Going to seminars on Twitter, Blogs and E Books at the Society of Authors turned out to be a day well spent. Authors are sometimes accused of burying their heads in the sand when it comes to social media and the digital revolution. Not true! We may grumble about lower advances and having to do our own marketing, but the sell-out, waitlisted, video-linked sessions last Wednesday proved our eagerness to get out there and tell the world about our work.
But the hard sell doesn’t work; we need to promote ourselves with gentle cunning, it seems. Nicola Morgan advised us to tweet 90% friendly content and only 10% sales speak, (http://www.nicolamorgan.com) and Alex Johnson told us to ‘think like a reader’ when composing your blog. In other words, what would you like to read when you visit someone’s blog? You don’t want to be sold something, that’s for sure. So make it fun, make it visual, make it catchy, make it ‘sticky’, and above all, post regularly, he told us.
http://www.shedworking.co.uk/.
E-books? This was a kind of self-help seminar, to pool our collective experience. Well, out of a whole crowd of writers who’d published their own e-books, only a couple had sold more than 200 of any one title, so it’s not a fast track to riches. My two latest books from Piatkus, Growing Your Family Tree and Your Life, Your Story are out on Kindle (here’s the 10% sales talk, if you didn’t spot it!) but I have no immediate plans to put out other offerings myself as e-readers. Maybe it’ll take a couple more seminars before I’m ready for that!
But the hard sell doesn’t work; we need to promote ourselves with gentle cunning, it seems. Nicola Morgan advised us to tweet 90% friendly content and only 10% sales speak, (http://www.nicolamorgan.com) and Alex Johnson told us to ‘think like a reader’ when composing your blog. In other words, what would you like to read when you visit someone’s blog? You don’t want to be sold something, that’s for sure. So make it fun, make it visual, make it catchy, make it ‘sticky’, and above all, post regularly, he told us.
http://www.shedworking.co.uk/.
E-books? This was a kind of self-help seminar, to pool our collective experience. Well, out of a whole crowd of writers who’d published their own e-books, only a couple had sold more than 200 of any one title, so it’s not a fast track to riches. My two latest books from Piatkus, Growing Your Family Tree and Your Life, Your Story are out on Kindle (here’s the 10% sales talk, if you didn’t spot it!) but I have no immediate plans to put out other offerings myself as e-readers. Maybe it’ll take a couple more seminars before I’m ready for that!
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