Writers in the Storm

by Penny Sansevieri

For many authors, creating a successful book marketing campaign seems as difficult and mysterious as effectively whipping up a delicious chocolate souffle. What are the ingredients, what are the tricks, what are the best tools and in what order should I be using them?

While there is an art to baking and also an art to marketing, you don’t have to be a professional to find your way to the sweet smell of success. Marketing amateurs can make great progress toward a terrific book marketing campaign by working on bite-sized pieces. So instead of chocolate souffle, think Snickers fun-size – and let yourself have that fun!

Today, I have some small but mighty book marketing strategies for you; many of them are quick and/or free.

You might think about sprinkling them through your week, doing one a night. Or maybe grab a handful and settle in on a weekend afternoon. You’ll find you’re in a much better position, marketing-wise, when Monday rolls around.

Claim What’s Yours

Claim your Amazon Author Page. It’s Amazon. This is a Must Do and you already know that. If you’ve been reluctant, decide you’ll just add your bio. Baby steps ARE steps.

Claim your Author Profile on Bookbub and get your books listed. It’s free to submit your book to be added to your profile.

Claim and fill out your author page on Goodreads and claim ALL your books. At minimum you should have representation on this site, even if you haven’t taken steps to use all of its features as part of your well-rounded author marketing approach…yet.

Use What You Already Have

Celebrate declining Covid cases by masking up and making your way out into the world to leave five of your author business cards around town this weekend. If you have a way for someone to use a coupon code on your website – jot that down as well to really up the ante!

Brainstorm a bunch of ideas for your next blog posts. Don’t overthink it, don’t commit to all of them, just jot down every single idea that comes to you. Overthinking can be one of your biggest author marketing downfalls.

Publish one of your popular blog posts on Medium. It’s fast and super easy to find new readers and extend your author marketing.

Look at your blog or website and find three improvements you can make. Or, look at other authors’ sites and steal a few ideas you’re missing out on.

Read your author bio on Amazon and social media. Spend five minutes thinking about how you could improve it and make notes.

Plan an upcoming newsletter to send to your mailing list. You don’t have to plan it, write it, illustrate it, revise it, edit it, and send it all in one sitting. Break it into manageable chunks and take satisfaction in chipping away at the process to get to a great product!

Socialize and Network

Comment on a post on a popular blog or on a newspaper article. Commenting is one of the most effective ways to get noticed as an indie author. If there is the option to reply to already posted comments, even better, as you will be entering into a conversation and getting a chance to show off your knowledge or experience in a key area of interest to those who frequent that site.

Join a writers’ group. Sometimes other writers have good ideas you can steal!

Follow 100 people on Twitter. On average about 20 will follow you back. Do it regularly and you will build a solid following to help your author marketing on Twitter.

Follow 10 friends of your friends on Facebook. You’ll be surprised how many will accept your request because they will see that you are in some way connected to them. You never know, you might be connecting with new fans!

Follow 10 authors in your genre on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (or whatever platforms you frequent). Not only is this good networking, you’ll also likely pick up some tips and tricks of the trade and learn from their own author marketing activities.

Share five posts of interest on Twitter, Facebook, or any of your social media accounts. It’s amazing how many people will notice and perhaps follow you back because you are sharing and playing nice, not shoving your books down people’s throats.

Find five new blogs that cater to your genre and add them to your master blogger list. Before you click out of each, leave a comment. Everyone wants feedback and bloggers will remember and be appreciative of whatever tracks you leave behind.

Learn New Tricks

Google search ‘book marketing for 2021’ and read two articles. You won’t ever come up with new ideas if you’re not always trying to learn. Learning does take time, but it’s free – pick your battles.

Read up on SEO and learn to write your blog posts around keywords to increase visitor traffic.

List some new materials or tools you’d like to master and then choose one to spend an hour on.  Maybe you’d like to learn more about using Canva (which is free!) so you spend your time making a few practice social media posts featuring your dog. Perhaps you’ve been wanting to up your Zoom game so you do some research on ring lights and the best way to set up your desk for video chats.

Check out a few websites and blogs for writers and independent authors with an eye toward free downloadable information. You might emerge from a dedicated surf session with everything from a monthly book marketing planner to a reader profile sheet. We routinely offer both of these tools at the end of Author Marketing Experts blog posts.

Final Thoughts

Book marketing doesn’t have to be a scary slog through the unknown if you make use of what you already have, build on your current success, look for holes in your learning, connect to others with like-minded interests, and, most importantly, enjoy the ride.

Best of luck to you!

What small actions have made a big difference in your book marketing efforts? Share them with us down in the comments!

