Louisa Guise's Blog, page 6

How do I market my book?

I am currently facing the biggest digital marketing challenge ever - book marketing. How do I market my book? Well, working out how to market my own book is the perfect case study to experiment with and work out marketing techniques. When you work for a digital marketing agency, or a company, you are likely starting with a product that is relatively easy to market, something people already care about. When you are an author, a new author, how will you convince people to care about you and your book?

I am doing a lot of different things for my book marketing. I have been on a podcast, on Australian TV and posted a lot on social media. But to create good digital content for marketing, you also need to also create some content (so to speak) in the real world. One way to do this for book marketing, is to hold a book signing.

I’ve now held three book signings to boost my book marketing. “How do I market my book?” is one of the most common questions that I see asked on social media, so having just done my third signing today at The Bell Bookshop at the English market town of Henley, I thought it would be good to share some book signing tips that I have gained from this book marketing experience.

Which bookshops should you approach for a book signing?

Independent bookshops are much more ameniable to new authors than established chains. I have so far approached over 40 Waterstones shops. One responded saying they had no time until October, and didn’t respond again when I said that October was fine. The Waterstones shop in Abergavenny was very helpful when I was part of the local writing festival, but otherwise I have been ignored. Waterstones - if you are listening - I’d still love to hold a book marketing event with you! The independent bookshops are always happy to have author appearances, esp. if the author has a connection to their location, or is someone particularly interesting. Travelling some way to promote a book might not be cost-effective for you, so perhaps start with the more local bookshops and then try those that are a bit further away. Email addresses are generally available on every bookshop’s website.

Book signing one - Fourbears Books, Caversham

My first ever book signing took place at Fourbears Books in Caversham. This book marketing event was an unofficial book launch, so it wasn’t a pure book signing. I teamed up with my writers group Caversham Writers to do this as an Ask the Author event, which we have done previously with authors such as Anita Frank, Eve Smith and Will Carver. The event was also streamed on YouTube to reach a wider audience, but also so that friends and family from further afield could also take part in something that I was doing. The full recording is available on YouTube.

Holding an event alongside a signing is the best way to sell books. You already have an audience interested to know more about your book and they are more willing to make a purchase than someone who has co-incidentally walked into a shop at the same time that you are holding a signing.

Holding any event or signing is also an opportunity to get into the local media. I wrote press releases which I both sent directly to local papers and to even more media outlets via a site called Press Loft which is currently offering a free 60-day trial and definitely worth trying out (worth mentioning that it covers lots of different countries). In my experience directly approaching local media works best, but I also received replies via Press Loft, and as different topics will interest different people, it’s definitely worth doing both.

Book signing two - Book-ish, Abergavenny

Book-ish was the first book signing I did that was purely a signing. Owen B Lewis from Book-ish (an author in his own right) invited me to do a book signing after seeing my talk at the AberWritingFest in Abergavenny back in April, so I was very greatful to be invited. As with all of my events, I sent press releases to a number of local publications, as well as even more via Press Loft to ensure that I was book marketing prior to the event. I placed articles in the Abergavenny Chronicle and the Monmouthshire Beacon.

At Book-ish I had a table in the corner by the door. Welsh customers being Welsh customers, people would awkwardly say hi, avoid eye contact and try to avoid you as they came into the shop. I realised pretty quickly that if I just sat there passively, I wouldn’t sell anything. I had to revisit my experience of working in retail (3 years working for Claire’s Accessories) and actively engage with people if I was going to succeed at book marketing and sell some copies. I forced my self out of my comfort zone, said hi, explained that I was there to promote my new book and what it was all about. I got interest and I also got some sales.

But a book signing isn’t just about signing books. It enhances your book marketing because you get to see your customers on the ground which is really important knowledge to have for any marketing strategy. When I worked for Holiday Extras, an English travel company, there were some things that they did really well, and one of those things was to ensure that members of staff at all levels (in particular their call centre) would actually go and visit their products, be it (in my department) hotels, theatre productions and theme parks, so that we knew what the product was and could better advertise it. It wasn’t just a perk of the job, it did make us better marketers and salespeople because we could give honest, personal and detailed information about the products to customers, and our excitement for our products was very genuine. This principle should also apply to book marketing. I could see from the afternoon that I spent at Book-ish that my cover was attracting people, that the design was working. I watched as customers would pick my book up, have a flick through and read the blurb, even if they weren’t going to buy it there and then. I’m a consumer too, and whatever I might be interested to have, I will look, research and assess the product. To see customers behaving in this way was good news. I know that my book is marketing itself.

