Hello! I wanted to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has read and reviewed my novel, The Field, this year, and also thank those who interviewed me about the book. It was quite the journey getting it published, and I truly appreciate the support and positive reviews I have received.
I also want to thank all the people who have subscribed to my blog (www.thefieldya.com) and have followed me on Twitter (@thefieldya). I haven’t posted in a while, but I assure you that more blog posts will be coming in 2019!
Thank you again, and I look forward to publishing my next novel in the new year!
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:
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!
