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Premium Promotional Tips for Writers

Jo-Anne Vandermeulen

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Aug 18, 2012 Katie Kenig rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, writing

For the record, if there were a 3.5 star rating, that would have been my choice, but I found this book to be closer to 4 stars than to 3.

This is a small book, but it's packed with useful information. I've been a writer for years, and recently decided to go it "on my own" rather than writing for other people. I have been kind of frustrated as to why bloggers can hire me to write for them and have a huge audience, but my own blogs always seemed to fall flat. My writing wasn't the problem; clearly For the record, if there were a 3.5 star rating, that would have been my choice, but I found this book to be closer to 4 stars than to 3.

This is a small book, but it's packed with useful information. I've been a writer for years, and recently decided to go it "on my own" rather than writing for other people. I have been kind of frustrated as to why bloggers can hire me to write for them and have a huge audience, but my own blogs always seemed to fall flat. My writing wasn't the problem; clearly their readers loved my ghostblogged posts. I knew how to write with keywords in mind and for search engine optimization, so I was getting crawled by the right search engine spiders. What was it then?

Honestly, I wasn't promoting. I wasn't using the tools I could have been using. I thought of promoting as paying for ads on search engines and other websites, and I balked at paying to generate a reaction. But what I learned from Vandermeulen was that there are lots and lots (and lots!) of ways to promote my blog without paying a cent. I just have to invest a little bit of time and energy into working the social media sites and other venues.

The first 100 pages of this book are packed with sites to go to, places to list your blog, ways to write to get and keep readers, and how to play the search engine games that get you listed as high as possible. This is primarily targeted at writers who have self-published a book and are looking to find an audience interested in buying and reading their work. The last segment is about Jo-Anne and her company, which does promotion for writers.

I don't have a book completed (yet!) but found the promotional tips for creating an online prescence extremely helpful nonetheless. There is a bit of repetition here and there, which probably is good for people who aren't super careful readers. Because I was taking notes, it got to me a little bit :)

A tip: Read this near your computer. You'll find it much easier to bookmark the websites referenced that way and can get started right away!

*This book was received at no cost through the GoodReads First Reads program. ...more

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