The Big Bad Book Blog

You’ve probably seen them: those interviews where there is no energy and the guest is as placid as the polar ice cap. Or worse: the guest is talkative—too talkative—and  runs over the host with wanton disregard. Guests like these are rarely invited back. The key to becoming a media darling and keeping the publicity coming is to be a great interviewee. Here are a few tips to help you do just that:

• Keep it short and sweet: Whether your appearance is in print, radio, television, or otherwise, the publication or broadcast program will have a limited amount of space and airtime allotted for each item. Be respectful and keep your answers brief.
• Develop your talking points: Though questions may vary from interview to interview, there will be some basic questions asked over and over again (e.g., what is your book about, why did you start writing, what advice do you have for writers, etc.). So, develop a few key talking points that you can easily integrate into every interview. Also, customize a few for each venue. This means doing your research before you show up to the interview.
• Mention your book often!: The point of publicity is to get your name and the name of your book out there. Mention your book, website, and contact information often. Here is a short video demonstrating how to easily work that information in to the conversation.
• Dress and act professionally: The majority of a person’s impression of you is formulated before you even open your mouth. To make the best first impression, dress like you care about the interview. If it’s an online or phone interview, make sure your website and social media are professional and clean; be on time and courteous; and don’t tie up the long-distance line any longer than necessary.
• Tempo: Speak quickly enough to finish your talking point, but don’t speak so fast that no one can understand you. Take deep breaths, wait for the host to complete his or her question before answering, and actively listen to yourself so you can catch any acceleration in pace.
• Be gracious: Especially if you are a first-time author, don’t continually correct the host or editor, don’t constantly nag, and by all means say thank you!

Being polite, brief, and professional will take you far with the media. And remember to prepare beforehand so you can work in all of your talking points and sell more books!

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Continuing where Part II left off:

1.    Build Your Brand – Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.
2.    Make Connections – Marketing is all about making connections. It’s not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.
3.    Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Build Relationships

How many of your good friends would say no if you asked them to read your writing? Probably not many. Even if you write science fiction novels and your friend isn’t a science fiction fan, they’ll still probably read it. To be a successful marketer you must not only make connections but you must also make friends. Although you might make a “miracle connection” with a magazine publisher or a book-reviewer, connections with these people mean nothing until they come to trust you and see you as a friend.

Not only must you must turn strangers into friends but you have to make sure your friends stay your friends. Many millions of marketing dollars are not spent on promoting new brands, but keeping people loyal to old brands. The reason for this is because it costs less to keep a customer than to make a new one. If you have loyal and devoted readers, it’s very important that they stay devoted. Your loyal readers are the most important marketing tool you have as they’re the most likely to talk about and recommend your work. It’s important to keep these readers happy because you want to keep them talking and keep them recommending. In the end, word-of-mouth advertising will always reign supreme.

For the purposes of marketing your writing, there are three levels of relationship. They are the unfamiliar, the acquainted, and the fans. It’s our job to turn the unfamiliar into the acquainted and the acquainted into our fans. (more…)

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Continuing where Part I left off:

1.    Build Your Brand – Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.
2.    Make Connections – Marketing is all about making connections. It’s not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.
3.    Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Make Connections

Only a few people that you know, if any, are members of your target audience. Most people that you know, however, are certain to know people who are members of your target audience. That’s why it’s important to make connections.

Not all connections are to be treated equally, of course. Making a single connection with one person could be worth making connections with 20 others. You could, for example, make a connection with the editor of a popular magazine with thousands of readers. You may know a college professor who’s willing to pass your name on to students that might benefit from reading your work. You may run into a talented web designer who’s so impressed with your writing that he or she offers to revamp your website for free. You might establish a connection with someone who runs a book of the month club with 50 readers, and each of those readers may have five friends each who are interested in what you’re writing. A wealthy philanthropist might come across your website, be impressed by your work, and give you a $10,000 donation. All of these connections could be a phone call, an email or a mouse click away.

Making connections like those listed above are not a matter of luck, but a matter of persistence. It’s quite possible you could make 100 connections before running into someone that could really help you out. What the skilled marketer must do then is see beyond any single person and do their best to get in touch with all the people they know and all the people that those people know. If you continue to do this, It’s only a matter of time before you make that “miracle” connection.

So how should you make these connections? Believe it or not, you already have a lot of connection building tools in your arsenal. In order to be a master marketer, you must become familiar with them all. You may, for example, be the most terrible cold caller in the world, but if you’re persistent, and improve your skills in that area, it may become your best connection maker.

