Event-Driven Author Marketing and PR

Happy 4th of July to all USA readers, although I’m quite sure you’re not reading this on the 4th!

Because time is such a rare commodity for anchored authors, the marketing that you do should be time-limited, regularly scheduled activities that renew and update current marketing strategies, such as maintenance to social network pages, or visiting well-trafficked forums, writing your monthly newsletter or daily blog post. I outlined a basic system for keeping on top of this regular marketing in an earlier post.

However, if you’re an active, published author, then things will happen that you haven’t planned for. You could sell a book, win a contest, be booked for a conference panel, or hit the top 10, 100 or 1,000 on Amazon. Or any of a hundred different, exciting, positive things that can happen once you start establishing yourself as an author.

For instance, in the last couple of days I learned that Red Leopard, a romantic suspense I have with Ellora’s Cave, will be published by a Japanese publisher. Not just published, but they’re making it the lead title for their launch of the Ellora’s Cave books they’re releasing in Japan, and doing a lot of fairly intense PR and marketing for the launch. (I can’t wait to see the printed book!)

And a week ago, I learned that two other titles of mine are being released in Russian and Spanish.

These are all good events and you shouldn’t let their marketing value go to waste, especially as they’re news. You should, of course, celebrate and tell everyone you know. But you should also take thirty minutes or so to figure out how you’re going to leverage the event for your marketing, because you need to act now, before the news gets stale and useless.

For really big events (a three book deal with a New York publisher, for an eye-widening amount, say), you should absolutely put your life and your writing on hold while you maximize the mileage and exposure this sort of news will give you – even if it takes a week out of your life to do it. For something this big, you go off-line and on-line, using traditional news releases, snail mail letters, special email newsletter editions. You give it the works.

For smaller events, like my foreign rights sales, take thirty minutes to figure out where and how you can use the news. My regular marketing time is several hours on Sunday night, so if I don’t get a spare 30 minutes between now and then, I will use some of my Sunday marketing time to scribble down a fast and dirty list of ways to announce the rights. That list will look something like:

Announce on my Facebook profile.
Announce on my Facebook Page (these are two different things, and as an author yourself, you should also have both).
Ditto, MySpace bulletin.
A blog post on my Amazon Connects blog
Add a news item to my website.

All of these will have affiliate links back to the buy page on Amazon.com, or to the Red Leopard page on my site (which has my Amazon Associate link to the page on Amazon).

I also considered announcing to various romance newsletters and sites, but this isn’t big enough news for them, and I don’t want to abuse their editors with time-wasting trivia because it will sour the relationship I’ve built with them.

There may be other items, but I won’t stretch the list much beyond this.

(Hint: You’ll find yourself “announcing” news over and over again. Build a list of places, sites, people, groups, etc, where you can send news, and use the list to decide where you’re going to spread this news, this time. If the list is electronic, you can add live links to each item, saving you a few precious minutes of typing in URL’s and clicking through bookmarks.

Hint #2: Create this list in Del.ici.ous or another social bookmarking site, and keep the list private. Then you’ll have the live list + links available at work, too — if your IT department hasn’t banned the site!)

I won’t take time away from my writing to complete the tasks that will announce the foreign rights sales because, again, it’s just not big enough news.

However, when the German rights to Heart of Vengeance were sold, the cover that the German publisher, Droemer Knaur, produced was to die for. I asked Knaur for a high resolution copy, which I got, and then spent two days solid peppering the web with copies of the cover, and expressing my (genuine) delight over it. I put it in my monthly newsletter at the end of that month, and I printed a 17? x 22? colour laser copy that I posted to the wall of my office. I made hay, in other words.

This is what I call event-driven marketing. Whenever anything happens related to your writing and your books, take a few minutes to think about how you can announce it to your readers and, if it’s remarkable enough, the world in general.

First appeared on Anchored Authors, July 4, 2008

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