Qualities Needed For Online Marketing

28th June

Using the internet to connect with potential fans of your book is a brilliant marketing strategy. But before you start perfecting your social media plan, consider these points.

• Do you have the energy to invest in the time that it takes to engage an online audience. To effectively build an audience, you have to spend a certain amount of time each day on sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and You Tube.

• Are you willing to take time out to interact with your fans, and respond to them on a personal level. Your fans are the most important people of all time, so you should try your very best to build up a relationship with them.

• Do you want to share the wisdom you have gained from writing with other people. If you help people in the short term, they're more likely to respond to you in the long term.

If you have all the qualities mentioned above then you are already several steps ahead for creating an optimistic strategy. But to ensure your marketing plan stays healthy, your expectations must remain realistic.

The most important thing to remember is however many people you may engage with, however many potential fans you may meet, you still might not have great sales. If you're willing to invest the effort in social media to spread the word about your book by building relationships with readers and other writers, you'll always have the potential to build more sales. Serendipity also plays a part. People may come across you with no intention of buying your book, but they might tell someone else, and so on. If you're active online, a positive person, and you believe in your book, there's no saying where you might end up.

How to Handle Criticism

24th June

Authors have a fantastic job of writing things down and putting these stories out for the world to see. People read our work all the time but sometimes their response to it isn't what we had hoped for. Writers love to get feedback off their fans, who doesn't love it when someone else thinks their fabulous? But what happens when people leave negative remarks or spiteful comments. How are you going to deal with them?

1. The most important thing to do is keep everything said in perspective. Negative feedback is not how the entire world sees your writing. It is one persons view. There are people out there who won't agree with the review because every single person is different. And unfortunately this means that there will always be negative feedback towards your writing, as well as all the positive reviews. No matter what we write, there will always be people who dislike it.

2. Look for positives. Once you're over the initial sting of the criticism, read the review again. Is there anything that's constructive that you can learn from? Does the person try to help you with advice? Thank them if they do and keep their advice in mind. If it's a personal attack then nothing can be gained from listening to their spiteful remarks so the best thing you can do is move on.

3. Do not stoop down to their level. If the criticism was malicious, just ignore it. If you don't respond at all, the person responsible for the attack can't get any more pleasure from seeing you hurt. Dealing with these sorts of people is usually just a waste of energy anyway. Direct your energy towards more positive things instead.

4. Don't let it get to you. After we've seen harsh criticism, our confidence is knocked. We don't want to write anymore, we don't want to promote our next book. But if we don't write anymore we have let this person win. Don't let that happen.

Remember, if our work is available online there are more opportunities for negative criticism. People who post nasty remarks often do so because they can remain completely annonymous. They might not feel so brave if everyone knew who they were.

Should You Ever Stop Marketing Your Book?

So I have published my book online as an ebook. I have researched all I can about marketing, and noted the importance of doing most of the marketing work myself. And then I've started to think that this is what my life will be like from now on. This is what I'll have to do for eternity. From the amount of work I have already put into my first book, I am already exhausted. What on earth is my life going to be like when I publish the next ten. Am I actually going to have a life outside writing and marketing? Living my life as I am currently doing, the answer is no. But then I remember a few things to make me feel slightly better.

• My book will take a long time to age because my content is not dated. I haven't written a book on how to ensure you get a ticket for the London Common Wealth games in 2012. Even if my book takes twenty years to find its reader, to them it will still be brand new.

• As I have placed my book online, it will always be there and people will still be able to find it if they follow the hyperlinks to it.

•  Generations keep growing. There will always be new people who have never heard of my book. The world does not stop turning.

• I can relaunch my book if I want to. By re-releasing it, I can hopefully capture the buzz that was there when I first released it. I can promote my book all over again by participating in new book tours. Other writers' can relaunch their book if they have written about an event in the world that has just happened in real life. For example, if an author has written about a severe earthquake in Japan.

• I can still mention my old book when I am promoting the new ones. I can still Tweet about my old books, and I can still mention the books in my blog. Writers generally say that when they've got more books out, they sell more of all of them. If a reader likes a particular author, then there's more chance of them reading the entire work of that author.

Press Release

http://www.prlog.org/11525872-ever-wanted-to-travel-australia-but-never-had-the-time-or-opportunity.html