Marketing: Unto thine own self be true...

I never saw sales out of FB, although I haven't worked the kinks out of advertising through there yet. It's really pretty cheap to do. Ron Gompertz uses both fb and twitter and does well by them. Anyway you slice it you've got to have a website to act as a central storage area of official info. The purpose of the other things, including blogs, is to drive people to your website and keep you're name in front of them.

Ok forgive the sudden circular trail I'm going to take, I'm not expert but I've got a theory forming in my brain so indulge me. I think its all about how you want to present yourself and your work. Fad's come and go in social networking, and they clearly work for some people and not for others. I think I can sum up the difference by asking, are you that type of person? Ron was a twitter kind of guy but he didn't know it. A friend sold him on trying it and he eventually liked it, and then it started working for him. I have yet to fall in love with it and I get no results from it, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it because maybe that's not how Andy the Author needs to interact with his customers/fans.

For example: I'm told Clint Eastwood is a fantastic jazz musician. I doubt he hides the fact, but he's not known for it. Somewhere along the line his handlers packaged him as a tough guy, and they reinforced that image to a point that he'd have to be very deliberate about getting people to see him outside that box. I doubt he sweats it though, as long as Clint the tough guy actor pays the bills.

As Indie's we don't have people to help us. We have to write and write just to find our unique writing voice. Now we are learning to promote ourselves and we are brand new to branding ourselves and our work. I believe there is a correlation between what will be effective and what we naturally gravitate to. If you're having fun it will promote you, if it makes you uncomfortable it probably won't promote you. I think it's important to state this at this juncture because we are all exploring ways to market ourselves, and sharing those experiments. It's likely that some of us will have fabulous success at something and when others try it they get zip. BUT like in Ron's case with twitter, you may not know until you try. I personally believe that as we grow as self promoters--like finding our voice--we'll gain the ability to say right off, that's not going to be an good investment of my time and money, that's so clearly not Andy Bunch that it won't work for Andy the Writer. That'll save time.

The other aspect of this, which I know but forgot until Blythe reminded me, is that at the end of the day "how can you spend more time writing?" Any promotion technique that eats your energy and time so much you don't get to write is not truly effective.

In Recap:
a) be true to yourself, frame your public portrait in a manor that compliments how you'd like to be seen
b) balance selling what you've written with writing the next thing.