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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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: Publish every day.
If you are a writer, you need to publish your work. One of the ways to publish every day is to write articles for your blog. It has almost become a requirement to sell a book. And it certainly helps to drum up business.
But best reasons to publish to your blog have nothing to do with selling a book or drumming up business: it’s creating the discipline to write every day.
Publishing every day helps with everything:
- Publishing every day helps define your unique writing voice
- Publishing helps build an audience for your work
- Publishing to an audience is different than writing for yourself. Your writing will change as a result of consistently writing for an audience.
- Publishing helps market your work because your work is on display for everyone to see
Perhaps you need not write every day as much as publish in your blog every (week)day. Many of my articles are, in fact, written ahead of time and time-stamped with a future publishing date. But the benefits of publishing every day are the same.
Having your own publishing platform that allows you to connect with your audience every day is a great use of technology.
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: Use mind maps to organize your work.
Wikipedia has a great definition of a mind map:
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
For writers, its a digital way to organize our work or writing projects. Compared to notebooks, outlines, or three ring binders, a mind map offers these advantages:
- Capture brainstorming. When we’re first starting off on a project or work, we usually brainstorm all the things that need be done on the writing project. Some of the work is pretty standard, of course, but capturing the ideas is central to having unique point of view for our work.
- Effortless organization. One of mind mappings great features is the ability to take an item drag and drop it from one category to another.
- Outlining. Mind maps are great tools to use to outline what needs to be done. Since you can create the mind map around subjects, each subject can be a chapter or scene in a book. Extensions to that subject can be what the scene or chapter is about, point by point.
- Visual To Do List. Mind maps can not only provide reference areas for your work (such as having a character from your manuscript with all the associated history of the character captured in your mind map), but also a way to visually have your next actions by category for the project. For example, you can have a “research” as well as an “interview” subject area for your writing project and capture what needs to be done in each area.
- Color your world. Mind maps can use color to differentiate different areas of the mind map. If you regularly color code your your subjects (via folders, highlighters, etc.), you can carry that over into most mind map programs.
Mind maps are great tools for writers. To see a demonstration of how mind mapping works, visit the MindManager tour site. While the demonstration is about business, change the subject matter to writing and you’ll see a completely different way to organize your work.
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
