AND THEN THERE WERE THREE

By Susan Reichert, Editor-in-Chief for Southern Writers Magazine

Can you believe we are already past the first quarter of the year? Time is flying by.

I think it always is a good plan for a writer to sit down with the beginning of the second quarter of the year. One, to see we’ve met our writing goals, marketing and promotion goals and determine what the results are. Hopefully we have met the goals we set at the beginning of the year. After all, we’ve all heard the old adage, if you don’t know where you are going any place will do. Trouble with that, it might not be where you wanted to go.

With the beginning of the second quarter, it is time to divide into the remaining quarters what we have left in terms of the number of words we are trying to complete by the end of the year. I find it easier to then take that number and divide the number of quarters into it; take those numbers and divide the number of months in the quarter into the word count. Before long, I can even figure out how many words a day I have to write to meet my goals for the quarter.

During this process, it helps to look at what needs to be done each quarter in terms of how much time should be spent on promoting and marketing. Then to figure out that time in terms of specifics–especially how much time to spend on each venue with Social Media. That in itself is a hard thing to balance some time. But too much time spent on one or the other venues doesn’t help us; it delays us in getting to the other areas of marketing.

I think one of the avenues of marketing and promotion that is overlooked are the opportunities of commenting on other author’s blogs. Let me explain. When you comment on their post, not only does your name go there, which brings attention to you, but you also, get to leave your website/blog address and the name of your book. If you did several of these every day, you would soon pick up more followers, you would show up more times on Google when someone googled your name.

Writing is our passion, but it is also our business. We have to wear two hats. Most authors don’t like to market themselves, but find it okay to go to Facebook, Twitter, and others and use those. Nothing wrong with using these. They have their purpose. But if you have noticed, not all your Facebook followers get to see your post.

Pick some author’s you know, or like their work, or write in your genre. Go to their blogs, post your comments. Make yourself a list of at list five sites to start with and each day make a comment on each one. If you continue to go there and comment on their posts, you will eventually see others are coming to know you and you them. They soon will start checking your site out and eventually they will buy a book.

What do you have to lose?