Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Promotion vs Writing

I have been thinking recently about the way authors market and promote themselves. Since the majority of money made by the author from e-books is in royalties it's a must to get their name out. Now that the Internet is such a big place there are many facilities available to the authors fingertips from having pens made with your name and book title inscribed, to posters even bookmarks and fridge magnets. It would be easy to go mad and get a little of everything but none of that would mater if your name wasn't out their in the first place.

The best way to get your name out there is to write, the more work that is around with your name on it the more likely you will be seen by readers. Attending chats and general book promotion is also a brilliant way of getting to know your readers, by making yourself seen on reader sites and chats being friendly and being available to the reader changes are you will go a long way.

As a reader I love getting to know the authors behind the books, I love finding out about their day to day lives (not in a stalker way of course - more in seeing the person behind the books if that makes sense). It's easy sometimes to forget that authors are human, what I mean by that is that a good author can leave us in awe and may seem hard to approach so by talking to them online in chats or at book signings it all seems so much more friendly.

As an author I love interacting with readers, and will very often work on suggestions given to me by them. if people show an interest in one particular character the likelihood is that that character will come back for a sequel. For me it's about telling a great story one and sometimes it's important to realise that the best promotion tool is the books themselves.

Well that's my thoughts on the mater, I know they might not work for everyone nor will they ever be totally agreed upon. The best thing that an author can do is try things and see what works for them.

2 comments:

Ciara Gold said...

It's all a balancing act, though. I love chatting also, but too much. I'm having a hard time making myself sit down and write. Well, that's not entirely true, but if I didn't have the internet pulling at me, I could probably write more.LOL.

Nicole Gestalt said...

I'll admit the internet does suck up a lot of my time! However I'm slowly getting better at working out when I'm writing and when I can surf etc...