A lot of people suggest gathering emails to build your author platform. (Your author platform is yourself as a brand and your vehicle to make sales). Those of you who have been following me awhile know I think you shouldn’t bother writing a newsletter. The data hasn’t changed since I wrote that. Open rates are still abysmal, and click-through rates are downright disheartening. However, you can still collect emails without writing a newsletter.
Everyone knows you can use social media to find readers, but how do you find your perfect customer in real life? You are a writer. You used to thinking like someone else. So, and today is well post we’re going to experiment with thinking like your reader.
I hear a lot of talk amongst my indie writer friends about writing to market.
What exactly is that? It’s when you figure out the trends of what’s popular so that you can write a book that fits into those tropes and ride the popularity wave to a nice profit. I have seen cases where a writer has hit the market at the right time, perhaps even by accident, and was able to build a nice-sized audience based on the incidental popularity of their first book. From there, the writer has been able to sustain a career, and many presume it’s because they write to market.
I gained 1400 followers in eight months. And you can too. Today, I’m explaining my process in the hope that it may help clarify the mysterious numbers game that is social media. Social media is about being social. Not just delivering information. You want followers to interact not only with you, but the information you are providing. Going into the development of my public profile, I had a few things in mind from my days in politics.
Lots of indie creatives struggle to get engagement on social media, even though social media is touted as one of the primary ways for indies to market themselves. What most people don’t understand though is what exactly they’re looking at when they are looking at engagement and more important what it means for a content creator. In order to understand how to increase engagement, we have to take a deep dive into what engagement is.
I have heard my fellow indie creatives talk about hosting an event as a marketing technique. For instance, a giveaway to market a book, or a Q&A to market a piece of artwork. You get the idea. But if you’re doing a single event, the event isn’t a marketing technique, it’s something to market. Let me explain.
