Responding to Fans

July 21st, 2010

One thing that most new authors don’t think about is what they’re going to do when someone contacts them. If you’ve got a blog and a website up and running, and a Twitter account and a Facebook or MySpace account, you’ll eventually have people trying to connect with you. The more popular you get, the more people you’ll have contacting you. At first this can be extremely thrilling, but as time goes on you can see how much time it can take in order to respond to all of your fans, so what do you do?

You need to make a decision about whether you’re going to automate your responses or are going to continue to send personalized messages. If you opt to send personalized messages, it can be a good idea to set aside a specific amount of time every week, or every day, depending on your schedule, in order to connect with your fans. Answer the letters quickly, but make sure that the messages are personal and that they don’t sound automated. Use the person’s name in the response a few times and speak directly to something that they wrote you.

If you go automated, make sure that you explain, in the message, why you’ve gone automated. Explain that you’re working on your next book, or that you’re overwhelmed with emails, and make sure that you explain that you do read every message and that you respond to as many as possible. This will help the person to realize that you aren’t simply ignoring them, and make sure that you do answer a few message as often as possible, so that you can stay connected with your fans.

Getting a Marketing Plan

June 30th, 2010

Most established writers have a strategy for writing. They may create a character web or some other type of outline that helps them to understand their work and to get it done well. What you don’t know is that most marketing experts also have a strategy. They never try to market a book until they know what they want to do and are ready to do it. This strategy helps to keep them organized and it helps to make sure that they do everything that they need to do in order to sell the book.

Most ebook writers don’t have a marketing guru behind them, so they need to learn how to market their ebook themselves. This means that you should definitely make yourself a marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy should be something that you can realistically follow, as well as something that hits all of the different levels of marketing that you need to do in order to have the best hope of selling many copies of your work. So how should you start your marketing strategy? First you should make sure that you know all of the different ways that you can market a book. You can, for instance, market your ebook through your website, through social networks (like Facebook and Twitter) and even though your regular, printed contacts.

Once you’ve got all of your marketing ideas written down, start organizing them in a way that makes sense to you. Most start by doing what is the most easy for them to do, but some say that doing the most difficult things first make sense, as after you figure out how to do the strategy, you can then spend your time doing the easier things. A marketing strategy is a great way to help you to sell your ebook – make sure that you know what plans you have and how you’re going to achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself.

How Long Should You Work on Marketing?

May 26th, 2010

Starting your own business can be extremely intimidating, and make no mistake – once you decide to create and market your own work, you’re starting your own business. It’s a small business, likely with only one employee (you), but it is a business and can be very intimidating. One question that many new writers have is how long they should spend marketing their new ebook.

Once you’ve gotten your ebook up and published, you need to market it. We’ve covered marketing before. It can be everything from setting up a website for your work to starting a Facebook page. But how long should you work on updating those pages and on marketing your work? The longest amount of time you’ll have to work on your marketing will be whenever you start something new. For instance, it takes longer to start a Facebook page than it does to update one. Initially you may need to spend a few hours setting up you marketing strategy and getting it going.

Once you’ve started everything, however, you can spend much less time working on your marketing and much more time working on your next book! Some well-established writers say that they tend to spend a few hours a week catching up on their marketing. And in truth it only takes a few minutes a day. Simply popping into Facebook and updating, or MySpace, or both, and writing a new post on your blog can be done extremely quickly. While it can seem to take an eternity to start up a marketing plan, it only takes a very short time to keep it going, so make sure that you don’t get disheartened by the amount of time it takes to start one!

Buying Ads to Market Your Ebook

May 21st, 2010

One thing that many new authors don’t realize is that they are the best person to market their books. They believe that they have to look to publishing houses and marketing firms, but that’s actually completely incorrect! If you keep an eye on book authors, you’ll see that they often go around the country in order to promote their books. It is their talking about their books that leads to the most sales of their books. That’s why authors are used to promote their own books. If you’re someone who is interested in getting the most sales for your book, you need to know how to market yourself.

This doesn’t mean that you have to spend thousands of dollars traveling around the country talking about your book. Start small! There are likely a number of local events that you can speak at. Many new authors find themselves starting to speak at schools or libraries about their books. This is great for two reasons: first it gets your book and yourself out there, and secondly it gives you some practice in public speaking.

You can also promote yourself through other media, like the radio. For instance, you could contact your local radio station and can talk about wanting to discuss writing on the air, or maybe doing some sort of a giveaway that includes free access to your work. This gives you great exposure and gets your work read by many others, which is absolutely perfect if you’re trying to market your ebook effectively. Remember, you are the best person to market your ebook, and you are the one who can get the most sales for it, so take the time to learn how to market yourself and you’ll get the most sales for your book.

Social Networking Sites to Push Your Books

March 12th, 2010

Once you’ve got your ebook written, it’s time to start doing some marketing for your ebook. One of the newest tricks of the trade is to utilize social networking sites, like Myspace and Facebook. Both of these social networking site have become extremely popular, and using them is a great way to get more people to check out what you’ve written.

If you want to make the most of these social networking sites, you first need to make a page. You need to decide if you’re going to make a page for you, as the author, or for the work you’ve written. Most authors find that it is easier to make a page for themselves, where they can then let their friends or contacts online know about what they’ve written, or what they’re working on, all at the same time.

When you create your page, make sure you make it personal. Include some of yourself in the page, like your picture and photos of your family or pets. If you keep things too sterile, people are likely to think that your page is not one that is written by a real person but that it only exists to push your work. While you know that the main purpose is to push your work, you don’t want your contacts to believe that.

To avoid that sterile feeling, which is off-putting, make sure you put yourself on the page and make sure also that you keep updating it. It doesn’t take very long to log onto the sites once a day and to write something for your contacts, or to pop over to a few of their pages and to comment there. This will not only connect you on a personal level to your contacts, but will make them much more likely to want to check out your work.