This past weekend was awesome. With 30 amazing authors at all stages of their authoring journey, their Author and Book GamePlans emerged, morphed or are rejuvenated. From the Business of Book Publishing to Diving into Social Media, to Soaring with Marketing and Publicity, to Creating an Amazon Bestseller Campaign to rolling out the Book Launch to Crafting a speech and workshop around the book and ending with showing how one book can create $1,000,000. It was an awesome weekend that used my book, Author YOU: Creating and Building Your Author and Book Platforms as the foundation.
When the glaze settled in on the social media module around lunch time; when the resistance resurrected—I don’t have the time … it was a “Let me show you what can happen …” moment–not planned, just that it was the right thing to do at the time for my group.
All had their computers; all were online throughout the two days as we worked through a variety of examples and how-tos in the author and book worlds.
My computer opened on my Hootsuite task bar … waiting for me to “wake it up”—which is exactly what I did. Taking just a few of my participants’ titles, I opened the Amazon page of each, copied its URL and then began …
Taking them within my Hootsuite account, I “composed” quick messages for Twitter; longer ones for Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, linking each with the book’s URL on Amazon. Within SECONDS, I recommended their books via Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook to hundreds of thousands of potential eyes via my followers, fans, and peeps. I didn’t do it once; I did it multiple times, spread out over time and days.
All through the power of marketing; the power of social media.
Checking their own social media feeds, they saw my messages pop up.
Seeing it live, in person, on the large room screen and their own—a transition started. The non-believers, unsure believers and believers saw the seeding of a social media message. It could have been their message. Within minutes, I got direct messages from some of my followers—they liked my message. Will any of them turn into book buyers? Who knows … but they may have never heard of Cristina Gradina, Natural Childbirth Exercises or The Bloomers if I hadn’t cared enough about their books and their messages to share with others.
Today’s author must get this: social media is the town hall of book marketing. Stop digging in your heels. Take the first step, a small one, and get started.
Judith Briles is known as The Book Shepherd, the Author and Publishing expert and the Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Author U, a membership organization created for the author who wants to be seriously successful. She’s been writing about and conducting workshops on publishing since the 80s. She’s the author of 31 books including Author YOU: Creating Your Book and Author Platform that has won multiple “best” in the writing/publishing categories in book award competitions. Her next book is Snappy, Sassy, Salty … Wise Words for Authors and Publishers and will be available this fall. Join Judith live on Thursdays at 6 p.m. EST for Your Guide to Book Publishing on the www.RockStarRadioNetwork.com.
Follow @AuthorU and @MyBookShepherd on Twitter and do a “Like” at AuthorU and Judith Briles on Facebook. Join the Author U LinkedIn Group and the Author U Google+ community. If you want to create a book that has no regrets, contact her at Judith@Briles.com.