UPDATE: The winner is…ButtonsMom2003!
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Being a writer—no, being a successful writer—isn’t only about getting words on pages. I wish it worked that way, but in the real world, or at least for the independently published authors…
- We write a book
- We scrounge for cover art to hand to the cover artist
- We look for decent editors (or in my case since I am an editor, good beta readers to find my errors)
- We pay or learn to format our books ourselves
- We upload the books on all the platforms where people buy books
- And then…we try to figure out how to get people to notice our book amid the millions of books available on all those platforms.
And that’s where you can really fall down that rabbit hole and waste an inordinate amount of time while you try to figure out what works.
I have a website. That’s a must for authors—the first order of business for any author.
I have a blog. Now, authors say blogs are dead, but I think mine does okay. See the number of folks on the left who get this daily post mailed straight to their inbox? I choose to continue this blog because it serves as my “face” to the real world out there. I talk about what’s real in my life. I talk about my books. I invite other authors to come to talk about their lives and their books. It’s a friendly place. But as an author, I have to do so much more.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… Gah. How can I be in all places at all times? Simply put, I can’t. And I do not want to pay someone to manage my social media, even though I’ve seen some authors who have the right support do very, very well. You see, I tried it, but it was work managing that support and I don’t really want anything more on my plate. I’ll do the occasional Facebook and Amazon ad and call it done.
And then my dd offered to do something for me.
She noticed all those lovely, luscious book memes on Instagram and Facebook and wondered why I wasn’t doing them. I told her flat out I didn’t have the time or the talent. Since she’s got online school to supervise every day and has to sit in the livingroom or dining room with the kids anyway, and it doesn’t take up every second of her time, she said she’d give it a shot. It looked like fun to her. Fun?! Of course, I worried about what those ads might look like because her taste and mine are not the same, and she doesn’t read romance, doesn’t get the genre at all.
But hey. She wanted to help.
So, for a little over a month now, I give her a cover and maybe a snippet about the book or a piece of an Amazon customer’s review and off she goes.
I told her donuts and the color pink feature in my latest release, Preacher…
And I thought, That’s alright. At least people will stop and look.
And then she saw my cover for my next release, Hardman, and asked whether I had more art with this guy because she said he was hot! This one’s simple. Stark. Sexy. I like it!
And she’s only gotten better. I wanted her to go back and do memes for books I already have out there but folks might have forgotten exist or had no idea they existed…
I had this Texas Cowboy story about a wild-child judge’s daughter who gets caught going Lady Godiva on a motorcycle by a pair of Dom deputies… She found this art!
The story that followed was about a schoolteacher voyeur spying on a deputy’s playroom. This one’s just too cute!
When she put all the Texas Cowboys together, she did this and I snorted with laughter.
My favorites so far? I love, love the biker girl and voyeur girl, but I love this one too!
And has it helped? I really think so. When I look at my sales on Amazon, there are more of my older titles selling, so I’m going to keep her employed for the longterm doing my memes. She’s becoming a goddess (and a godsend—just one more thing I don’t have to worry about)!
What do you think? And which is your favorite image from the ones I provided. Comment for a chance to win a backlisted title of your choice!
