Writers on Wednesday: Eric Mondschein’s Author-Driven Marketing—The Ongoing Journey

Writing a book is no easy task and having it published is quite an accomplishment. So congratulations are in order as you are the author of a published book. After enjoying the deserved praise from family, friends, and colleagues, as I indicated in an earlier post, you will soon recall that you did write it hoping that people would read it. And now that your book is published, you have to market the book.

Eric_Mondschein_v_2-296x370If you thought writing was a challenge, welcome to the new world of author-driven marketing, and except for a select few, this is the new world of authorship and publishing circa 2015.  Yes, we are responsible for getting people to know about and hopefully read our books. That is what is called marketing. To suggest that the world of author-driven marketing is easy would be misleading at best, but it must be done if we want people to learn about the books we write, and more importantly, to invite people to read them. Thankfully, as I have said before, with the assistance of SOOP, we do not have to travel this daunting road alone.

So, as my journey in marketing Life at 12 College Road continues, I keep posting regularly to my Facebook page, LinkedIn account, and daily to Twitter (I now have over 4,630 followers and growing). I also try to post regularly to my website. I have learned that it is important to maintain a presence in social media. I am certainly not going to tell you I fully understand it, I just know that staying in the “public eye,” for both you and your book, is important if you wish to encourage people to take an interest in your work.

I have also in previous posts discussed the importance of offline events such as doing book readings and participating in local book fairs. This time I want to encourage you to investigate the possibilities of doing interviews about why you write in general and about your book in particular. There are a number of sites that offer interviews and reviews of your book. Of course you cannot predict what will be said about your book, but you have to have confidence in your work. These sites have followers who are very interested in reading and rely on the reviews and interviews to help select books for themselves and even their book clubs. I was pleased to have been interviewed by author Stacie Theis of BeachBoundBooks and by author Jan Bowman of janbowmanwriter.com about writing and my book Life at 12 College Road. I also had the book reviewed by author Dorothy Sander on her Aging Abundantly Website.

Another line of action you should consider is exploring whether others would be interested in posting excerpts or chapters from your book. There are digital and hard copy magazines of almost every genre that would be a good “fit” for your book. This is a great way to get your work noticed. I was honored to have BoomerCafé, a leading digital magazine for Boomers run a story, Christmas Morning, from my book Life at 12 College Road.

At the end of this month BeachBoundBooks is going to be running a formal review of my book. I will let you know in next month’s post how it went.

Life-at-12-College-Road-3-D_200W

It’s not always the earth-shattering events that are most significant in our hectic lives. More often, it’s the small things, many long forgotten, that touch and shape us most deeply. Our memories of these events might bring smiles, or anger, or even a desire to forget. But every one of them helps to make us who we are today — and in some ways, who we will become tomorrow. Join Eric Mondschein at the unhurried pace of a cup of coffee for a surprising and powerful journey in which laughter inevitably mingles with tears, sorrow turns to joy, and loss almost becomes bearable.

Life at 12 College Road is available at Amazon.com!

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