About Penny

Penny C. Sansevieri, Founder and CEO of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a bestselling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. She is an Adjunct Professor teaching Self-Publishing for NYU. She was named one of the top influencers of 2019 by New York Metropolitan Magazine. 

Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most innovative Amazon Optimization programs as well as Social Media/Internet book marketing campaigns. She is the author of 18 books, including How to Sell Books by the Truckload on Amazon: 2021 Amazon Ads Powerhouse Edition, Revise and Re-Release Your Book, 5-Minute Book Marketing, and Red Hot Internet Publicity, which has been called the "leading guide to everything Internet." Her next book From Book to Bestseller is due out in Spring 2021.

AME has had dozens of books on top bestseller lists, including those of The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.

To learn more about Penny’s books or her promotional services, visit www.amarketingexpert.com.

by Laurie Schnebly Campbell

We all know your main character can’t suddenly stand up and dance around the room without having SOME motivation for doing that. Maybe a red laser-dot just revealed there’s an assassin trying to get a clean shot through the window, or maybe somebody just announced “you inherited three billion dollars” or their favorite song just came on the radio. Without any motivation or inciting incident, the sudden dancing is gonna look plain weird.

We know, too, this same character can’t accept a job in Antarctica without some motivation for doing that. Maybe it’s a chance to work with an old love who’s indicated an interest in picking up where they left off, or maybe the pay will cover a new roof for poor Grandma’s house, or perhaps there’s a rare breed of penguin expected to appear and being the first to see it would rejuvenate a faltering career.

Motivation vs. Goals

It’s pretty easy to come up with a motivation for whatever gets your character started on the action of the story. But technically, avoiding an assassin or reconnecting with an old love or spotting the amazing penguin isn’t a motivation. It’s an understandable desire, but it’s not a motivation.

It’s a goal.

”Fine,” you say. ”But that’s all just semantics.”

It could be, sure. Or it could be the difference between a character who goes through predictable actions without ever really coming alive on the page, and one who makes readers feel like this character is so fully, vividly real that they’d recognize ‘em in an instant if they met each other on the street.

(Or a ranch, a windswept moor, a vintage boutique, a bustling emergency room, or wherever this character tends to be seen.)

Why do we care about motivation?

Motivation is what makes this character the person they are.

It also makes ‘em the person they’ve been long before the story ever began, and the person they’ll be long after it concludes.

That’s not to say their motivation must remain consistent from beginning to end. It certainly CAN, and still deliver your readers a truly compelling character all the way through the story and beyond, but it doesn’t HAVE to.

Think about someone who wants something.

It might be a character in a book you’re immersed in right now. It might be someone you live or work with. Heck, make it easy – think about yourself and something YOU want!

It doesn’t matter whether you choose a tangible goal like “a new phone” or “a trip to Paris” or something loftier like “a cure for Covid” or “the happiness of my children.” No matter how lofty the goal might be, it’s still driven by a motivation.

How to choose the right motivation?

We don’t always know, and neither do our characters, what motivation lies behind a goal. I might want a new phone to make life more convenient, or to have more room for photos of loved ones, or to impress my co-workers, or to quit spending so much on repair hacks, without ever thinking about why that particular outcome matters to me.

The same is true if I want to cure Covid. Saving the world is an understandable desire, and there are all kinds of possible motivations:

• Someone might want the acclaim that comes from discovering a cure.

• Someone might want the recovery of their beloved father who makes life easier for them.

• Someone might want the freedom of once again being able to go anywhere anytime with anybody who looks interesting.

• Someone might want the world to be a healthier, happier place.

Which of those will be the most interesting character?

Any one of the above would work, except the last.

Wanting the world to be a healthier, happier place is pretty bland. It’s pretty universal. It doesn’t really TELL us anything about this person.

Whereas a character who wants acclamation, who wants Dad to smooth things out, who wants to explore every avenue they can find, is almost certainly going to be less bland. More interesting.

More the kind of person we’d like to read about.

So does that mean your characters should never have truly good, noble reasons for doing what they’re doing?

We’ll get into that more next month during “Plotting Via Motivation,” which goes into considerably more detail on how to use motivation to make your book shine. And because I always give a free-class prize to someone who leaves a comment whenever a blog gets 25 or more commenters (hmm, is that a word?)...

Let me ask you a question:

What’s a book you remember enjoying, and what did the main character want?

Please share it with out down in the comments. You don’t need to say WHY they wanted it, just WHAT they wanted. That’ll be a good way of showing how many different kinds of motivation can lie behind just about any desire…which is one more reason books are so fascinating to read!

And, yes, write. :)

Laurie

(Who should mention that as of February 22 the class is on a wait-list basis but it can’t hurt to email WriterUniv.com@gmail.com if you’re interested.)

