Do You Know Me? 5 Things You Can Do To Promote Yourself for Free

Let me whip out the old American Express card. I'm Josh Lanyon. If you read m/m fiction the name is probably vaguely familiar to you. Your response to "Josh Lanyon" may be positive or negative or merely oh yeah, I think I've heard of him, but generally if you know this genre, you know of me.

And that, of course, is the goal of each and every new writer.

You want name recognition. It would be delightful if, with that name recognition, came an automatic fuzzy, warm feeling, but it doesn't work that way. And it's not the topic of today's post. Today's post is one dear to the hearts of writers both old and new, because we're all constantly scrabbling for a better foothold on the precarious slope that is our writing career. Today's post contains five quick and easy things you can to promote yourself for free.


1 - Become a regular reader and commenter on popular blogs. It doesn't get much easier than this. Show up and participate. Interact with readers and other authors. This has the added benefit of keeping you abreast of what's happening in your community, which is a good and useful thing. When your name pops up on a regular basis and people come to associate it with smart, insightful comments, it becomes a little advertisement for your work.

You can start this strategy long before your book is actually published. There are a number of writers I became interested in simply because they commented regularly enough on places I frequented and I began to get a sense of "knowing" them.

Caution: the internet -- and this genre in particular -- are prone to sweeps of ill-thought self-righteous hysteria on any given topic. Avoid that stuff. Very rarely do the people yelling the loudest have all the facts. And everyone looks foolish after the confetti has settled.

2 - Write an article for a webzine or popular blog on a topic you know well. And for God's sake DON'T write about writing or self-promotion. You heard me right. Try and avoid writing about writing. Why? Because this is the absolute first idea that leaps to everyone's mind. It's safe, it's harmless, and it's invisible.

I know what you're thinking. Establish yourself as an expert was one of those pieces of advice they dished out when the internet was new and still wet behind the ears. And that was -- and is -- good advice, but on what topic do all writers imagine themselves experts? Writing. So everyone is out there blabbing about writing. And they're mostly blabbing to other writers.

Do I honestly need to tell you why this is a mistake?

What else are you an expert on? How can you take that expertise and apply it to writing -- even apply it in such a way that other writers might conceivably turn to you for advice? Do you have medical know-how? Are you fluent in a language? Do you have a degree in a particular historical period? How are you unique from everyone else in this genre?

Your uniqueness is the selling point.




3 - Use an email address that matches your pen name. This is a no brainer, surely? All your communication should be under the name you're promoting, your "brand," as it were. It's confusing to see Betty Johnson railing away on a list about this, that, and the other and get to the bottom of her post and find out that she's actually the author of nine erotic romances under the nom de plume of Jackson Hole.

You want all the indicators leading to your author identity. And if you don't have an email address for your author identity it's like you don't expect to be in business very long. I mean, you can get these email addresses at hotmail. They're free. Why wouldn't you do this?

4 - Give away books. I know. It seems counterintuitive. You're not earning that much to start with. And now I'm advising you to cut into your profits. Consider those pennies lost as money invested in advertising. Send books to reviewers, sure, but give books to regular readers too.

Why? Because you're trying to establish something called Word of Mouth. Word of mouth is what happens when readers like your stories and, all unsolicited, talk you up to other readers. And so on and so on. There is no single better promotional thing that can happen to you. Period. All the banner ads, all the glowing reviews, all the authors blurbing each other, NONE of that can compare to the effectiveness of a handful of readers who love your work and share that love with their friends.

Give books away.

5 - Post excerpts. This can be tricky, I admit it. Readers sometimes buy books based on reviews, but the number one decider in whether a reader reads a book will be her feeling as she skims the first few paragraphs. And while you may think all you need is for the reader to buy your book, what you really need is a reader to buy all your books -- and that only happens if they like your books.

When you post excerpts, a reader gets to sample your work and one of three things happens: the book doesn't sound like her kind of thing, the book sounds like something he wants to read right now, and -- most commonly -- the book sounds like something she or he wants to read eventually.

And how you get that reader to move you from the "eventually" pile to the Must Have Right Now pile has to do with repeated exposure to the work and to you -- which is where all those other little seemingly invisible efforts start to pay off.

Readers, what kinds of promotional efforts appeal to you? What kinds of things turn you off?

Authors, what's your biggest challenge in getting the word out there?