I can’t speak to those published by traditional publishers but my understanding is that you need to do most of your own marketing.

I’ve attended several workshops and the general message I got was don’t worry about marketing was if you only have one book published, don’t worry about marketing. Write the next book and the next. Then with at least three published books, consider marketing. I followed this advice, but partly because I didn’t want to do any marketing. J

The next point about marketing – establish a budget. How much can you afford to spend?

Blog tours that you do yourself are free – except for the books you might give away.

Facebook parties are again free. Many loops you may be a member of, have free promos for the member’s books.

Newsletters are one of the best ways to promote your book. And if you can get a street team, that’s relatively free. You can give them small gifts to help promote your books.

You can buy ads on Facebook and Twitter. BTSeMag has a full page premium ad in their online magazine, which is quite well done, for $70. There is a charge to design the ad, but it also is reasonable and you can have as much input as needed to finalize. http://www.btsemag.com Fiverr http://www.fiverr.com/bknights Bookbub (which is great but can be a challenge to get one) http://ohfb.com/index.html

Check back on Thursday for more information on marketing.

I’m getting ready to head off to Orlando, Florida for the Romance Writers of America (RWA) National conference. Anyone else still a member of RWA?

One of the reasons I continue to be an RWA member is because of my online chapter, Kiss of Death. I can’t be a member if I’m not part of RWA. Also, RWA does provide some good workshops for writers and Indie authors at t he National conference. I’ll talk about those later. 

 

Kiss of Death (KOD) has its own event preceding the National conference. This year our speaker is a former member of the elite US Air Force Combat Search and Rescue team and a pararescue jumper, Jarrod Honrada. Other special forces call the pararescue jumper to rescue them. He excels at bringing in the personal and character building side of our heroes and will give us great insight into what makes a Special Forces soldier special. We have him for the morning and it will be a lot of questions and answers. 

 

I’m hoping to take good notes and I’ll try and pass on a little of the information to you next week. I’d love to hear your thoughts and maybe some questions about the speakers.

And I’ll be talking more about the RWA workshops later.

I thought this made sense and marketing scared me. (It still does) So I kept writing and publishing books. Life threw a few curves and I didn’t publish the books quite as quickly as I had planned. Last year I planned on marketing but with selling and moving, twice it didn’t get off the ground. This year I’m beginning to market, and researching the best ways to market. 

 

 

Does marketing have to be active like taking out ads and doing blog tours, etc. or can it be the simple things we do when we self-publish. I didn’t consider what I did, marketing. But I’m rethinking it. What about you, what do you think marketing involves?

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