Marketing Yourself as a Writer

By Tom Tripp

What's the difference between a business with a good idea and a successful business? Well, a lot of things, actually, but for this post I'm going to focus on marketing. As writers, we have to market ourselves and our writing. It may seem obvious, but the most fascinating, compelling freelancer will fail utterly if no one ever finds out about her. Mike said that yesterday in his post on selling his books online.

This means that we need to spend some of our creativity selling ourselves and our work. There are almost as many ways to do that as there are writers who need to do it. For my freelance writing business, I had to accomplish two things — gain some name recognition and establish some credibility as an authoritative writer. Before I went freelance, I was NOT in the boating industry. In fact, my background was in the aviation and aerospace world. Fortunately, the job requirement there was to explain the science and technology of flying things to a public that didn't understand them.

At one point, after several years of high-visibility public and media relations work, Microsoft asked me to write the Encarta encyclopedia entry for "airplane."  I didn't realize it then, but that would come in handy when it was time to reassure boating publication editors that I could successfully explain how new boating technology worked for boaters. That article reference is still on my "About" page and it still starts conversations, although Microsoft closed the last online encyclopedia website in 2009.

We've talked on this blog before about the importance of having your own website, preferably, in my opinion, in your own name if web blogging isn't already your business. Your website can have examples of your writing and will absolutely serve as your online resume. Your website is also where you will talk about the publications for whom you have written. You can update the list as the reputation of the pubs you write for increases, and as you add more of them.

Eventually, with persistence, you will assemble a portfolio that will itself begin to open new opportunities to market yourself. For me, that opportunity recently arrived with a nomination by my writing association (Boating Writers International - BWI) to serve as a judge at the annual International Boatbuilders Exhibition for the traditional innovation awards. My writing over the past couple of years had satisfied my colleagues at BWI that I knew the industry well enough and had garnered enough name recognition to satisfy the industry attendees of the same. I worked hard on those awards and I was proud to see my name and publication displayed on the opening slide at the awards presentation, which was attended by about a thousand of the key people in the boating industry. Despite the fact that attendees would have had to hand-write my web address, I saw a big spike in traffic to my website the very same day.

So make sure you're doing things to both expand your experience in your writing realm, and then use those credits to expand your name recognition. Finally, you're gonna have to get over the discomfort of talking about yourself. I grimaced all the way through writing this post, just as I do when I have to re-write my resume or my About page. I hate talking about myself. But I have to do it and so do you.