Mid Michigan Gospel Fest is an annual festival that brings families and communities together for a wholesome experience great for kids and adults alike. Every year we work hard to bring great live music, rides, games, activities, ministries and vendors for the public to enjoy. This year we are even working on an Author Alley to help promote writers! It began in Potterville, MI and will be continuing in Charlotte, MI at the Eaton County Fairgrounds August 12th-14th 2022. This is a Christian based event in which our ultimate goal is to glorify God and share the message of love and redemption with all willing to hear it!
Company Description: A marketing tool and community of authors that work together to find reviewers, build mailing lists, increase sales, and stay on top of deadlines
Recently one of our regulars, RLM Cooper, posted a comment, to wit:
What I’d like to know is not how to avoid critics, but how to get your book noticed in the first place. My book has great reviews (all handful of them) but Amazon makes it nearly impossible to find even when you key in the exact title of it. Unless you know the author and the book title, you are toast. I’ve tried advertising (on a small scale – I’m a writer, not a billionaire). I’ve tried having someone “promote” my book by placing posts on their book promo site with “thousands of followers.” And each day, new books are published and mine sinks down a bit in the Amazon ratings….You all know how much work, sweat, time, tears, effort, love goes into your work. How do you cope when almost no one notices? … How do you keep going when nothing seems to help? … I’m becoming discouraged even with the great reviews my book has gotten. Is it worth it to keep on keeping on?
To which our own Steve Hooley offered foundational advice: “Don’t give up, RLM. Remember PERSEVERANCE. This is a topic worthy of a future discussion.”
In this edition of the Reedsy marketing newsletter, we’re going to take an even closer look at — you guessed it — writing conferences. More specifically: how to make the most of them when attending. If you’re wondering which conferences (if any!) you should consider attending in the first place, it means you didn’t read my last newsletter! If that’s the case, you can find it here. Note: Unfortunately, due to issues related to my passport and the unreliable Spanish post, I won’t actually be able to attend SPS Live in London. However, there is one conference I’ll be attending that I forgot to mention: the Stockholm Writers Festival. It could be an excellent option for those living in Central Europe. Check it out here. Tip #1: Plan which sections to attendAlmost all writing conferences will share an agenda with attendees at least a few weeks before. I always like to have an in-depth look at it, and circle any talks, panels, or round tables of particular interest — and even add them to my personal calendar. This way, I can then “relax” during the conference itself and focus on the sessions and networking without having to worry about what the next panel is about, or if I’m missing anything important. Some conferences have several “tracks” with different sessions running at the same time, which means that you might find yourself in a position where you can’t attend two really interesting ones that run at the same time. In cases like this, it’s always good to find a “conference buddy” to share sessions with — each taking notes and then relaying the important information to the other. Some conferences also record sessions live, so you can access the replays later for the ones you missed. Tip #2: Find your peersAs writers, we can spend a lot of time sitting alone in front of our computer, typewriter, notebook, or what have you. And while we tend to have our social media friends, groups, and gatherings, nothing beats meeting other writers in person — especially if they write in the same genre as you. But how do you find those peers and approach them in the first place? Most conferences will have genre- or topic-specific events as part of the official or non-official schedule. The 20Books conferences, for example, generally have genre dinners/lunches/meetups open to anyone writing in that genre. These are a great way to meet like-minded authors and make friends in your genre. If you’re not aware of any such meetups, you can create them! Conferences will usually have a Facebook group or other forums for attendees to chat in. So what you can do is post something a few weeks before the conference asking: “Are any other cat cozy authors coming? If so, I’d love to meet up!” Chances are, you’ll get a bunch of answers and be able to organize your own meetup. The earlier you set it up, the earlier you’ll find your peers and be able to enjoy the rest of the conference in good company. Tip #3: Make the most of the barWant another uber-simple tip to make new connections? Just hang out at the bar. That’s how I originally met most of the people I know from conferences — and that’s usually where I have the most insightful or productive conversations. Bars — or lobbies, or coffee shops, but mostly bars, really — are places where