I give this topic a lot of thought. We create our sites and content to brand ourselves and our projects. Our goal as novelists is to achieve a following for our writing, creative and otherwise. As freelancers, we want to sell our services and support our families by creating content for websites, magazines, newspapers, and any other outlets. What few consider is how these two avenues can come together for mutual success. I’ve got a way and The Writing Network will be employing this package opportunity for anyone who would like to take advantage of our experienced team of writers and editors.
Before we get into the details, let’s talk about books. Novelists make money from the royalties. This doesn’t come from random conversation but from hours upon hours of planning, effort, hard work and execution of those plans. Marketing is not a passive income avenue and it’s not a sport, but without help, you may feel battered by the process none the less. You have multiple tiers of promotion. There are many factors to providing your website with what it needs to promote your work. There are many factors that go into letting others know that you have books available for sale. Everything starts before you launch a book.
We’re going to look at what goes into the first tier of launch day preparedness. It’s called a publicity package. You need one for every book. It’s a set of information compiled to promote your book, and for some it can be extensive. Below is the bare minim needed in a novel publicity package.
- A press release
- Synopsis of the book (or books)
- Author Biography (no less than 150 words by itself) This can be information people won’t find elsewhere, or something about the inspiration behind the book creation. Regardless of approach, make it unique to each package.
- Links – you need no more than 3 links, one to an author page or the book, one to your website or blog, and one to a method of contact. This includes but is not limited to Twitter, Facebook Fanpage, G+ and other similar methods. You should create a different package for each set of 3 links you can create from what you update and use often.
- A blog post about the book, or books, no less than 150 words.
- An excerpt from the book or books
- Images of the book cover, the author and if desired, any interior images as well.
Now, you need your information to be fresh, original and concise. If you want the search engines to track back to your websites, author pages and books, your content needs to be unique to your site and unique on the sites that are hosting your information. You need to spread this unique content across the internet with links to each of your locations. Creation of the novel or short story anthology is already time consuming. It’s clear how much work is going into your guest posts and your publicity package. Add to that all of your tweeting, status updates and the like and you’re looking at weeks prior to launch before you have the basics together. Putting out one publicity package isn’t enough. Especially across multiple websites. Ideally it would be a new package for each host. Reality is, that’s a lot of additional work for any author already working on the next book.
This is where freelancers come in. As freelance writers we learn to spin content, rewrite and recreate information provided into original and unique content. We also learn to pull from many sources in a short time to create new articles and blog posts. This is very common for a freelance writer who creates for the web. Allowing a freelance writer to recreate a provided publicity package saves you time and allows you to have multiple options available to your kind blog hosts.
Yes, with any service there is a cost, but the benefits are always far more profitable. An author’s time is freed up, options are provide and any package recreated is a fresh opportunity for your book to be talked about.
