I had lunch one day last February with my brother’s boss, a high-level marketing guy for a company whose product is wildly popular. He also co-authored and self-published a business book that did so well the Big Bookstores picked it up, so I wanted to pick his brain about what I could do to get my writing out into the world beyond my blog. I explained that, though I blogged fairly regularly, I didn’t do much to try to promote it. The real focus of my writing efforts was a quasi-memoir that revolves loosely around my relationship with the first house I owned. I wanted his thoughts on how to pitch the quasi-memoir, which at the time was 70% complete, to agents, publishers, etc.
He held up both of his hands and said, “Wait a minute, Karen, you haven’t published anything yet, have you?” I shook my head. “Then you’re doing this all wrong.” He went on to tell me I needed to build a platform and find a way to generate demand for the quasi-memoir even before it was written. This seems like such obvious advice, especially since my minimal efforts to promote my blog guaranteed that it hadn’t been seen by anyone who doesn’t share my DNA. He suggested that I read a marketing book that’s oh-so-helpfully called Platform.
I greet business books with the same enthusiasm as I do tax returns, so I won’t lie and tell you I read it in great detail. I skimmed it, focusing on the areas that interested me most and skipping right over duh counsel like “create great content.” The insights I gleaned from the book led me to crank out the collection of humor essays that I self-published on CreateSpace and released on Nov. 4. But doing all of that still isn’t enough, because you have to promote it.
Which is how I find myself staring down Day 23 of Shameless Self-Promotion Month. (Happy SSPM, everyone!) I understand that, no matter what you’re “selling,” you must have a social media presence. But how do you figure out where to allocate your time without cutting into your precious writing time, especially if you, like me, have a non-writing full-time job? Do you choose only two or three outlets –facebook, twitter and Goodreads, for example–and focus on those? Or do you try to touch them all and then stick with the ones where you get traction?
And I would especially love to hear from anyone who has figured out how to make sense of what feels like cacophony to me on Twitter. I know people form relationships and connections there all the time but I don’t quite understand how that happens when so much content is flying around so quickly.
Hoping to hear from all of you wonderful folks out there!
The Write Stuff 