people go to relax during a conference. As such, it’s much easier to strike up a conversation there, mingle, and get to know other people. Let’s say you absolutely want to talk to a particular speaker. What most people will do is try to intercept them after their talk, which leads to massive lines trapping the speaker inside the room when their talk is finished. That’s probably one of the worst moments to talk to someone, as they’ll be exhausted from their workshop, and eager to leave the room. What they might very much be up for, however, is getting a drink (or a coffee). You can offer to get them one, or just politely ask whether they’ll be at the bar (or in the lobby) later, so you can chat with them in a more relaxed setting. Tip #4: Define your post-conference prioritiesOne of the best after-effects of a conference is that you generally feel inspired to take on the world. This is good, because you’ll have probably learned a ton of new things — and added tons of new ideas to your to-do list. That wave of inspiration won’t last forever, though, so you need to ride it hard to implement as many ideas as possible in the first few weeks immediately after the conference. For that, it’s important that you come back organized, with a clear list of priorities. For example, you might come back from a conference thinking that you need to make an audiobook, hire someone to take care of your ads, create a different reader magnet, and get started on TikTok. On top of, you know, writing the next book. Obviously, you can’t do all of that at once. If you try, you’ll likely end up making small progress on all of them, but not fully realizing any of them. And you’ll go back to the same conference next year with the exact same to-do list… Instead, you should take a step back and ask yourself: which of these is going to have the biggest, most immediate impact on my author business? Start with that, focus all your energy on it to get it done as soon as possible, and then move on to the others. Prioritizing your post-conference tasks is a simple mental exercise that doesn’t take long. It’s something you can do on the flight (or ride) back, or once you’re sitting back at your usual desk. That’s it for this week’s tips! Next week, I’ll start sharing some of the insights I gleaned from the last conference I could attend: 20Books Madrid. Until then, happy writing, and happy marketing!Ricardo
Over 500,000 authors trust the professionals on Reedsy to edit, design, and market their books. Create your free account to meet them.Google Facebook
Why Your Brand Story is So Important Photo Credit: 123rf.com Issue #56: Branding We discuss “branding” a lot in this space. We’ve decided that your brand is NOT just your logo. Your logo is the visual representation of your brand, and that is important, but it’s not your brand. Your full brand tells the full story of your company. Yes, the story of your company. If you’ve been following me here, you probably know my story, and how my brand consistent even while my companies have changed and evolved over the years. Through all of my companies, I help clients to tell their own stories. My original tagline was: “It Matters How You Say It!” Your brand unites everything about your company: the name, the logo, the online and offline presence, and the products and services you offer. Your brand is what you present to the public and what you promise your prospects and clients. This is why your story needs to be authentic, engaging, and truthful. Your brand helps you to build trust with your clients and in turn for your clients to stay loyal to you. Think about the loyalty you have to the brands and companies you love. What is it about those brands that make you stick with them? Your brand story helps you relate to your prospects and clients. You’ve probably heard the maxim: People like to do business with people they like! That is especially important if you are a solopreneur. Your brand story helps you to design the image for your company and gives prospects a reason to choose your product or service over all the others available. Your brand and developing your brand’s story are the most important investments you can make in your business. Your brand is more than a design, a logo, or a tagline. Your brand is also what your clients and customers experience, what your promises are, and the story that you are able to tell. Your brand and your brand story make your company different and unique and set you and your business apart. We’ll discuss further how to develop your brand story, because if you don’t know your own brand story, no one else will either. I teach Branding and Marketing Monthly Lessons for Independent Writers. The next monthly lesson, “Make a Marketing Plan for Your Book,” begins July 5, 2022. Click this link to find out more and enroll. I teach Branding and Marketing Monthly Lessons for Creative and Solo Professionals. The next monthly lesson, “Develop Your Brand Values,” begins July 5, 2022. Click this link to find out more and enroll .Join the conversation
Know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Share it with them.
