An Uncle in the Marketing Business? ~ Part 1

This past week I’ve been doing some fresh thinking around the topic of marketing. As Terri said yesterday, it can be a full-time job. On the other hand, if we allow it to be full time, we won’t ever get more writing done.

At times I feel as if I’m banging my head against the fridge—-but no food is coming out. So what am I doing wrong?

The other day, I had a light-bulb moment. I haven’t finished processing the topic, and would love to hear from you, but I do believe I’m on to something.

Let's start off by asking five questions.

1. Where are we marketing? As writers, we like to hang together, after all writers are really the only people who understand writers, right? We rejoice with each other when we have some sort of break-through moment. We encourage one another. And we share our links. This is a great idea. But it’s not marketing! Marketing starts to happen when those people, whether they are writers or not, share your links and your information.

2. Who are we marketing to? Here in South Africa we have a chain of furniture stores called “Joshua Doore”. They have a catchy advertising jingle that first appeared in 1970. It says, “You’ve got an uncle in the furniture business: Joshua Doore!” (You can listen to the original version here.) It really is a brilliant piece of advertising, and the fact that the main slogan is still played daily on our television sets proves this to be true.

It’s great to have friends in the business, and I’m sure the staff of Joshua Doore take advantage of specials on their floors. But imagine if you will that the advert only plays in store, outside of shopping hours, so the staff are the only ones present.

Kind of silly, don’t you think?

Yet, is that perhaps what we do as writers? We belong to writers’ groups, we create an author’s page on Facebook, and we invite all our writer friends to follow the page. After all, our “personal page” on Facebook is just that. It’s personal. We create one or more Twitter accounts, and we “follow” other writers and ask them to follow us. We retweet other writers’ messages—to other writers (of course, because those are the ones following us) in the hope that they will RT ours. We join LinkedIn, and we link to other writers’ groups. We may enjoy the fellowship, and much of this may be helpful, but it’s not marketing! Marketing starts to happen when those people catch the message and share it, together with your links.

3. Do people really follow our marketing attempts? A friend was a missionary teacher in a primitive country. Her small daughter was one of her pupils. One day the mommy was busy making supper and the little girl was trailing her, chattering endlessly. All of a sudden the child called, “Teacher! Teacher!” The mommy stopped and looked in astonishment. The child had worked out how to get her mommy’s attention. She had realised that Mommy had tuned out from her incessant chatter.

Don’t we all do that? We tune out to voices or other people who are not interesting us. That leads to another question. In our marketing, are we perhaps trying too hard? When people see our posts, do they switch off? I confess that I have a few such contacts. I know any link they share will be self-promotion. I know nothing about them except that they are writers. And they know nothing about me. They're not interested in me—and I don’t know enough about them to know if I'm interested in them. I hardly ever read their tweets, their Facebook pages, or their LinkedIn comments.

4. Are we missing the point with our marketing? Not other writers (unless of course we’re writing for writers, like this blog). But are we reaching the ones who want or need to read what we have written? Sure, we're interacting on various social media sites, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus . . .   But think about it. These all fall under the category "Social Media".

My dictionary defines “social” as “Marked by friendly companionship with others.”  We're not talking about Marketing Media. It is called Social Media. Social. Friendly. 

5. How can we be social and still market? Is it possible? We're already complaining that we don't have time to both market and write. How can we now stop to have "friendly companionship with others"? Surely that will take up even more time? "I don't have the time for this!" we wail, as we carry on furiously using up time on ineffective methods of marketing.

I don't believe it will require more time. I think it calls for a smarter use of our time. But I've already taken up enough of your time explaining the dilemma, and I hope I've given you something to think about. Next month we'll look further into this, and hopefully come up with some easy ways to become an uncle (or aunt) in the marketing business.

OVER TO YOU: Do you have any thoughts about how we can develop our social skills without frittering away time we don't have? Please share your suggestions below.

