Most authors go randomly into their career. 

They had a great idea for a book.  They write it.  They hope it will be good enough to get published.  They send queries.  Their focus is not on having a career as an author.  It’s strictly about becoming an author—getting that one book published.

Even indies will put a book out and randomly attempt to market it without thinking long term or seeing the bigger picture.

Think about the implication.  Most people choose a career—say a business marketing career.  They go to school to train for it.  Then they take the steps to build that career. 

Too many writers are waiting in line to be chosen as if waiting to get picked for a team during gym class.  Will I get picked?  Will people like me?  Do I have what it takes?  If I give them free stuff will they buy stuff later?

People in business don’t wait to get picked.  They hone their skills, choose positions carefully, read up on employers and keep an eye focused on their goals.  There is no waiting to be picked.  They make their careers happen.

In my class, Get Serious. Get Discovered. I ask my students to take a stand.  They will not hope to become an author.  They will not wait in line to be picked.  They will take their career seriously.  Hone their craft.  Get their work out in front of readers.  Consciously work toward building their readership, getting feedback, writing more, putting more out there for people to read.  They will work toward catching the eye of agents and publishers.

I ask that of them because they deserve it.

But how can you accomplish all of that?  Well, let's start with the basics:

1. List out the genre or genres where you want to excel.  The genre you want some enthusiastic fan to list you at the top of their "Best of" list on Goodreads.

2. Read that genre.  Read the best and the worst.  What made the difference?  What can you learn from both of them?

3. As a fan of that genre, what would you like to see your favorite authors blog, tweet, or post about?  List at least three.

4. Do you follow any of the authors in your genre on social media?  If not, start now.  Watch what they do.  What they don't.  Think about what works for them.

5. Learn.  Emulate.  Grow.  Take what you have learned from your favorite authors in your genre and emulate them—the way they write and market themselves.  When you have their basics, then start to find your own voice.  Add your own rhythm to the dance. 

That's how people in business succeed.  They find mentors in their field.  They read about them, study them and find out all their business tactics.  They follow them on social media and interact with them.  Then they take what they've learned from them and start to build their own dreams. 

Need a little help getting started?

Get Serious.  Get Discovered.  May 6 – 30

Online class at www.margielawson.com

Just $40

One of the very best ways to capture audience attention is by giving away your writing.  People are willing to take a chance on a new author if their work is free.  But did you know that giving away your writing is also a great way to measure the effectiveness of your writing?  It can show you whether you are connecting with people or if the writing needs work.  

There are a variety of ways to gain exposure by using your writing.  Blogging is the most popular, but it isn't the only way.  Here are a few marketing strategies you can use that may even help to improve your writing:

Continue reading »

Here are some great tips on how to focus your marketing and avoid overwhelm, from my favorite author platform guru, Joanna Penn.  You can find her at www.TheCreativePenn.com

Enjoy her lovely accent too!

Three additional tips to avoiding overwhelm:

1.  Be Patient – Your platform will take time to build.

2.  Build in Steps – Don’t try to do everything at once.  Try one thing, get comfortable with it, then add another.

3.  Schedule time & take breaks – Create a schedule for when you are going to do your marketing (ex. every morning for one hour).  Also, define time when you don’t work on your platform.  I rarely do any marketing on the weekends.

If you are a new or self published author, you have the same problem with your author platform as you have for your blog… finding readers.  We are all told to have a blog so we can attract readers and turn them into fans of our writing, but how do we get the there?  As the final post in this series about fiction blogs, we will look at readers. They are the reason you blog. The three most important rules of blogging revolve around how well you know your readers, how well you cater to them and how you capture them.

Rule #1 Readers – Know Them So You Can Find Them

Who is your reader? Your reader likes your writing.  Why?  They have specific reasons for liking it. What are those reasons? Do they like your sassy style? Do they need a laugh for the day?  Do they want to be informed or inspired?  Build a strong image of your reader in your mind the way you would a character. The more you know about them the better you will be at finding them and giving them what they want on your blog.

Once you have a strong idea of who your reader is, then you can put yourself in front of them at the venues they frequent. Think about what other blogs they’d like to read or what social media they are using. This helps you to focus your marketing — saving you time.

Rule #2 Readers – Cater To Your Reader

I talked about this in a previous post, but I can never say it too much. Cater to your reader! Take the time to know who they are and what they want, then make your blog the most inviting place for them. This is where content is king. Though here’s the tricky part: you can write the most wonderful post with perfect grammar and intelligent prose, but if it’s not what your reader wants from you then you might as well have not written it. Readers are fickle folk. Many are short on time and they come to your blog with a “what have you done for me lately” mentality. So make sure that you are thinking of them when you write.

Provide the content they want, also provide the experience they want. Help them out with useful links or tips. Find out what they want. How? Ask them. There is no harm is writing a post that asks your readers what they’d like to see on your blog.

Rule #3 Readers – Capture Them

Once you have them coming to your site, you’ll want to create ways of capturing them… or at least their contact information. Put together a sign up area and something special that can be sent to them regularly. Hey now, wait a minute, I can hear you groaning out there. Many writers I meet don’t want to send out weekly newsletters or be perceived as a spammer. Frankly, I would never ask you to do that. Still, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for you to gather the information of your readers. Imagine the boost in sales your next book will get if you can send an announcement of its launch to a large list of people who love your writing.

