Since compiling and self-publishing my latest book, Welsh Cakes: Book of Short Stories, I have done more marketing than with any of my previous books—not that I have sold any more books this time around than I did with any of my other books. My marketing efforts have, however, drawn a lot of visitors to my web site, particularly to my monthly meditations, which I now have in text and audio.
Visits to my website are important to me and, though I would like to sell more books, I am writing a lot through my website with more immediate results than I have ever done with my books. I have been getting around 1,000 visits to my site each month for several months now; this is up from 100 when I first started in 2007. This is attributable to my presence on the internet on other sites.
Most of my marketing has been done on-line and there are a lot of opportunities available to an author. I got quite involved with on-line marketing a few months ago when one of The Word Guild members told us about a site called Marketing Tips for Authors. http://blog.marketingtipsforauthors.com From reading this blog by Tony Eldridge, I have linked up with a number of helpful ways to market my work and website.
One cannot take advantage of all the suggestions that are given—if one did there would be no time for writing—but one can search through and pick out some that would be helpful to one’s own situation. The following are examples of ideas that I have chosen to pursue.
1. I joined Authors Den, www.authorsden.com which is a site where authors and readers meet together. Here I have an opportunity to put all my information in one place. I blog there once a week; I show my poetry, short stories, and published books; I have links to my other blogs, my website, and where to buy my books; I can keep track of visits by others to these areas by viewing my stats page.
2. When I started my blog on my book of short stories, I decided to follow a suggestion I found on Marketing Tips, to use my new blog to tell the story behind each of the short stories in the book and the reason that led me to write it.
3. The most recent idea that got my attention was putting up my book in readable form on my website, blogs, and anywhere else I so desired. I joined a website called fReado www.freado.com from where I was directed to BookBuzzr. www.bookbuzzr.com Here I was able to put sample pages of my book for people to read and could put a widget of this in various places on the internet so that people could have access to it.
These are new times and we have to be able to change our method of bringing God’s message to the people with the times if that is what God is leading us to do. I was never much of a computer techie but I have been willing to try and now enjoy the challenge of learning new marketing tips and techniques in order to make God’s word available to the ever growing internet population.
To God be the glory in all we do.
