eBookGuru.org

#9 Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

There are many sites that have great articles regarding various methods of promotion. Hopefully some of them will spark your imagination and give you some ideas that you may not have previously thought about. You may use one of their ideas and spring board it into another or your could possibly spin it in a totally different direction. Remember if you don’t like it, then do what David Bowie said and make Changes! The whole point is to get out there and research. If you’ve found this article then you are taking a step in the right direction. Now, bear in mind that I don’t promote or work for any of these promotion websites, but I do read their articles from time to time. I find some of their facts, ideas and marketing ploys interesting but some of the information has absolutely no bearing on what I’m working on at the moment.

• http://www.1stturningpoint.com, What I love most about this site is that email reminders when they have posted new articles. I swear some days I would forget my name if I didn’t have my driver’s license to refer to. Now where did I put that wallet? So, that alone makes this site worth it for me, but wait…there’s more! These articles are written by authors such as Rowena Cherry and Amber Scott and include great topics such as Email Promotion and Marketing. This is a wealth of knowledge handed to you on a silver platter, what more could you ask for? Oh, I know I could ask for chocolate, a million dollars, a three book contract and a cabana boy!

• http://www.epicauthors.com/, This is a great networking site. Though it is important thatyou know that you will need to join EPIC to reap most of the benefits that they offer, but you can access their blog and various articles from the main page. It’s definitely worth your time and effort for to take a look around. Make sure if you decide that you are going to try joining EPIC that you check out their membership criteria. There are two levels of membership and you may qualify for one or both of them.

• http://pumpupyouronlinebookpromotion.blogspot.com/, From what I’ve seen there are some decent tidbits here. And the fact that I am a bookaholic and they have contests also has absolutely no bearing at all in my choice to put them in this article. Honestly it was totally random.

• http://www.bauuinstitute.com/Marketing/IndieMarketingBooksWriting.html, I’ve already found one of my pet peeves brought out into the forefront here and they said I was RIGHT! Isn’t nice when you can find someone else who can validate you when you think know you are right? They have great, to the point, information that is very quick and easy to access. For finding out more about my pet peeve you need to see me in a couple of weeks when I say Gather All Your Friends Around.

• http://writersdigest.com/article/101-websites-2009-general, Now you need to remember something here, just because I or some other guy on the net says that this site or the next is the best, guess what? It might not be the best for you. Only you can determine if a site has any relevance to you at all. We all think that we are giving out the best and most relevant information to our friends and colleagues, but just because it works for me doesn’t mean it will work for you. So make sure that when you are reading up on things that you take the “latest and greatest” (even when coming from me) with a grain of salt or twelve.

• http://www.amazines.com/Publishing/article_category.cfm?catid=37, Another site that has countless topics that helps me feed my reading ADD. I can read about nearly endless topics and get new ideas almost daily. Unfortunately, as with most of of the places I love to visit, I don’t have time to go there every day and most of the time not even every other day. But it’s great to know that when I need or want them, I can look at their left side bar and pull up my topics and off to my knowledge bank they go!

Search the web for sites that you are going to like. Just because these references do something for me, doesn’t mean that they are going to do something for you. So, search out different promotional resources. Follow their advice, or don’t. Use their ideas or change them. Jump into the water with both feet, the water’s just fine!

And if you haven’t realized it yet I like to talk and, I Wanna to Talk About Me! And if you don’t believe me, come back next week to see what I have to say on the topic!

#10. Get your name out!

Now this can be done in so many ways it’s nearly ridiculous. There are so many possibilities that it actually overwhelms the normal (hmmm….normal…I used to know what that was, but have since lost the meaning) person.

“Why do I need to do the Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, etc. thing?”

The honest answer? You don’t. You are the master of your own destiny (Unlike the Queen song states!) and you choose what you have time for and what you don’t. This is a GREAT thing. You have options, many of them, and they are all under your control.

You can create a:

• Facebook page (www.facebook.com), though I haven’t found that very helpful. I find that I am more apt to have family that know me there and want to share pictures and talk about real life and not my writing world. Though I have heard great things from other authors that use the same reasons why I don’t find it helpful as reasons why they find it helpful. Though be on guard if you write under your real name. There may be people in your life that don’t know that you write in a certain genre, and it may be a bit awkward for them to find out in this manner.

• MySpace page (www.myspace.com), several authors say that their page has gotten them pretty good traffic while some older (or should I say “more sophisticated”) authors have found MySpace to be a little “young” for their taste. I guess being hit on by young rap gods, and being proposed marriage by a Nigerian prince isn’t a popular promotional tool.

• Blogger or WordPress blog (www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com), these can become rather time consuming and some authors do decide to pool their resources and create one blog. This creates the need to only blog once or twice per week. You can kill your blog and the interest in you if you are inconsistent in your blogging. If you start blogging every week and get your readers hooked on you and STOP! Your readers will become confused. They will not know when to come by to visit and will make little or no effort to search you out. This would be especially true if you were giving them samples of your work and were providing them tidbits of a free story to get them hooked on you and your writing. Starving readers will read elsewhere. So if you go this route, be prepared to be consistent, OR be prepared to work ahead and pre-post your posts.

• Twitter page (www.twitter.com), OK, obviously you can tell that I can’t get anything said in 140 characters or less, but with Twitter, if you are able to do it, then the world is at your fingertips. There are Twitter novelists that have a great following, and authors who mention all of their contests, and some authors who honestly mention some rather “unique” things on their Twitter pages. It’s definitely a way to get your readers to know who you are and what is happening in your world. They have even gone as far as creating Twitter groups (http://twittgroups.com/index.php) which have every single type of group you could possibly want from Barfly to Book Marketing Online.

• Create your very own website! Of course your readers want to get to learn who you are as a person and a writer, so show them! Showcase your talents and let them know exactly who you are. But keep in mind the things that niggle at your nerves when you visit other websites, and keep things to a minimum. No reader likes to have to dig through a jungle to find your latest release or your contact information. Keep everything within reach and ENJOY!

I am sure that there are thousands of other sites that you can join and network on, but I wanted to touch on some of the more popular ones and give you a few ideas as to what you could be aiming for. Shoot for the skies, this is your journey. Take it with your eyes wide open, open your wings and FLY!

Make sure you come back next week when I will be shouting like an old newspaper hawker, Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

I recently came across an article on CNET about the shortcomings of the Kindle and how these short comings represent opportunities for competitors to exploit.

“Competitors will attack Amazon’s market position Read the rest of this entry »