Free and Inexpensive Ways to Promote Your
Romance
Copyright Judy Bagshaw - All Rights
Reserved
Getting your story
published is just the beginning of the journey for you and
your book. In this day and age, even with the large
established "New York" publishing houses, and most
certainly with the small independent presses, an author
needs to be prepared to take a leading role in promoting
and marketing their work.
This doesn't have to be an odious and
financially crippling thing. There are a number of
inexpensive and creative ways to promote your romance
novel, and I'll share a few of them with you
here.
Having your own website is the single
most important element in your marketing program. Your
website is your "home" on the web, a place to which you can
invite readers so they can learn about you and your books.
You don't have to know HTML or be a computer whiz to do it
either. Homestead (www.homestead.com) and
Geocities (www.geocities.com) are just
two website hosts that provide templates, and all the tools
for you to put a decent site together. You can easily
import jpgs of both you and your book covers. You can link
to your publisher and purchase sites or sales pages. You
can even communicate with fans. And as you become more
proficient at working on your website, you can incorporate
all sorts of nifty little things to really make your web
home a desirable place to visit.
If you simply have no aptitude or desire
to build your own site, look around you. You probably have
a computer savvy friend, relative or neighbour, who would
be happy to help you build your cyber presence, and act as
your webmaster. Make sure they are available for regular
updating, or willing to take the time to teach you what you
need to know to maintain your own site.
Another set of popular marketing tools
these days, are blogs, forums and chats. Again, there are a
multitude of places where you can set these up.
Here are a few:
www.wordpress.com
www.conforums.com
www.livejournal.com
www.blogger.com
www.chatfreak.com
www.chattersonline.com
A Google search will glean many more
choices. The only cost to you your time, because for them
to be successful, you have to keep them current and work to
drive traffic to them.
Forums offer you a chance to set up
discussion groups for your fans. You can have multiple
threads at once; for example, a thread about your latest
book, one on you as an author, another offering writing
advice, discussions on pop culture...anything...whatever
will interest your fans and bring them to your forum over
and over. A great example of an active forum is http://indigochick.conforums3.com
Blogs, a sort of online journal, gives
you a bragging zone for your writing. Post excerpts and
teasers of your work. Post about any appearances coming up,
reviews you've received, or interviews you've done. Talk
about what you're working on, or set up a contest.Again,
blogs are open to all sorts of different uses. A good
example of a writer's blog is http://daisydexterdobbs.blogspot.com/
Chats can be a lot of fun. You can host
a virtual book launch, or have reader appreciation days for
your fans. You can invite fellow authors to visit and have
an author day where your fans can come and ask
questions.
Yahoo and MSN offer the ability to set
up groups for free. These can be a great way of connecting
with your fans. My fan club is on a geocities site and my
monthly fan newsletter goes out through a Yahoo group.
It gives another place for fans to go and find out about
me and my books, and it gives me a forum every month to
talk to my fans, run contests just for them, promote
upcoming work, remind them of what work I have
available. And it doesn't cost me a thing. A close
friend acts as my fanclub president and does a lot of
the work for me.
Building up your fan base is a slow
process, but worthwhile. What I've done is to keep track of
anyone who signs my guestbook on my website. I then send
them an invitation to join. They can choose to accept or
decline. As well, I belong to a couple of promotional
groups www.bookswelove.com and
www.divasofromance.com
At Books We Love, I have a page with a
guestbook. They run regular popular contests for readers
and so I get hundreds of visits to my page and guestbook.
These guests are also invited to join my fanclub. Many
have. You can then direct these "fans" to your forums,
blogs and chats. Just remember to avoid spamming
unsuspecting people with random invitations. If they've
signed your guestbook, they at least have shown an
interest.
Promotional groups are a great way to
gain some visibility with someone else doing the work. The
two I mentioned above are not expensive, but give lots of
exposure. Books We Love provides an author webpage that
they update as needed. They run extremely popular,
well-publicized contests. You pay for a package with Divas
of Romance and are given a year's worth of publicizing
opportunities--internet radio interviews, ads in
newsletters that go to thousands of libraries, ads in
newsletters that go to readers, opportunities for ads in
magazines, among other things.
It is relatively easy to create your own
promotional materials to hand out, things like brochures,
business cards and bookmarks. For business cards I
recommend www.vistaprint.com (or
in Canada www.vistaprint.ca) You can
design your own cards using their large selections of
graphics. They have an easy system to work through and they
are fast. Your designs are then stored and you can go back
to alter them or reorder. You can get 250 business cards
for only the cost of shipping, and they are shipped
quickly. Vistaprint offers a range of other items like
magnets, postcards, and greeting cards that you can use for
promoting your work.
I create my own bookmarks using my Word
program. I have a general all purpose author bookmark, and
then sometimes will create individual ones for each of my
books. I can print them out on my colour inkjet printer as
I need them. I give two out with each book I sell, asking
that the purchaser pass on the spare bookmark to a
friend.
I also create my own brochures using
MSWorks. Again, it's easy to do using the templates
provided, and I can update them often. Printed out on my
little inkjet colour printer, they are eye-catching and
give a potential reader a good idea of what my work is all
about.
I've covered some of the basics that any
romance writer can utilize to promote and market their
work. Next month I'll cover some other creative inexpensive
tools.
Read
Part Two of this article here
About the Author: Judy
Bagshaw has been published since 2000. Writing
romance featuring full-figured heroines, her
publishing credits include 4 novels, 1 collection of
short stories, and short stories in three
anthologies. She was also part of the writing team
for the Ginn Reading Series, and Reaching Readers
Series, used in many elementary schools. Retired from
teaching, she writes full-time from her home in
Ontario, Canada. Visit Judy's website: www.judybagshaw.com