More Reading on Making Friends on Social Media

Making Twitter Friends
Some Old Facebook Friends

SHIRLEY CORDER  lives a short walk from the seaside in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, with her husband Rob. She is author of Strength Renewed: Meditations for your Journey through Breast Cancer. Shirley is also contributing author to ten other books and has published hundreds of devotions and articles internationally. 

Visit Shirley on her website to inspire and encourage writers, or on Rise and Soar, her website for encouraging those on the cancer journey. 

Follow her on Twitter or "like" her Author's page on Facebook, and if you tell her who you are she'll be happy to be your friend and follow you back.

Marketing Is Not for the Faint of Heart

Marketing is hard work... no really it takes effort. Those who have celebrity status may not have the same difficulty with marketing their work but little old me who has only a handful publishing credits doesn't fair so well. It can downright make me grumble.  Here is what I have learned, my own marketing 101 if you will.

1. Marketing is a full time gig. Whether you are giving a 20 second statement to a peer about what you do for a living or you are meeting with your printer to do a flier on your new book you must think about how, when, and where you can market your newest work and also yourself with every contact you make.

2. Marketing can take up so much time that you don't get enough writing time. It may take up so much time that you actually feel resentful because between websites, blogs, and networking  you don't feel like a writer anymore but more like a PR spokesperson. And the truth is, you are.

3. Marketing one published work will continue well into the next project promotion if you want that published work to keep selling. You also must start marketing the newest project well before it is published to continue building your writing platform. It feels like a continuous motion similar to the endless moving sidewalks in those huge airports. One leads to the next and finally you get to your terminal.

4. You need to set marketing boundaries and as an author, you need to rest and refresh. Realistically decide what percent of your day should  be writing and what should be marketing and networking. Design your day and your work week with those boundaries in mind and include a portion for rest and rejuvenation.

Marketing can be fun but it is also time sucking hard work. Seek advice from experts in the field of marketing the written word and some of those experts are right here at our fingertips. Soak up the information in their books and on their websites and sign up for their newsletters. Join a critique group that will help steer you to the right contacts or who will write  reviews of your work or share your name with those who might need your services. And the most important part of marketing is to believe in yourself and your work. That is not being arrogant but confident, and that will make the marketing of yourself a tad bit easier.

Tips on Point of View

You have completed your manuscript and now is the time for you to edit and rewrite. One of the things you should look at is your point of view. Did you choose the right perspective from which to tell your story? And is it consistent? Here are a few guidelines.

First of all, point of view refers to who is telling the story. Generally three points of view are used. First person - where the "I" voice is used and it is a character who is telling the story. This provides a level of intimacy, a closeness to the story teller.  Omniscient - which is where the author is telling the story and generally provides a more distant perspective. And third person - which is almost a mix of the two, where you can tell the story from several different perspectives and move easily from one character's head to another. 

Tips for editing POV:

1. Determine how much intimacy you want to create between the reader and your characters.

2. After deciding the level of closeness you want, check to see if the point of view you chose also allows you to easily tell the story in the way you want.

3. If you have chosen first person, is your character someone readers will want to spend time with? Are they likable, but flawed? Not annoyingly perfect.

4. If you chose to write in third person, review each scene and determine who's head you will be showing the scene through and make sure you are consistent in only sharing with the reader those things that particular character would know.

5. When using third person, check each passage and determine how soon you clue the reader into who's head they are in. You may want to make sure readers can quickly identify who's perspective they've stepped into. 

6. To continue to create consistency in your POV, look to ensure when you are writing from a particular character's perspective you are using the words, terms and emotions that are most likely to be used by your character. 

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D. Jean Quarles is a writer of Women's Fiction and a co-author of a Young Adult Science Fiction Series. Her latest book, House of Glass, Book 2 of The Exodus Series was written with coauthor, Austine Etcheverry.

D. Jean loves to tell stories of personal growth – where success has nothing to do with money or fame, but of living life to the fullest. She is also the author of the novels: Rocky's Mountains, Fire in the Hole and, Perception. The Mermaid, an award winning short story was published in the anthology, Tales from a Sweltering City.  