I could also watch customers as they came into the shop and observe how they moved through the shop, which books caught their attention and if there were particular corners that were noticed more than others. I put some books in those corners accordingly to see if they were noticed more or sold.

I had some ideas for further book marketing, as well as for my next book signing.

Book signing three - The Bell Bookshop, Henley

Again I approached media outlets and had a placement in the Henley Herald prior to my signing at the The Bell Bookshop. The Bell Bookshop also placed an article about the signing event in Xperience Henley. It’s even better if the bookshop you are visiting will help with the promotion by also letting their media contacts know you are coming, and advertising the event on their own website and social channels.

The third book signing was different to the other two. I arrived knowing that I have to be salesly in order to do any effective book marketing, and this can be hard, I showed up armed with some chocolate which is the best way to start a conversation with everyone. I also wrote some thank you cards and placed them inside each of the books on sale. The purpose of the cards was to also disguise the fact that a £10 note was hidden in one of the books. I hoped that having a competition, as well as some chocolatey bribes, would give me a conversation starter and encourage people to buy my book.

It worked. I sold even more books at The Bell Bookshop than I did at Book-ish (sorry Book-ish!) - I actually came close to selling the entire stock. At a signing not everyone will buy your book, and, as already mentioned, not everyone will buy your book straight away anyway. I placed books strategically in different corners. I was amused when one customer decided to do some housekeeping and moved my carefully placed book from the corner of one table and put it on the nearby shelf next to another copy. We also had a couple of incidences where copies went from the front of the shop to the back as customers considered buying it and then decided not to. I was able to introduce my book to many people, and they were interested and asking questions. The chocolates went down well, I even offered them to TV chef Mary Berry who popped in to buy a book (not mine, social media isn’t quite her thing).

I guess the final piece of advice is to use your content more than once when you are book marketing. Here I am blogging about my three book signings for a blog about how to market your book, and getting some more publicity, not just for myself, but also for these three wonderful bookshops that have hosted me. I also have photos and videos which I can share across all of my social channels.

Have you ever held a book signing? Was it a success and what have you tried to sell your own book? Let me know in the comments.

Share

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

How digital marketing helps to grow your business

How does digital marketing help to grow your business? Well, the first answer is that if you don’t promote yourself, no one will know that you exist. Unless you are very lucky and your product or service is well liked by a small number of people, and the word spreads far enough, you are unlikely to make any money. The world is now online, so this is where you need to be targeting your advertising. Read on to learn more about how digital marketing helps to grow your business.

Digital marketing allows you to reach more people

The world is global, not local. A little over 5 billion people, that’s around two thirds of the global population, use the internet worldwide. Digital marketing allows you to reach them where they are active, and even advertising your product or service to a fraction of these potential customers can really improve your sales.

Digital marketing attracts customers

This is because digital marketing allows for customers to easily come to you. They can find your business from a quick Google search. If you practice SEO correctly or have lots of assets online like blogs and social channels, you are more likely to be found.

Digital marketing allows you to target potential customers with precision

One massive advantage of how digital marketing helps to grow your business, compared to how conventional marketing helps to grow your business, is that you can target your customers with precision. Targeted advertising allows you to state precisely the kind of person you want to target when you submit the ad. You can also set up ads to follow potential customers who have already engaged with your product in some way.

Digital marketing is cheap, or sometimes free

The internet plus with modern technology have provided lots of cheap and free tools that have become the key to how digital marketing helps you to grow your business. It costs nothing to set up a basic website, social platform or blog and even content for it can be made on a computer or a phone with many free apps and programmes.

Digital marketing allows you to collect data, so you can continously improve your marketing

Google Analytics is free and can be connected to any website, and most programmes come with their own analytical dashboard so that you can see how your content is performing.

