It is a truth universally acknowledged that writers cannot spend all their time writing. Sometimes, they must market the writing they produce.
For many writers, this is an uncomfortable task. They prefer writing to marketing. And there are many people who tell them that their most important task is to produce a good book that readers want to read. The first requirement for marketing is to have a good product to sell.
Still, a regular presence as a marketer is necessary to keep the writer’s books and name from falling to the bottom of the Amazon and Google algorithms.
As a part-time writer, I need to make choices. Balancing both writing and marketing is one of those choices—a choice I make every day. Do I write? Or market? Or deal with the other pressing issues in my life?
Most days, I must deal with caregiving, household chores, and financial matters, which eats into writing time. Some days, I can spend an hour or two drafting my novel. Rarely can I spend more than three hours writing. And rarer yet does innovative marketing rise to the top of my list, though I do put some marketing tasks on my regular schedule.
One of the reasons I write this blog is to have new content for search engines to find. It took me a while to get results, but now, if I enter my name in the search window of most browsers, links to my books and website constitute most of the first page of search results. (That isn’t true if I search for my pseudonym, which I do not market regularly.)
In addition to this blog, I send a monthly newsletter to subscribers. And I recently ran an ad on Amazon to promote Lead Me Home, the first book in my historical fiction series.
But these activities are about all the marketing I do.
I have a subscription to BookBrush which helps me produce nice graphics to use on various social media sites. I’ve created some images of my books that I really like. Here are a couple of examples.
I should spend a few minutes each week creating something in BookBrush to post on Facebook or Instagram or other sites. I also think Pinterest is a possible marketing tool. I like Pinterest, and I’ve set up some boards on the historical period and settings I use in my books.
But I don’t want my social media sites clogged only with advertisements of my books, so if I post these nice BookBrush images, I also need to post about other things. All of this takes time, and, as I wrote above, I have to make choices how I spend my time.
I also purchased a subscription to Kindlepreneur a few months ago, though I have not explored it yet. I should use its information to improve my Amazon ads. I’ve run the same ad off and on for the last two years. It is losing its effectiveness.
So many possibilities for marketing. And yet, I continue to give priority to finishing the first draft of my novel.
Authors, do you have marketing ideas you are using successfully at the moment?
