Where should your book be reviewed? What literary journals and magazines should you submit excerpts or adaptations to? Which bookstore events will be worth your while? Are there podcasts or radio interviews you should book to promote your new release? These and other questions you may have when you begin to put together a marketing strategy are not easy to answer. Studying your comp titles… [Read More]
What should be in your digital toolkit for the business of being an author? Google Suite for your email. Do you wonder why your emails don’t get a reply? It may be they were never delivered. If your account is with AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo, there is a strong likelihood if you send someone you don’t already have a connection with they will never receive… [Read More]
Good writers don’t happen by chance. Chances are they draw from their favorite books to craft their own. What’s on your shelf? We encourage you to post your shelfie in the comments below and on Instagram. Six of our authors with forthcoming or new releases shared what is on their bookshelves, giving you an inside look at the books they’ve been reading. Check out their… [Read More]
In the past two years, the importance of Instagram for marketing books has grown exponentially. Readers, book reviewers, and now even publishers have adopted this new social media platform for marketing new releases. As of April 2017, there are more than 700 million users. And it is extremely popular with the millennials. If your audience is under age 35 or college educated, consider joining Instagram…. [Read More]
More than 1.7 billion people are active on Facebook. Fifty-three percent of them are female. The average Facebook user in the U.S. was 40.5 years old. These statistics help explain why it is one of the most popular social media platforms used by authors to engage with readers. But what happens when Facebook explodes with news about political scandals, natural disasters, celebrity deaths, or sports?… [Read More]
When your writing is published, expect to go public. Positive engagement with your audience is critical to the success of your book. Readers want to connect with authors. And writers like to hear feedback from their readers. During the last decade publishers have come to expect authors to create and manage their online personas on various social media platforms to promote and market their books…. [Read More]
Elaine Mansfield is the author of Leaning Into Love: A Spiritual Journey Through Grief (Larson, 2014). Gold Medal Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award 2015, her memoir captures your heart—from the extraordinary closeness of Elaine’s marriage to how she and Vic transformed their struggle with cancer and despair into a conscious relationship with mortality. After Vic’s death, Elaine leaned into her ongoing love as… [Read More]
How are readers going to find you? When agents and publishers consider a book project, especially nonfiction, they ask questions about your discoverability. There are two basic ways authors and their books get found by readers: search or referral. The first method requires you master search engine optimization and the second requires you master social networking. The marriage of the two in social media marketing… [Read More]
How can you spend your time wisely with social media? Based on current research, best practices for frequency of social media posts: Twitter – 3 times a day, or more. Facebook – 2 times per day, at most. LinkedIn – 1 time per business day. If you’re on Pinterest – 5 pins per day. Blog at least once a month, no more than once a… [Read More]
Today I’m going to share my top 10 digital tools for the business of being an author. Most of these are free and all of them are easy to use. I recommend them to you because I use them and find them valuable and think you will too. (1) WordPress for website and blogging – Hands down there is no better platform for authors… [Read More]