Digital marketing is an easy way to make customers aware of your brand

Through the methods mentioned above, you have a huge opportunity to increase your brand awareness to a very wide-reaching audience.

Digital marketing improves sales

Targeting the right people, ensuring the people who really want your product or service can find it, is more likely to turn into a conversion, with customers found by SEO almost 15% more likely to purchase and 80% of local relevant searches converting.

Digital marketing futureproofs you

Digital marketing is growing as people are increasingly online (could we be any more online?). It is important to keep up with the latest technologies, both by knowing where your customers are and by networking with other digital marketers on the web via sites such as LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

.

Unwanted promotion and sales promotion

Image courtesy of Andre Hunter via unsplash.com

I published a book last month. And since I published How to Leave a Group Chat, I've been hounded by people offering me unwanted promotion and sales promotion, insisting that they can help me market and publish my book for money. I can see them coming from a mile away, it's always the same technique: follow > add > a message saying "how are you?"

It doesn't take more than a glance at my LinkedIn profile to see that I am also a Marketer, and not only more than capable of doing my own promotion and sales promotion, but currently doing that. And as a Marketer, the first thing I'll mark down is your market research. You can see from my profile, and a quick google, that I am working like crazy to market my own book.

Also, I'm a first-time author. I have a hybrid contract which means I invested half for this. I am making back what I invested. I don't have a large budget to spend on someone else to do any promotion or sales promotion for me.

If I wanted to spend some money on marketing, I would be seeking someone who was established and had good credientials to action a solid promotion for me. I'd want to see a good website and portfolio, along with promotion and sales promotion case studies. Not cold calls from people who haven't read my profile.

Although cold marketing has always been a thing, and probably always will be a thing, I wanted to talk about this, because it affects people across all industries. I also get offers of promotion and sales promotion to my inbox at work, where someone has worked out my email address and pretended they already discussed something with a colleague. I will never accept a promotional offer that way.

Have you ever received an unwanted promotion or sales promotion? What was your response?

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

What do you learn in digital marketing and communications?

The power of social media

I was working at a British travel company called Holiday Extras when companies were only just starting to use social media to promote their products. I was working as a Digital Marketing and Communications professional, under the title of Content Assistant and Online Search Marketer, so my job was to find opportunities to promote products and, as well as general content writing and digital marketing and communications tasks similar to those mentioned in the above roles, I took charge of social media for our theatre break brand Show & Stay. One of my greatest accomplishments in the role was organising a social and blog promotion with the self-proclaimed Queen of Twitter - @Queen_UK (who stopped their account when Queen Elizabeth died but continued as @Charles_HRH). This account was a parody of the Queen of England at the time the late Elizabeth II, it was funny, contemporary and had a million followers whilst following no-one (remember, this was the early days of social) and 850,000 followers on Facebook. I saw an opportunity. We had a play coming out at the time called The Audience with Helen Mirren playing the Queen – and she had also played the Queen in the 2006 film The Queen. I thought it would be perfect to have the Queen (of Twitter) reviewing a film about The Queen starring the actress who had played The Queen. My managers were sceptical because this was a very new medium and a very new way to promote a product. I managed to convince my manager and the Head of Theatre to let me run with this promotion. After they had agreed, I negotiated the Queen’s representative (who kept his identity anonymous, so I don’t know who I made a deal with to this day) down from £400 to £200 + free tickets and expenses. The Queen wrote a blog about the play, linked through to our site in the resulting blog post review and it was the highest driver of organic search traffic to the website that month.

Self-Belief

Early on in my Digital Marketing and Communications career I was invited to an interview at Dyson. It was for a Content Writing position, and it was one of the quickest interviews I had ever been offered. I was excited to go to their head office which felt futuristic and had a small display of Dyson devices and inventions in the building. At the interview I ticked all the boxes, but then the interviewers were concerned that I might have trouble translating the often complex, scientific content. Their doubt became my doubt, and from that point in the interview I believed that I wasn’t good enough. I shook hands and left believing that I wouldn’t get this particular Digital Marketing and Communications job. So did they. Spoiler: I didn’t get the job.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Afterwards I realised how important self-belief is in the role. There’s a common perception that women will read a job description, tick 8 out of 10 boxes and not apply for a job because they believe that they aren’t qualified enough. Men will tick 7 out of 10 boxes and they will apply anyway, and they might well end up with the job. Since then, I have worked on my confidence, projecting it until it became real. At a later job at Monarch Airlines, a British Airline, where I worked for their holiday company branch I, as someone who loves cycling, offered to take on a project to advertise Majorca cycling holidays and my colleagues doubted my ability to do this. Likely because I was female. Likely subconsciously, and each of their doubts probably reinforced the other’s. I backed down, but then straight after wrote my boss an email demonstrating my cycling knowledge. I got the project and saw it through.

