ideas so that you can decide which one works best for you.

Finally, though, I would say remember your main goal is to write. If you spend too much time on promotion, you will find you don’t have time to write. Don’t let promotion overwhelm you. Be a writer first!

5 Tips on Blogging

One of the promotional tools writers have been told to use as a way of getting their word out about their stories is blogging.  It can be both fun, but also time consuming. And coming up with ideas for blogs every week can become an issue.  What is there to blog about that can be helpful to your fiction writing?

1.      Blog about your research – This is a no brainer.  I always find items that I look up that I might not use in my story that might make a good blog. For instance, my research on ghostly legends of the southwest took me back to my childhood and hearing my mother tell me of the story of La Llorona, an infamous story of a ghostly woman who haunts the waterways and rivers in the southwest, looking for her lost children. It was an old legend that Hispanic parents told their children to keep them from going out at night. I used it for several blogs around Halloween.

2.      Blog about places you visit – this too was part of research on one of my stories. I spent a weekend travelling by train across the Rocky Mountains and was able to use it as the basis for a blog about train travel. But it can be a fun car trip you make, or even a visit to the local museum. One of the places I also blogged about was a visit to the historic Brown Palace in Denver.

3.      Blog about simple, every day things – one of my friends, Darla Bartos, who has written a wonderful mystery set in South Africa, has a great way of coming up with blog ideas. She writes about many every day events, ideas that just hits her and how they affect her writing. She did a great blog on hitting all the stop lights and how that encouraged her writing progress.

4.      Blog about classes you might be taking – I have often blogged about the conferences I attend and about the workshops I’ve attended. One of the reasons I like to blog about them is that it encourages me to take better notes at the conference, and it also serves as a way of reinforcing what I learn. It also is a good way to force me to get those notes transcribed when I get home.  Then I can keep them in a file on my computer and available should I ever need them again.

5.      Review a book on your blog – I’ve done author profiles on My Writing Corner blog and have sometimes offered up reviews, but this is another way to get in some interesting writing and also can give you some help with your own writing. 

I am going to try reviewing writing books on this blog. I have dozens of writing books and recently someone asked me what my favorite books on writing were and which I always keep handy.  Starting next week, I will give a list of some of those books and then I will begin to review some of the ones that have been so helpful to me.