See me, Read me, Remember me...

I think staying in touch is important. I mean, how do you feel if a friend or family member you haven't heard from in forever calls you up to ask for a favor? Generally you're not as willing to do it. But a friend or family member that you see or talk to often who asks you to pick up a check and says they'll get the next one, you're ok paying for, because you know you see or talk to them often and they'll take care of you. The same holds true for independent authors, you can't come out of the blue and ask people to buy your books, they don't know you, they don't want to spend their hard earned money on an unproven author, and they already have their favorite authors. But if you have blog, and you're on Facebook, maybe post a few videos on YouTube, and you Tweet often, then you have an audience who is familiar with you and willing to step up to the plate and buy your book when you finally get around to finishing it. I try and blog as often as possible. The easiest thing for me to blog about is what I'm watching, or what I'm reading, or like this post, what I'm thinking about a particular subject. And the reason I do this is because I want to stay in the front of people brains, instead of falling into the back of them. I want to be that friend or family member that you hear from often, the one you trust, and the one your willing to help out. It's not a new concept because it's really just basic public relations, but it's amazing to me how many authors just fall off the face of the earth in between books, and then are left wondering why their audience isn't all there when they come back. Blogs don't take a tremendous amount of time to write, and you can do them in the spaces in between everything else that eats up time in your day, but the dividend that the blog will pay is worth every second you put into it. The blog keeps you connected, it keeps you talking to your audience, it lets them know what's going on, what you're thinking, what you're watching, and it maintains that relationship that you've worked so hard to develop. You'll note that I'm not mentioning Twitter and Facebook in here, and that's because my blogs post to Twitter and Facebook, so I'm killing a few birds with a single stone. Now you also have to make sure that you constantly re-Tweet, Follow Back, Friend, return E-Mails, Messages, and answer Comments, review books and join groups on Goodreads, but then you add in your blog to make sure that you're getting in front of your potential readers as much as you possible can. Even if you're doing reviews of TV shows, or movies, or books, or posting random crazed thoughts, you're still reaching out and touching your readers, and if you do it on a consistent enough basis, then you'll reap the benefits of your efforts when it comes time to release your next book. I didn't know this before I released my first book, but I've been reading blogs and articles, and have developed my own experiences ever since, and the idea of maintaining and continuing contact is really solid, so I'm passing it along, and hopefully future self-published authors will learn from my mistakes, and we can all move forward into a successful future of selling a lot of books.