Why Your Brand Story is So Important Photo Credit: 123rf.com Issue #56: Branding We discuss “branding” a lot in this space. We’ve decided that your brand is NOT just your logo. Your logo is the visual representation of your brand, and that is important, but it’s not your brand. Your full brand tells the full story of your company. Yes, the story of your company. If you’ve been following me here, you probably know my story, and how my brand consistent even while my companies have changed and evolved over the years. Through all of my companies, I help clients to tell their own stories. My original tagline was: “It Matters How You Say It!” Your brand unites everything about your company: the name, the logo, the online and offline presence, and the products and services you offer. Your brand is what you present to the public and what you promise your prospects and clients. This is why your story needs to be authentic, engaging, and truthful. Your brand helps you to build trust with your clients and in turn for your clients to stay loyal to you. Think about the loyalty you have to the brands and companies you love. What is it about those brands that make you stick with them? Your brand story helps you relate to your prospects and clients. You’ve probably heard the maxim: People like to do business with people they like! That is especially important if you are a solopreneur. Your brand story helps you to design the image for your company and gives prospects a reason to choose your product or service over all the others available. Your brand and developing your brand’s story are the most important investments you can make in your business. Your brand is more than a design, a logo, or a tagline. Your brand is also what your clients and customers experience, what your promises are, and the story that you are able to tell. Your brand and your brand story make your company different and unique and set you and your business apart. We’ll discuss further how to develop your brand story, because if you don’t know your own brand story, no one else will either. I teach Branding and Marketing Monthly Lessons for Independent Writers. The next monthly lesson, “Make a Marketing Plan for Your Book,” begins July 5, 2022. Click this link to find out more and enroll. I teach Branding and Marketing Monthly Lessons for Creative and Solo Professionals. The next monthly lesson, “Develop Your Brand Values,” begins July 5, 2022. Click this link to find out more and enroll .Join the conversation
Know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Share it with them.
Why Your Brand Story is So Important Photo Credit: 123rf.com Issue #56: Branding We discuss “branding” a lot in this space. We’ve decided that your brand is NOT just your logo. Your logo is the visual representation of your brand, and that is important, but it’s not your brand. Your full brand tells the full story of your company. Yes, the story of your company. If you’ve been following me here, you probably know my story, and how my brand consistent even while my companies have changed and evolved over the years. Through all of my companies, I help clients to tell their own stories. My original tagline was: “It Matters How You Say It!” Your brand unites everything about your company: the name, the logo, the online and offline presence, and the products and services you offer. Your brand is what you present to the public and what you promise your prospects and clients. This is why your story needs to be authentic, engaging, and truthful. Your brand helps you to build trust with your clients and in turn for your clients to stay loyal to you. Think about the loyalty you have to the brands and companies you love. What is it about those brands that make you stick with them? Your brand story helps you relate to your prospects and clients. You’ve probably heard the maxim: People like to do business with people they like! That is especially important if you are a solopreneur. Your brand story helps you to design the image for your company and gives prospects a reason to choose your product or service over all the others available. Your brand and developing your brand’s story are the most important investments you can make in your business. Your brand is more than a design, a logo, or a tagline. Your brand is also what your clients and customers experience, what your promises are, and the story that you are able to tell. Your brand and your brand story make your company different and unique and set you and your business apart. We’ll discuss further how to develop your brand story, because if you don’t know your own brand story, no one else will either. I teach Branding and Marketing Monthly Lessons for Independent Writers. The next monthly lesson, “Make a Marketing Plan for Your Book,” begins July 5, 2022. Click this link to find out more and enroll. I teach Branding and Marketing Monthly Lessons for Creative and Solo Professionals. The next monthly lesson, “Develop Your Brand Values,” begins July 5, 2022. Click this link to find out more and enroll .Join the conversation
Know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Share it with them.
Hi –You don’t have to be on TikTok in order to learn some important social media lessons. TikTok has made a massive impact on the world of social media – and nearly every outlet has tried to mimic TikTok’s features. So as authors, what can we learn from from TikTok?In this episode of the Book Marketing Simplified podcast, Jenn and Marcus discuss what TikTok is doing really well and how we can apply it to our marketing strategies.