Here’s a list of some connection making tools:

• You
• Your writing
• Your website
• RSS feeds and directories
• Internet bulletin boards and forums
• Emails
• Newsletters
• Affiliate programs
• Link building programs (link exchanges, blogrolls)
• Online contests
• Your own e-zine
• Other peoples e-zines
• Webinars
• Live seminars
• Advertisements (from Craigslist to Google Ads to print media)
• Writers conferences
• Interviews (both being interviewed and interviewing others)
• Speaking or reading stories at events
• Business cards
• E-books
• Podcasts
• Vlogging
• Snail mail
• Asking for referrals
• The phone
• Print media
• Social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Linked In)
• Slogans
• Memes
• Word-of-Mouth
• Alternative web navigation tools (delicious.com, Stumbleupon)
• Other websites and blogs
• Elevator pitch
• Personal PR

As you can see, the amount of options you have to build connections with your audience are almost endless. As it’d be a Herculean task to master all of these at once. It’d be best to focus on one at a time until you get the hang of each. Try as many as you can, especially the ones that scare you, as those can be indications of where you can grow.

For starters, choose some of these weapons and make a full frontal assault on your target audience. Don’t depend on any single tool for your marketing success. It’s important to take advantage of several tools at once. You must not, for example, rely on your website as the only way to make connections. Use your other connection making tools to leverage each other. Send letters to publishers and tack your website address in the letter. Make cold-calls or write emails to people who might be interested in your site and send them a link. The key to good marketing is repetition. The more people hear about you and your writing the more they’ll be curious about it. If you approach your audience using all the tools in your arsenal, chances are the right people will see your name enough times to want to know what you’re all about.

Kenji Crosland is a creative writing major who, scared of becoming a starving artist, became a corporate headhunter in Tokyo. Since then he’s regained his sanity, quit his job, and now blogs about creating an ideal career at unreadyandwilling.com. He is also developing a web application that just might change the internet. Follow him on Twitter: @KenjiCrosland.

Part I of III: Build Your Brand

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Marketing your writing is essential if you want your work to be read by a wide audience.

For many, marketing is an alien word that may conjure up images of people in suits sitting at round tables analyzing market trends, consulting with focus groups, and pouring millions of dollars into nationwide ad campaigns. It’s big company stuff that individuals don’t have the time, money, or skills to get involved in.

Because of this image, many writers have considered the job of marketing their writing as something that publishing houses or literary agents should do for them. The reality is, however, that although the big publishing houses may do a great job in promoting the next bestseller, they’ll seldom take the risk to market the work of an unknown author. If you want to take advantage of the marketing might of the publishing houses, you must first learn how to market your writing on your own, to get your writing read by enough people that you get on a publisher’s radar, and make it worth their while to consider promoting what you’ve written.

The goals of marketing your writing are simple: you want to raise awareness of your writing, get more people to read it, and to keep them reading. If you’re persistent and committed to your marketing effort, it’s only a matter of time before that book offer arrives in your mailbox.

Self-marketing, unlike what a large corporation would have to go through, is much simpler than focus groups and market trend research, and can be broken down into these three steps:

1.         Build Your Brand – Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.

2.         Make Connections – Marketing is all about making connections. It’s not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.

3.         Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Build Your Brand

Just as Apple has Steve Jobs, and Virgin has Richard Branson. Your writing must have you.

Although you may have not consciously worked to build it, you already have a personal brand. A personal brand is all the thoughts and feelings that are associated with you and your work. A strong brand will capture people’s imagination and will make people remember you, your name, and your writing. A weak brand, however, can make it very difficult to promote yourself, no matter how much time and energy you spend on marketing efforts.

Stephen King has an incredibly strong personal brand. His name has become almost synonymous with horror, and just by picking up one of his books, without even reading word one, you can feel the uncanny weight of all his monstrous creations. Even if the book you read wasn’t one of his best, your reading experience would still be enhanced by its association with the Stephen King brand, with all the other books of his that you’ve enjoyed.

Michael Jordan has a strong personal brand, a brand which speaks athletic prowess and determination. When great athletes like him wear Nike merchandise, the power of the swoosh becomes amplified by association with their athletic talent. Because they wear Nike, you’re likely to associate their athletic skill with Nike merchandise, and you’ll probably even feel like a better athlete when you wear Nike because, on a real subconscious level, the athletic skill of these athletes have been transferred directly to you.

As you can see, a strong brand can have a powerful effect on how we view a product, movie, or book. If you can work to build your brand, to strengthen it and harness its power, it can be a tremendous asset to your marketing effort. So how can you work to start building an incredible brand? How can you make your readers tremble in anticipation even before opening your book?

As a writer, your personal brand has three elements: (more…)

As the number of independent authors continues to grow, more and more writers are looking for expert advice. When everyone claims to have all the answers, how do you sort the reputable from the riff-raff? Well, the Big Bad Book Blog is a good place to start. Our Guru Who’s Who will introduce you to three experts in the field and what they’re up to now. We ask that you, our readers, contribute comments to articles like this to share your experiences with other Big Bad enthusiasts. continue reading