Marketing your writing is probably one of the hardest skills for us writers to learn. Even if you have a publisher you will be doing some kind of marketing for your books when they are published. Even though writing is considered a solitary pursuit it is really good to have a support system in place to help you, not only with your writing, but with ideas on effective marketing once you have published or even prior to publication. That is where friends, family and your writing group people might be able to help.
As an avid reader I am amazed that more writers do not take advantage of the electronic age. For something as simple as having an up-to-date website, a public writer’s Facebook page and some other social media account that most of your readers might participate in has become essential. For example joining a birding group page if your main character is a birder or even some policemen’s organizations if your main character is a police person. They are out there if you look for them and interacting with your readers might even get you more readers in the future as well as being a fairly great source of information for your stories.
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The bare minimum that any writer should have is an up-to-date website. There is no excuse not to have one as there are several companies out there who offer FREE websites and hosting as well as very simple instructions on how to create and maintain your website. The first place I go when I want to know more about a writer is to search the internet for their website. If you can use a word processor on the computer you can create and update a website these days. If you don’t have the money to pay someone to create one for you then use one of the many “FREE” services out there such as WIX, WordPress, Blogger, etc. Again, if you have a publisher they will, more than likely, add an author page to their website. But remember they own that page, what it says and how long it stays up there is strictly up to them. If you change your publishers, decide to self publish or not publish much of anything over the next couple of years you really should have a website for your readers to go to. There is nothing more frustrating than looking for your favorite writer’s contact information and the websites and emails listed in the books are all outdated. AND, if you put a web address in your published works please either keep that website or have it forwarded to your new one automatically.
Almost every single book ever published ends up being sold on Amazon. And Amazon offers a free service for authors under the Authors Central pages called an author profile page. It allows you to link every ISBN that you have under your name to your completed author profile. Please, please, please take the time to fill out this page and link all of your published works to it. You can, you know, even post updates to this profile page as a way to keep in touch with your readers too. I cannot tell you how many times I have found an author I like to read and went onto Amazon to see what else they may have published only to find that they don’t have a filled out author profile page or they haven’t updated it with anything but that one book. Come on guys! Take advantage of Free things.
Lastly, on my rant about marketing yourself is public Facebook pages. Yes, you can have a “Private” profile page for your friends and family but as an author you are going to want to create a SEPARATE author Facebook public page that people can visit, get updates on your progress, read about upcoming sales events for your books, etc. You can get your kids to help you keep this page updated and it is a way for people to connect with other readers who like your books too. It only takes few minutes to set this page up, add in your website information, link some of your other social media accounts and then share it with your friends and family. Once you get a certain number of “Likes” and/or “Follows” you will get an updated URL without all those numbers that you can post on your business cards. Now as to the question should you set up a Facebook page for your main character of a series, the name of your book and/or just your publishing name and Author on the end is really up to you. If you have a really interesting series you might want to create a page just for the main character so that your fellow readers can interact with each other.
Till next time