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PROMOTIONAL BASICS: GETTING THE WORD OUT, WHEN YOUR WORDS COME OUT: Online Course by Barbara_Mountjoy
INSTRUCTOR: Babs Mountjoy DATE: August 1 – September 2, 2011
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Congratulations! Your book or project has just been published. Now comes the real work: making sure your audience can find your book, purchase it, enjoy it and share it with others, bringing you fame and fortune! Most publishers want to hear about your platform, which includes a website, blog, or other publicity method to sell and promote your product or book across the world.
The internet and social media are great methods to share your news and can go a long way toward reaching your potential audience. This online course will teach you the basics of publicity and marketing, some old tricks and some new tricks, to make your new release a real success.
* 4 most important things to include when developing a website
* Discover a variety of ways to get your work noticed online and offline
* Blog tours: how to get one started and why they’re a great way to spread your name
* Freebies and giveaways to attract readers and followers
* Setting up personal appearances and book signings (Have a program in mind, not just a chair behind a table)
FREE BONUS: A list of 50 sites where writers can submit their books for review.
TESTIMONIALS:
"Definitely a 5 out of 5. So much information, and the handouts were great!" - Emma T.
"Loved this! Worth the price of the whole day." - Kathleen B.
"Very informative. A wide breadth of material covered."
"This is the reason I came to the conference--I learned so much that I can use." - Linda A.
Get better website and book sales results from proven promotion methods! LIMITED CLASS SIZE. Enroll now.
$79 ($89 non-Pennwriters members) $89 ($99 non-Pennwriters members) EARLY-BIRD PRICES END SOON!
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:
Barbara “Babs” Mountjoy has been writing ever since she was a little girl, unable to control the urge of stories that wanted to percolate through her fingers into the keyboard. Or back then, onto the old Royal typewriter (before the TRS-80 even! Wow!). She's been a published writer for over 35 years, spent seven years as a news reporter and editor in South Florida, and has contributed stories to two CUP OF COMFORT volumes. Her non-fiction book 101 LITTLE INSTRUCTIONS FOR SURVIVING YOUR DIVORCE was published by Impact Publishers in 1999, and her first novel, THE ELF QUEEN (under the pen name Lyndi Alexander) came out in 2010. THE ELF QUEEN is the first of the Clan Elves of the Bitterroot series, with THE ELF CHILD coming out in 2011 and THE ELF MAGE to be released in 2012.
Her romantic suspense novel SECRETS IN THE SAND was released by the Wild Rose Press in 2011 (under the pen name Alana Lorens) , and her women's fiction book SECOND CHANCES comes out from Zumaya Publications in 2012. She blogs about autism, writing and life at http://awalkabout.wordpress.com, and continues to write tech articles and TV reviews at Firefox News online.
For more information on Babs Mountjoy or this course, email her at bmountjoy at zoominternet dot .net or visit the Pennwriters site today.
Organizing: One Less Thing
When I started writing fiction years ago, I read an estimate that a novelist needs to spend 2000 hours learning the craft of fiction writing in order to get published.
I thought that was excessive. I figured a smart guy could learn to write a novel in a few hundred hours.
Maybe I'm just not all that smart, but it wound up taking me quite a bit more than 2000 hours of writing to get my first novel accepted by a publisher and on the shelves of bookstores.
Even though I wildly underestimated the amount of time it would take, I always knew it wasn't something you do in a weekend, so I made a point early in my writing life to find ways to spend more time writing.
I believe that if you're a serious writer, you need to be writing at least 10 to 20 hours per week.
Why?
Because when you finally sell your manuscript to a publisher, they're going to expect you to polish your novel within a few months. And then they'll expect you to do a second novel soon after that. And then a third, and a fourth . . .
That level of effort is easily going to cost you 20 hours every week for the rest of your writing life. Easily.
If you're not already writing at least 10 hours per week by that time, you just plain won't be able to gear up quickly enough to meet those demands from your publisher.
You don't have to start out writing 10 hours per week when you first begin writing fiction, of course. Hardly anybody can do that.
I recommend that you work up to the level of writing about 5 hours per week by the end of your first year of serious writing. And yes, it may take you a full year just to get up to that level.
Once you're writing 5 hours per week, you can then ramp up over the next year or two to writing at that magic level of 10 hours per week.
How do you do that? How do you find that kind of time when you're probably already overwhelmed by all the other things you're doing in life?
It's not easy. It's going to call for you to make some hard decisions on what's most important to you.
We're all juggling a lot of different things in our lives. I am. You are. That's just how things are.