A few adjustments can make a big difference! And as always, let me know if you have questions.
Until next time,
P.S. Be sure to check out our brand new membership – The Author Circle! You can get 30% off until July 1st by using the code FOUNDER. Click the link to find out more!
Mid Michigan Gospel Fest is an annual festival that brings families and communities together for a wholesome experience great for kids and adults alike. Every year we work hard to bring great live music, rides, games, activities, ministries and vendors for the public to enjoy. This year we are even working on an Author Alley to help promote writers! It began in Potterville, MI and will be continuing in Charlotte, MI at the Eaton County Fairgrounds August 12th-14th 2022. This is a Christian based event in which our ultimate goal is to glorify God and share the message of love and redemption with all willing to hear it!
The days run away like wild horses over the hill. We are approaching the midway point of the year, which triggers similar emotions in me as New Year’s Eve: confusion, regret, and my favorite emotion of all, hunger.
It’s a good time of year to take stock, resolve to do better, and so forth. With that in mind, I thought it would be the right time to survey the authorial landscape and make a series of gimlet-eyed pronouncements, perhaps with a bombastic title like…
How To Sell Books in 2022
Every genre is different, every author is different, hell, sometimes every book is different too. The road to hell might be paved with generic advice, but what are the things we all wrestle with if we want to sell books?
Fundamentally, we need to have three things in some kind of shape to make that task realistically possible. You can call it the three Ps if you like, but I think that makes me sound like a math teacher from the 1950s wearing an abominable sleeveless sweater.
Anyway, you need:
Product
Promotion
Platform
Product is easy: you need a book. Preferably several, ideally in a series in a commercially viable genre, presented in a professional way which will specifically entice readers of that niche. I’m not saying writing a good book is easy, or that packaging it well is a walk in the park – clearly the devil is in the details. But the concept itself is manageable.
Promotion is easier again to understand but authors without a marketing background can find this harder to execute, at least on a meaningful scale. The basic idea of this element is that you need some way to communicate to prospective readers – i.e. fans of the genre you write in – that you have a book for sale and that they would like it very much, thank you. In more hard-nosed marketing terms: you need to generate quality traffic to your books. Easy to say, harder to do.
Platform is one that, in my humble opinion, most authors should be nailing as it more naturally complements the typical author skillset than promotion. But most authors, quite frankly… don’t. There is a lot of terrible information around about how to run email lists, or your social channels, so I don’t particularly blame writers on this front. Although it does make me sad when so many limit their books’ potential because they don’t even try building a platform as their heads are so full of (wrong) ideas of what that might entail. It’s a huge pity because building up your platform gives you a largely free and hugely effective dollop of promotion every time you put something out into the world – acting as a hefty multiplier to whatever marketing you might be doing.
Putting it all together, product is what you are selling (and the weaker your book is in hard-nosed commercial terms, the harder your job will be in selling it). Promotion is the art of getting that message out to your target audience. And platform makes the job of selling the next book a whole lot easier – giving you a free megaphone for every launch.
I think one of the problems authors have in selling books – especially in the hyper-competitive environment of 2022 – is that they focus too much on the promotion stage. They just want to sell books, not realizing that some quite important things need to be in place first to make the product shifting part go smoothly – and then neglecting to put enough effort into what you might call aftercare, the process of ensuring that a customer becomes a fan, one who recommends all your books to their friends and is first in line for the next one. Or platform if you prefer.
Over the next three emails, as we take a short break from Facebook Ads, I will break down these three stages in more detail and share all my favorite tools for mastering them too.
But first I want to highlight the more common mistakes I see among writers trying to get a handle on this stuff.
Product Errors
The biggest error I tend to see at the product stage is simply not spending enough time on it.
I don’t mean in terms of dedicating the requisite time to learn the craft and then actually write a good book – although obviously that happens quite a lot too.
