Tag: social media

Marketing Research Begins

Tonight, although I’m still working on turning manuscripts into formatted novels, I am also beginning to look into promotion and marketing. I signed up for a class, and I bit the bullet and purchased Publisher Rocket, which analyzes Amazon data to help an author select the best categories and keywords. I am staring at it and can tell it will have a learning curve: It’s not hard to use, but its information is not easy to interpret. Also, all the categories that appear most relevant to my work have major players in their top slots, which probably means I need to dig deeper to find categories I can conceivably be competitive in.

In any case, tonight is yet another work night. If you’re interested, check out my Social Media page, which I have updated with some new accounts. If you’re using any of the platforms listed, I invite you to follow me; it takes only a moment and will help me build an audience.

Find Me on Social Media

Using social-media apps can feel like screaming into the void, but they’re still basic author-promotion tools. Since I’m planning some new book releases in the near future, I’m working to arrange and build my social presence. To that end I’ve created a new page for the blog that lists my active social-media accounts. You can find it in the menu at the top of your screen. WordPress will automatically push to some of those services, but others I have to update manually. So I created the page for my convenience as much as yours: When I post, I can easily find all my accounts and update the ones that need it.

So if you use any of the services listed, I invite you to follow me there. Much of the content will of course be mirrored from this blog, but I will make an effort to include original content on most of those platforms and to interact from time to time with other users. (The exceptions might be my author pages and Tumblr, which mirror the blog but for which I have no other plans at present).

Also, I likely don’t need to say this because my readers are unusually polite for internet denizens, but I wish to note that I am really, really not interested in the politics of social media. I’m only interested in creating a web presence and promoting my work. If you see an app listed that rankles you, I will not remove myself from it because you complain. If I stayed off every app that someone has said people should stay off of, I couldn’t use any.

Also, I’m thinking of creating a MySpace account just because it would be funny.

The Joys and Frustrations of Online Marketing

I wanted to spend the day writing, but I’ve instead spent the last four hours in deep frustration while trying to set up social accounts and improve my SEO. Priorities, I guess.

I’m posting this, admittedly, partly because I’m cleaning excess plugins off this blog, which is much heavier than it has a right to be, and I want to test if my Open Graph and Twitter Cards are still functioning correctly after I’ve tossed out huge chunks of code.

I’ve set up an account with Mailchimp, which often gets recommended for both author and business promotions, but after going to all that trouble, it appears that Mailchimp’s only method of plugging into the blog is to create a popup window that appears over the content while you’re trying to read, and there’s no way in hell I’m being that annoying on purpose. So for now, email subscriptions are still through the default widget in the right sidebar, which claims—to my shock—that I have over 1,600 subscribers, indicating either that I’m somehow doing something right or that I attract a lot of bots.

I’m also trying to find new social media buttons better than my current ones; the ones I use now are unobtrusive but blocked by ad-blockers, which probably means they’re adding unwelcome trackers.

The image at the top of this post is from 2004’s Uta Kata, a magical girl title I don’t happen to be familiar with; it’s the only one on this list I don’t recognize. I might have to see if I can find it.