Think about all the things on your plate. You probably have 10 or 15 that are important. Maybe more. You've got 168 hours in every week, and you're awake for at least 110 of those. That's a lot of hours. How do you fill up those hours?
Is it possible that you could live your life with one less thing on your plate?
(I know that the grammar purists will probably say it should be "one fewer thing," but that just doesn't ring well in my ear.)
If you've never tracked your time, this might be an enlightening exercise. Keep a daily log of where your time goes over the course of a full week. Keep a record of anything that takes longer than about 5 minutes. Lump together things that take less time than that. You may be amazed at what you spend your time on.
Now it's time to get serious. Every three months, ask yourself if there's one less thing you could do. One thing you could shove off your plate that would gain you at least an hour per week in writing time.
Maybe it's an "essential" TV show that really isn't all that important.
Maybe it's time spent browsing the web, fooling around on Facebook, texting, Skyping, tweeting, or whatever your favorite way is to chitchat electronically. Can you carve out an hour from that?
Every three months, can you find one less thing that "must" be done? Something that's really not essential? Something you can offload to somebody else?
Can you take that time and use it for your writing?
One less thing, every three months. If that one less thing buys you an extra hour per week of writing time, then in a year, you'll be writing at least four hours per week.
In two years, you'll have an extra eight hours per week to devote to your writing.
In three years, you'll have twelve hours a week.
This is not easy. At first, that "one less thing" won't cost you much. But as the months go by, each "one less thing" is going to sting more and more.
Life is full of sacrifices. If you want to write a novel, you have to give up something else that you like doing. You have to give up lots of somethings.
You can get there. One less thing at a time.
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION-- Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the
Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 25,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.
Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.
The last thirty days have been quite a rollercoaster for me. I finally got the job with the county I've been angling for since about 2008, with full benefits for me and the whole family. Fantastic. My book THE ELF CHILD, second in the Clan Elves of the Bitterroot series, came out. My first romance, SECRETS IN THE SAND, was released in ebook by The Wild Rose Press. My first teaching gig in the writing field got WOW reviews from attendees at the St. David's mini-conference.
At the same time, my father's painful bone cancer finally rendered him incapable of caring for himself, and we took him into our home, with the help of Hospice, for his final days.
So much got put aside as we really took things day by day, not planning farther ahead than the next morning. Work took a back seat, and I am grateful for the court's understanding and patience. Writing was set aside, too, except for the moments when I just needed to escape to some other place to get through an hour, anywhere except real life that was all too real.
Here's hoping the "bumpy night" is over, and spring might actually arrive sometime here in the frozen Northlands, setting my fibromyalgia pain to 'low' for the season. My hyacinths are out, sharing their delightful aromas, so that's a good sign. Writing on book three, THE ELF MAGE, is proceeding again at last. Working up to the Pennwriters conference in three weeks, where I'll meet with an agent about an autism project very close to my heart. Forward, world, forward.
I'm hosting a number of my sister authors on their blog tours at the Clan Elves' site, Other Writers, Other Worlds, including Brianna Soloski, Mayra Calvani and Jessica Zellman, and making the rounds myself to celebrate my new books as well. See me at Brianna's blog, asking the question, Are You an Old Dog?
I'm guest blogging today on The Book of Your Heart at Mayra Calvani's blog, The Dark Phantom Review. Come by and say hello!
And for a look at Mayra's column at the Clan Elves' page, see A Typical Writing Day!
One of the things an author needs to have in his or her arsenal is a good photo to send with press releases, interviews and post with notices of book releases, etc. I've been putting this off for some time, partly because of cost and partly because I HATE HATE HATE having my picture taken. :) (That's why I'm always the one with the camera--then I'm sure I'm out of the viewer range!!)
But as more and more opportunities come along, (and more and more books, too!) it seems like an inevitable task that we need to accomplish. Yesterday, I gathered the courage to go to the studio. My lovely "Theatah" friend Pam with the fabulous shoe store AND a Mary Kay business (how does she find the time!!) did my 'glam' makeup, and sent me off to the photo session, where a lovely young woman named Jennifer cajoled me through the process. I can't wait till she gets her own studio up and running--Capturing Moments Photography seems like the perfect name to me! Thanks so much to both of you for your help and encouragement!
It wasn't too painful, and I in fact survived. I've already sent out some of the shots as accompaniments to interviews and the like. What do you think?
Today I'm the blog guest of Emma Lai at Emma Lai Writes-- She is a delightful hostess with fascinating books of her own. :) Come by and say hello!