My spontaneously scheduled meeting with Jennifer of Hart & Galla today led to a day of networking with my re-branded self. What I lost in creative writing time, I gained in valuable connections with like-minded individuals.

There’s a lot to consider for any new author with no marketing experience when self-publishing a book. Here are a few points I gleaned today:

Crowd Funding and Kick Starters

There are several online sites to chose from for third party investment and sponsorship such as Indiegogo, and Kickstarter. I came away from my meeting with homework: research. Crowd Fund Beat and The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada have Canadian driven content and information. The key point to any crowdfunding is product. I have to produce the promised book/product or it’s considered fraud.

I am My Brand

As much as I am going to be selling a book, I’ll be selling myself. This means that  have to know what “brand” of myself I want other people to pay attention to (in a business sense). If I want people to follow me for my talent, then I have to pull back on revealing the more domestic parts of my life, unless it relates to me as author-brand. I’ve created separate work and personal social network accounts. There’s still a lot of streamlining I need to do in that respect. My readers will figure out I’m the same person. But, first they’ll be seeking me for my words, not photos of my breakfast.

I Have to Know What I’m Selling

It’s called the elevator pitch, the one sentence pitch, the 140 character pitch… I have to carefully phrase the pitch for each book in such a way that I hook the attention of the person listening to me/reading my words and make them want to learn more. And it occurs in seconds. For both my memoir and my fiction, I have to practice the words until they come out of my mouth as second nature as breathing. It also has to sound authentic.

Jump into and Create Conversations

Twitter and I were fair weather friends up until this point. I’ve always been nervous about being the jerk who throws an uninvited comment into the conversation. With a quick refresher of the tools that Twitter provides, I now have a better understanding on how to leverage the social medium to invite people to talk with me, as well as introducing myself to them in a meaningful way. By the way, writing “buy my book” a million times a day doesn’t work (at least, not for unknown authors).

Blog with Purpose

I’ve been writing online for years in one form or another. After I attended Blissdom Canada 2013, I wanted to do it all: publish my memoir about prematurity, be a fiction writer, get paid to plug brands and be a social influencer.  Realistically, I couldn’t do all of it at once and keep my head from exploding (or my life from imploding). This version of my online voice, being a Born Again Writer, focuses on my writing and its publishing. There will be link backs to content that I think is good, relevant or provides leverage. I’ll be conscious of tagging my posts to make my content come up in a search engine. What I write online, much like the characters of a story, provides meaning and direction for my self-publishing goal.

 

The only creative work I did on The Queen’s Viper today was having a conversation with the characters who set out as a group to help my protagonist. I saw a post on Margaret Taylor’s Facebook page: “Only a writer will hold a conversation between people that don’t exist. We don’t talk to ourselves… we talk to the people we created from nothing.” I was going to link it, but the site come up suspicious looking. Instead, I quote the words from an unknown source.

Creative writing today: 0 word count
Hours marketing/brand prep: 8+
Hours brainstorming book content: 2 (give or take)

I also (finally) saw the Season 4 Premier of HBO’s Game of Thrones (Canadian Link).
I must get George R.R. Martin‘s Dance with Dragons finished!