In case you can’t tell from my various posts, let me tell you that I am beyond thrilled to have my first book – Blue Violet – finally published. I wrote the first draft almost three years ago, and to have it available for readers, rather than just talking about how I want to publish a book, is almost surreal.
It has been especially fun to have various family and friends email me that they’ve bought my book and started reading it. I’ve been tickled by several observations such as what shows up in search results with my book, familiar places and incidents I built into the story, and how on earth did I finish this while raising a family/working full time/getting my MBA. I am particularly excited to get feedback from readers as they finish the book! And patience is not a strong suit, so feel free to read fast my friends!
Believe it or not, the work doesn’t stop once the book is published. I can’t just sit back and hope that people find it. Now is time for me to take an active role in getting the word out and trying to move it up the search results list. The way I do that is through extensive, varied, and vigorous self-marketing.
Over the last few days I’ve created an author page on Amazon and made sure that all of my various author sites are updated with the link to the book. I continue to post regularly on my various author sites. I might try the Facebook ads. And I am researching how to get the book listed on sites like GoodReads. There are tons of different things I can try. I’m only seeing the tip of the iceberg at this point.
A key – longer-term – part of my strategy is to get more books written and published. New readers are more likely to give me a try if I have multiple books – especially if there’s a series. The good news is I now have a method to my madness, I plan (hope) to get more books out at a faster pace. I am already working on book #2 of the series – Hyacinth – and am currently aiming to have it out sometime in early 2013. I’ll be honest that I was a little worried I’d run out of topics for this blog after Blue Violet was published, but marketing one book while writing another should keep my topics list sufficiently full.
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