Sorry I’m late this week. It was newsletter week and I felt like I’d already written the blog. They got to see the many phases of the cover for my third book. I have been busy this week. I have been networking with authors from a site I joined called AllAuthor. It’s a place for authors to discover new books. It was there that I realized I had more reviews than just what was on Amazon.com. I have even better reviews from other sites like Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk. I asked Amazon if they would combine my reviews. The other sites also have a link to the reviews on Amazon.com, so they can see them all. But Amazon.com does not. That really stinks. Anyway, there is a page where you can follow other authors on their social media and then check a little box that notifies the author that another author has liked their author page. Almost all the authors that I contacted got back to me.

I was asking them about what to put in a newsletter and how to get reviews. Nobody had any new ideas about reviews, but I did brainstorm with a few ladies about newsletters. When I first joined Booksweeps, I joined a giveaway and received a list of 449 people who’d signed up to win my book and be on my mailing list. What was I going to give to these people? I had no idea.

I have no problem writing my blog every week, I always come up with something to say. But I tell you guys all about my writing life, so what do I tell my subscribers? Do I just recap the month? I don’t want to just send them the blog posts I missed. They need exclusive, fresh content. So we came up with the following list. If you have an idea, or one of these sparks an idea, do us all a favor and respond to this post. Let’s make the list bigger!

But I’m not a bestseller or anything! It doesn’t matter. Have you ever read a truly great book and wanted to look up the author, but there was nothing there? It seems unprofessional, doesn’t it? You want to know more about them and more about the book. You want something.

It’s normal for a fan, and anyone who reads your book and likes it enough to read another one of your books just because you wrote it, is a fan. Everyone wants fans. So make sure they can find you.

I met a lady at the library’s grand opening last week and found out she was a local author as well, so I grabbed her book. It was a YA fantasy, like mine, so I checked it out. The story ended up to be good, there were a few issues, but nothing major and I wanted to talk to her again. Actually, I wanted to invite her to my weekly writer’s workshop.

But I couldn’t find her. Her book had no contact information. And I couldn’t find her on ANY social media channels with the exception of a few articles written about her. Still, they were outdated and had no contact information. No website. Even Google brought up nothing. I wanted to tell her what I enjoyed in her book. I could always leave a review and I will when I’m finished, but that’s not the point. If you are an author, fans want to find you.

They may never say anything, but they may peruse every line of every page in your website. They may just want to follow you on social media to see when your next big thing comes out. They may want to read your blog. You can’t know who your fans will be, but take a look at your target audience. You can get an idea of where your audience hangs out. Put yourself there. Make it easy for them. Some people, like me, will hunt until they find it. But most will try two or three things and then give up. Especially if you write YA. Teenagers do not have the attention span or patience to dig for information you should have available if you are a professional author.

The other thing we talked about this week was getting reviews. My post last week was on getting reviews, if you missed it, it’s here. I spoke mostly about the value of reviews and some ideas of things to do. To re-cap a bit, here are a few things you can try:

Some more ideas might be:

Some of those sites do reviews, and some do book trailer marketing. They were color coded in my spreadsheet but I can’t seem to do that here. I’m sure you can tell it took me a lot of time to find them all, look them up, make a table, and color code it. I just wish it had copy/pasted with the original format. Sheesh.

The point is, I haven’t figured this out yet. There are people who have, and I will find out what the secret is, if it kills me. I just don’t have $5,000 to learn… yet. It’s like the chicken and the egg. I need the knowledge to make the money, but the classes all cost money I’m not making. One thing you DON’T want to do is to throw your net wide and invest a tiny bit of money everywhere buying ads and pushing posts. You want targeted marketing. I just can’t tell you who the targets are yet. But I’m excited for the day when I can share it. And I will, eventually.

In the meantime, keep writing!

~jenn