SEO can be slow

I mention Holiday Extras again, but the two years I spent there, my first Digital Marketing and Communications job out of University, I learnt some excellent marketing skills which set me in good stead to propel my career. I learnt how to do SEO, which in a nutshell, is following the keywords that people already use to search for a product. Organic SEO traffic can be a real boost to a website – it’s a technique which is both so obvious and so clever, but it takes time. This was one thing Holiday Extras did really well. But it’s a slow process especially when you are using Google Ads. Most people don’t understand SEO, even though it can be an asset for any Digital Marketing and Communications professional. I have been told so many times to “do that SEO thing you do”. My method for Google Ads is to pick 2 or 3 keywords, create Ads featuring them, spend a small amount of money to see how they do, then find the one or two did that did the best, and create a couple more ads based on those. See how they do and build it out that way. People’s expectations are that you come in and click your fingers like Mary Poppins and suddenly everything is different, but it really takes time.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this please subscribe for more Marketing and Communications tips and tricks.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Who is my target audience?

Image by chris_j_scott from unsplash.com

In the beginning

You have a product. Imagine someone using it. How old are they? Are they a man or a woman? Which age-range would they fit into? What are the benefits they would gain from using your product? What would they like about it?

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

A picture might start forming in your mind. This is good. Imagine your character using the product. Multiply your characters - you now have an audience, your target audience. This is how you find your target audience.

Case study: Mugs

I’m choosing mugs to help you work out who your target audience is, because they are a very basic product that can some in multiple shapes and sizes. They are also a product which we all need in some shape or form.

Image by L.D.I.A from unsplash.com

To appeal to your target audience, you might start shaping the design around the above points and creating features that appeal to your target audience and who they are.

For example, the mug can look very different if your target audience is a mum.

Image by Chelsey Horne from pexels.com

This manufacturer has made a simple amendment to the humble mug to appeal to a target audience who is likely a young(ish) mum of probably 25-35 years old. The design is simple, the font is fun and the mention of the children (the tiny humans) leans more strongly to a maternal audience than a paternal audience based on current demographics.

Let’s take the example of a mug that has been designed to appeal to the opposite target audience:

Image by Ruslan Alekso from pexels.com

The producer of this mug above is likely appealing to a target audience who is male and aged 20-45. He is someone who is a fan of science fiction, probably Star Wars because the design of the mug references Star Wars in a fun, "Starbucks” style, and he might be someone who is partial to a takeaway coffee from Starbucks or an establishment like it. This second preference is a secondary one because you can enjoy a joke about Starbucks even if you don’t go there.

Then there is the mug below that has been designed for a younger target audience:

Image by Tamara Malaniy from unsplash.com

The pinkish facade and vibrantly coloured rainbow would appeal to a target audience aged about 3-12 years old, and if the background was whiter it would appeal pretty equally to boys and girls. The rainbow is simple and drawn in a similar way to how a child might draw a rainbow, so it is very suited to this target audience.

Mugs are a product which give us the same benefits regardless of who uses them. They allow us to drink, which is one of the most fundemental things that we need to do to live. Their handle makes them easier to hold and whether they are made of china, porcelin or plastic they broaden our options by allowing us to drink both hot and cold drinks. But as you can see above, such a simple product can be designed quite differently in order to appeal to a different target audience.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

What happens when you get a book publishing contract?

In my first blog How do you publish your book, I went through the steps that I took to secure a book publishing agreement. So, what happened next? I have been asked a lot about the mysterious process that happens after you have a book publishing contract and here is what happened next.

