Welcome back to Austen Promises and the Writer’s Journal!
Marketing is, I have learned, an incredibly important part of being an author. I had thought I could spend all my time writing…eight hours a day of it, every day. I was wrong.
I spend probably half my day promoting my books. According to something I learned from a Joanna Penn podcast, fifty percent of my day should be marketing. (Joanna Penn is a very successful author and podcaster, who shares all manner of wonderful information to help us all succeed.)
Back up the train, you say….fifty percent of your day should be marketing? Yes, fifty. That seems like a lot of time, and it is, to be honest. And it’s not easy time, either. Like many others, I have difficulty promoting myself. It has gotten much easier, though my skin is still not as thick as it really should be.
You might be wondering how exactly I market that it takes up half my day. For starters, there is social media. I have accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and MeWe. Granted, I have yet to do much with Pinterest, and while I have MeWe chat open all the time, I have not done much with that platform, either. However, I am on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pretty regularly. My favorite is Instagram, because it’s not all about my books. It’s more about me and my writing life; my most often used hashtag is #mywritinglife, as a matter of fact.
Besides interacting on social media, I spend time creating graphics…memes and ads and things…to use on my social media accounts. Searching for images and good quotes is part of that, and eats up more time than you’d think.
Speaking of ads…I recently tried both a Facebook ad and an Amazon ad. I’m not certain that I got any more book sales from the Facebook ad, but I have data to prove that the Amazon ad got me some. I have plans to do more of both in the future.
I know that there are people in the world who are horrified that people like me write books, especially Jane Austen Fan Fiction, and actually earn money from them. People should not write because they want to earn money. They should take years to write the perfect manuscript, and then spend more years submitting it to agents and publishers, in the hopes that a big-name publishing house will pick it up. That’s not what I do this for. I do this to tell stories to entertain people for a few hours. It never ceases to amaze me that people pay me to do it. 🙂
Come back next Wednesday for another peek into my journal! <3
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It’s so easy to get sucked into social media and spend more than 50% promoting and forget to actually do the writing! Nice post, thanks for sharing.
It is!! I find that I have to just flat out close the tabs so I get something actually accomplished! I have found, however, that once I’m out of the constant Facebook habit, it’s easy to stay off it. It’s my least favorite site. 🙂 Thanks for commenting! 🙂
Fantastic post. As a relatively new JAFF writer (since late 2015)…I do tend to fight with myself to be sure that “the perfect is not the enemy of the good.” I love your stories! Great pointers on marketing. I tend to hang out on Twitter (JAFFwriter) and and Facebook.
Thank you! 🙂
I think if my goal was to write as well as Jane Austen or to be another Jack London or Mark Twain, or even another Earnest Hemingway, it might make sense to try to be perfect. And I do fight that tendency myself, agonizing over the wording, making sure I don’t use “very” three times in two sentences and checking to see if “botch” is period-appropriate. But in the end, my goal is to entertain, and to give people a “place” to go to forget about their everyday lives for a few hours. <3 And, there's nothing wrong with making money while I'm at it, you know? JK Rowling did… 😉
Of Twitter and Facebook, I prefer Twitter, but even that is filled with things that bug me. LOL And I truly despise Facebook. If it were not a necessary thing to make my business thrive, I'd not be there at all. 🙂 I'm glad you enjoyed my post! 🙂