Happy St. Paddy’s, Squiders! I should have probably drawn you a landsquid, but that would require me to have foresight. And not be still recovering from brain fatigue.
There is in theory wifi here, but the wifi is a lie. So who knows when you will get this! Bwhahahaha. (Probably in about an hour when I get home. But you’ll never know, because you have no idea when it is right now.)
Sorry. Sorry. I am so behind on sleep.
Now that the revising portion of the sekrit project is done, in theory, it’s time to move on to marketing. Marketing, bane of authors everywhere. But, alas, it must be done. The following is both a to do list for me, and an idea of what needs to be done in general if you’ve never marketed a novel and plan to attempt it sometime in the near future.
- Cover
We’ve talked covers before. Covers are super important, because people totally judge books by their covers. - Book Description
The book description is also super important. It goes everywhere, from Amazon to book release announcements to guest blogs to the back of the book itself. It’s got to sell the book without being misleading. They are hard and some of mine have not gone well in the past. At least I’ve got a cohort this time? - Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is a single place for you to lay out and keep track of all the marketing you’re doing. It includes things like planned advertising, reviewers to contact, people/blogs to contact about guest posts, promotions you’re planning (like who you’re releasing info, such as a cover reveal, to), extras you plan to release and where you’re releasing them to, teasers or excerpts, etc. - Contacting People
Once you’ve got your marketing plan in hand, you’ve got to start implementing it. Normally this involves contacting people first–many websites require at least a month lead time, and if you’re asking someone to review your book, they might have a backlog. Plus, there seems to be a lousy return on reviews vs. number of people you contact–5% or something. So if you want 10 reviews, you might need to contact 200 people or more. You can also hire people to set up a blog tour for you, which is usually fairly reasonably priced, though I have not used this service myself. - Put Up Other Materials
The good news is that it’s easy to upload things places, like your website or Goodreads or Amazon or wherever, so you can do this last, or throughout your marketing process as you want, without worrying too much about timing.
That’s the basic premise. I’d better get on it.
Hope you have a lovely Thursday and weekend, Squiders! If you have any marketing tips you’d like to share–things that have worked well for you, people who have been helpful, etc.–please do! It never hurts to have some help! Oh, and if you’re interested in being part of our book’s release (it’s due out May 1), either through hosting a cover release or guest post, or acting as a reviewer (it’s high fantasy), or whatnot, leave me a comment here or shoot me an email at kit m campbell at gmail dot com.