She is a wife, mother, grandmother and business coach. In her free time . . . ha! ha! ha! Anyway, you can find more about D. Jean Quarles, her writing and her books at her website at www.djeanquarles.com

You can also follower her at www.djeanquarles.blogspot.com or on Facebook

Marketing Mistakes to Avoid if You're a New Freelance Writer

by Suzanne Lieurance, the Working Writer's Coach


If you’re trying to build a business as a freelance writer, you need to market yourself and your business, of course. But avoid these common marketing mistakes and you’ll build your business (and your income) much faster:

Setting Up Too Many Online Sites Too Soon
Most writers love to blog. In fact, I see writers who set up blog after blog before they find any writing jobs that pay, thinking these blogs will help them build their writer's platform. But then, before they know it, they’ve eaten up all their available writing time simply trying to keep up with the many fun sites they’ve created.

Create just one blog or website that you can use to promote your freelance writing, then get some writing jobs that pay before you branch out and set up additional fun sites.

Writing for Free for Too Long
In the beginning, freelance writers need published clips so they can get bigger and better writing assignments. And it’s often necessary to write for free to get these published clips. Yet many writers continue to write for free long after they’ve acquired published clips. They spend their days writing book reviews or conducting interviews with authors. They end up spending a LOT of time doing this, and it eats up the time they could, and should, spend writing for pay or looking for new assignments or clients.

If you're a new freelance writer, write a few short articles for online directories or no-pay markets to get clips. But once you have these clips, start looking for writing jobs that pay. If you like to write book reviews and interviews with authors, do this only after you’ve acquired some steady writing assignments that will provide you with income.

Spending Too Much Time Doing the Fun, Easy Stuff
To earn money as a freelance writer, it’s necessary to send out queries and take other actions to get new clients and assignments. This is usually uncomfortable for new writers, so quite often they avoid the real work that can help them earn substantial income in favor of spending too much time doing fun, easy stuff like tweeting, posting to Facebook, and even writing short low-paying articles for content mills. They convince themselves this is building their business, yet it isn't bringing in any new clients or assignments.

Start your workday looking for new assignments or clients and save the social networking and more fun stuff for later in the day.

It isn't difficult to build a substantial income as a freelance writer if you spend most of your time focusing on actions that can earn you money.

Try it!

Suzanne Lieurance is an author, freelance writer, certified professional life coach and writing coach, speaker and workshop presenter. She has written over two dozen published books and hundreds of articles for newspapers, magazines, and other publications. She lives and writes by the sea in Jensen Beach, Florida.

Visit her blog at www.writebythesea.com and for daily tips to help you stay focused on your writing career, get your free subscription to The Morning Nudge at www.morningnudge.com.

Writing, Fear and Yoga

Though it may look like the writer isn't doing much, sitting for hours in front of a laptop, the brain is heavily engaged. The work is often emotionally demanding in the extreme, taking us places that we're afraid of but need to go, and forcing us to look deep into the black hearts of our deepest fears to uncover reality in our characters and situation.  It takes great courage to walk the difficult path of the artist, and often the effort is physically exhausting.  Fear is always tracking you, and the closer you are to reaching your writing goals, the more intense and insidious that fear can become.  Fear is a great shapeshifter, looking like block, like the need to research, like being too busy to write.  It can stop your story in its tracks just at its most critical point.

My latest work in progress (WIP) is particularly challenging, taking me to dark recesses of the past, exploring notions just beyond my intellectual capabilities, and forcing me to rethink what I know about fiction.  Every writing session is hard.  That's how I know I'm on the right path - because it it were easy, I wouldn't be pushing myself, growing, or moving my skills to a higher bar.  So how does one cope with this fear in all of its incarnations?  How do you push through it towards completion?