So here are a few ways to capture contact information without feeling like a spammer.

1. Offer to send your blog posts to their inbox. People who love your writing will love to have it sent to them when it is posted. Best of all, some contact management companies offer this automatically. They send your feed to your list. Check out contact management companies such as aWeber and Constant Contact.
2. Do a monthly newsletter with links to specific posts from your blog and add in contests where your readers can win books from similar writers. They’ll appreciate the chance to win and your fellow writers will appreciate the nod (hint: let your fellow writers know you are doing this and maybe they’ll return the favor)
3. Come up with a short but consistent item you can send. For example, a sign up for the quote of the day, word of the week or story of the month. My books deal with the paranormal so I’m starting a weekly horrorscope (spelling intentional) delivered to their inbox.
4. If you don’t want to send out anything consistently, then have an occasional contest with a prize. Readers must sign up with name and email to be entered into the drawing.

Always remember that your blog has a purpose, to attract and keep your readers so that you can sell more books.

This week we are exploring the pains and problems of blogging as a fiction author.  As authors, we are told to blog so that we can build an author platform, gain a following of readers and boost book sales. Unfortunately, only a few bloggers will ever find success with their blog. Why is that? Is it the blog or the blogger?

In this post lets examine the blog. That mysterious of beasts.  There are so many options for blogging software.  There are so many problems with blogging itself.  What are some of the pitfalls of using a blog as a marketing tool for fiction and what you can do to overcome them?

Pitfall #1 – Blogs don’t come with instructions.

Well, technically, they can.  You can find a plethora of blogging tutorials and classes (we even have a WordPress Class).  However, I’m not talking about how to post pictures or change your theme. I’m talking about gaining a readership and advancing your writing career. Even the gurus don’t really have a guaranteed formula. It’s more like a template of what usually works, or what’s worked lately. Blog marketing is part science, part art, and dollop of “let’s throw it out there and see what sticks.”

So how do you know what will work for you? Continue reading »

In January we are offering a class entitled:
Where Do I Start? Book Marketing Mastery Series #1
If you’ve been wondering where to start on your road to marketing your book, then this is the class for you.  But you’ve heard that before.  So we’re going to offer you some tantalizing tidbits from the class.   Giving you a chance to try it on for size.

Here’s tidbit #1

Interested in learning more? For more about the class CLICK HERE
Have questions? Feel free to comment below!

In my last post, we looked at how to build a list of candidates of potential marketing partners.  This list will contain writers similar enough to you that their readership that might also be interested in your books.  However, each of the members of the team might have different strengths and weaknesses in the way that they market. The key is to discover their marketing style so that you can work together on those types of marketing.  That way you are not adding any burden to their daily routine.  You may even be helping them out by asking to guest post on their blog or commenting on their posts.  Working with their style will encourage them to promote you regularly.

Today, we will go through the list to find those whose strength is blogging. Begin by sorting them into five blogging areas:

1. Commenting
2. Blog Roll or Badges
3. Guest Blogging
4. Group Blogging
5. Blog post referrals

Any person on your list can be categorized into multiple areas. Just be careful not to stretch them too thin. If you have them doing all five, they will quickly get burned out.

So let’s take a look at each of the these arenas and how you and your marketing machine members can help each other build your readership. Continue reading »

Over and over, I’ve heard authors explain to me why they don’t need a book marketing strategy.  They tell me that they aren’t a business (a statement that makes me shudder).  That books are sold on the merit of their writing (like Snooki’s book).  And finally, that if a book is truly great, the word will spread.  Sure it will.

Do you really believe J.K. Rowlings sold a gazillion books without an ounce of book marketing strategy?

Think of it as a critique or support group for your book marketing.

Here’s the deal. If you have a book, then you already have a marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy might be that you depend on your publishing company to do all the work. Your marketing strategy may be to tell your friends and relatives about the book, then let word of mouth sell the book. Maybe you posted a website? Maybe you are on Amazon.com or Goodreads.com? Those are all pieces of a marketing strategy.

So people who don’t like or believe in developing marketing strategies are still marketing. They just aren’t marketing effectively.

The good news is that, for those of us who are eager to put our books in front of more eyeballs, there are better strategies to help us market. One strategy that works well is to build yourself something that I like to call the marketing machine. Continue reading »

Tomorrow is #WW (Writer Wednesday) on Twitter, making it a perfect day to cover that crazy Twitter phenomenon called the hashtag. What is it? Why should you care?

Twitter Hashtags are created by putting the # symbol in front of a word or words. They started as a way to organize conversations. For example, a tweet with #writermarketing on the end would indicate that the tweet was part of a conversation about… you guessed it, writer marketing. The hashtag makes it convenient for tweeters to click on the tag and bring up all the people who are tweeting in that conversation. This creates a type of Twitter chat room that is open for public viewing. All those using the tag can communicate with each other, but your followers will also see your tweets, and they can decide whether to join in the conversation.

That is the normal use of a hashtag. You may be perplexed to see hashtags that don’t have groups, such as #notcool or #winning. Hashtags have grown beyond their original usage into a creative way of expressing one’s self. If people like the hashtag, think it’s funny or clever, then many people will use it. That is called trending. It is fun, but not necessarily useful. #ohmygodbecky Continue reading »