Marketing for Writers

This month, I’m providing a writer’s technology tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you in your writing goals.

Today’s tip: Use your blog for writing promotions.

Once a writer has a blog and some decent traffic, a great way to promote your work, keep your fans, and create interaction on your blog is through promotions and prizes.

Promotions come in all shapes and sizes and are limited only by the imagination of the writer. They can be big promotions such as the $4,000(!) blog anniversary prize drawing by David Airey, the graphic designer specializing in logo design, to small promotions such as Alison Kent, the master of promotion, giving away prizes for her birthday in Another year come and gone.

Regardless of the size of the type, keep these three things in mind for your promotion on a blog:

1. Ensure the promotion is about the subject of your blog. You want to make sure the message of your writing comes across in the promotion you are doing. If you are a romance writer, giving away book prizes in the science fiction category will make no sense.
2. Promotions should be strategic in their timing. For example, if you as an author have early releases of your book, you could do a promotion around that so that fans get the “early scoop” on your book.
3. Always follow through in your promotion with your readers. You have made a promise to deliver with your readers and your readers responded to your offer. Now make sure you fill the reward in a timely manner — and make a big deal about the winner on your blog!

Promotions on your blog are not for everyone. But they can be an effective tool for creating and maintaining buzz, building readership, and letting a little bit of your great personality get out to your fans.

Scot

This month, I’m providing a writer’s technology tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you in your writing goals.

Today’s tip: Virtual book tour.

Published authors face a difficult marketing challenge between the time their book is accepted for publication, publication, and then pushing the envelope to help sell the book after publication.

It’s simple: publishing houses, especially for new authors, will provide little help marketing your book. In fact, if you don’t have a marketing plan to go along with your great manuscript, you may not even have a chance to have your book published.

Touring the country (or planet) to market your book isn’t high on my list of ways to spend my time or money either.

Enter the virtual book tour. Asking the writers of the blogs to interview you as part of your marketing plan for your book is most often accepted by the host bloggers. There’s good reasons, too.

It’s win-win:

• A blogger gets to interview an author for their audience
• The author gets to promote the writing to the very audience they are targeting with their writing
• You can do a virtual book tour from your home — no travel
• Virtual book tours cost little — a great expense to make is offer a signed copy of your book to one of the readers of your tour host blog.
• You can promote the tour — blog names, dates, cities — on your own blog and/or web site.
• You can help create a blogging community around the hosting blog sites as not all of the bloggers would necessarily know each other unless you were doing the tour.

Getting published is tough. Marketing your work is tougher. Doing a world tour to market your work through blogs is priceless.

Scot

Loyal readers of this blog will note that I have been a fan of authors and writers doing a “virtual book tour” by visiting other blogs on a schedule and promoting the tour on their own blog and other sites. I’ve been a big proponent of using the blog technology to do the virtual tours as it is a perfect mechanism for reaching your core audience.

For context, I’ve mentioned virtual book tours in my articles Marketing Using Technology, or Book a Book Tour with Your Blog.

Context is great, but where are the tips on setting up and doing a virtual tour? Yvonne, over at Grow Your Own Writing Business had Mary Emma Allen of Home Biz Notes (where I know her writing) and two other blogs come over and provide a guest post on how to do the Virtual Blog Tour.

In the article, Mary Emma covers the right stuff:

• How to participate in blog tours
• Making the most of the virtual tour
• Coordinating Virtual Tours
• Virtual Tour Resources

This is a great article for how technology can help a writer market their work. Take a read; it’s a great article and resource.

Scot

One of the more interesting concepts in blogging happened over at Writing Thoughts and Grow Your Writing Business. The challenge? Write one post on a problem and another on your solution.

Now, this is one of those blog “meme’s” where bloggers think up an innovative way to get people to write about their subject. My issue? The meme is usually about something totally unrelated to the topic on your blog — and you know how I am about that topic. You need to write about the topic of your blog and stay there because it helps define your brand.

Well, this meme was perfect for it. I wrote an article that was on topic for my blog — The Problem: My Hosting Company Sucks — and a solution to it through — The Solution: Changing Hosting Companies. Both were struggles with technology for a writer. And, believe me, they have been struggles.

Yvonne and Laura have posted all the articles for the problems and the solutions and they are a great, eclectic set of issues presented by writers. I’m passing them on here as a great representation of the different avenues you could pursue for a writing blog and how to stay on topic.

And, oh-by-the-way, great reading too.

Scot