My biggest ally against fear is to move my body.  Exercise of all kind helps, but for me, there's nothing quite like either swimming, or doing yoga - two forms of exercise that have a mental impact on me - helping to clear my vision, work out intellectual problems with my stories, and teach me to cope with fear.  Both swimming and yoga are what I call breath practices.  They involve engaging your breath and using the breath to propel and lengthen the muscles.  Being quite small boned, I tend to get cold easily and it's often too cold to swim.  I don't much like heated indoor pools (the chlorine doesn't agree with me), so I tend to do quite a lot of yoga.  Yoga is amazing for writers.  Here are three reasons why yoga is a natural ally for the writer:

• It helps teach us to see writing as a practice, rather than an end point.  We keep moving along the writing path, growing, changing, and pushing towards wisdom and expression.  It's not possible to fail, no matter how hard it is, when you have this perception. 
• It teaches you to breathe. Ah, breath.  How simple and yet how powerful. Breathing is the perfect antedote to fear.  I first found out how powerful it was when I was in labour with my first child, screaming in pain.  An angel of a midwife came to me and taught me to breath slowly, deeply, with my full body and I calmed down and got to work. I've turned to breath again and again in times of stress, strive, and fear, and it never fails to remind me of the transience of each moment and the need to work, calmly, through the panic. 
• It teaches patience.  Sometimes the right words take time to come.  You have to keep showing up, doing the exercises, stretching, breathing and working towards the vision. 

About my writing work, yoga teaches me to see my writing as work that has to be done - a responsibility and positive impetus rather than a vanity (another manifestation of fear). So next time you're struggling with the dragons of fear - call it what you will: block, self-doubt, other priorities, "no-time", try taking a 30 minute yoga break and see if that doesn't help. Breath through it. Even when it hurts. Then back to work. The world is waiting for you to change it.

Dialogue Important in Memoirs Too

The use of dialogue is important in memoirs as well as in fiction.

Many of us assume that because we can’t recall conversations word for word, we can’t write dialogue. Memoirs are your “memories,” so you can take a little creative license with them. Actually, no one recalls conversations in detail. If you do remember a significant line or exchange, by all means quote it. But more often you will simply remember that a conversation took place. You will have to imagine the conversation as a novelist would, without all the uhs and ers, tangents and digressions that people use when they talk.

Here’s what dialogue is:
• Talk is an ACTION. An ideal, compact way to advance your story by having one character tell the other what’s happening—to reveal, admit, incite, accuse, lie, etc.
• A way to define a character. The way someone speaks—accent, vocabulary, idiom, inflection—tells as much about what he is like as his actions do. And let’s us see him better than just using description.
• One way to show emotion. Characters reveal themselves when under stress or angry. Dialogue is used to create an emotional effect in the reader.
 • Another way to show point of view POV. (in whose head the reader should be.) This is not quite as critical in Memoirs as in fiction, because it may be all from your POV. Depends how you write it—if you’re writing someone else’s story, you may want to write it in story form, from “within your character’s head” or third person—Suzy did, she said, etc.
• Often used to get across what is NOT said. Example, if you want to show that someone wants to avoid an unpleasant encounter, you can show this by having them talk around the subject uppermost in their mind, but never quite touch it. In this way, you’re asking the reader to read between the lines. It’s tricky, but think about how you talk to someone yourself when you’re angry at them but don’t want to tell them exactly why—by being sarcastic, arch, nitpicky, over solicitous, etc.

Techniques. One of the most common reasons for flat, voiceless dialogue is formality. Dialogue sounds artificial when it is totally coherent and logical. You want thoughts that are loose, words that tumble out.

• Use more contractions—“I would not (wouldn’t) do that if I were you.” UNLESS you want to portray your character as being stiff or pompous or that English is not his first language. “Is it not wonderful?” has a Continental flair.
• Use sentence fragments. Example: Instead of:
“Is she sick?”
“It does not matter if she is or is not. She is not going to go to the party.”
Write:
“Is she sick?” “Doesn’t matter, she’s not going.”

Taglines. Whenever possible, try to use an action instead of a tagline (he said, she said). One of the reasons for not using a lot of taglines is to develop each person’s distinct voice, so that all your characters don’t sound the same. Hint: If you do use taglines, it’s better to stick with the word “said”, rather than trying to come up with substitutes such as cry, interject, interrupt, mused, state, counter, conclude, mumble, intone, roar, exclaim, fume, explode. These are “telling” words. Let the words in the dialogue show the emotion. And you can NEVER smile words, or squint them, or laugh them.

