Marketing a Book and the Author

Children's Cottage at Forest Grove McMenamins

I had a fun time this past weekend attending a symposium put on by the Northwest Independent Writers Association in Forest Grove, Oregon.

When I wasn't teaching a workshop on craft I sat in on the Marketing workshops. I feel this is an area that I'm lacking. I came away with some wonderful ideas. The first ones I picked up from author Chanda Hahn. She writes for the teen audience and has science fiction and paranormal elements in her books. Her philosophy is not how many people she can acquire as friends on Facebook but how many comments she can get for one question. And the way she does that is by giving away something if people answer a question on FB. The methodology behind that is the more comments one post gets the higher in the algorithms the comment goes and more people see it. Chanda also mentioned a site called Pic Monkey that allows you to edit photos and use them to make online banners and ads.

Danita Cahill and I teaching a workshop

The second workshop that helped me was Indie Marketing 101 by authors Delilah Marvelle, C. Morgan Kennedy, and Therese Patrick.  I've sat in on C. Morgan and Therese's workshop on Author Marketing 101 and Delilah is always full of wisdom and humor. This workshop opened my eyes to some things I could do to show readers what is coming next by having covers up of  the whole series with the publication dates underneath and provide a printable book list, listing the books in the order of the series.

And the best thing I learned that should make my readers happy, is give your loyal readers new release alert and allow them to purchase the book at a reduced priced when it first comes out. That my readers is something I can pass on to you for being loyal and something I've felt bad about in the past and now know how to do.

So keep your eyes peeled to this blog and my website to find out how that is going to work!

What did you do this past weekend? Anything fun?