Marketing Your Book: 3 months after launch

When I published my debut novel, Pestilence on 6 January 2021, I wrote a marketing plan to help raise awareness and generate sales. It was obviously limited by lockdown, but there was plenty I could do online. So nearly three months on, how's it gone? Well it wasn't a complete disaster...

Tell Everyone

The single most successful approach to marketing, which I cannot recommend highly enough, is to simply tell everyone. I told everyone I could think of.

Turning rejection into acceptance

I had a couple of articles rejected recently. That hasn't happened in a long while, and frankly, I wasn't very impressed because it took the editor 7 months to let me know, and the reason for one of them, was simply that he'd totally changed his mind about the brief. He wanted something completely different. Was a kill fee available? No. But if I wanted rewrite them both, taking into account his extensive criticisms, then he'd reconsider his position.

How to sell your feature ideas to a magazine

I recently received an email from a lady who'd read my book, "Freelance Writing: Aim Higher Earn More". She asked, "My question is, how do I pitch? Do I write a story then think what magazine to send it to, or do I write to the magazine asking for a page for a story?"

Writing for children: point of view

I went on a FutureLearn story telling course, where in week 3, Al MacCuish explained how he overcame his struggles to write a successful children's book. This is a bit of the transcript from the interview. It's a great reminder to get into the head of the child and see the world from their point of view!

 

"I suddenly understood why I was struggling. I had never once tried to look at the world from a child's point of view. I didn't know, understand, or empathise with my audience. So I went back the one of the very first children's stories ideas that I'd had, and I started again.

Don't be a publisher's nightmare. One space at the end of a sentence is plenty!

My mum always taught me to put two spaces after a full-stop, just as she was taught to do in typing school in the 1960s. But when I started working in marketing and brochure production in the late 1990s, I quickly learnt to stop this bad habit.