Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Marketing madness

March flew by so fast, I didn't get in on any March madness this year. So I’m designating April as Marketing Madness month. With eight stories ranging from shorts to novellas releasing from three epresses this year (or early next), I’m trying to be very organized about how I go about promoting them all. Each needs to be given their due in individualized attention.
I’ve been exploring the web for some marketing resources, and have found some great stuff which I’ll post over the course of this month.
First, a freebie called The Savvy Book Marketer’s Top Book Marketing Tips: A collection of popular articles from the Book Marketing Maven blog and The Savvy Book Marketer newsletter. Developed by Dana Lynn Smith, the Book Marketing Maven, this PDF includes tips on viral marketing, virtual book tours, using Flickr and videos, creating display materials, and more. It includes links to outside resources. Worth a look!

Blogs
As Ms. Smith advised, I listed this blog with a few blog listing sites: Google’s Blog Search and Technorati.
Ms. Smith also mentioned Samepoint but I didn’t see a quick sign-up there. I’ll have to look into it a little more.
I also listed my blog with Romancing the Blog and Authors’ Blogs.
Blogging Tips lists 75 blog listing services with which to list your own site.
I looked at Blog Listing because it seemed generic enough, but saw no category for fiction or authors blogs. I have an email into the admin and we’ll see what they say.
It’s all about getting the word out, and part of that is driving traffic to your site.
The other handy thing to remember about blogs are the Tags. Whatever terms you enter into the Tags field will be made available to search engines, so if someone enters, say, your name into Google and you’ve used that as a Tag on a post, it will come up in the search results.

Blog tours
This year, I have or will be guest blogging at a few other sites, so far including Yankee Romance Reviewers, Lily Stone (possibly next week), Alisha Paige (April 30), and Book Talk with J&J (Oct. 3-4). Once each month, I blog at Popculturedivas, too - next on April 24.
I hope to feature other authors here on my blog, too. Any author who wants to set up a reciprocal arrangement, just email me at cate.masters@gmail.com.
Marketing Madness will continue!