Marketing Updates and - Ahhg!

Ahhg!!!  I’m going to be off-duty officer again. Pray that I hear the phone ring. Please. The person scheduled had an emergency and I was asked to fill in. I could use the extra money. (If you don’t know this story, you can read the post, “The Week of Favor and Lesson Learned” under the label “Ideas.”)

Other than relaying that bit of info and petitioning prayers, I wanted to give updates on marketing and networking. I’m still researching and consider myself to be a novice, but here’s what I’ve been looking into:

1.                  Author Marketing Club. This is a free site where you can announce your book to other authors and also readers; ask for reviews; post your book trailer; try and get your book highlighted; take part in blog exchanges; and engage in “tagging,” where everyone in the forum confirms each others' tags for their books on Amazon.com and likes it. Tags are search descriptors of your book. Supposedly the more tags and likes you have, the more your book shows up in searches. It’s a free site, so it’s worth giving it a try.

2.                  The Kindle Board blog. Here, you can announce your free book giveaways from Amazon.com, or if your book is being sold for very cheap, like .99 or something like that. I’ve barely taken a peak at the site and am unsure of what all could be done.

3.                  Pinterest. Someone on LinkedIn showed where she used her Pinterest account to show her book trailer (I didn’t know you could do that ), add writing samples, and anything else related to her as a writer. She has a separate board for each of her books. I guess that’s another site where I need to hunt for followers and likes! I’ve added my trailer and samples, and need to work on building the board. Here’s my link: http://pinterest.com/chancelet/

4.                  Other Blogs. Connecting with other blogs that have your interests is another way of marketing and networking. Some people are just for numbers and their own blogs. But some like making connections and supporting other bloggers. They may do a write-up on your blog or book and link the info to your sites. When Julie Luek of the blog A Thought Grows wrote something about my blog and book, I received the most traffic after that and got a few more members. I believe I will make another connection soon too. I suggest you do this only for blogs that you really like, otherwise you’ll be suffering through the posts of those blogs. That has not been a problem for me yet!

5.                  LinkedIn. I believe I’ve mentioned this before. But there are a lot of groups you can join, announcements you can make and ways to try and get people to be interested in you and what you have to say. I’ve received the most blog traffic from LinkedIn.

6.                  Twitter. Okay, I’m still confused about twitter. I thought it was all about numbers – trying to get lots of followers. But people have been “retweeting” my tweets, which is a way of getting your tweets to more people, because the people retweeting me have many more followers than I do. On occasion, I read tweets, but I’ve been so busy with researching, I haven’t done much lately. I need to so hopefully people will know that I’m grateful for their retweeting me.

7.                  CNN iReport. I finally figured out how to directly upload my book trailer to different sites using my Mac. This is my first Mac and the differences from Windows got me a bit behind. Anyway, I came across iCNN, where I uploaded my trailer to, and found out you can have a profile there and post info. They have stories you can submit to, I believe via video only, and try and get your name out there. I plan on doing a story on the topic, “Being Black in American.” I’ve written out the script and need to try and do the no-more-than-30-second video. This is totally new to me! I’ll let you know what happens. Here's my profile: http://ireport.cnn.com/people/Chancelet

If you have other ideas, wish to add some info on the links above, or to set me straight about something, please feel free to leave a comment. God bless and have a wonderful week. 

Until the next writing prompt tomorrow!