Social Media, Podcasts, and Blogs

I’ve briefly touched on the number one necessity in writing these days.  It’s not about the quality of your work, but the size of your social media footprint.  What do I have for social media?  Four followers on Twitter, where I’ve never made a tweet, a handful of friends on Instagram, where’ I’ve posted about 10 pictures, and about 400 friends and acquaintances on Facebook.  I suppose I’ll have to make an author page on Facebook and invite some of my friends, where I will feel like I’m imposing on them, but oh well.  I’ve even thought about offering some free unpublished flashback chapters as a reward for signing up for the newsletter.  I have two of these already, and could write more.  I’ll wait a bit after launch before I decide if there is any appetite for that or not.

Conventional wisdom says I need to build up my social media following.  Start tweeting, posting on Instagram, pushing people to a Facebook author page and posting there, so that I can push my book to as many people as possible when I launch. For me, I don’t think it’s worth the tradeoff.  I only have my friends to promote to at this point, and my plan is to post about it during my 99 cent promo. Maybe after launch I’ll start working Twitter, along with my plans to post on my Facebook author page and send out messages to the above group of readers in a ‘newsletter’ (hate that term).

So what’s my marketing plan seeing as how the above plan isn’t even a plan?  I mentioned in my last post that I’m hoping to get on an apologetics podcast.  I’ve since been able to make contact with the podcaster, and he asked for a copy of my book.  So it comes down to whether or not he likes it enough to invite me to be a guest on his podcast.  Along these lines, I’ve made contact with a book reviewer who reviews Christian Speculative Fiction specifically.  He not only agreed to let me guest blog for him, but also to review my book.  I’m pumped about both of these opportunities.  I plan to reach out to other podcasters and book review bloggers leading up to launch, and ask them to take a look at my book (maybe mentioning these others who are having me on, assuming the podcast thing works out).  Then after launch, once the podcast and review go live, go back to any other bloggers or podcasters who weren’t interested the first time around, or who I thought were too big to approach earlier, and give them links to the review and podcast, and see if they are interested then.  Hopefully the podcasts and reviews happen and go well, and I even get some unsolicited requests.

There’s a concept called a blog tour, where an author launching a book guest blogs about his or her book or book launch, hopefully with a unique take.  I have written one up for the blog where I’ve already been invited to guest post, and I plan to reach out and find more blogs who are open to having guest bloggers.  And speaking of guest blogs, my next post will be the one I plan to use for my first guest blog.

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