THAT bad word: Marketing

This frustrated little guy is how most of us writers feel about marketing. UGH! Just the word “marketing” is likely to lead us to the nearest, hardest wall.

I’ve been trying to learn how to market since 2003. In truth, I mainly ignored that part of the process for some time after my first book came out. A not exaggerated fact about me: I’m social phobic, and have been for many, many years (yes, I am that old). I don’t mean I’m only kind of reserved. I mean according to the DSM-IV (psych manual of disorders), I’m full-blown social phobic. Well, or I was full-blown. Now I’m only half blown. Uh.. or something like that. Either way, I can talk to one person in a casual setting who I am familiar with and still fight shaking hands and voice tremors and heart rate increase. Add several more people in a group who are looking at me and expecting me to speak and all of that increases, along with the warming face and swirling head that feels like my brain’s in a Tilt-A-Whirl underground with water rushing in.

So, when I read the plethora of expert advice on marketing that all led to … UGH! … public speaking, I just figured I would never sell books other than to family and a few close friends because there was NO WAY in the world I was going to voluntarily speak in public.

A..hem…  Well, I have. To an extent, a very small extent. But we’ll get to that later.

Avoiding that humiliation at all costs, I searched for any way other than that to get the word out. I bought John Kremer’s 1001 Ways To Market Your Books and spent a fair amount of time getting ideas and learning the process. Much of it is geared toward non-fiction or authors with an actual publishing house, so it left me with about 5 ways to market my indie mutt genre books. (Okay, that one is an exaggeration. There were more than 5 left that applied. A few more than 5.) Of course, this was way back before being indie started to be cool.

[Read my post about not so cool indie beginnings here at Lindsay’s Romantics.]

What did I do? Here’s a brief list as I can remember. I don’t remember which ideas I found in Kremer’s book and which I adapted, created on my own. Most of this applied to my second book, Rehearsal: A Different Drummer, since from what I read, I’d lost the “new book” window for Finishing Touches.

~~ I bought my own domain name and used my amateur html and web skills to put up my brand: LKHunsaker.com where the thousands of readers I would reach by my marketing efforts would throng to find more info. (uh..)

~~ I ordered business cards with one of my books featured, along with my web address. (That works best if you have the guts to actually give them out.)

~~ I ordered postcards with the same info, then searched online to find dozens of indie booksellers, printed out the info, and sat addressing postcards each night for about a week, bought post card stamps, and mailed them out. (Please don’t imitate this method. It’s a waste of stamps.)

~~ I started up an indie arts site to feature other indies of different sorts and bought pens with the site address to hand out (or conveniently ‘forget’ to take with me when I was out and used one).

None of it seemed to be even making a dent in getting my name out there, despite some gorgeous reviews from the handful of people who did read my books. I added some of those reviews to my “reworked several times” website and begged a few of those readers to please leave reviews on my publisher’s site! Bless their souls, they sure did, too. Some of them did.

Without results, it was time to go back to more research about how to market. If there’s one big thing I’ve accomplished, it’s that I’ve learned a heck of a lot of “how to” although putting it into practice is another story.

As this is getting long and one thing I’ve learned is to keep blog posts fairly short since online reading attention span is fairly short, I’ll continue this tomorrow.

Come back and bring your friends and I’ll get to how I found techniques that are much more productive than those above.

By the way, I now have my blog organized! Entries are linked in categories. Find what you want to read by clicking on one of the top tabs.

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Do You Twitter?

 

AHHH! There are so MANY social networks out there and although some of your friends may already be on the one(s) you're on, some are on different ones and how do you keep up with all of them when they're all over the place?

Well there has to be a limit. I'm on Myspace, Facebook, Shelfari, Goodreads (although I only know how to get to my account there through my Facebook), Yahoo 360, Flixster (connected to family only), Gather (although I haven't been there in forever), LibraryThing, and there are likely others I've forgotten by now. I also recently joined Twitter. Why? Because John Kremer told me to.

No, I don't always follow orders from experts who say "you have to do this to market," and I put it off for some time after Mr. Kremer insisted it's a book marketing necessity, but ... I'm at Twitter. Find me there and everywhere else by searching LK Hunsaker (no punctuation, although I apparently like parentheses). You know what? I like Twitter although my first thought when I heard about it was somewhere along the lines of rolling my eyes, which I very well did. How can I not like it? I "followed" Keith Urban and he's following me back! Granted, most of the big names don't bother to follow you back and I know Mr. Urban has more to do than to actually read my twitterings (yes, I think that is an actual word now) but still, when you decide to stalk someone who decides to stalk you in return, it's flattering. Uh, I mean follow, not stalk. I think.

Much of it feels like stalking, though, with some of the stuff people put on there. I finally stopped following an author who every two minutes informed all of us about how her refrigerator cleaning was going with more description than I wanted, thanks anyway. So Twitter away, go for it, but leave the frig cleaning and such in private, please. I don't want five minute updates about what you're doing unless it's actually interesting. Hey, if you're backstage with Bon Jovi getting to see the roadies at work and the band at play, by all means, let us know. Or if you're on your way to London from the States and getting stopped by security although you're a big name, let us know that, too (a nod to Rob Thomas -- sorry, had to laugh about that one). I like finding new blog entries and new happenings and reading successes and struggles along career paths. I like nature/spiritual quotes. I like some of the regular daily stuff as long as it's not overdone, or gross. I do appreciate those who keep the language PG rated since you never know what age group is following you.

Today Steve Weber decided to follow me. Of course he's looking for writers to follow him in return and I'll be glad to do so, but that means my name is getting out there as being a writer. That's a good thing. It's also getting out that I'm music-obsessed and appreciate the meditative quality of nature since those into Yoga are following me.

It doesn't even take much time, which is a good thing when your schedule is busy as most of us can say. I run through now and then to see what others are up to, sometimes sending return comments, and post what I'm doing or thinking. Um, I don't post about what I'm cleaning. That's even boring to me. Why would I share the boredom? Of course, some may think my nature appreciation posts are boring, so I don't do them often. Variety is good. I do some marketing posts but I prefer simply to chat with people. I might have to find something interesting to be in the midst of so I'll have something more interesting to post. Because ... while editing may be brain-filling and intense, it's boring to read about. Hmmm... what I can think of to tell people today?

Oh, I have these blog posts linking automatically to Facebook. Now if I could do that with every other site and make this my main hub of communication, how grand would that be?

Now for the minor marketing insert... I have a new short story free to read: a very short romantic comedy about two dogs and sneakers. Go to Smashwords to check it out. While you're there, peruse my other free stories! It won't bother me if you decide to check out my novels in Ebook format, either. ;-)

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