The Writer's Summit, Part Two

 

The next speaker at The Writer's Summit was the energetic and engaging Sam Missingham, founder of @lounge_books, a home for book lovers (lounge-books.com). The title of her talk was `7 Habits of Highly Effective Authors', key tips on promotion and marketing, building your author platform and more.

We writers need a whole list of attributes: persistence, belief in yourself, determination, belief in your talents, a strong work ethic, commitment, enthusiasm, resilience, optimism and bravery. I felt like adding a few adjectives of my own: `dogged' persistence, `reckless' optimism, `crazed' determination…

Basically, however you get published, whether you choose the traditional route or go for digital self publishing, you have to be the CEO of your own writing career. No one can afford to sit back and think that your books will sell themselves or that publishing houses have anything other than miniscule marketing budgets for all but the big names. This means you need to be active, engaged, skilled and a hustler!

Where are your readers? You should have an account with goodreads, `find and share the books you love', which has 35 million people registered. You also need to be active on Twitter and Facebook, have a website- she recommended using WordPress.com-  and create a newsletter, so that you can attract `cheerleaders for your work'. She cited the author Clare Mackintosh, whose debut novel `I Let You Go' won the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year award, as someone who writes a brilliant newsletter.

KEEP YOURSELF INFORMED: Basically, she advocated signing up for everything, including BookBub, a free service which helps you discover books you'll love with great deals and recommendations. Foyles also does particularly good emails, as does The Bookseller.

Copy any good ideas on authors' websites and make them better. She showed us Neil Gaiman's impressive page (author of `American Gods'). She particularly recommended The Creative Penn (Joanna Penn), which is a site with blogs, podcasts, courses and her own fiction and non fiction books- totally professional and very impressive. She also mentioned Writer's Digest, an American magazine aimed at beginning and established writers with interviews, tips and helpful articles about self publishing etc.

With regards to Twitter she recommended following Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) and Marian Keyes (@MarianKeyes) in particular, as they have a huge following and use Twitter brilliantly. When using Twitter, you should express your own views, respond to others, share your writing and your hobbies, be generous to other authors, share humour and add value. Hashtags are important.

Who writes the same kind of books as you do? Everyone following them could also follow you, so see who they follow. Who follows your local bookshop? Follow those people. You should be spending at least half an hour a day on Twitter.

Look at bloggers and influencers (blog tours), join author associations as they often have events and the Alliance of Independent Authors gives good advice on self publishing. Go to festivals, events, awards.

I began to feel quite exhausted just listening to her, hadn't quite realised how much time you have to invest and despaired a little, as did several members of the audience, as to how you were supposed to do all this and write and have a full time job to pay the bills!

HUSTLING: she suggested speaking at an event, talking to your local bookseller, emailing an editor. What's the worst that can happen? (I could think of a whole list of debacles!) You should collaborate as much as possible, like Killer Women have or The Prime Writers, an authors' collective, of writers who published their first book over the age of 40.

If you blog, you can do what she called micro blogging (I confess my ignorance of this term), where you post excerpts of your book and ask the reader what they think of a particular character or plot twist, so you can get valuable feedback. Another option is using wattpad, a free online storytelling community where people can post articles, stories or poems.

 By the end of this excellent talk, I was desperate for caffeine and more hours in the day!