Visibility is Salability: Making the World Ready for Your Book
* Register your name as your website asap. If your name is taken, tweak it by, for example, adding your middle initial.
* Use your name for your email address: [your first name]@[your first name followed by your last name].com. Keep your address clear, simple, and easy to remember.
* Participate in social media, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ LinkedIn, SnapChat lead the pack. There are also forums, message boards, chat rooms, and groups in your field. Tumblr is big with young readers. Goodreads towers over other social reading sites. Be where your readers are. Serve, don’t sell. Maximize the professional; minimize the personal.
* Write a blog on WordPress. Share your passion for your field; discuss developments in your field; relate other news to your field; share content that will inform or entertain your readers; Consider blogging 80% or all of your book to get feedback on it, promote it, and attract book buyers, agents and publishers. (Use Nina Amir’s How to Blog Your Book.) Send posts to social media and build a community of bloggers in your field by exchanging posts and comments. Include your blog in your email address, and on your business card, and in on other print materials.
* Build your website around your blog. Provide a go-to source of information about your field; continually add opportunities for visitors to learn and enjoy themselves; give them the chance to give you feedback on the site and your work; host your updated speaking and media kits, including a list of speaking and media appearances, your articles, testimonials, and audio and video links. Use the title of your books to build a separate site, if only a landing page, for each of them.
* Build your ranking on search engines. Use keywords on your blog and site.
* Make your email signature and business card a brochure. Include your book cover(s), products, services, on- and offline contact info, and a headshot.
* Read books and articles in trade and consumer magazines, newsletters, websites, blogs for news and to build your communities of writers and influencers. Make yourself an authority in your field.
* Write a newsletter; articles for trade, consumer and academic print and online media; reviews; op-ed pieces; letters to the editor; a self-syndicated column and articles (ezinearticles.com); contributions for Wikipedia; audios and videos.
* Give talks, classes, seminars, webinars, teleseminars, teleconferences, and workshops; do consulting, coaching, and training at businesses, nonprofits, conferences, and conventions; podcast your book. Join Toastmasters (www.toastmasters.org) to learn the craft and the National Speaker’s Association (www.nsaspeakers.org), if you want to get paid. Join or start a community of speakers. Send your speaker’s kit to speaker’s bureaus that represent speakers, and meeting planners, and other people who can hire you to speak.
* Appear in print, broadcast, and electronic trade and consumer media or on a radio or television show you create, online or off. Starting your own podcast will enable you to interview influencers in your field.
* Build relationships with organizations, event organizers, and people in the media, academia, government, and professionals in your field.
* Build an email list and a community of people in your field who will give or sell you access to their list.
* Win contests, awards, and prizes.
* Participate in and lead community, writing, and professional organizations.
* Partner with a business, nonprofit or foundation.
Put everything you do in the service of your visibility, income, enjoyment, and building your brand.
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