Welcome back Phyllis Zimbler Miller for Week 2.
Last week you offered tips for an author's website. What's next?
Blogging can be a book author’s best friend (after Twitter, which I’ll explain below). First, don’t groan. You’re a writer, so write.
A blog on your website is even better than a standalone blog because all that fresh content (and you will commit to blogging at least three times a week) makes the search engines like your book author website better. (Full disclosure again: I didn’t know this when I first started blogging so my book’s blog is separate; it’s at www.mrslieutenant.blogspot.com)
And blogging is one reason to have a book author website before your book is published – it’s a great way to start the author-reader relationship.
If you are a nonfiction author, it’s pretty clear what you’ll write blog posts about. Whatever your book topic is on.
And if you are a fiction author, don’t despair. There are all kinds of things you can blog about – from recipes of your book’s locale (Thailand perhaps) to actual detective techniques (for mystery novels) to writing strategies.
Great, you’re blogging. Now you have to get people to read your blog.
While Facebook (where you can have a group or fan page for your book) and LinkedIn are two of the most effective social networking sites, Twitter is the goose that lay the golden egg in my opinion. Why? Because, once you learn how to use Twitter effectively, it is the easiest way to get in front of people interested in your topic in a non-invasive and genuinely helpful manner.
Again, if you have a nonfiction book, you share information related to this topic, including information that does NOT come from you. And you answer questions on this topic if you can.
If you have a fiction book, you interact with all the other fiction authors on Twitter and share writing tips, publishing tips, and your worse nightmares (your books aren’t available at the Borders author panel). Through your tweets you share with others and become a real person to them. And if they read fiction they should be interested in checking out what you’ve written.
One of the biggest pluses of Twitter (besides the 140-character limit for each tweet and not having to open email to read the message) is that you get only 160 characters for your bio and only one hot link. (Currently LinkedIn has three hot links available in your profile and is there even a limit on Facebook?)
Upload a good headshot of yourself (not your book cover – people like to interact with people, not inanimate objects), write an interesting (truthful) bio, and link to your website or blog.
Then start slowly, learning as much as you can about Twitter etiquette and how to tweet worthwhile information for your followers. (Do NOT -- unless you wrote a cookbook -- tweet what you ate for dinner regardless of whether you see other people tweet this.)
One final word of caution that has to do with your website, your blog and your outreach efforts:
This is NOT a three-month project
of book promotion and you stop after three months.
This is a three-year project or more of promoting your book.Commit to the long haul, to continually learning new strategies, and to keeping an open mind about new possibilities, joint ventures, and new ideas. Remember, you’re sharing your hard work with the world because you believe in what that hard work produced. Now you just have to make it easier for people to learn about your hard work and want to partake of it.
Thanks Phyllis, for all your advice.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant whose power marketing website is http://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com.
Her company builds book author websites and provides other book marketing services.
Download now her free report on
“Power Marketing’s Top 3 Internet Marketing Tips”
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“What You Should Know About Marketing-Driven Websites”
