Promotion.
Regardless of whether or not you’re independently or traditionally published,
it’s a nightmare, a time-eater, a word-creation-time thief. But there are ways
of reducing the amount of time you spend preparing each promotion and blog
post. The simplest of these is to create an Excel spreadsheet or Word document
capturing the information you’re going to find yourself needing to repeat for
each and every title you produce. Arranging it in alphabetical order makes it
easier to find in a list, or document. The following is a list of the
information I find myself looking for every time I write a post to promote a
particular title:
Title: Well, duh. Helps you find it on the spreadsheet
or Word document
Author Name or Pen Name: for those of you who write under
different ones. Trust me, when you’re in a hurry, mistakes happen. This will
help reduce the chance of attributing the wrong pen name to a title. It’s been
known…
Blurb and description: Trying to remember what you wrote
last time rarely ever works. It is better to have a good basic blurb and
description pre-written. That way you can copy and paste and then tweak it to
suit the market or blog entry or platform you’re marketing to.
Spiel on availability: It’s easier to create this once,
put it into a blog post or web entry, and then add the links you’ve prepared
below, than to try to write it anew each time.
Release Date: You’d be surprised how easy it is to lose
track of these, especially if you’re publishing on multiple fronts.
Book Buy Links: You need to list a link for each platform on
which you make your work available. Having these links available in one
document makes it easy to copy and paste them into blogs and emails when
writing a promotion. It makes it easier to find the links, too, when you are
formatting your files for upload to different platforms.
Every title
I publish has at least an Amazon Kindle, and a Smashwords link. My longer works
have links for Amazon Kindle, Amazon print versions, the CreateSpace store,
Kobo, and the iTunes store. I should also add one in for Nook. In addition to
those, I distribute my longer fantasy and science fiction titles via
DriveThruFiction, so I have to include a link for that on those titles. When I
start to produce roleplaying game titles, I will need to add a DriveThruRPG
link as well.
Benefits: Since I’ve been putting this information in
one document, promotions have been a lot easier. I also find I can add links to
the ‘my other work’ sections of my e-book editions a lot faster, now I don’t
have to search the titles up each and every time I do the back matter for a
title. They’re also helpful when updating your titles on Linked-In or adding
your covers to Pinterest.
Little
things like this buy you writing time, and in this busy, busy world, writing
time is precious.
About C.M. Simpson:
C.M. Simpson spent the first twenty years
of her life living in different parts of Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Her father was a teacher who liked to travel, so he took teaching appointments
in all kinds of places. She didn’t stay in one place for more than four years
at a stretch. She wrote stories for most of that time, drawing on the different
landscapes she encountered and giving a hyper-active imagination somewhere to
run. Seeing so many different places gave her a lot of food for thought as she
stepped into the world of adulthood and took her first full-time job, and she
never stopped writing and exploring the worlds in her head.
In the last ten months, C.M. Simpson has released 35
short stories and 13 poems of varying genres and types, as well as four anthologies, and three full-length novels as herself. She has also released one
contemporary romance as Madeleine Torr, four tween-young adult chapter books as
Carlie Simonsen, and a number of novellas. Promotion is necessary, and
minimising its impact on her writing time essential.
