March was all about helping yourself to stand out and making connections. If you’re just starting out, you can still market yourself, even without an obvious track record. The question is: how do you start from scratch? Part of marketing is networking. Even though many of us who are creatives are introverts, we still have to network.
At this point, it may feel like you have to be a magician to conjure your aspiration into existence before anyone recognizes that you ARE who you want to be.
As an indie, you’re making a lot of connections with fellow indies, freelancers, bloggers, and readers. What should you have ready when you meet a potential collaborator or reader? online or IRL. How on earth are you going to keep track of everyone?
One of the last tips in my previous post, 10 Tips for Launching Your Book, was to come with a book production budget. How do you do that? Easy. A book production budget is an estimate of what it will cost to get your book published. It includes everything from the cover design, to editing, formatting, marketing, and maybe even research materials. (I’ll explain in a little bit).
Congratulations! You’re getting ready to publish your book. You’ve been so busy getting it ready, and you’ve realized you’re not sure what to do for your launch. You want it to be spectacular so that you SELL books. I’ve got 10 tips to help you do just that .
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.