mostly marketing

I have several things on my mind today so bear with me if I meander...since mercury is now out of retrograde I feel an edginess that I need to explore even if I've talked about these subjects in previous blogs...

1. Hashtags on twitter: Just yesterday I realized that I've been posting links to twitter without sending it to the places where my readers might be hanging out...I'm sure most of you know this already but for me it was an epiphany...

2. The goddess principle: This is connected to the hashtags--my book is filled with goddesses and at the risk of sounding weird, a goddess wrote my book using my computer and my fingers to type it out...so how do I employ the goddess (feminine) principle to my marketing plan?
   
3. Twitter: I need to have a theme for each week and places to go--for instance, #mythology or #druid/pagan  etc...tweet once a day on the theme of the week--fifteen minutes max. (good luck)

3. How to organize the social media marketing in general: Advice to myself: get on Facebook and Goodreads at certain times of day--spend a half hour or less at those times--and then, step away! Hard to do since now I'm on 'indie authors', 'fantasy authors', 'bookjunkies', 'authors pitch for readers' and a few others--getting caught up in the threads is not only time-consuming, it takes energy from my writing, draining me before I've begun.

4. Reading blogs: This one is unbelievably time consuming and yet it's vitally important. If I expect others to read mine I have to make the effort...and many bloggers have kindly taken time to read my book and review on their blogs...many thanks to all of them!

5. Writing blogs: I have two blogs on blogspot as well as one on my website...I love the exercise of writing and I love the disparate subjects I'm writing about--so time spent doing this is good.

6. Website: My extremely expensive website is languishing. I don't know how to get people there--I've put links on this blog but have no way of knowing if anyone uses them. Wordpress is unfamiliar to me and more complicated..plus I don't like the black with white type--but it's part of the template and can't be changed.

With my second book about to come out I need to think about a blog tour--contest/giveaways, all things I'm unfamiliar with...luckily all the author pages I'm on will be a tremendous source of information...

Sorry if I've repeated myself here...and thanks for reading! Comments are greatly appreciated.

And last but not least: The Moonstone will be free on Kindle from August 10-12th

http://www.amazon.com/The-Moonstone-ebook/dp/B007DXI9SM

social media marketing

I went to a talk on social media marketing the other evening. It was given at the local bookstore here in Vancouver, Cover to Cover. Ron Gompertz, author of No Roads Lead to Rome, was the speaker and had a lot of useful information to impart.

He spoke about the building blocks needed to market online: e-mail, blogs, website, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook, going through each one in some detail. But with only an hour and a half there was not enough time to delve into each one and I can tell you right now that for me they need major delving!

Take Twitter, for instance. Apparently there are all kinds of things you can do there. I'm sure many of you if not all of you already know this but I was taken by surprise when Ron spoke of organizing groups on his Twitter account. I'm just barely understanding hash tags at this point! (# is a hash tag for those of you who aren't familiar with it) And the following thing gives me a strange sense of responsibility, as though I either need to entertain or at least keep up with what everyone is doing as well as find some interesting articles to link to my tweets. Did I mention feeling overwhelmed?

 I have upped my time on Twitter now and have retweeted, replied and favorited as well as gone to sites listed (in strange heiroglyphic sorts of letters and numbers that I haven't quite figured out, by the way) and read numerous blogs and commented. If I let it, this could become my entire day!

How does one get the most out of this without drowning? I have gotten a few more followers because of Twitter and I must say I enjoy learning about it but I do have two books to edit and another one that needs to be written, so tell me, how do you manage your time? Do you check into Twitter every day or once a week? What do you tweet about?