PaperBox Books

Surprise. I actually did manage to try out my new process for social media activities for the whole week. I thought I’d give you a quick update, for those of you trying to get a handle on it yourselves.

I didn’t manage to get all my activities done everyday, I’m thinking it’s okay to miss a day rather than do something sucky just to put a tick mark on my worksheet. But, I did time out everything and on average I’m spending ….. wait for it…… 35 minutes a day on social media activities. That’s manageable.

The average does swing a bit based on two things.

How many blogs or articles I’m writing in the day (over the week it’s 5 blogs posts and 1 article as a goal).

How hard I have to look for blogs to comment on with something interesting to say. I try to give some value in my comments so it can take between 5 and 15 minutes to complete this activity.

Facebook and twitter take so little time I don’t bother with adding it up.

So, I’m calling victory over the time suck.

Have a great week.

Perry

2 Comments | In: Marketing Help | tags: marketing, social media. | #

Hi, everyone. At PaperBox Books, we use social media to connect the readers to our books. For a new author the thought of posting, tweeting, blogging, Linkedin posting and every other social media activity can be overwhelming.

Personally, I write 1 blog as a Project Manager and contribute to this blog. I also have two author blogs I need to keep active: Alice Griffiths and PA Wilson. Along with the blogs, come twitter, Facebook and a number of forums I participate in. I was feeling overwhelmed because I was spending 90 min to 2 hours a day just marketing. This wasn’t sustainable because one of the things you can’t do is be on and off with your social medial marketing – consistency is required!

I spent some time trying to get a handle on what I could do in a week but what happened is I just kept cutting out activities without understanding where I needed to put my effort. This week I changed my approach. Rather than try to figure out what I can do within my week I decided to figure out what was really taking the time.

Let’s just look at my activity on blog comments and Linkedin discussion contributions.

First, I find inspiration for my blogs in other people’s blogs and comments. Then I find opportunities to comment on blogs and Linkedin suggestions from what I follow on my gmail accounts.

I would browse postings and discussions until I found something I could comment on, sometimes this took most of the hour. It never took more than a minute to comment, or join the discussion.

Now let’s look at today – my first day on my new approach.

I set my iTouch stopwatch to find out what the time suck really was. I opened Gmail and started looking for blogs and discussions. Epiphany #1. I didn’t need to read beyond the ones I commented on – reading was a separate activity. I quickly scanned the headlines and found two Linkedin discussions, commented and move on to my googlereader account.

Using the same concept, I scanned headlines found 2 I had comments to contribute and stopped looking. Total time for this set of activities – 15 minutes. So, not really 90 min to 2 hours

I went back and read the remaining discussions and blog posts, but because I had completed my social media tasks, I didn’t feel like I was marketing for the whole time.

So, the tip is to focus on the real activity, not on all the time you spend around the activity, and you will be less overwhelmed.

Happy writing.

Perry

No Comments | In: Marketing Help, Writing Tips | tags: book promotion, marketing, perception, social media, time management. | #

I’ve been reading a lot about how writers are using youtube.com for book promotion. They’re doing trailers, interviews and promotional bit to get the word out about not only their books, but also to build their reputation as an author.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing out my cameras for sound quality, scouting out locations, trying to figure out how to get rid of unflattering shadows etc. Then there was the whole – what am I going to say, how am I going to say it, what image do I want to present information I needed to have clear in my mind before I started.

It’s complex, there is a lot of non-writing stuff to think about.

I decided to give it a shot last week and put the ‘better’ results up on youtube.com – there were ‘several’ attempts. For my test run, I chose to do informal videos as Sue Nelson Buckley, the author. This would allow the style to be less polished than representing PaperBox Books.

If you want a more technical overview of the videos and tips and tricks that I’ve learned during the process take a look at my blog at SNBConsultingServices.ca (my alter ego).

In the meantime, here is some writing advice and an explanation of why I chose to publish both versions of Jake and Kathryn’s story in the Dual Version – The Trouble with Jake and The Problem With Jake. Enjoy

Fast Facts about me and some writing advice

A tale of two novels

No Comments | In: Marketing Help, Writing Tips, happening in the market | tags: book promotion, videos, writing advice, youtube.com. | #