Marketing (and Other Dirty Words)

I have a mentor for Sisters in Crime, the ever wonderful and patient Michele Drier. She is pushing me in every Zoom meeting to get out of my comfort zone (where I don't submit things or finish things because imposter syndrome is a, well, we all know the rest of that phrase). We come up with a list of goals and I usually try to complete them.

This last month, though, I completed none of the tasks that we'd set up as goals the previous month. I went into the meeting feeling like an absolute failure.

I've talked before about how life can get in the way. My day job went insane with one of my people quitting without notice right as our busy season began. Which happened on the same day that we had to take Mercury (my sweet, but apparently a little dumb, dog) to the vet to remove a rock that she'd somehow managed to swallow.

Michele assured me that sometimes life does indeed happen. And sometimes life happens like a steamroller in one of those old Looney Tunes episodes with Wile E. Coyote.

But while setting goals for the next month, which will hopefully be a tiny bit less crazy, our conversation turned toward my blog. And I mentioned my frustration with myself for the lack of consistency... which leads to a lower readership, especially of blog posts that I'm quite proud of.

I didn't know how to solve that particular problem and was seeing it as both inevitable and insurmountable that my readership would just decline into nothingness.

Michele, though, had another idea. She mentioned the Sisters In Crime Guppies group, specifically the marketing arm. They have a section on doing guest posts on other writer's blogs. It's not an idea which had ever occurred to me. I've heard of doing guest blog posts, but I had never thought of reaching out to other writers to do a guest post myself.

Part of writing, whether self-published or traditionally published, or even pre-published, is marketing. Even self-published authors are responsible for a good portion of their own marketing- the budget to fully market new books is not there at most of the publishing houses. That's especially true for indie publishers as their profit margins are even lower.

So what can we do? How can we effectively market ourselves?

Well, we can do what Michele, the Guppies, and my group of Wily Writers do.

We can share strategies.

We can boost each other's work.

We can support each other in this lonely journey toward the ultimate goal: someone reading, and hopefully liking, our work.