Tag Archives: book marketing

Don’t do as I did!

My author platform is now:

www.dianajacksonauthor.co.uk

www.dianajacksonauthor.com

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaJackson/

DianaJackson@Riduna on Twitter

My main blog www.dianamj.wordpress.com

Dear Reader

I began writing in 2000 and had my first book Riduna published in 2009 by Pegasus Elliot McKenzie. I knew nothing about author platforms and just chose a Twitter handle and web address fairly randomly.

Twitter

I chose my Twitter handle @Riduna’ before it had occurred to me I’d write several books. It was the title of my first book and the Roman name for the island of Alderney, on which my novel was located. In the early days of marketing it certainly helped to link myself to Alderney and one of my first followers and readers did a search for ‘Riduna’ on Twitter and came up with me. He was an ESOL teacher in Argentina at the time, but his Great Grandparents were alive on Alderney at the same time of mine. One of those lovely coincidences!

In 2012, a small Indie Author Collaborative, for which I was a founding member, relaunched Riduna and its sequel Ancasta. (losing all my hard earned reviews for Riduna on Amazon unfortunately, but that’s another story)

It was when I came to release ‘Murder Now and Then’ in 2014 that @Riduna was less helpful, although characters in that novel did in fact visit Alderney briefly.

Website

The website for Diana Jackson was not available and I so I chose http://www.dianamaryjackson.co.uk as my web address. I was asked where the ‘Mary’ came from when interviewed by Chiltern Radio. I must have looked surprised, although of course I couldn’t be seen, ‘it’s my middle name,’ I replied. Since then I’ve realised that it is a little odd. At first I thought to change my pen name to Diana Mary Jackson. It has a certain ring to it don’t you think? If you ever wish to do that, please don’t go there! It’s far too complicated, especially since I had already published at least one book in each of my three series.

Blogs

I am reluctant to update my main blog www.dianamj.wordpress.com because it goes through periods of success and increased outreach, dependent on my input and a bit of luck. I also find that some posts and themes have a certain amount of longevity, discovered by folks sometimes years later. I now have links to this blog on both websites making it easy to share news and for me to update most of it myself. This works seamlessly

I have two blogs, but this year I have paused on www.selectionofreflections.wordpress.com to give myself less pressure through a difficult year.

…and so I’ve kept ‘Mary’ hidden in my blog address by the initial ‘M’ and that sounds like the title of a book!

Banner

In Short:

Think carefully before you choose twitter handles and web addresses and not only that its worth paying for web addresses ahead of time to reserve them. You never know who might come along and snap them up. Be consistent!

“Diana Jackson’s latest release is a #YA book of encouragement, inspiration and motivation called ‘Search for the Pearl Inside Yourself‘, just released on Kindle .”