Try something new, she said... (On finding ways to promote my books)

 

An early TikTok video. There's plenty of room for improvement. 😊

For the last couple years, I've been a member of the Book Boss Author Community run by Angela James. It's been a great experience, both for networking with other authors and for expanding my own knowledge base. This fall, I took Angela's Book Boss Strategy Intensive, a 4-month course in business planning for authors. That experience, more than anything else, has helped me shift my mindset. Writing is not my hobby. I'm running a small business and books and their related content are my product.

Those words are at once freeing and loaded with responsibility. I still tend to throw things at the wall and see if they stick, but I'm (hopefully) more intentional about it. 

At the end of the Strategy Intensive, we all created a business plan. Angela gave us individual feedback on our plans, and her advice to me was to try new things. I'd basically built a marketing plan that was based on what worked for Soulmates, the first book in my Soulmates series, even though the 2nd and 3rd books in the series hadn't done as well.

Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to point out what should be easy for me to see. 

So, determined to Try New Things, in early January I joined a Bookfunnel promo and dropped the price of Soulmates to free for a 5-day period. The book has been out for 2 years and it's the first time I've done a free promotion, and OMG did it go well. I had about 2000 downloads over the 5 days, with almost 30 new reviews so far - and those reviews are like gold. I also had sales and KU downloads for the next two books, along with a handful of new reviews for each. 

I can't run a free promo all that often, but I was very pleased with the experience. January's going to be my best month since Redeemed's release in April.

Bolstered by that experience, and in a fit of "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks", I dove into TikTok. Angela made a how-to video for the Author Community that demystified the process, so I made a couple of short videos and la voila, I have a TikTok account. (You can find it here.)

While it's been fun so far, and making the videos exercises a different part of my creative brain than writing does, I'm just now realizing how much I don't know. I did join an Author TikTokers FB page and dug up a video on TikTok from the 20Booksto50K conference I went to in November, so I have resources for learning. I'm also beginning to appreciate the time commitment involved in creating new content every day. The little buggers are short, but it takes time to put them together.

Still, my oldest kid called me yesterday morning and told me that he and his friends love my TikTok account. His friends think it's cool that his 60-year-old mother is living her best life, and you know what? Encouragement like that motivates me to push on. 

Blogging is also an attempt to try something new, and I'm pretty happy with how that's going, too. Thank you all for reading along, and drop a comment if you have questions or want to share promo ideas. We can all learn from each other!