Helping authors go social.

You may be an author or a writer. And you love this, because to speak in front of more than one or two people (maybe even that too!) scares you to death.

But learning to speak as an expert on what you write about? There’s a gold mine in there, trust me.

I’ve been speaking on being a writer and marketing as a writer since 2002. My venues are small, about 100-200 people and they are writing conferences, usually themed, spiritual writing conferences, fiction writing conferences, and it’s only growing from there. I’ve met tons of people who always want to know what’s new in my writing career every time I see them in person or on Facebook!

That’s a powerful way to reach more than your immediate acquaintances about your latest book, don’t you think?

How does one find speaking opportunities?

Here’s a list of ideas:

1. Your local community. Churches, civic groups, libraries, bookstores, just about anyone who has a published book has a veritable golden ticket to local speaking engagements. There may not be pay, there may be a small honorarium, but the opportunities are there.

2. Your regional chapter of a national writer’s organization. Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustators, America Society of Journalists and Authors, Romance Writers of America, there are many more out there. You could speak on a writing topic or a research topic for these groups.

How to practice speaking in front of an audince?

1. Twitter chats. It’s happening already on Twitter. Grab a hashtag (#WCLW for Michelle Rafter’s Word Count Last Wednesday, for instance; I’ll be the featured guest on September 29 talking about using Facebook for authors!). Get people to get on Twitter at the time of the chat, and start chatting. It may start out small at first, but it will grow. This helps you get used to writing-speaking before you actually have to.

2. Webinars. Have a great idea that helps people with how-to steps? Host a webinar. (Again, this isn’t EXACTLY speaking, but it’s excellent training.) I’ve got an upcoming free webinar with Writer’s Digest in the next few weeks (I’ll keep you posted!).

Action Tip: Consider speaking as well as writing to build your platform and to get visible as an expert. You may really enjoy the experience!

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I’ve said before on this blog that you should start with social media (as an author) with the lowest barrier to entry (easiest entry point). I am now here to say: start a blog.

You may be freaking out. You may be saying, “Hey, she just reversed and contradicted herself!”

Say what you will, but don’t freak out.

A blog is the lowest barrier entry to social media. Seriously. Consider a blog your new content hub. You only have to post information that your audience wants and that you already know. It isn’t rocket science and it shouldn’t take you hours of your day. It should take time only because you want it to be the best it can possibly be, not because you’re sitting there freaking out in front of your computer that this social media/blogging thing is a waste of time and will anyone even read what you write?

Don’t give away your energy.

Remember, how everyone used to say that email was archaic? That it was outdated, old? Recently, it was said that Generation Y doesn’t even use email. That’s all true.

But, as the Internet grows by leaps and bounds (yes, still), the people just now getting online in a serious way are using email and email alone. Less than half of the new Internet users polled in a 2009 study are on social media. Thus, the way to the majority of your buying audience’s heart . . . at least for now . . . is blogs.

Wait a minute. Did you say blogs or email?

I said blogs.

Blogs can be delivered via email using RSS. Blog posts can be emailed. Ezines are emailed, which direct people to posts on your blog.

Folks have been saying that email is out. Well, it’s back and in a major way. And I’ve heard several people in the past week say (out loud) that they are thinking about ditching their blog and going strictly to email. I think that is a great idea . . . for them . . . but for authors and writers and anyone who is trying to sell books, it’s a mistake.

You’re going to gather interested people to yourself by writing. The best way to get that writing seen (aside from writing your book) is still a blog. You can Tweet out your posts. You can post your blog writing on Facebook. You can spread so much content around, it’ll be like spreading jam on a PB&J sandwich.

Because your blog is your content hub. It’s central intelligence. It’s where everything originates, draws from, points back to, and circulates around. You create a blog, you’ve just begun your journey into social media.

Unless you are really, really good at email newsletters. If you can knock out your own email newsletter that gathers thousands of subscribers without a blog, go for it!

But I’ll go down in history as the one who said: a blog is a content hub. It works, if you’re willing to do the work.

Action Tip: So, you’re going to start a blog? Not sure where to start? Sign up for my biweekly social media strategy eZine (sign up box is up toward the top of the page and to the right of this text) and you’ll get tips and tricks on blogging, including a free ebook, “Author’s Guide to Blogging” coming soon from yours truly.

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Lots of questions:

How do I market the books already published and have time to write the new books?
How do you corral the social media? It’s taking over my entire life!
I can’t focus on the new book when I’m so into promotion for the recent one. Help!

These are normal questions. This is the age-old question for any artist. How to make a living and create amazing art at the same time? I don’t think we’ve yet hit a solution either. I hear novelists, artists, screenwriters, actors, producers, and directors asking the same questions all over? Been on any art or writing forums lately?

There is no easy one-size-fits-all answer.

It depends on your work. What strategy do you have in place to write new work and promote the published work? How do you keep yourself sequestered to bring forth the new dream when every day Twitter scrolls by like textual diarrhea?