I checked my book publishing contract

My publisher The Book Guild gave me a few weeks to sign the contract, so I used the time to check my book publishing agreement thoroughly. I have signed contracted before, for a mortgage, for jobs – but I have never signed a book publishing contract before and although I could discern what looked okay and what I might question, I am no expert in this field. I signed up to the Society of Authors who offer, among many perks, a service to check your book publishing agreement and I can’t recommend it enough.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Tip: Sign up to the Society of Authors, they have a service that looks over your book publishing contract, and the yearly fee is worth it even if just for that.

As a new author you might feel a little insecure or excited, but this is an important business transaction, so don’t be afraid to check the book publishing agreement thoroughly, ask questions and negotiate anything that you feel is missing. It’s only in your best interests.

Last chance – send your final manuscript

Once the book publishing contract is signed, this is your LAST chance to make any major corrections to your manuscript. Any major edits from hereon could cost you more. Once this is done, you send the manuscript to your publisher.

N.B. In my experience my manuscript was finished before I even began looking for an Agent or Publisher. This step of course will come later if you have signed a book publishing agreement before you have finished your book – and this can happen if you have a contract whereby you can research a topic or if you have signed a deal to produce a number of books, perhaps in a series, for a publisher.

Start marketing

For the best chance of success, you should start marketing your book as early as possible, even laying the groundwork before securing a book publishing contract. Set up or polish your own website, social sites and blogs. Work out where your audience is and how to reach them. Make notes of places where you could potentially showcase your work and speak such as literary fairs, conferences, and venues. How to market your book is an entire topic in itself (and if you follow this blog, you will get some good tips for this), but my point is, you should have started this process yesterday. You might get some marketing from your publisher, but it’s unlikely to be enough so expect to take on the bulk of this work yourself.

Tell your publisher more

Pretty early on after receiving my book publishing contract I was sent some forms. I had to write more about my book, say which outlets I thought would be good to showcase it, summarise it, say more about myself and send off images and descriptions of the type of cover that I wanted.

Edit your work

Deep breath. You’ll be sent a document of your edited work to check. I personally prefer to print anything that I have to edit heavily and go through it by hand. My editor also sent me a table to fill in to detail any issues – but it was easier, once I had edited the manuscript by hand, to then go through it on the computer using Word’s Track Changes function. This also fills in a list at the side so all the amends can be seen in one go. The tracked changes version of the manuscript is what I sent back to the publisher.

Take 2

I thought after a weekend of heavy editing I’d have a clean weekend to do some promo. Wrong! I had a second edited manuscript to check. I repeated the same process again.

The Typeset edit

So I received my Type edit which meant, yes, MORE editing! But this time the pages I printed actually looked like they were in book form which was quite exciting. I repeated the same process as above, editing the Typeset twice a couple of days apart. My method was to first to through the manuscript with a pencil so that when I looked at it again I could check that this was the edit I actually wanted, because this is the final final bit. The second edit I went through it again and finalised all edits in red pen. It's important to use a colour that stands out so that the editor can clearly see what you want amended.

In my case I also received a table detailing professional editing marks, and I had to edit using these rather than any of my own marks or comments.

35 pages out of 160 were sent back. Not too bad.

The draft cover

At the same time as receiving the Typeset manuscript, I also received a draft cover. I gave myself a few days to scrutinise this with the help of immediate family and my writer’s group Caversham Writers. Thank you to everyone who helped with their input. It is helpful to have other people’s opinions for this, but maybe not too many. In my case I got some useful feedback, and I sent the feedback in a bulleted list to my publisher.

The book cover was included in my book publishing contract - this might be something that you may choose to do yourself if you have the skills, but I think as a general rule covers are included in book publishing agreements.

The story continues

I’m expecting an amended Typeset manuscript and cover back for more checks. And I think the next part of the procedure is an initial copy of the book and some proofing. Sign up to my Substack to hear more about the publishing process, as well as to receive the best Digital Marketing tips which you can use when the time comes for you to receive a book publishing agreement or contract and to market your own books.

How to Leave a Group Chat is currently available for presale at major book shops including Waterstones.

Share

Image credit scott-graham-OQMZwNd3ThU-unsplash from unsplash.com

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

What is an email marketing campaign?

