Day two starts up …
10:00 a.m.
Social Media:
Rusty Shelton (Shelton Interactive)
Phil Gerbyshak (12 Minute Media/800ceoread)
It’s important to have a WRITTEN business plan.
First step, think about the hundred writers or bloggers who can support your book. Work on getting into their network and connect with social media. Same with people who run conferences you might want to speak at (eg: local TEDx conferences). Same with influencers and other authors who are big in the space.
It takes 18 months to build a relationship on social media – you have to think ahead. Remember that little social media people can grow up to be big social media people.
Social media has to be fun if you are going to be successful at it. People want to know about you, not just your most brilliant ideas. It’s about relationships and connections. We find relationships not so much in content but in context. Follow the 80/20 rule: about 20 percent should be personal, not more.
People will remember you by your last tweet.
An online platform is the number of people you can reach at any time. Your platform has several onramps: your blogs, your speaking, your clients and your social media. How do you avoid spiking when the book comes out? How do you get people attaching to your platform for the long term?
A lot of people have a ton of onramps up tend not to be able to keep people there. Seth Godin says the future of publishing is in your permission list.
Your monthly platform is your permission list.
One word defines the future of publishing: Discoverability. The chance of your book being discovered on Amazon is close to zero. There are four main companies who dominate discoverability: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. These four are trying to control search.
The first search term for most people is their Google plus profile.
You need to take as much control as you can over your direct platform.
Get on blog lists for Forbes, Huffington Post, others. Give them an overview of what you’re going to focus on.
89% of journalists working on stories go to social media first.
If you’re looking for how-to, read copyblogger.
9:00 a.m.
Publicity:
Barbara Cave Henricks (CHC)
Adrienne Lang (BenBella)
David Hahn (Planned TV Arts)
CHC works with writers to build their social media platform and their web presence long before the book comes out to make sure the buzz is out there before the book comes out.
Expect to write as much after the book comes out as you did writing it.
How does a publicist quantify their impact? They really try to look at how they can get value to the client. It depends on what the author’s goals are. Example, one client on a niche financial book only wanted to get a few speaking engagements. They got him an article in CFO magazine and that led to an interesting relationship with them as a go-to expert and then invitations to speak at two of their conferences.
Associations are great – getting an article in an association magazine is really good because they sell books and speaking engagements.
Les McKeown gets people to link to his assessement tool and gets a lot of interest that way.
Adrienne talked about word of mouth campaigns – trading books for people talking about the book on their Facebook sites.
Contests work really well – Dave ran “Best Boss, Worst Boss” contest that got people engaged in a book – got hundreds of submissions.
Your job as an author is to help media contacts – do go into it to sell books, go into it to help them put on a good show or a good magazine. They’ll remember that.
Barbara talked about launching Jack Welch’s book on the morning of 9/11, he was on the Today Show when the first plane hit. Some times there are things bigger than your book.