I like to think of marketing as playing a game. Robert Middleton of Marketing Ball fame talks about how marketing is like a game of baseball. You move from base to base as you answer the questions your prospective customers ask of you. For book authors, prospects are asking: Does this author know what she’s talking about? Is she a good writer? Does he provide practical tips for me? Do I learn what I need to know from this guy’s book?

Think about how you can create a marketing strategy from just those questions. You could start a blog or eZine and answer those questions in different variations using different mediums. A blog post talking about how you discovered the steps you give in your book, an eZine sharing a case study about how another professional you know tried their own method, then found yours and they had much more success. Get the idea?

Another strategy would be to tell a story. And we’re writers, this is what we do for a living, right? The story can be how all your life you were drawn to this certain kind of cheese (bad example, but bear with me) and then suddenly, one day you realized that this other cheese suited your needs better. And voila, your life was changed, the world opened up, the sun came out, and so on and so on. You engage your audience (and their questions) by telling them how you experienced those same questions and how you decided to answer them. And then you publish that “story” as a manifesto or as a white paper or as a series of blog posts that people searching for you on Google will find when they click on your web site or blog. You’re preloading your content with the most likely questions. And then on your blog, you host a link to our book from independent booksellers and Amazon so that people who see that you do know what you’re talking about. They realize you will answer all their questions and they will learn something from you and they order your book. Or they leave a comment or they lurk for several maddening weeks until they buy.

You can’t force people to buy your book. You can’t force anyone to read your blog. You can, however, make it so inviting, so interesting, so intriguing that your target readership just can’t resist.

Action Tip: Information no longer goes out to an audience. The audience comes looking for information (mostly via the Internet). How can you take advantage of this shift in our society (called inbound marketing) and use it to your advantage?

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I was talking about my BSM (before social media) writing career with someone the other day and as I spoke, I realized that many of my readers here might not realize that this social media for authors thing was a direct result of me being an author whose books went out of print. I didn’t just decide that I was going to become an expert at social media . . . oh yeah, for authors. I am an author. And I am thrilled with social media. And much of what I see happening in social media right now is primed for authors. The publishing industry may lose midlist authors at the speed of sound, but the social media industry is saving them.

Yeah, I was one of those lost authors. Back in the 1990s, I wrote books, eight of them in fact. I sold all of these books without social media (or an agent for that matter) and I learned a lot about how tough the publishing industry is.

It’s tough. It used to be tougher to get yourself noticed by publishers. Back then, there wasn’t Facebook or Twitter or even blogs. This was 1997; the Internet was AOL. I had only been online for two years and my computer was so old (a used 486 laptop) that I had to turn off images whenever I wanted to download web pages. I had an extra phone line for my dial up Internet access. (Yes, I did live way out in the boonies; in a town of about 1,500 people actually.) I helped the postmaster with her email, often going back into the mail sorting room to restart her hard drive. (She still remembers me and tells my mother hello all the time!)

So it’s not like I didn’t have the Internet or email. I did. And I used it to my benefit by connecting with a lot of information, including how to write book proposals and how to approach publishers. The first publisher I approached didn’t do royalties (I was so naive without an agent, I didn’t care) and gave me a flat sum to write seven books for them in 1997 and 1998. They had liked my poetry. (Again, yes, I was a poet once. I poured out my grief in verse after the death of my beloved grandmother.) And so, I was published.

How did that happen? I still don’t know. I was in the right place at the right time. My books may have been from a packager/small publisher, but they scored endcaps in Targets for three years straight. My books were in gift shop catalogs for years. I remember, because I sent out letters to local gift shops telling them so. (Businesses like gift shops didn’t have email back then.) I talked up my books for as long as they were in print.

That may surprise many of you. I know a lot of authors who believe that marketing and promotion of a book only happens in the six weeks leading up to and after a book is published. Yes. And those authors are now out of print.

Just like me.

And I didn’t ever stop marketing. I’m still out of print. It doesn’t mean my books are bad or poorly put together (they were gorgeous hardcovers with vellum book jackets); I have several sitting on my shelf right beside me. It means that there was too limited a way for readers to find out about my books. It means that there were no tools in place to help authors promote and market their books for as long as they are in print.

Things are so much easier in 2010 (I am so thankful!) and my next book will be so much fun to promote! I, for one, can’t wait to start the promotion part. It’s now my favorite thing to do (second to actually writing and revising my book).

Why, you may ask? Why would you love to market and promote?

Because it’s so much better now. It’s possible for authors to promote and market their own books better than their publishers. It’s possible that authors will become bigger brands than publishers!

And that gets me very excited.

Action Tip: Have you been thinking you’ll only have to promote your new book for a couple of months around the release? Can you change your mindset?

In future posts, we’ll be brainstorming ways that authors can promote their books to keep them in print for many, many years and in a way that doesn’t let the promotion take over the writer’s life. Stay tuned.

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