An email marketing campaign is a digital marketing campaign whereby a key action or message is communicated via email. An email marketing campaign can take place externally from a company to customers, internally from a company to employees or it can consist of both of these.

What is the goal of an email marketing campaign?

The goal of an email marketing campaign is to raise awareness of something, increase engagement or sell a product or service.

Types of emails that feature in email marketing campaignsNewsletters

Newsletters are the regular emails that companies might send to stakeholders on a regular basis – perhaps once a week, month, or a few times a year. They usually contain an overview of information that companies want to convey to their stakeholders via email marketing.

Promotional emails and announcements

You’ll send a promotional marketing emails as part of your email marketing campaign when you want to raise awareness of something (usually new information, discounts or offers).

Transactional emails

These are updates. They often seem par for the course, however without them an email marketing campaign would be incomplete. Whether you are following a process at work or you are purchasing an item online, it is very important to be kept informed at each stage of a transaction.

How email marketing campaigns work

One email just won’t do for an email marketing campaign. There needs to be at least a few sent out which are connected and advance and/or enhance the message of the marketing email that came before it.

At the most basic level:

Marketing email 1: A new offer for you

Marketing email 2: Did you catch that – we have a new offer for you?

Marketing email 3: Last chance – the new offer that we have for you

How many and how long your email marketing campaign can be is as long as a piece of string.

Marketing email 1: A new offer for you

Marketing email 2: Did you catch that – we have a new offer for you?

Marketing email 3: We’ve added free shipping to the new offer for you!

Marketing email 4: Don’t forget our new offer for you comes with free shipping!

Marketing email 5: Reminder – our new offer for you with free shipping ends soon

Marketing email 6: Last chance – don’t miss our new offer for you with free shipping!

What is the best way to get the most out of an email marketing campaign?

The best way to get the most out of an email marketing campaign is to make an email marketing campaign part of a wider digital marketing campaign. Email can be part of your digital marketing arsenal along with social media, blog posts, printed materials like posters and leaflets, personal letters etc. – technology is your oyster.

Share

Subscribe now

Image credit: stephen-phillips-hostreviews-co-uk-3Mhgvrk4tjM-unsplash from unsplash.com

How to work with your Digital Marketing and Communications colleagues

This is a blog which will resonate with digital marketing and communications professionals and be useful for everyone else. Often your Digital Marketer, whether they are internal, external or a bit of both, will be a little removed from your day job. In my experience teams in a business sometimes don’t know how to best work with their Digital Marketer or Communications Professional and might make a few faux pas. Here’s a guide about how to work with your Digital Marketer, and how to keep them happy.

1. We want realistic deadlines

Digital Marketers might seem like magicians, but those brilliant texts, impressive graphics and perfect emails actually take quite a bit of work behind the scenes. If you tell your Digital Marketer that a task is urgent, it has to be needed within the next couple of days. Our lists are loaded, so if you can’t provide a deadline, your task will be at the bottom of the list.

2. Consider timescales

Some campaigns might be larger than you imagine, some might be smaller. If you want bells and whistles, please factor in that we might need more time, or that we might have other large jobs on the go.

3. We want labels

To you, it’s one photo. To us, it could be one of 50, and when they are filed together, we have no hope of matching them. Please label your images so that they can be clearly matched to your content, and so we are not spending time labelling them for you.

4. We want the correct document in the correct format

If you are handing us a final document - Word, or PDF please. If you want us to make changes, please send the raw file. A raw file is anything we can edit, this can be Word, PowerPoint, Adobe InDesign (which you are likely not using, but your source might be) or something else. Check the instructions regarding what is required – they will exist.

5. Don’t over-format documents for web uploads

Formatting in documents can create additional code for content management systems (CMS’ – things like WordPress or Drupal), so if you make the document look too fancy it’s going to take us extra time to take it out.

6. No, we don’t use PowerPoint to do graphic design

PowerPoint was not created as a design tool, so we only use it as it was intended – to produce slides. More on that in another blog.

7. Read our content

We spend a lot of time putting together quality content because it is useful for you and contains the things that you need to know or action. Familiarise yourself with your company’s internet, intranet, emails, blog posts, app posts, social media etc. – it will save you writing emails to ask us questions about information that we have provided you already.

