By K. A. Laity
With the mainstream blossoming of social media sites on the web, a lot of writers I know are tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, linking and commenting everywhere they possibly can in order to get the word out on their books. A book launch is no longer a quiet affair at a single comfy bookstore, but a cross-the-globe blitz that scorches everyone in its path with your project's brilliance and timeliness.
There are more outlets for information now than there ever were and to get noticed you have to be out there. You're not just releasing a book; you're launching a media campaign for the hearts, minds and most importantly, wallets of the general public.
But it’s not the general public you want: you want your niche. Who is your niche? You have to find that by exploring branding – the latest omnipresent buzzword for how to market yourself. It's always been true that marketing is the crucial step in making sales, but now that publishers have cut back on staff, more of that burden falls on the writer than ever before.
It's not enough to show up and sign books, or even to read your book to a willing audience (assuming you can find one). Now you have to complement actual appearances with virtual ones, so you find yourself going on a blog tour across the virtual span.
While you don't have to fly or drive across the country, you do have to spend a big chunk of every day of the tour online, checking up on the comments, answering questions and choosing contest winners (what? You think people are just going to drop by for your pearls of wisdom?). This is to say nothing about all the work it takes to set up all the tour stops in the first place, to coordinate with all the blog owners and arrange for the prizes.
It's one thing if you have a clear audience and an identity that's easy to brand: sf, chick lit, romance, mommy blogging? Piece o' cake. What if you write slipstream? Or cross genres? Is your latest book nothing like the last one? Do you shift from drama to prose and then take a detour into poetry? You do? Do you have any desire to be successful? Because if you did, you wouldn't mess up your brand that way. Be consistent! Forget what Emerson said. A foolish consistency is the path to market success.
It's no surprise that with all this full tilt marketing most of the writers I know have begun to fear that there's simply no time to actually write anymore. By the time you've updated all your blogs, dropped by friends' blogs to make sure they'll do the same, tweeted your latest updates and touched base with everyone important on Facebook, the day has shot by and it's time to start writing up the marketing plan for the next book -- assuming you ever find the time to write it.
I would advise you to budget your time for marketing and branding, to schedule specific times of day for Facebook, to write blog posts ahead of time when you've got sufficient leisure and most importantly, to turn off your computer for hours at a time, but right now I have to go update my Facebook status and flog my book on some Yahoo groups before I blip some tunes that tie into my forthcoming novel. What song says "feel good SF chick lit with an edge and some great recipes?"
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