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:
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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