Excerpt from What Nonfiction Authors Can Learn About Marketing From Fiction Authors
That brand starts to take on value over time because it becomes a known and trusted commodity. Your brand takes on value over time when it becomes known and trusted. The only way to get it to be known and trusted is for you to take power and control over your writing career and take charge of marketing your novels, your books, your self-help guides and get them out there to the people who need what you have written. We have time left Gail and I am very, very happy to answer questions.
GAIL RICHARDS: Yes, let?s take some questions before we wrap up. I want to share a little information at the end but please let?s have your questions now. I know you have them.
CALLER: I have a two-fold question. Can you give the recommended website that Gail said is so good for us to look at?
GAIL MARTIN: Yes. It is www.chroniclesofthenecromancer.com.
CALLER: You said something in passing that I wanted you to perhaps develop further. How is it that you link the social network sites to your website? How does that work?
GAIL MARTIN: Well, if you have a MySpace page you have an opportunity right there to list your website. You can also refer to your websites in the blog postings that you make. Think about interaction on a social media site whether it is Facebook or MySpace or Rise or Yak or Book Marketing or any of the rest of them as a window to talk to other people. Social networks have to be a two-way dialogue. That is the social part of the social media. It is not just about pushing the information out; it is about being accessible for them to reach you with questions. If people send you a question or make a comment about your book perhaps in the course of answering that comment, you refer them to something on your book website. Certainly all of your email should have in its signature block your name, the name of your book, your book website, your book video trailer if you have one so that it makes it very easy for people to find more about you and your book. Does that help?
CALLER: It does but the other part of the question implicitly is what I have to spell out. How do you find a really good website design that really works with authors as opposed to others?
GAIL MARTIN: Well, I cheated on that and I did my own. Hey do not get scared. The program that I used is called www.citymax.com. If you can cut and paste, you can do City Max. It is very affordable. It is very easy to
customize. Even if you have someone use it as a template for you it is very, very easy to do. I found that as a resource. That is what I used for both my book website and my company website.
GAIL RICHARDS: I thought you covered an awful lot and I am really excited about a lot of what you had to share because it was a different way of approaching a lot of the stuff that I always try to share. I thought you did it very eloquently and with great examples. I loved the idea of the treasure hunt for your book launch. I think that was brilliant and I hope people made note of that. The social media is a topic that is covered a lot in my newsletter lately so I thought you did a great job. I think you gave people a lot to do.
GAIL MARTIN: Do not be scared about it because you can prioritize what you want to do and pick these things off one thing at a time. You do not have to go out tomorrow and do all of them. I certainly would not.
GAIL RICHARDS: Because people do get scared and I know a lot of you on the line are aware of this but I want to remind you we at Author Smart when we kept hearing this over and over again about a year and a half ago started a program where we train virtual assistants to work specifically with authors on all of the book creation, the publishing and the marketing and the people that come out of our program are ready to help you. They know about these things that you need to do and they can help you work on some of these creative approaches that are best suited to your book. Everything that Gail said, I was particularly interested in having her because she was a fiction author because even if you cannot really relate to what she is writing, it still gives you this great metaphor that you can understand and that is far enough removed from what you are working on to really make a difference in teaching you something.
GAIL MARTIN: The great thing is especially with the Internet so much of the marketing opportunity is free. It does not cost anything to join a site like BookTours.com and list your upcoming speaking engagements or to post your book on Shelfari or to get into the dialogue at the Yak to BookMarket.ning. That is where other readers are hanging out and there will be sites out there I guarantee you for whatever your non-fiction specialty is. All it takes is asking. I have found people to be for the most part very, very approachable if sent them a polite email saying I saw your site. I am very impressed. I have a book that I would really to talk about the opportunities to do a guest blog or be interviewed, whatever I can do to be of service to your reader. Nine times out of ten truly I have had the site owner jump on it and start talking possibilities. You have to initiate the dialog.
GAIL RICHARDS: Terrific. Do you want to talk about your eBook before we wrap up?
GAIL MARTIN: Absolutely. This is flipping to the other side of what I do which is marketing consulting. I have a free eBook called 154 Power Packed PR and Marketing Tips and that is available free on my DreamSpinner Communication site, www.dreamspinnercommunications.com. If you look on the left hand side there is a free eBook tab. Click there and you can ask for my free eBook. It is just packed full of ideas specifically targeted to business owners on how to do more effective marketing and PR. Whatever field of expertise you are in, I am betting that some of those 154 tips may be of help to you. They are not specifically at all on book marketing. They are focused on business marketing but the same concepts apply.
GAIL RICHARDS: Terrific. I want to remind everyone that we are not through with Gail yet. She is presenting two more sessions for us. One is coming up in March which is called Reality 101: Marketing Your Book in the Age of Information Overload and then one is coming up on September called Passionate, Persuasive Publicity Tips for Marketing your Fiction. We do know some of you are writing fiction even though you do not always talk about it, admit to it. I know for a fact based on some of the links I have put in the newsletter that there are quite a few of you out there dabbling in fiction. I want to invite you to go ahead and sign up for those. If when the time comes you cannot make it, but why not get your name on the list so that we can send you a reminder ahead of time and you do not miss those opportunities.
Also Gail gave us a tremendous amount of valuable information today and that is why this year we have started offering transcripts and audio packs when you take these teleclasses. For the people who take the teleclasses, we offer them for half-price on the day of the class through midnight the following day. So, if you want to go back to the registration site, just go back like you are going to register for a class again. You will see that and you can get a transcript and an audio for $29 and that will be something you can keep and review for as long as you want. After that time it goes up to the regular price of $49 and we put it out for the general public. We like to make that offer to the people that took the time to take the class so that they can reinforce their learning.
If you have any questions that come up after you leave the call, you can always submit them to AskAuthorSmart.com. If you go to that website we have a link where you can submit questions and we will make sure that they get to Gail. Also another way to get her is we have assigned her an email address which is askgailmartin@authorsmart.com and we will make sure she gets those questions from you. We will answer any of them that we can for you live on Friday at our Q&A session which is at 8 am Pacific/11 am Eastern and the information is on our website. Gail you are welcome to join us if you would like. We always have a very interesting time on Friday. We never know what topics will come up. We would love to give everyone on the line a change to followup with questions if they need to.
Gail, thank you so very much.
GAIL MARTIN: Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.
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Tags: Community Relations Marketing, DreamSpinner, events, Gail Martin, marketing, Media TIps, PR, small business, Small Business Owners, social media, solopreneur, start-up companies
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