Marketing Fail
Sunday March 27, 2022 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Writer's life | Leave Comments
I get emails all the time trying to get me to spend money on a fruitless ad campaign. I've learned a lot in the last year about marketing but this is a great example of how not to do it:
Hi Effacement,
I hope you are doing well, we came across your book "Hieronymus Hawkes", it seems fantastic. Would you like to promote your book?
If you want the massive views, exposure and targeted traffic then you can definitely choose our services. We have 16k Subscribers. And we get 20K to 30K visitors per month.
What will we do for you?
• We will promote your book on our various social media platforms.
• We will send 3 promotional tweets per day to our Twitter followers.
• We send our subscribers weekly newspapers on Monday, in which we will include your book.
Know more & submit your book here:- XXXXXXXXX
Thank You
Team XXXXXXXX
I redacted the the names and link.
Did you see what they did?
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How do You do Social Media?
Monday August 19, 2019 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Blogging | Leave Comments
[caption id="attachment_media-521" align="alignnone" width="1880"] Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com[/caption]
During my MFA course we talked about how to present yourself to the world. Marketing yourself is pretty much expected these days. The problem for a lot of writers is that they tend to be introverts by nature, and having to put themselves out there in the public eye can produce a lot of anxiety. Especially doing live events, like conventions and sitting on panels or books signings. But even beyond that there seems to be an expectation by the industry to have a presence on social media.
There are so many now, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Patreon, Twitch, Flickr, Tumblr, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress and so many more. I found a link that discussed 165 different platforms for 2019. Holy crap.
Obviously, we don’t have time to do everything, and still have time to write. I could have stopped with the first half of that last sentence. We don’t have time for 165 different platforms even if we did nothing else.
Just keeping up this blog takes up quite a bit of my time when I could be writing more for my current work in progress. So, for me I spend most of my energy on three, WordPress, Twitter and Facebook. I have accounts for LinkedIn, and LiveJournal, Flickr, Tumblr, Patreon, Instagram, and YouTube, but I rarely use them, other than to peruse the content of others.
Are my three the best three? I have no idea. My kids tell me that nobody uses Facebook anymore. I have to laugh at that because it is still the largest with over 2.4 BILLION users. That is almost unbelievable. What my kids mean is young people rarely use Facebook now. My youngest spends a lot of time on Reddit, which I can barely stand, but he loves it.
Young people are always moving onto the hot new thing. Which, I have to admit, I have no idea what that might be. I try to stay up on current events, but pop culture moves fast at times, and I have no doubt that at some point it will leave me behind.
I know there is a fine line between selling too hard and not doing any. I think the real trick is to simply be you. I know that I don’t like following people that all they talk about is their latest book, with character discussion or snippets of their novel. If I don’t see some real personality in there, at least occasionally, then I don’t want to be your friend on there. In fact, we aren’t making any sort of connection, because all I am to you is a person to buy your book.
So, what are your favorites? If you are a writer or an artist do you actively market yourself? How do you go about it?