The Marketing Call: Everything I Always Wanted to Know
On Wednesday afternoon July 29 at 4:00 Eastern Standard Time, I took a scheduled conference call from John Koehler at Koehler Books and Shari Stauch, creator and CEO of the marketing website, http://writerswin.com, and a marketing consultant for Koehler Books. This hour-long consultation, known as the Marketing Call, is a service Koehler provides for its authors. It was helpful beyond belief.
Up to this point I had spent several months thinking up and attempting to implement various marketing ideas, some of which actually worked, some of which were-shall we say–less than stunningly successful. I was flying blind but in a veritable updraft of often pointless activity. And then I “met” Shari.
I am pleased to report that she paid me the compliment of saying I had been doing pretty well. She liked the website, and both she and John had some very concrete suggestions for minor changes and improvements. I am absolutely NOT savvy to the ways of websites and so am waiting for my WordPress Guru to return from vacation to talk me through some of the tasks.
Meanwhile, once I was off the phone on the 29th, I sat down and typed up my notes from Shari, and I realized immediately that she had done much more than offer me a list of concrete leads in the marketing game. She had given me the sage advice–and the list to carry it out–to take the marketing of my book one step at a time, setting realistic goals for each day. For example, as an overall goal-using whatever items from the list seem best suited at the time–setting a goal of number of people who will have become familiar with my name by the end of the day. She suggested starting low, at maybe five people. Then the task is to choose the avenue to take to reach those five people. This is revolutionary for me because I tend to tackle everything at once and, of course, become quickly overwhelmed and discouraged.
There are the ubiquitous social media (and she also had specific suggestions for using each of those–Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Twitter–more effectively); there is this blog which I can begin to place in categories rather than leaving “uncategorized,” to which I can continue to invite guest bloggers, for which I can choose broad topics like “Twenty Questions to Use for Discussion of Your Book,” then put in a sample with explanation, from the Discussions at the end of my own book. And more grand ideas like that.
She pointed me in the direction-at a very reasonable yearly fee–of an offshoot of her website, The Winners Circle, which provides article after article on frequent issues in marketing and does amazing things like paring the million online book clubs down to a few that will seriously consider submissions in a particular genre. I was already looking at these book clubs with despair having Googled “online book clubs” and viewed the overwhelming number.
In short, there is help out there for us novices in both publishing and marketing our own books. And, finally, here are the notes I typed on the 29th of July–they are unedited but I believe self-explanatory. I have completed the items that are **.
Conversation with Shari Stauch and John Koehler 7-29: KB Marketing Call
** Go to BISAC and pick three categories to send to John
** Sign up for WritersWin/bookmark from Shari: VIPW20 to save $20; they screen sites, like book clubs; I can go after reviews on my own? I need to go ahead and do this
Link website/blogs to FB Author Page, not just FB
Define categories (5-6) for blogs
Pull selected blogs from the past, put into categories, re-date—click on url of specific blog to bring it back up to republish
Twitter: look for writers in similar genres: follow their followers
From website—Discuss the Book: share questions in a blog to social media—Do things like “Twenty Questions You Hadn’t Thought to Ask” then pull 1-2 from Lydia Questions, e.g., Which of the ladies is your favorite; why
**Upload photo to Goodreads Author Page
**Set up a Google+ Author Page (turns out this is your profile page on Google, so I just adjusted content to reflect my status as an author)
Set myself a goal, e.g., five or ten people per day who will know my name (through marketing)
ONE DAY AT A TIME.
