#Open Book Blog Hop – Marketing your books

Uncategorized 3 Minutes

29861-52

This week on the Open Book Blog Hop the topic is all about the best way to market our books.

Marketing the books we write seems to be the biggest concern of most writers, whether they are self-published or traditionally published. Unless you are a well known name, even traditionally published authors seem to have to spend a fair bit of their time marketing their books on-line and physically.

My first children’s book, Sir Chocolate and the strawberry cream berries story and cookbook was published into a social media vacuum in August 2016. As it was my first book, it gained a fair amount of interest from family and friends but I knew when I published the second book, that I had to look further for a market.

I started looking into social media. Firstly, I created a Facebook account and that was hilarious. I called it Sir Chocolate and I got a lot of requests for friendship by some rather interesting characters including a platoon of USA military personnel, according to their profiles in any event. I quickly changed it to Robbie Cheadle and my sister showed me how to create a page called Sir Chocolate Books which worked much better.

I created a twitter account and spent a bit of time learning how to use twitter and finding other authors and reading their tweets. I soon realised that all the authors had blogs. What was a blog? I followed a number of the links and saw that WP was a popular choice for these “blogs”. I spend the whole of one Sunday finding WP and setting up my blog step-by-painful-step.

I was very lucky with my blog. I used the search tool to look for other authors and quickly came across Smorgasbord, run by the amazing Sally Cronin. I started following her posts and reading and commenting as I saw other people doing. Sally came over and had a look at my blog and kindly shared one of my posts. It was a Christmas post about how to make a red robin out of fondant. I went over to her blog and thanked her and followed all the links to the bloggers who had commented on her post. I read and commented on a few of their posts and followed them all. That is how I became involved in the amazing writing and blogging community that is my mainstay in this strange social media world. Blogging is different to other social media, it is interactive and you learn a whole lot of fascinating and useful things. You find book reviews that lead you to fantastic new writers and their books and discover historical, scientific and natural wonders shared by bloggers all over the world.

My blog is the marketing tool I use the most. I try not to use it to post to many specially book promotional posts. I like to participate in writing prompts and meet other participants. My books are along the sidebar of my blogs so people who like my writing can find them if they want to.

Another thing I do quite often is write guest posts. These are usually about some historical event or circumstance that I have found interesting or which has prompted a piece of writing. The bit about my books is usually at the end and people can continue to read it if they are interested in it or just read the actual article.

I am not a great marketer, but I do let people know I have books and I try to support my fellow authors as much as possible because I like to and because I think that you need to offer visitors to your social media variety and insights into other peoples books and writing. It is a bit like the marketing psychology that is used in shopping malls when stores that sell similar products are grouped together. You go to a certain section of the mall to buy shoes and another to buy books. In that one place you get to look around and make a selection from all the different products that are on offer.

How to other authors market their books? You can find out here:

Rules:

  1. Link your blog to this hop.
  2. Notify your following that you are participating in this blog hop.
  3. Promise to visit/leave a comment on all participants’ blogs.
  4. Tweet/or share each person’s blog post. Use #OpenBook when tweeting.
  5. Put a banner on your blog that you are participating.
You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Published by robertawrites235681907

I am a writer of young adult fiction and poetry

Published

38 thoughts on “#Open Book Blog Hop – Marketing your books”

  3. Blogging is by far the most effective social media tool for me and it’s fun. You do a great job of blogging, communicating with and following others. I love the interaction and actually getting to know each other. Guest posts are great too.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. I like blogging too, Darlene, and I also think it is fun. I am a people collector and love to read all about people’s lives and how they spend their time, how they write and what they think about things. I just wish I had enough time to read everything I want to.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  4. An interesting piece, Robbie, for someone like me who blogs but is unlikely ever to be a proper author. Your point about your blog being your best marketing tool is revealing, and your tips on how to engage with others to promote your blog have given me a few pointers towards things I should be doing.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. Hi Clive, lovely to see you. I am glad that my post is helpful to you. I don’t think about these things in a formal way very often. I have my ideas in my head and it is useful to me to pull them out occasionally and really consider what I do that works or doesn’t work.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

    1. Thank you. The idea behind that was to have a good that parents and small children could read together and then do the baking together. An interactive book to help teach children concepts in a fun way. Baking is amazing for teaching maths concepts.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  11. Thanks for the mention Robbie and you have done an excellent job both with the blogging and managing to find time to write books too. Getting noticed for all the right reasons is the best way to market books and you do that with your interesting guest posts on various topics, that provide content for the host blogger, (a blessing) and also associates your name with quality writing, very important as part of marketing your books. You also feature others frequently in your various series such as the Poetry Readathon.. and that is a winner too…

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. Thank you, Sally. I must admit that I learned it all from you and Sue and a few other helpful bloggers like Craig Boyack. You have no idea how much help you give to others with your amazing blog. I do enjoy writing guest posts because I like to share things that interest me with others who are like minded. I also read their posts and learn from them.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  12. The trouble is a lot of us are just writers and don’t know much about marketing. That’s the problem with self-publishing, as you definitely have to do all the marketing yourself, and if you’re not good at that sort of thing, it will make it harder to get your work out there.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. What you have said is true, Joanne, and most writers are shy. I am not shy as I have to do a lot of presenting of ideas and concepts in my job so I have become used to pushing myself forward. You will learn to market better from other bloggers and writers and it gets easier. If you don’t do it, then your work will never be seem which would be a great shame.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      1. I’ve learned so much about marketing my work from you, Sally, and others in the year since my novel has been out that I am definitely in the position of if-I-had-known-then-what-I-know-now. However, I have more books in me, so I will definitely be putting this new knowledge to good use in the future!

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s