Compared to this time last year, how are you promoting your books differently? Are there promotional efforts you made a year ago that you've since backed off? Which efforts have you made for the first time or ramped up this year?
Here are my answers to the questions above. This is NOT marketing advice by any means, it's just on my mind at the moment.
What's down?
- Chats. I used to participate in a lot more chats than I do now. As much as I love them, I find I spend all my time blabbing with other authors. That's fun, but it eats up my entire day. Also, truth be told, I often forget when they're happening, even if I put them on the calendar. My bad.
- Author interviews. I would do more, but I have this sense (which is probably way off base) that everyone who ever wanted to interview me did so four years ago. I also feel like I'm repetitive and boring and repetitive in interviews. ;-)
What's up?
- Twitter. #OMG the time I spend on Twitter! This should probably go in the blabbing with other authors category too, but let's look at marketing holistically for the sake of this post and say that online presence is in some way promotional.
- Blogging. I post here at Donuts & Desires just about every day, which is up from maybe three or four times a week last year. As for guest blogging? I think I do more of that too but I haven't kept track.
- Spending Money! Holy Mackerel, it's something I thought I'd never do (I am cheap as store brand ramen, people) but I decided to purchase a membership at Manic Readers. It was affordable, so I thought what the hell, give it a go.
- Being Organized. I have a promotions checklist I go through every time a new book comes out. I have checklists for just about everything submissions-related as well, and it's making me feel much more on the ball than usual. Now if somebody could just sort my mail for me, I'd be set.
- Contacting Libraries. I have a few mainstream titles (ebooks) available through Overdrive (Nobody Gets Lucky, Ugly Naked People, Love Again, and very soon Dennis and Dad), so one thing I did recently that I've never done before is write to libraries all across Canada (so far). I just told them a bit about my titles and asked if they would like to carry the ebooks in their catalogues.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head.
Your turn. What's up, what's down?
Comment to your heart's content!
Giselle
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Giselle Renarde
I created Facebook author "page" with a different pseudonym and have found it didn't help me at all. Blogging and doing the Twitter thing is way much better than FB, for me at least.
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