The Calm Before The Storm

I was asked recently by a soon-to-be-published debut author what types of promotion work best for me. And since today is the day before my release of The Forgotten Debutante, the calm before the storm, I thought I'd share what I've learned in the four years since I was a soon-to-be-published author.

1. Make friends with other authors, both inside your local chapter, and outside. Follow them on the various forums, buy and read their books, write reviews and post them, if you have a blog, offer to host them, etc. You'll soon find an entire group who are following the same trajectory you are at the same time, and there's safety in numbers. Plus, it's fun to watch their successes. I know the conventional marketing wisdom is not to add these fellow authors to your twitter feed, or friend them on Facebook, but I think that's a mistake. Most authors are also voracious readers, too. And they have friends.

2. Work with your publisher or agent, if you're going the traditional route, to find promotional opportunities. Most publishers have a list of places where they'll send your ARC for review, but develop your own list that caters to your genre. A review from a legitimate review site is golden. It takes time to figure out which sites prefer your type of book, but the end result is worthwhile. If you know that a certain site likes your books, you can keep sending them and rest assured you'll get a good review.

3. Don't turn down any promotional opportunity, however frightening it may be. Participate in local author book signings, get your books in the local library or bookstore, even if you have to carry them in yourself, be on whatever radio show you can find (it's not as scary as it sounds), be interviewed for your local newspaper. A few years ago, USA Today was starting up an on-line presence for romance and asked for folks to help. I raised my hand immediately, and for months afterward, it was my job to find new releases in a specific genre. They since decided not to run the new releases on a daily basis and disbanded the group that was helping, but I made a valuable contact there, which I still use today. (See the coverage on April 6 for my new release.)

4. Join whatever offshoot group you can find that caters to your genre. Within RWA, you have the FF&P chapter for paranormal authors, Hearts Through History for historical authors, RWA Contemporary for, you guessed it, the contemporary author, and so on. Each of these groups provide a wealth of information, new friends to make and ways to get the word out about your upcoming work.

5. Explore the various types of social media and find what works best for you. At a minimum, you need a website and Facebook page, but there are so many other outlets that you could easily spend your entire day on this task alone, instead of writing the next book. Play around with them all, and find what works best for you. Then pick three or four and use them daily.

6. Write the next book! You are only as good as your next one. How's that for pressure?

So today, I'll rest up, work a bit on the next book, and get ready for tomorrow's mayhem, which will stretch out for the next few weeks. You can glimpse where I am all month on the upcoming guest appearance tab of this blog, but here's an idea of what Monday brings.

I've got some gift copies to mail. I want reviews to start showing up on Amazon as well as on Goodreads, so I'll prod my beta readers. I have the BookBub ad running on Monday for another book in the series and hope to take The Duplicitous Debutante into the top 100 for historical romances, if even for an hour. And, I hope while people are there, buying The Duplicitous Debutante, they also will pick up The Forgotten Debutante. But that can't happen with just the ad. I must be active on social media all week, promoting on Twitter, Google +, Pinterest, Facebook, and all the rest. It'll be a fun, exhausting, time.

 

Buy Link: http://amzn.to/1V0b11r