DIALOGUE DO’S AND DON’T’S 

DO:
• Establish the point of view (POV) of each character, i.e. his or her values and attitudes
• Recreate the impression of natural speech.
• Use dramatic structure to shape the sequence of what is said.
DON’T:
• Let characters make long speeches
• Put in “dead” dialog that doesn’t further the story line, e.g., “Hello, how are you?” “Fine, how are you.”
• Use too many odd spellings, for dialect
• Use too many taglines or substitute different words for “said.”

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A native Montanan, Heidi M. Thomas now lives in North-central Arizona. Her first novel, Cowgirl
Dreams, is based on her grandmother, and the sequel, Follow the Dream, won the national WILLA Award. Heidi has a degree in journalism, a certificate in fiction writing, and is a member of the Independent Editors Guild. She teaches writing and edits, blogs, and her next book Dare to Dream Will be published next May.

Use Seven Senses to Spark Your Writing

Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison

"Use Seven Senses to Spark Your Writing" by Joan Y. Edwards

In learning how to write better song lyrics for the musical movie I am writing, I ordered about 6 books about how to write or improve your writing of lyrics from the library. Much to my surprise, when I read Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison, I was amazed that he gave his readers exercises that would not only improve the writing of lyrics, but any kind of creative writing, you might pursue.

He suggests that for ten minutes - only ten minutes a day - not a minute longer to do an Object exercise.
Use seven senses: (There may be more, but Pat Pattison only emphasized seven)

1. Sight- What you see and what it looks like
2. Hearing - What you hear with your ears and what it sounds like.
3. Taste - What you taste and what it tastes like.
4. Smell - What you smell and what it smells like.
5. Touch - What you touch and what it feels like: hot, cold, prickly, smooth.
6. Inside Body Functions (Organic) - Your awareness of inner bodily functions. For example: heartbeat, pulse, muscle tension, stomach-aches, cramps, nausea, and breathing, pain, poisons. Concerns the movement and function of the physical organs insights and senses inside your body. 
7. Kinesthetic - Sense of motion, speed of motion, balance, gravity. Use of the body to do something or create something, to move. 

For ten minutes you write freely. The only thing is you write sentences or phrases about the object. Tell something you remember about this object. Show us in as many ways as you can. Use your senses. Make it personal to you or write as a character in a story. You are free to include who, what, when, where, why, and how to your writing during the exercise. I think it would be a good idea to read over the different senses described here before you begin to write.

Pattison says that each time you do it, you'll dive deeper into your subconscious mind and get all those treasured word jewels hiding out in there. Each time you do it, you'll get more relaxed and able to dive down sooner than you did the last time. You can pretend you are a character seeing or using this object.

Pattison says not to spend longer than ten minutes a day doing this. He warns that people stop because they say it takes too long when they spend more than ten minutes. Or they say, I did 30 minutes today. I can skip Thursday and Friday. When you do it regularly, you reap the benefits.

I'm going to put a word here: SALT. I'd like for you to share what you wrote about it during your ten minute exercise as a comment. If you don't want to share your writing, just tell me how and why you think this will lead you to improved writing.

Here are five other words you might like to do a free 10 minute exercise for 5 different days:

1. sand
2. clock
3. concrete
4. beret
5. refrigerator

I did a 10-minute writing exercise for the word Salt. I will post it in the comments area. I may not have used all 7 senses, but I had fun writing it. If you like these kind of exercises, let me know. I'll try to dream up or find a few others to try to help us improve our writing.

Celebrate you
Never Give Up
Joan Y. Edwards
Copyright © 2013 Joan Y. Edwards

Reference:
Pat Pattison. "Writing Better Lyrics:" http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Better-Lyrics-Pat-Pattison/dp/1582975779/ 

Never Give Up-Joan Y. Edwards

My Books:

Flip Flap Floodle, even mean ole Mr. Fox can't stop this little duck

Joan’s Elder Care Guide, Release date June 2014 by 4RV Publishing

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