I think the consensus last week was that y’all want to see me market in public. Ahem. While I am not naturally an exhibitionist, I am a trained performer, so I shall do my best to reveal all.

Firstly, I’ve created a channel in my Discord Server where I’m jotting stuff down as I am working on it, with the intention both of journaling to collect up for these posts (and yes, I do intend this to be some kind of series) and encouraging the writer types in there to follow along if I hit on something they hadn’t thought of. Which also meant they thought of things I had not, which was fantastic. I love this collaborative effort! If you’d like to be part of that, Book Club with Spikes is open briefly at the link.

Secondly, the reason for the title. I find the scope of marketing can be overwhelming, and it doesn’t need to be. My concept is to take this project on in small bites. One or two new things a week, balancing against what you already have on your plate, and you can handle this even if you are an ultra-introvert type. Also, it doesn’t have to cost money until you are ready for it to cost. While you can, and should interact with others on social media to build that networking, you can focus just on the basics of website, and Amazon, for now if you can’t bring yourself to talk about your book in public. A lot of this is consistent branding, to help the readers know who you are, where to find your work, and what they can expect.

Ok! Ready? Let’s begin.

1. Update your bio
   • Short bio for any social media you are active on
   • Medium bio for Amazon and Goodreads
   • Long bio for your website
2. Refresh any and all links on your website to your social media presence, and vice versa
3. Research A+ Content on Amazon (next week we’ll be working on creating this)
4. Build and share graphic teasers

There, that’s a week’s worth of work, which should take no longer than an hour a day. Less, if you want to spread it out a bit.

For your bio, you need them to be consistent across platforms. Include a link to your website anywhere you can. If you have trouble writing a bio for yourself, see if you can get a friend to do it or at least review it (my husband wrote my first author bio). You can use a chat-bot for a draft of a bio, but they generally get things wildly and hilariously wrong, so if you do, make sure you review it and maybe also have a friend review it if they know you pretty well.

Currently my short bio I use on social media looks something like this: “Author • Artist • Scientist • Perennially inquisitive. Worlds of magic, science, & whimsy.” My long bio is on my website, at this link. My medium bio is visible on Amazon at this link. Feel free to take a look and see what I’m doing and if it will work for you. Even if you don’t have a book out yet, you’ll see there are other ways to tie in who and what you are that will interest a potential reader. Really, though, the longer bio is for readers who track you down and want to know more. Short bios give people who are following you, or you are following, an idea of your weird flavor and if it’s something they may enjoy.

I’m really bad about updating links, and this is such a fast and easy little chore that has to be done periodically. Go ahead and do it, and set up a notification or calendar event to remind you to do it again regularly. Monthly, if you like, but personally I think I’ll just check it quarterly.

I thought that I’d be talking about putting up A+ content on Amazon, but as it turns out, there’s a lot, it’s going to take time, and I’ve only gotten one graphic done so far. So! Research. Amazon has a huge amount of information on how to do this. I’m really excited about the timelines, because a couple of my series are a little complicated that way. Amazon even helpfully provides information on how to format graphics, so that’s cool. You can create an A+ page, and link multiple books to it, so for instance I’ll be able to do one for all four of the Underhill novels, and the so-far single standalone short in that world.

Finally, I plan to create and share on all my socials a couple of graphic teasers every week, moving through all of my books slowly. At the end of having made all of them, I should be able to kind of randomize and share those again without overwhelming people, but I have a couple of dozen books I’ll be doing this with, so that’s about six months lapse before I start recycling graphics. If you’re newer to the biz, you’ll have to get more creative about what you pull from each book to promote it. This can include, but not limited to:

• Pull Quotes (catchy bits from the book, a sentence or two in length)
• Character art
• Book genre (i.e. “Fantasy Noir, on the rocks!” for my Pixie Noir)
• Reader Cookies (if you like… you might like…)

Here are a couple I did this week for Pixie Noir.

Now, I’m using Affinity Photo to build the graphic teasers, but you can easily do them with Canva or another app.

Ok, that’s this week. There will be more next week! I’m sitting down with my planner every weekend and plotting out what I’m doing, for the upcoming week. Trying to keep these to small projects on a given day, but I know there will be some big jobs I’ll have to break apart to make them more approachable. Oh! The other thing I’m doing is loading stuff up to my YouTube channel. Nothing specifically related to my books just yet, as I’m still learning what is working and what isn’t in terms of audio and video. But I’m building the base there by doing art, book reviews, and will likely start doing readings next week to be able to directly link in my books. Someone on my Discord pointed out you can link a YouTube video to your Goodreads author page, so I will be doing some short ‘book trailers’ where either I animate and do what I did for Wonderland, or I’ll just hold up a book and talk about it. Maybe both!