Entries Tagged 'self-promotion' ↓

Jennifer Perkins of Naughty Secretary Club is a celebrity in the indie/DIY craft scene. A member of the Austin Craft Mafia which launched dozens of chapters worldwide, Jennifer’s jewelry has been featured in numerous magazines including Bust and Seventeen. She also has her own TV show, Craft Lab, on HGTV.On top of all of that, Jennifer is a soon-to-be published author! Her book, The Naughty Secretary Club: The Working Girl’s Guide to Handmade Jewelry, hits bookstores on August 11.

In her blog this week, Jennifer evaluates some of the social networking opportunities for authors.

Jennifer’s also a good example of how the use of online video can help boost publicity for a book. She filmed a video of herself making one of the projects for her book and it’s now syndicated in various places on the web.

What is the best way to blog? Be yourself.

Marrus, an artist and acquaintance of mine, maintains a blog at LiveJournal. A friend of hers, Jeff Simmons, recently wrote about her in his own blog, Can Someone Please Explain?. In his post, Jeff credits Marrus’ achievements in integrated marketing.

One of the reasons that Marrus’ blog is such a delight to read is because it seamlessly blends the lines between her artistic profession and her life outside of work. Some days you’ll read about her pet chicken and other days you’ll hear about her fight to sell prints of her artwork in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

The strongest reason, however, that Marrus has so many cyberfans reading her blog is that it is sincere. She keeps an online journal because she wants to — not, I believe, with any marketing slant in mind.

So if you want to check out a good example of an artist’s blog, whether for inspiration or pure enjoyment, jump over to Marrus’ journal.

I’m a newbie to Twitter. I was in social networking overload (well, I still am…) and didn’t want to bother with something new. But as of last week, I’m a convert. It’s fun, and I can definitely see the potential publicity uses for business.

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” tool. You communicate with your Twitter followers with 140-character or less updates — called “tweets.” You post your updates and read your followers’ either via the web or a mobile device.

There are some cool resources for Twitter that I’ve discovered in the past week, including a couple sent to me by my friend and former co-worker Loki:

• Summize - Search Twitter conversations to find people with similar interests.
• Loud Twitter - Automatically send your tweets to your regular blog.
• twitAbit - Queue up your tweets when Twitter is down — which lately seems to be quite often!
• Twitter Feed - Send your regular blog posts to Twitter.
• Twitter Fox - An interface for Twitter via an add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

What are some of your favorite resources for Twitter? What are some of your favorite uses for Twitter, either for your business or from a personal perspective?

Follow me on Twitter!

David Unowsky has written a great article with tips for getting your books into bookstores and for scheduling promotional events, too. He knows his stuff. He owned an independent bookstore for over 30 years, has worked in publishing, and currently works as the Events Manager at Magers & Quinn Booksellers.

Unowsky says you need to make sure that three important areas are covered in order to entice bookstores to work with you:

1. Quality Of the Book - In addition to just writing a good book, pay attention to presentation, copyediting, etc.

2. Appropriate Pricing - Don’t put an astronomical price on your book that will make no one want to buy it. Also remember that bookstores need to purchase the books at a 45-47% discount off of the retail price.

3. Marketing and Publicity - The bookstores want to know that if they stock your book, they have help trying to sell it. One of Unknowsky’s suggestions: “Take advantage of every relevant on-line resource to post information about your book.”

He also gives some tips for successfully navigating your promotional events in the bookstores. You can read more at the Minn Post website.

A few days ago, I gave thumbs up to the ladies at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books blog in my post, “Ain’t It A Bitch.” I also emailed Sarah and Candy, the bloggers behind SBWLTB, to let them know. Sarah had some additional advice to share about a sudden increase in web traffic due to publicity:

“[W]e didn’t expect the AP or the NYT to pick up the story - I said the day before we launched the news that the Seinfeld plagiarism cookbook scandal would probably get more press, and was I wrong! - and once they did, we had to scramble, removing a lot of the slow-loading content from the site, talking to our hosting company to get more server space as fast as possible, and adding the “Looking for Cassie?” content to the top of the sidebar. I figured a lot of the clicks would be curious readers who aren’t really interested in romance novels, just in the Cassie Edwards content.”

I also got some great comments from visitors who had suggestions for handling the Cassie Edwards scandal, including Ivana Taylor of the marketing blog Strategy Stew. She was one of Anita Campbell’s “partners in crime” in rounding up contributions to “Top Experts Dish with their Best Kept Marketing Secrets” at the Small Business Trends blog and is doing a series on her own blog where she expands on some of the marketing secrets that commenters added to the list. You can see the post where she wrote about my idea here. (I saw incoming traffic from this post on my web stats and that’s how I met Ivana, by the way!)

Here’s what Ivana suggested:

I’d love to see someone do something really honorable and dramatic - like re-print the novel and insert an introduction by Cassie Edwards that says that much of the work is pulled from the following books and authors (with references in the text). The I’d like to see them actually take the proceeds from the book and pay the references a fair amount as a royalty. By doing this, those readers who are interested in the subject matter (in this case the Lakota) will have references they could follow for further reading - if they want to. Most won’t care and I don’t think her sales would be affected.

Steve Weber also dropped by and left a comment. His book, Plug Your Book!, is a great read. I highly recommend it for any authors trying to learn online publicity tactics for themselves. Like I told Steve, I’ve been doing online publicity for years, but I still took pages of notes when reading this and I really want to read through it again. An interesting side note: Steve O’Keefe of Patron Saint Productions, where I worked for years and still do some freelance work, wrote the foreword!

I visited some online writers’ forums this past weekend, doing some research about the kind of self-promotion questions that new authors might have. One of the discussion threads I found dealt with whether or not there was a point to having a blog and/or a website, or even registering a domain name, before a writer had actually gotten a publishing contract.

My answer to this question is, “Yes, it’s worth it. Start early.” Why wait until your book is published to start building an online presence for yourself? Getting a jumpstart on a website full of content relating to your book is going to help your online publicity in the long run. Don’t wait until your book hits stores for the search engines to start finding you. (This is by no means advocating keyword spamming. I’m talking about good, strong, natural content.)

At the very least, go ahead and register your domain name(s), including www.YourName.com. With domain name registrars like GoDaddy, who frequently offer discount codes, domain registration for a year usually runs less than $10.

Rachal Donadio published an article in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago that focuses more on general marketing buzz for books rather than specifically talking about online publicity, but I think what she writes only adds to my point:

[…] publishing still relies on a time-honored, time-consuming sales strategy: word of mouth. […]

“It’s not only buzz, it’s a product introduction — but with nothing like the advertising or marketing budget that a piece of soap would have,” said David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. With the Internet and blogs, word of mouth travels more quickly today, but there’s a glut of information. To help a book break through the static, publishers have to plan months in advance.