Category Archives: Social Media Networking

October 24, 2019 · 3:07 pm

Getting in the Zone ~ Small Steps to Book Marketing

Inspiration for Book Marketing

I’ve just been inspired by an article by Sandra Beckwith on book marketing, posted on the wonderful blog The Book Designer.

3 Ways to Get Past What’s Holding You Back

Sandra goes beyond looking at what holds you back in marketing but she also explores how to break free in a positive way. These are my thoughts and my resolutions inspired by the post. I do recommend you reading the original post, which is packed with ideas, but if you come to write your own resolutions I’d love to hear from you. Here are my three resolutions:

Getting in the Zone ~ Essential First for Book Marketing

The post brought to mind the wonderful Carol from Kirkcaldy Curves

who talks about ‘Getting in the Zone’ as far as keeping fit and losing weight and I believe that the same applies to book marketing, or writing for that matter.  Life gets in the way, its true, but I have no hesitation in finding time to write when I’m in the middle of a project, so why is marketing so hard? Carol explains that sometimes it seems impossible to be motivated to lose weight, plan meals and exercise enough, but its all about changing our mind-set. I think doing what you enjoy helps.

Since living in Scotland I’ve learnt to love a good blether. I enjoy the banter on Twitter when you connect and I’ve been told that the #writingcommunity are great for feeling connected to like minded folks. I have my twitter ‘friends’ with whom I’ve built a connection over the years, but since leaving behind The Ampthill Writers’ Group, I’ve never really felt part of a community of writers and I must admit that it sounds fun. This, then is going to be one of my aims in the next few weeks; one to look forward to.

Setting Small Steps for Book Marketing

Going with the above analogy, a crash diet may work but often that approach doesn’t last and is unsustainable. It’s the long consistent effort which really works. It’s a mindset and one of the bits of advice on Sandra’s post which struck a chord with me was small steps.  Set yourself manageable tasks. OK, so apart from getting to know the #writingcommunity and all the good karma which goes with supporting others, I’m going to set myself a book marketing task each week. This week I plan to use the little video I had made a couple of months back but have been remiss in using it ~ so here’s the link:

Murder Now and Then Promo

Click on photo to view book on Amazon (universal link)

Regular Blog Posts for Book Marketing

All of the advice about blog writing is that you should be consistent, write regularly and as frequently as you can. This is one area I often let slip, but with the ability to schedule blog posts with WordPress it should be easy enough to do this. I do try to schedule posts when I am on holiday.

I find blog posts are a way to connect and give information, which hopefully folks enjoy, rather than just as a book marketing tool. New readers of posts I wrote a while back show that search engines work and give me such a surprise when I get an email or message.

There are times in life when the needs of the family or work commitments must come first and at those times it is impossible to keep to a plan, but while I am awaiting the right time to launch my next novel I’m going to  attempt the above, achievable steps. (I think they are anyway!)

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February 19, 2019 · 7:31 pm

Writing effective blog posts ~ I suggest you ‘Do as I say and not as I do’

As I was trying to be organised and think through a plan for blog posts for the next month I realised how haphazard I’d been of late, for various reasons and have vowed to try to do better. I’m sure if I were more disciplined I would follow the following:

  1. Write regularly so that your readers get to know you and look forward to your posts. Personally I admit that I’ve been distracted from writing my blogs, from Twitter and from Facebook in the past couple of years. Firstly real life got in the way as we settled into our move to Fife. Then I was spooked by talk of problems of security with Social Media. (could do better)
  2. Be consistent ~ if your readers want to read about the background to writing, or wish to follow a travel journal, browse comments about health or even the best wines, then they search for it.  A blogger needs to find what interests them and share it in the best possible way ~ prose, poetry, photos, diagrams, lists …. (I’m afraid I’ve failed on this one too. My posts are, at present, spasmodic to say the least and flit from subject to subject as the mood takes me.)
  3. Make your themes within your topic clear ~ Using tabs carefully, which helps you to be found on a search engine too incidentally, you can cover a few themes -categories – within your umbrella topic, but your readers should be able to find them easily. (Oh dear ~ I rather like my cloud of many themes to the right hand side of the screen, but with hindsight it would have been best to plan my posts better and restrict the number of categories.)
  4. Use Tabs and Categories ~ always remember to set up these pesky little details. They appear at the bottom of your post and help the reader to find your posts when searching within WordPress but also on Google. (Hooray ~ Yes, I nearly always remember to do this now.)
  5. Always proof read carefully before clicking the final ‘publish’ button. (I hold my hand up here as I sometimes look back on posts and, though I’ve read it through a couple of times, pesky errors have crept in unbidden.) It also helps to schedule the post in a couple of days in advance, giving you time to revisit meanwhile and scrutinise it with fresh eyes.
  6. Not too long ~( I think I’m OK with this one.)
  7. Do your research carefully ~ (yes I’m fairly good at that too)

I’m sure there are many more, but now I’ve remembered that planning and being organised is the key I will attempt to get back on track.

My next post will be to complete a=the long awaited end to a series I began a few months ago ~ A Virtual Walk Along the Fife Coastal Path ~ I will finally write about the last walk (for me) to St Andrews. After that I’ll let you know.

Happy blogging!

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August 5, 2017 · 8:21 am

‘What a novel idea ~ to talk to each other’ or ‘A Truly Social Media Free Holiday’

For two weeks every year I like to leave Twitter, Facebook and my blogs behind me and have a total break. I’m getting more and more content with this as the years pass. At first I panicked. I wrote blog posts to schedule automatically and tweets to appear through Hootsuite. You can do all of this if you:

a) pay an expert to do your marketing for you

b) have the time to do so

or c) just cannot bear being silent for a couple of weeks or more.

I used to ask ~ Will my followers get bored and desert me? Will I have to start again when I get back? Will the world still turn without me?

It is strange for the first couple of days. I am tempted to turn on the internet using my smart phone. You may laugh here but I have never had Facebook or Twitter or even email on my phone. Too intrusive on real life. The man in the phone shop raised his eyebrows when he saw that I hadn’t even discovered the App Store.

I resisted temptation for the first couple of days ~only just.

By the third day I started to relax ~ to forget the pull of all of these time sucking activities and then I noticed something which made me smile and frown at the same time.

At restaurants while hubby and I were learning to talk to each other again we noticed whole families who sat at their table glued to their phones, sharing the occasional joke or two they’d read from friends back home. On buses and on the beach too! By the end of the holiday we were even feeling quite smug about it.

In fact, we enjoyed talking so much that we have vowed to turn the TV off during supper each night back at home, to sit opposite each other and chat about our day. It’s been so refreshing for our communication skills and our relationship as a couple. You should try it.

What a novel idea ~ to talk to each other!

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