Why Authors Need a Marketing Cheat Sheet

Zara West Suspense

~How to Keep Your Marketing Info At Your Fingertips~

Do you have a marketing cheat sheet? I do. Last year when I released my first book in the Skin Quartet series, Beneath the Skin, I had no idea how to go about marketing it. I hosted two well-attended book signings. I sent out some tweets. I posted on Facebook. I guest visited two blogs. That was it. But I knew that there was much more I should be doing.

So all last year, I took workshops, read blogs, and tried to educate myself on modern day book selling techniques via the web. I explored BookBud and similar discount e-book sites. I joined Netgalley, Romance Reviews, and several other review sites and learned how they worked. I upped my presence on Goodreads.  I took a Savvy course on Facebook Ads, and I subscribed to every marketing site I could find.

On August 18th, I released my second romantic suspense, Close to the Skin, published by Wild Rose Press. Here was my chance to put into action all I had learned. But before I could do that, I realized that I needed to have at my fingertips a whole kettle of information about myself and my book. This was the info needed to fill in ad requests, give to bloggers you visited, people you asked to review, and more.

Now I am a fairly orderly person. I have nice tidy document folders in my Dropbox arranged in subgroups either alphabetically or by date. I rarely have difficulty finding something. However, in setting up my marketing, I found I was continually pulling up the same materials and tweaking them to fit the number of words requested. It was time consuming and boring. So I developed what I call my marketing cheat sheet.

What is a Marketing Cheat Sheet?

My marketing cheat sheet is a single word document that lists all the info that I need to market my books. I started out with the obvious categories and then added new ones as they were needed. Here is my current list of headers and sub-categories. Everything listed here is something I used in completing forms and ad applications and so on to publicize my book. I continue to add to it daily. Feel free to copy it and adapt to your own needs.

AUTHOR INFO

Address
Email
Kindle Email

WEBSITE/ URLS

Readers Club Signup Page URL

Google Analytics#

Rss Feed URL

KEYWORDS FOR AUTHOR/GENRE

Phrase 1
Phrase 2
Phrase 3

CONTEST WINS

AUTHOR BIO

Twitter Bio 100 Characters
100 Words
120 Words
159 Words
200 Words
350 Words
2500 Characters (475 Words)
4000 Characters

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

Amazon Author Page
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Goodreads
Google Plus
Instagram
Tumblir
Linkedin

FACEBOOK STREET TEAM URL

_________________________________

BOOK TITLE #1

PUBLISHER INFO

COVER DESIGNER

BOOKFUNNEL LINK

WEBPAGE for Book URL

# of PAGES

BARCODE

BISAC subject headings

ISBN

AISN

BOOK COVER URL

LOGLINE

PITCH

BLURB

100 characters (Twitter)
250 characters
400 characters
112 words/754 characters + spaces
350 words
4000 characters

EXCERPT

REVIEW QUOTES 4000 character maximum

KEYWORDS

BUY LINKS

Amazon
B&N
iTunes
Kobo
Google Play
Universal Buy Link
Goodreads

AD WORDING

[image error] Making the Cheat Sheet Easy to Use

Now scrolling up and down what eventually became 20 pages of info was no fun. So I utilized a processing trick that has been so helpful in outlining my novels. I used Headers. By making every main category a Heading 1 and every subcategory a Heading 2. I can use the FIND tool to create a list along the left side of the document. Each Heading is clickable and will take you instantly to that spot in the Chat Sheet.

The second thing I learned to do was the open the Cheat Sheet first thing every morning when I opened my word processor. That way the Sheet sat on the far left, ready to yield its data throughout the day. Need a 100 word bio? It there. Need the ISBN? It’s there.

How do you organize your author and book data?

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