8. Please proof your content properly

So many times I have taken a lot of time and care on a piece, only to have an amended item back that is full of errors. This then takes up time as I correct both my errors and yours. There are some useful proofing tips in this blog post.

9. Write for dummies

Us Digital Marketers and Communications Professionals might have a good knowledge of the business, but we are not specialists in your area. Provide all the details in the most easily understandable way, with as few abbreviations as possible, so that we can understand it and your colleagues in other areas of the business can understand it too.

10. Consider if we need to be copied into emails

Please copy us in when there is an action for us or something we really have to know. Numerous times I have had an inbox full of email chains about teams discussing between them what they intend to do, or about a task that I passed onto someone else because it isn’t something I am involved with anyway.

Finally - Talk to us

Your digital marketing or communications person or team is always more than happy to explain what we do and how we can work with you to create some great content to promote your product, team, area, or goal. It is what we are here for.

I hope that was useful. To any fellow Digital Marketers or Communications Professionals, do you have any other tips on how to work with you, and keep you happy?

Subscribe now

Share

Image credit: magnet-me-LDcC7aCWVlo-unsplash - from unsplash.com

How do you publish your book?

How do you publish your book? is the most common question that I am being asked at the moment as my own publication date for my book How to Leave a Group Chat is just four months away – and it’s coming quickly.

A lot of people are writing, but the publication process is shrouded in mystery, and there is no longer one linear path to publish your book like there used to be:

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In the past, you would publish your book by:

1. Submitting your book to an agent, publisher or both

2. A publisher would accept your book, pay you an advance and sort out everything

It’s not quite like that anymore, so let me tell you my story, from the beginning.

This advice regarding how to publish your book is useful for writers, but why is it also useful for Digital Marketers?

Well, Digital Marketing friends, I can guarantee that you have gained a lot of useful knowledge, experience, and expertise during the course of your career. If you write and publish your own book about what you know, you will stand out from the other Digital Marketers whether you want to progress in your current company, start your own business or take on a new opportunity at a higher level. Simples!

How do you publish your book? This is how I started.

I wrote a book, and like all great ideas, this one started in lockdown when one of the few ways I had to contract people was instant messengers. How to Leave a Group Chat was conceived.

Fast forward approximately two and a half years.

I was asking the same question that you have been asking, how DO you publish your book? All of us have been writing in some form since primary school, so how to write isn’t much of a mystery, even for those of us who haven’t done it since GCSE (aka school leaving exams). Publishing isn’t something that we get taught – I don’t even recall doing anything on it during my English degree.

As I do when I have any great question, I turned to Uncle Google. But this is one area where Google didn’t clarify anything for me. Instead, the search gave me so-called publishing companies who wanted me to pay thousands of pounds to publish with them. I didn’t have that kind of money, and, as I learnt later, I absolutely shouldn’t have to pay a fortune to get a book published.

What about Amazon?

If you have vaguely heard about one way of getting published, it would be as an e-book on Amazon. Oh don’t worry, my book will be on Amazon. No publisher would let me get away without being on Amazon. But I have always had a dream to be in print, and this dream goes back to the days before e-books. Also, self-publishing, which I would have considered in the event of no alternative, requires a lot more work. So I was determined to try and publish my book via a more traditional means.

How did you publish your book via a more traditional means?

The information I needed came from one very valuable source the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook. This is the yellow pages for authors – every agent and publisher listed in here is legitimate and operational and the publication has been around since 1906.

After talking to other authors, I decided to apply to agents first, and then publishers. The logic is that only agents can reach the big publishers, and if you apply to publishers first and get rejected, then if you do score an agent there are fewer publishers that your agents are able to reach out to on your behalf. Don’t forget that you only have one try per agent, and one try per publisher.

I spent a good few hours in the library going through the Writers and Artists Yearbook making a long list of all the agents who might be interested in the type of book that I was writing. In fact, my entire summer looked like this:

I uploaded my list of agents to an Excel spreadsheet and spent my weekends applying to 4-5 at a time. This can be no mean feat – each agent has different requirements for applications, some want just an overview, some a chapter, some a pack – some application lists can outdo any job application.