About Laurie

Laurie Schnebly Campbell has taught Plotting Via Motivation for WriterUniv.com every spring for the past decade, with some authors taking it annually to plot their next story and others saving the “Big Fabulous Worksheets” to use on their own for subsequent books. She still loves getting Amazon shipments of novels she watched taking shape during the class and reading them not as a coach but a fan.

by Tasha Seegmiller

There is a tricky situation that occurs in the lives of writers. To people who are not engaged in some kind of similar creative pursuit, explaining a difficult day can be met with expressions of disbelief. “You mean sitting in your seat and typing words was hard? Exhausting? Really?”

These people may also not understand why the words of others can hurt, whether that hurt was intentional or not. It can be anything from a bad review to a critique from a well-meaning colleague or beta reader that can make us doubt, stall, quit.

I’ve been on a bit of a Brené Brown kick lately.

[Full disclosure: I gave away nearly a dozen copies of her Daring Greatly, have been listening to every talk I can get my hands on, and recount key points almost daily to my very patient husband.]

Most recently, I’ve been listening to The Power of Vulnerability, which has been great because it is a live recording of Brené and I get to hear that she is a lot like me in her resilience to this whole open and honest thing.

But it has got me thinking quite a bit about what it might mean to be a whole-hearted writer. To start with, these are the guideposts she suggests of whole-hearted living:

1. Practice Authenticity
2. Find Self-Compassion
3. Cultivate Resilience
4. Build Gratitude, Joy, And Sufficiency
5. Trust Your Intuition and Faith
6. Foster Creativity
7. Protect Your Play and Rest
8. Don’t Fear Calm and Stillness
9. Pursue Meaningful Work
10. Laugh, Sing, And Dance

(There’s a great visual of these you can print and/or color here)

While writers may be some of the most generous people I’ve ever met, we are also, by necessity of our craft, hyper-aware of the world around us. That is great when it comes creating characters and stories and settings and plots, but it’s less than great when the business and real world side of writing comes trickling out.

To get a quick overview of where you might stand as a whole-hearted writer, consider how you’d respond in the following situations:

• Someone signed with an agent after you and got a good book deal before you.
• People who are not now (and probably never will be) writers ask why you aren’t done with a book yet.
• You find an error in the final final copy of your book.
• You are at a conference when an agent/editor says another genre is growing faster than the one you are currently writing.
• You send out another batch of queries or go on submission.
• You are told that is the cover for your book, thanks but no thanks to your offer for additional feedback.
• You are presented with a publishing deal that is not quite what you were hoping for with a company you aren’t sure is a good match.
• A call to your agent or editor goes unanswered. Two calls. Three calls. And emails.
• Someone who writes a similar genre to yours had their book sell in several foreign countries.
• A writer shares their victory in completing 10,000 words in a day.
• Every week, you come across an article that undercuts your genre or mentions that the interest toward what you are passionate about is fading.

What was your response? Did you feel shame or unworthiness even though the situation was hypothetical? Did you want to hide, dismiss what you were genuinely feeling, or downplay the stress that was very tangible and very real? Could you envision yourself squaring your shoulders, bringing out your greatest attitude and showing “them” that you weren’t affected?

In these kinds of situations when we feel like something we hold dear, something we are working on or through is being attacked, Brené Brown suggests the following mantra:

Do not shrink.
Do not puff up.
Stand my sacred ground.

Is your writing sacred? Is your writing time? Do you allow yourself to acknowledge that people may not understand or do you feel the necessity to downplay what you are passionate about because it is entirely possible that explanation won’t change the opinion or someone else, or worse, will give them the excuse to think even less about your passion than they already do?

Do you have the courage to put out a piece of work that is honestly and truly the best you could do, knowing there is a decent chance it will be attacked in some way by someone? Do you have the courage to respond with grace and conviction, to acknowledge there was a mistake and you and your work might not be perfect? Do you really feel better when you belittle the person who left the review, gave the advice, passed you on the career path?

The greatest takeaway from all this is that being whole-hearted IS NOT EASY. But when compared with living a life that is detached, false, insincere or unfulfilled, I bet it’s the option where most of us would really like to spend a little more time.

How have you practiced being whole-hearted? What tips or tricks have you learned when your first instinct is to respond in a way you may regret later?

About Tasha

Tasha Seegmiller believes in the magic of love and hope, which she weaves into every story she creates. She is an MFA candidate in the Writing Program at Pacific University and teaches composition courses at Southern Utah University. Tasha married a guy she’s known since she was seven, is the mom of three teens, and co-owner of a soda shack and cotton candy company. She is represented by Annelise Robey of Jane Rotrosen Agency.