By Chris Harris
Development, Strategy and Marketing my Writing. Part 1. Ground Zero
In this series of blogs, follow my journey as I try to discover the magic formula for promoting my writing and books, while learning to master the vast array of promotional tools that modern technology has put at our fingertips.
With my book, Something About England, published last week I now, amongst other things, begin a series of blogs where you can follow my attempt to promote and market my books. I currently have virtually zero online exposure, and over the next twelve to eighteen months I will try to rectify the current parlous engagement and build an audience. Within these pages, succeed or fail, I will describe the process and the inevitable successes and failures and see which one triumphs. Either way it will be self-deprecating, entertaining and hopefully amusing!
So here are the current dismal ‘engagement’ stats and the full extent of my various media’s, ahem….’reach,’ pre-campaign. A challenge to be sure!
Blue Sky: 25 followers
Denham Facebook: 15 followers
Personal Facebook: about 100 proper followers.
Instagram: 430 followers
Tik Tok. Just set up.
WordPress blog: The Rights of Fans 800-1500 views per month
WordPress blog: Denham: Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Messes 1 view last month.
Medium: Very poor but not non existent.
Substack: Just set up
A few months ago I began the process I am restarting now! The first book was due to launch at the end of July, but I wasn’t happy with the proof copy, so we essentially rewrote a lot of it. In the month or so before that, Louise, my editor and illustrator, and I had started to do podcasts; I upped the ante with blogs and started to put content on Medium and Substack. But spending two months wrestling with a major re-edit meant the small amount of interest we garnered went to pot, and the new fangles media quickly became redundant, and of course, the logins, etc., were lost!
None of this has been helped by the fact that I’ve just got a new Apple iPhone, and for the last few months I’ve been using it, I’d deliberately not signed into social media because I wanted a nice break from it to focus on the editing. So I am grappling with making this fir for purpose too.
Just the usual mess any amateur finds themselves in dealing with a medium that looks so easy but is so infuriatingly complicated.
The book was published on Thursday. I am under no illusion I will shift some initial copies before I draw a blank for several months. Well, only friends and family know of the book, and any social media campaign will take 6-12 months to get established and 12-18 months to hopefully reap significant rewards.
So, it was two days, Thursday and Friday, trying to find older accounts and work out what still existed and what I could still get into.
An hour was spent trying to get Instagram onto my phone; my partner succeeded where I failed.
My Tik Tok account was fairly new with limited engagement so after fifteen minutes of faffing around, I simply set up a new one.
Facebooks were a muddle between Microsoft and Firefox, but I triumphed. I hadn’t used them for months, so they will take a while to get their reach back.
Substack was another hour of my life I’ll never retrieve, but as the engagement on that was near to zero, I set up a new account.
Medium, BlueSky and the two blogs were fine. Yay.
It was a large part of two days unravelling the mess.
But a couple of positive things. I chuck content on social media, but I know if my campaign is to be successful, I must learn to ‘curate’ content; in other words, think it out. In the same way I think out content for my blogs, I need to start creating engaging posts rather than quick giveaway nonsense. Beyond that, this is good for the health of the strategy, but it’s also more intellectually and creatively challenging. I’ve disliked doing social media because it is pretty crass, and I’ve never really been that successful on it because I’ve never put myself out with it, because I’ve never needed to do it properly, but with a long campaign and the challenge of creating something genuine, smart and engaging to kick-start a writing career, I’m actually quite excited by it.
Small example: I decided to do a post about a nearby pop-up bar that fuelled a short story of a village clubbing together to close one down, as it was more like a weekend rave. Instead of using a photo I had of it, I walked around and took a twenty-second video quickly explaining what I was doing with the story. Videos draw in significantly more views than photos. Indeed, it received 800 views on Insta and TikTok, insignificant in terms of these media, but it would have been 100 if it had been a photo, and that is, in a nutshell, what I need to start doing: being smarter.
Paramount to a successful campaign will be my blogs; I am promoting my writing, and the best way to do that is through my writing / blogs, Substack and Medium. Blogs are not a few second long pieces of drivel we all scroll through; with blogs, you readily have an audience who are interested in writing, and getting these platforms firing is key to a successful campaign.
Sunday afternoon was spent firing questions, images, and videos of my blogs into AI and Google for research, and between us we came up with a plan to make my blogs look much better, more navigable, and a smart-looking hub and resource for the campaign.
All in all, with nine platforms functioning, albeit with little to zero content and zoned in on my blogging platform, next week I will begin to tame, structure and make them into the engine room for my promotional campaign. So tune in and see how I get on!
