Friday, February 2, 2018

Guest Post written by my mom, Carole P. Roman


I have no background in marketing and promotion, but I realized as soon as we started our self-publishing enterprise I was going to have to learn fast.
As an author, I thought publishing was a snap. One wrote a book, loaded it on Createspace and snap, you were off and running. After all, that was my experience with my son's first book, Just Ask the Universe.
Michael wrote the book, against my better judgement and within weeks of publishing was linked with one of the most popular and best-selling books of all time. I don't know how it happened, but it took absolutely no work and virtually no investment.
Man, I thought this was going to be easy!
Between my son and I we published ten books in the next year. I purchased a press kit from Createspace, just in case we were going to need it. I published Captain No Beard and he published Brood X.
We waited for the reviews and sales to come pouring in. We waited, and waited, every day checking the falling rank with dismay. I started looking up other authors, looking at their websites and other social media to see what we were missing. I realized the successful ones had several things going for them, the first being a brand.
A brand is something that identifies the author with his body of work. Okay, that meant we worked overtime on pumping out multiple books.
What next? They had strong social presences. I didn't even know what Facebook was. I found an affordable social marketer, Julie Gerber and asked her to guide me in the shoals of marketing both myself and my kid.
That being said, I didn't just hand it all over to her, but took responsibility in learning all the different ways to promote our work, both with funds and without.
It is, I learned as easy as ABC.
A- Accept that you have to be constantly looking for ways to promote your books.
B- Be a blogger and look to be on as many blogs as you can.
C- Chat with other authors on discussion groups on Goodreads.
and D- Don't get discouraged.
There are 22 more letters to go though. Take your time and don't forget to have fun.

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