I made a list of promotional efforts that I want to be more consistent about and decided to share my new goals.
Give out more bookmarks! I read about people who say they do this everywhere and with everyone, and I must get into the habit. Goal: Give out 3 bookmarks a day. And I intend to start ordering them in large quantities from online printers. (Nothing like having 2000 bookmarks sitting around to motivate you to give them away.)
Send out one e-mail a day to writer/mystery/review blogs offering to guest blog or participate in a Q&A.
Send out two e-mails a week to writers I know online offering a free copy of my novel. If they like it, they’ll probably say so. Free promotion from other writers is as good as it gets.
Spend 10 minutes a day on Goodreads in discussion forums and adding books to my list. This is a direct connection to readers.
Spend 10 minutes a day on CrimeSpace. I used to do this everyday, then got out of the habit when I started spending more time on Facebook and Twitter (and blogging everyday). As a result, I’ve noticed a drop off in the number of books I sell on Amazon.
Comment on two other blogs everyday. This one is easy, and I'd like to do more of it, but I have to leave some time for writing novels.
Write one article a month and offer it online magazines—even for no pay—just for exposure. (This will be the hardest one to keep up. I hate writing for free...except for blogging!)
Get all of this into an Excel spreadsheet so I can track it and not get sloppy.
Get up earlier to get it all done!
Craig Johnson at The Poisoned Pen
3 hours ago
9 comments:
wow - excellent motivating checklist of goals. I could adopt those verbatim.
Excellent ideas, L.J. Especially the Excel sheet. I find it hard to make habits and sooo easy to forget things. Having it in an Excel sheet is a good way to remember what your goals are and to check up on yourself.
Thanks for these tips.
Excellent list! I want a copy of that spreadsheet, miss! And now to go dig out my bookmarks... :-)
This is great, but let me save you
a little work and increase your exposure.
I tend to write most of my Blog posts as articles. I know each venue has a different readership, so I do cross post my articles. I have a list of about 5 sites that I will post my stuff on.
If I post it first on my blog, then I rehash it on the freebie article sites and not have to be concerned with more work.
I try to keep my posts to one page which is good length for articles. So if you do a couple of serious article posts a month on your Blog you can increase your number of article submissions with no extra writing time and have more time to Tweet.
Karen Syed
http://karensyed.blogspot.com
Great idea, as usual, Karen!
Good Job! Thanks for posting this it gives me incentive and a few hints.
Billie
www.billiewilliams.com
Great goals. Now that part about the Excel spreadsheet - I've got to get more up on working Excel. So far, I can enter into spreadsheets already made, but have forgotten how to make one.
More to learn!
Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com
Great goals! I've found that it helps to have very clearly defined goals with my writing projects. I write them down everywhere so that I keep running into them! The blog comments are the best. I find the best stuff when I'm blog surfing.
Best of luck to you!
You can always send about 25 of those bookmarks to a certain online friend who does a lot of contests and online trading, and who likes to slip bookmarks inside the books she mails out...
Just an idea...
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