In the self-published world, if writers hate one thing, then that must be marketing. Marketing is hard, it is a lot of work. Marketing is nothing but putting yourself out there. I will describe some tips for deconstructing marketing for writers.
If I write a book and publish it, it will be out there. But nobody will know without good marketing strategies. This is especially true if you are writing for a particular genre that is not popular among readers.
If you go to any writer and ask him advice about marketing, he will tell you to use social media, attend writers’ events, use ads on google. That’s all. A very standard way to reach the audience. This is a bit of fair advice if a writer is starting his journey. But this is also like to tell someone to jump into an ocean and let that person learn swimming.
In traditional publishing, publishers and agents did a lot of marketing for writers, writers focused on writing. But things have changed now. A writer has to do everything from writing, editing, publishing, and endless marketing. Now you see why writers don’t like marketing.
Let’s see how we can deconstruct marketing for writers.
Change your mindset
Most importantly, we should change our mindset. Instead of thinking, marketing is too much work or it is too laborious, we should think it is fun and part of the process.
The process starts with writing your first draft and continues with marketing your book until you reach your target audience.
So what is the mindset that we should adopt?
Marketing is fun.
Using Social Media Effectively
Social media can be overwhelming. There are too extreme either people use it too much or people use it too little. Finding that middle ground in using social media will help you with your writing and finding the right audience for your books.
Instead of using every social media outlet there, use a few, and use them effectively.
Personally, I prefer to use Twitter, Facebook for Facebook groups, and Reddit for its subcommunities.
Twitter helps in improving your craft, you also get immediate feedback and it is textual content, so easy to use. Once you have a good number of followers, you can reach a wider audience. The struggle comes with building an audience. As a beginner, you can use a hashtag like #WritingCommunity and that can help you to get an audience.
Facebook groups are invaluable if you want to find the right audience. A lot of readers are hanging out in these groups. If you know what genre you are writing in, search the groups for that genre and you will find people who read or write about that genre. One Facebook group that is full of information is 20BooksTo50K.
Similar to Facebook groups, you will get a lot of feedback and an audience from Reddit communities.
Marketing is all about finding your target audience.
Increase your online presence
When you are in between writing your books, you should continue to write and publish your work. I love writing short stories and submitting them to different online outlets. You can read my accepted short story The Traffic. Now you will question why this is needed for marketing?
The more presence online you have, the more there are chances that someone will stumble across your work. If they enjoyed your stories, they will try to find out if you have any books published. Curiosity works in mysterious ways. So spread your online presence.
To reach the target audience, you should spread your online presence.
Start early, start often
Once you finish your first draft, you should start marketing. You should market at least a year to six months before publishing your book. There are different strategies you can use to market your books.
Some of these techniques include giving previews of your work, meeting people in person, and talking about your upcoming book, creating a great cover, and displaying that at various places.
You can also create ads on different social media platforms to promote your book.
Start early and do it often.
Author Website and Mailing List
As a writer, one critical aspect is to have an author website. This is a central spot where all readers who either do online search for your work or type of your work can find you. This is also the place where you can advertise your books and write about your craft and other stories.
Another reason to have a website is so you can build your mailing list. Readers who are interested in your work can join your group. This will be your place where you can connect with your readers and offer them a glimpse of your work.
Build an author website and use it frequently to provide an update about your work.
Conclusion
To conclude this post, I want to say marketing is like growing a tree. A tree doesn’t grow in a day, you have to water it every day, provide food, sunshine to a tree every day so that one day it grows as a big tree and provide shade to everyone.
Similarly, marketing for one day won’t help you to find your readers. You must nurture it every day, even for an hour is sufficient. Do it every day and you will have a giant tree one day.
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