Self Promotion Required

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Self-promotion is the biggest and sometimes the hardest requirement of all writers. Even those with agents and publishers there is always some self-promotion that has to go on in order to get new readers, keep your old readers and help make your writings more sellable in the future. Yes, even big-named writers have to attend the book signing events, make commercials for ads and participate in other book promoting events the publishing company arranges for them to increase book sales.

With self-published authors, this is even more important as you will not sell a thing if you don’t tell people it is available to get. Generally, you want to start marketing your books even before they have been uploaded to whichever self-publishing company you are using. You want to create a buzz and excitement among your readers about an upcoming story that is about to be released. Even if you haven’t published a thing yet you can start today by creating a website, connected it to an author public Facebook page, get onto Twitter and follow and tweet with other writers, even create a different Instagram Account just for your writing. Then you need to start posting pictures of you working, pictures of any book cover art you are thinking about using, take a little video of you explaining the premise of the story you are writing, and even dressing up like one of the characters and read a chapter or two. Of course, posting the first couple of chapters on your website in Acrobat PDF format can help garner some readers interest too.

There are a wide variety of things you can do to start getting attention as a writer, your books, and upcoming books and listing any places you will be in the future promoting your books. You can post pictures of you doing volunteer work if you think it will interest your readers or might be relevant to what you are writing. Most of all you want to do it consistently, persistently and patiently each and every week or an hour a day. Once, you get your book published you will have, hopefully, a built-in audience just waiting to buy the finished product.

Once you have published your book(s) then you want to start attending book fairs, local author events, schedule book signings at local bookstores, etc. You can gather email addresses from the participates by offering a signed copy of your book as a giveaway. That will eventually enable you to add them to your mailing list to announce new books in the future. Of course, you can create a subscription form on your website that will do that for you. But if you are at an event you can just have a sign-up sheet and add them manually later.

Of course, if we would be happy to share any North Florida author’s upcoming events on our calendar and on all of our social media pages. Just use our CONTACT US form to send us the details.

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Until next time.


Author: Jolene MacFadden

Single mother, retired from a normal job, was traveling around the State of Florida in an old RV. Now stationary writing new books and helping others get their self-published.

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