Over the summer, I spent some time trying to do a bit of promo for my work. If there's one area where I really fall down as a writer, it's promotion. Yeah, I blog and I twitter and I podcast and I do the web comic, but there are facets of promo that I don't do often enough, like participate in Yahoo groups or hold contests or send out for reviews.
So I've been thinking lately of ways I can improve my promotion plan. Yes, I have a plan, or rather, I should have a plan. I sort of have a plan, but I need to sit down and redo it and make it better - easier to execute, defined goals, etc. The problem is finding time to do all this planning of promotion and executing of promotion and still get my writing done. So I'm looking into simple tasks that I can do that won't tax my time or my brain. My initial ideas so far are...
Send out one of my books for review every Friday. I have a list of review websites, and if I just took 30 minutes each Friday, I could send these books out and maybe get a slew of reviews. It takes time to get a review done; most places take 8-12 weeks to get a review done. But if I start sending out now, I could have a ton of reviews coming my way in a couple months. That can't be bad.
Continue to blog. Right now, I'm doing at least 3 regular posts a week here and my weekly post on Oh Get A Grip. I'd like to add one more regular post to this, and then I think my blogging efforts would be complete. A good blog would (hopefully) keep people coming back for more, but a good blog has to be maintained with regular content. I want to be certain I provide that content.
Continue to cartoon. Since the start of school, I've set aside one day a week to work on the web comic, and so far I've been able to keep a regular schedule. Hopefully, with regular drawing, I'll get faster and better at producing the comic, so I won't have to spend an entire work day on it, but for now, I'm willing to spend a day to get this thing done!
Revamp the website. I've talked about this before, but now have finally started to take action on it. On Friday, I set in motion a transfer of all my domain names to GoDaddy.com, because I know GoDaddy plays nice with WordPress (it better play nice!), and because I can host multiple domain names on one hosting package. Once the domain name transfer is complete, the actual website revamp begins. I've got the domain name www.cynicalwoman.com, which I've used for years for a flash website I did way back when. I love the work I did on that, but updating a flash website is a bitch and a half for me, especially since I no longer understand the latest version of Action Script (a situation I'll need to correct very soon, it seems). I want an html website with a WordPress blog, and I want the website to combine most of my current websites - www.helenehmadden.com, www.cynicalwoman.blogspot.com, www.theadventuresofcynicalwoman.blogspot.com - into one place. I've pretty much stopped posting anything over at www.helenehmadden.com because it's too much effort to maintain a separate writing website from my personal blog. And besides, I've pretty much effectively branded myself as Cynical Woman, stay-at-home mom and erotica writer, so why not go with that?
Once the website revamp is done, I'll add to my list of promo goals. But for now, I think this is enough. Hopefully, I can get a working website up and running by Halloween. Let's see what I can do.
Now, I want all of YOU guys to tell me something. If you're a writer, what kind of promo do you do that works well for you? What promo have you done that turned out to be a huge waste of time? And readers, what kind of promo would you like to see me do? Give me some ideas of things you would enjoy, because one thing I don't want to do is annoy the crap out of readers with bad promo. (Please, please, please leave comments on this one, because I really do want to know!)
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