Promote Yourself - Toot That Horn!

Greetings from Wisconsin where one day it's snowing and the next we are wearing short sleeves (and my children no longer enjoy having their photo taken...case in point here on the left)! I want to talk about promoting your work as an author. I certainly don't have all the answers, but I've been a Blog Tour Manager with WOW! Women on Writing for several years now and I'd like to share some advice about promoting your work and branding yourself. The books I have had the most success promoting have been for those authors who have set some serious ground-work. Authors who have the following:

An Author Page on Facebook
A LinkedIn Account
An Instagram Account
A Twitter Account
A Blog or Website
A Goodreads Author Account
A Goodreads listing of their Book
An Author Profile on Amazon

When an author hires WOW! for a Book Blog Tour, we do quite a bit of behind the scenes work spreading the word about their book. We ask readers to post reviews on blogs, social media, Goodreads, and anywhere they can. We want to shout from the mountain top - we want the world to know about the fabulous book we've had the pleasure of reading. In doing this, we also want to TAG the author on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc... if you aren't there, we can't tag you. This also means readers may not find you. The more places you put yourself and the more ways you promote yourself, the broader your audience will be.

It's not impossible to promote a book for an author who is not on social media, but our promotion isn't as far-reaching. I'd strongly suggest either getting yourself out there or hiring someone to do it for you - BEFORE your book is published. You have nothing to lose if you are out there months (or years) before your book is published, but if you wait until people are trying to find you and CAN'T - then there's definitely a potential for lost readers/followers/reviews.

On a related subject - you can promote yourself without saying "read my book". As a reader and reviewer, nothing is more disheartening than taking time to write a review or a blog post about a book and hearing NOTHING from the author. A brief comment is so encouraging and makes me want to write more reviews. A comment on a review is like a little thank you note - and Gramma said you can never go wrong with a thank you note. An author recently offered to send my daughter's school a copy of his book because my daughter left such a kind review. Now all the students in her school have the opportunity to read his book. He also engaged her in conversation through blog comments and she's excited about the next book in his series. It took a few minutes for them to connect and his readership has expanded greatly because of the interaction.

As Thanksgiving approaches here at our house, I want to say:

Thank you to all the authors, bloggers, readers, and reviewers who place their trust in WOW! - you are all such a joy!

Hugs,
~Crystal


Crystal is a secretary, council secretary, financial secretary, and musician at her church, birth mother, Auntie, babywearing mama, business owner, active journaler, writer and blogger, Blog Tour Manager with WOW! Women on Writing, Press Corp teammate for the DairyGirl Network, Unicorn Mom Ambassador, as well as a dairy farmer. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband and their five youngest children, two dogs, four little piggies, a handful of cats and kittens, horses Darlin' and Joker, and over 250 Holsteins.

You can find Crystal milking cows and riding unicorns (not at the same time), taking the ordinary and giving it a little extra (making it extraordinary), blogging and reviewing books here, and at her personal blog - Crystal is dedicated to turning life's lemons into lemonade!

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