The Field – From Word Doc to Paperback, Part Five

With Book Baby, you can sign up for a marketing consultation with Smith Publicity, which is exactly what I did.  Having a Young Adult novel to sell is great, but you need to get people – especially young people – interested and buying the book. I had two one-hour consultation and I learned a whole heck-of-a-lot!  A few of the key takeaways were:

  • You need to have a social media presence;
  • You need to have an Author Photo;
  • You should have hard copies of your book to send out for potential reviews and interviews.

Well, guess what?  I didn’t have any of these!  Like I said in the first post of this series, I had run away from social media in 2016, so I had no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, none of it (I didn’t have a dating profile up!).  I knew that it was time to extricate myself from the wilderness and rejoin the masses on social media.  Well, at least one platform: Twitter (@thefieldya).

I also had no really good, current pics of myself to use for my website or profiles.  Luckily, I knew a co-worker who was a photographer and I asked him if he could take some photos of me for my Author Photo.  After I offered him money, he said yes (I’m kidding, he would have done it for free…but I’m sure the cash didn’t hurt).  We took a whole bunch of photos and by a vote of my co-workers, we landed on this one as my official Author Photo:

Ian Dawson_Author Photo
Photo Credit: (c) Andrew Ramirez

The biggest hurdle was the lack of paperback books to send out.  I knew it was a good idea for a number of reasons: a lot of kids don’t have access to tablets and phones 24/7; many of my co-workers wanted paperbacks instead of the eBook; a lot of my relatives didn’t have tablets or phones to read the book on and would prefer a hard copy.  Hm. There seemed to be a demand for paperbacks, something I had not realized.

It was time to go back to Book Baby for another project. How did it go?  Come by tomorrow to find out!

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