Thursday Thirteen 8/9/12- 13 Reasons an Author Shouldn’t Be an Island

There’s been a lot of talk lately about book reviewers, book bloggers, social media, etc and with that, much debate about how effective and necessary they are, so I figured it was about time for me to weigh in. *grin*

I know you’ve all been holding your breath. Let it out before you turn blue!

1. If you, as one person can make, say, 100 people aware of your books, how many people can discover you if 10 or 50 or 100 people are featuring you/reviewing you/talking about you? It’s simple math, and the phenomenon is called amplification.
2. Good reviews from trusted reviewers, in my opinion, make a concrete difference in sales.
3.  ”You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Any favors/nice stuff you do for your fellow authors will come back to you at some point.
4.  Our publishers do what they can for us (really, they do!) but let’s face it, authors are responsible for most of the day-to-day work of getting and keeping their names out there. Why would you want to do that alone when there are people who would love to help you?
5. You never know when an influential person will see something you’ve promoted online and offer you an opportunity. I know for a fact there ARE editors and agents out there following us on Twitter, watching contest results, reading blogs etc.
6.  Working with other people takes some of the responsibility off your shoulders.
7.  This is the job of lots of people (helping authors). For others, they do it because they love it. Either way, these are people who are devoted to what you do. Why would you ignore them?
8. If you’ve never heard the Rule of Seven about marketing, let me sum it up. It takes the average person at LEAST seven “touches” with you before they actually recognize you. If you can get to them through Facebook, Amazon author page, guest blogs etc you’re going to get discoverability faster than someone who doesn’t.
9. It’s up to every author to decide for themselves where they want to focus their marketing time, money, and energy, but there are so many places you can hit once and leave it seems silly not to. Examples of this are making free author pages at places like Manic Readers.
10.  If you use your Amazon author page and the extras available to you through Amazon Author Central, you can have several “touches” with readers just through those. Did you know you can put up text from reviews on your book product pages on Amazon? You can tell the story of why you wrote the book, along with lots of other stuff, especially if you decide to use Shelfari.
11.  If you don’t know how or where to start, Google the following phrase “romance book marketing”. Then start going through the links. Obviously some of them will be to services you can pay, but many of them aren’t. Other good searches are “romance review sites” and “romance book blogs”.
12. You can learn from other authors. Watch what other authors are doing and what seems to be working for them. ASK them what’s working — most of them will tell you.
13.  We might all be competition for our readers’ dollars, but we’re also all in this together. Let people help you!

To see the other fantastic authors taking part in Thursday Thirteen, go the official website.

For more information about me or my books, check out my website.