I mean in more flinty terms, researching the market, understanding what readers are responding to, knowing what is trending, respecting genre conventions in both content and packaging, really spending the time to absolutely nail your cover (as that’s the most important packaging element by far), and just making sure the overall impression is one of polish and professionalism.
And the cost of not doing all this to at least a reasonable degree will be a bill most surely paid at the next stage, as authors will waste more and more money trying to promote a book which just might not work in the marketplace, at least how it is currently presented.
Promotion Fails
Mistakes at the promotion stage are commonplace because most writers have a steep learning curve when it comes to marketing. (And then of course it’s an endless cesspool of spoofers and chancers and all flavors of weasel.)
Even if you neatly sidestep all the bluffers and schemers, the endless array of promotional options can be extremely confusing, particularly as some are more suitable for different kinds of authors and it’s not always clear what is for who.
One charge that can be stuck on most writers, though, is spending too much time on promotion when they only have 1 or 2 books out. This is advice that is always given and rarely heeded, for reasons I completely understand on a psychological level by the way, but do try to keep your focus on producing more books because promotion gets sooooooo much easier when you have more product to fling out of your monkey-cage. Your money goes further too, so bank those Benjamins for later.
Honestly. My heart sinks when I get an email from an author saying something like “I know I shouldn’t spend big when I only have one book out, but what if I had ten grand to spend on this launch – how would you do it?”
Truly, if you have money to spend, buy yourself the most valuable thing of all: time. And use it to write more books.
Platform Flubs
The rap-sheet for the platform stage is the longest of all but most infractions can be gathered under using the wrong tool for the job. Specifically, using your nascent platform to relentlessly flog your books to death over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
You get the idea, I’m sure, but I’m going to ram this point home because it’s so important (and because this mistake is so prevalent). You can use your email list to sell books – of course you can. You can use your social channels to make noise around your latest release, or current backlist sale – and you absolutely should! The mistake is in doing that non-stop.
No one wants to follow anyone who is just engaging in the hard sell, all the time. You need to give fans (esp. proto fans) a better reason than that to follow you, and to stick around. Otherwise, you are just chewing through your own fanbase, and strip-mining a sale or two from each meatbag before tossing them on the pyre.
Instead of hanging out with them and chatting like a normal person, and then building a supercool human pyramid that can touch the moon.
Company Description: A marketing tool and community of authors that work together to find reviewers, build mailing lists, increase sales, and stay on top of deadlines
Authors & Aspiring Authors!! Is there a book in you? Join us for inspiration, tools of the trade, & writing tips from published authors. Learn how sharpening your speaking, leadership & communication skills can help you promote your message, your book, &/or your next business venture.
Session III of our “Author Series” is on Tuesday, June 14th. I ‘d like to invite you & ask you to share our post in your writer’s networks. We are here to serve! Toastmasters (TM) is a safe place where writers can gain confidence & clarity. We are taught how to identify our audience, effectively target & share our message to maximize impact. We are offering TM as a solution for those who aren’t selling their books or want to use a book to position themselves as an authority extending their exposure as a Professional Speaker. TM has helped millions around the world communicate their ideas more persuasively & it has a myriad of purposeful training materials targeted to individual needs & interests.
Barnes and Noble Writer’s Exchange
5275 Harvey St, Muskegon, MI 49444
Contact Store for Next Meetup
Grand Rapids Region Writers Group
Meetings are held on the 2nd Saturday of the month, starting at noon located at Peppino’s Sports Grille, 1515 Eastport Drive, Kentwood.
Mid-Michigan MEETINGS
2nd & 4th Monday’s of each Month
6:30 P.M.
West Branch Public Library
(Community Room Downstairs)
119 N. Fourth Street
West Branch, MI 48661
Ludington Writers Group
meets at the Ludington Area Center for the Arts (107 S Harrison St, Ludington, MI 49431), inside Judith Minty Room 202
Contact Group for next meetup
Photo Credit: 
click here for details
Motown Writers Network . . . Michigan Literary Network 
Recent Comments