It is recommended that you apply in batches and wait before applying to more, but realistically it can take weeks, months, or even years to hear back. How to Leave a Group chat is a book that is about the instant messengers that we are using now, and due to the changing technology, it will date if I leave it too long, so I had to keep going.

I applied to over 50 agents. I got some replies, and even a couple which gave me a small amount of feedback. This might not sound like much, but the odds for replies are tiny, and the odds for replies with any feedback are even smaller, so each one was encouraging.

Spoiler: I didn’t get an agent.

All over again

I then repeated the process, going through the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook in the library all over again and making a list of all of the publishers that were a good fit for me. I continued spending weekends applying, double-checking each publisher on their website and what their requirements are.

Finally

On Friday the 25th August 2023, just as summer was setting for the year, I received an email from The Book Guild, a small publisher based in Leicestershire.

“We may be able to offer publication as a partnership project, where we share the risks and, hopefully, rewards, though we would need to consider the manuscript fully prior to making a commitment (details attached).”

A “partnership project” – also known as a hybrid publishing deal, is a newer type of publishing deal where a publisher shares the publication costs with you – usually 50/50 – because your book, although good, is unlikely to have mainstream appeal and is more of a risk for them.

I sent my manuscript the same day and I waited until another email came around three-weeks later on the 19th September.

“We would be delighted to work with you to bring your book to the market, it would make an excellent addition to our publishing list.”

So, how do you publish your book? That’s how.

As well as general digital marketing content, I will be releasing more blogs about my experience of the publishing process along with some useful tips on All About Digital Marketing.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

How to improve your proofreading skills

Proof reading has been a huge part of my career forever, and if I have learnt anything, it is very hard to catch grammatical mistakes. I used to work on publishing holiday brochures for the late British Airline Monarch Airlines, and coming into the Content Team afresh, I was picking up proofreading errors that had been published time and time again on the same pages for as long as twenty years. So how do you improve your proofreading skills and minimise the chances of mistakes? Here are my top editing tips.

1. Get someone else to edit your work

You get used to your own writing and your brain knows exactly what your text should say which is one of the biggest challenges to overcome when improving your proofreading skills. Whether it’s a short piece or a longer text that you have edited a million times, your brain compensates meaning that you become blind to your own errors. Amazingly in teams I have worked in there hasn’t always been a culture of cross-checking, so if this is the case ask a colleague or two to look over the piece for you. I guarentee you they will spot mistakes right away.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

2. Read your text aloud

From your head comes one voice, from your mouth comes another. Reading a text aloud should be adopted for all of your important texts if you want to improve your proofreading skills and spot grammatical mistakes. You will quickly find that errors stand out when your brain expects one thing and your mouth says something else. It is a great way not only to find errors, but also to understand how the piece reads and where you could make it sound more cohearent or even better.

3. Read your text aloud backwards

Hear me out! I was introduced to this technique about ten years ago and it has been an absolute game-changer, improving my proof-reading skills to the point that I might make one mistake at most, if any at all! The technique of reading your work aloud backwards means that you are forced to assess your written work word by word, and because it is a very unnatural thing to do, any errors or spelling mistakes become obvious right away. It is hard on your brain, so as I write so much I do reserve this one for my most important pieces only. I also recommend when doing this to use something to keep track of where you are on the page, such as a cursor or a pen, so that you can take a breather if your mind feels a little exhausted. But if you can master this method of proofreading, I promise you you will be reaping rewards.

4. Change the format

You probably write in Microsoft Word. If you save your text as a pdf and check it there, you’ll see more errors jump out. If you transfer your text to an email, you’ll see other errors. Sometimes in my work I might work on the same text in Word and on the website and on a poster - in all three I will find different proofreading errors and I can correct the text accordingly. The same principle of the brain seeing something different applies.

5. Come back to it later

Editing is an intense process, so one way to improve your proofreading skills is to put your work to one side and edit it later. If you’re at work, close the document, do something else and return to it tomorrow. If it’s a personal piece, save it on your computer or pop it in a drawer. There’s no rule as to how long you should leave your work - you can disappear for dinner and see the text with fresh eyes, or you can look at it a week or a month later and still see something new.

Do you have any tried and tested techniques that have improved your proofreading skills? Share in the comments below.

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.