I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
I am not at all excited about promoting my Things Men Gave me essay-and-art project with social media. I have very few followers & friends on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and I’m not active on those platforms. I have ok numbers of connections on LinkedIn, but that’s not exactly the right place to promote a memoir about midlife love.
And I don’t want to promote mainly to people who know me, which is who I’d reach with those platforms.
So I’m researching marketing without social media.
Author Carol Michel shared a guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog for book authors How to Market Your Book Without Social Media, providing 12 alternatives including, appropriately enough, writing a guest post for someone else’s blog.
Marketing a book is obviously different from what I’m doing. I want to build up a readership/viewership for my essays and paintings and then possibly use that as a springboard to publishing a full memoir. I’m also planning in the nearer future to host a solo exhibition of my paintings and sell chapbook versions of the memoir (shorter pamphlet-style books).
Let’s review Michel’s 12 ideas and see how I might use them:
- Author website — Already have that, but I could probably write content that’s more optimized to attracting new readers and winning subscribers rather than simply documenting what I’m up to.
- A blog — Have that too. Could offer blog subscriptions to collect email addresses. Again, right now I’m writing for myself mostly.
- An email newsletter — I have three! I plan to write an article for the AI one this week that tells people about the TMGM project.
- Guest posts — Here’s something I can start looking into.
- A weekly podcast — I thought of doing a podcast on personal finance for Gen Xers. Could instead do one about online dating at midlife, or reinvention? Or art?
- A YouTube channel — I experimented with that during my year-long reinvention project and had a good time. I could consider launching a new one, again could be about midlife dating or about art or about reinvention.
- Professional organizations — I am planning to promote the project through my local art groups. Could consider doing it through national art groups as well. I keep wondering if I ought to hit on the theme of finding myself as an artist harder in the arc of the essays. Something to consider this week as I begin a new essay.
- Guest appearance on a podcast or radio show — I like this idea a lot, but I’ll have to research which podcasts might be appropriate for my work.
- Review copies of my book — Not ready for this yet.
- Speaking — to whom? Artist groups? Something to ponder.
- A LinkedIn presence — I could stand to update my profile, and link to the project. I will post my AI article there and may get some attention that way.
- Local bookstores — Not sure about this, but I like the local angle, as my essays are not just about my love of my romantic partners, but also my love of Colorado. In fact, maybe that is the real love story? Hmmm!
And some ideas that Michel didn’t mention:
- Host solo exhibitions and sell chapbooks. Could sell prints of the paintings also. Good for finding a local audience that resonates with my Colorado love story.
- Press releases to local news sources. What if the Denver Post wrote a story on my project? Not until it’s further along though.
- Submit an essay to the NY Times Modern Love column. This needs to wait until I have more of the project done, possibly even a book published?
- Buy an ad on Reddit. For example, I could promote this project on r/dating overfifty. Alternatively I could promote on Facebook or LinkedIn with paid ads.
For this week, here are my planned marketing activities:
- Provide my bio and a photo of myself to my WCACO contact who is building artist bio cards for the WCACO Facebook so that can be published
- Write an article for Incantata AI about using ChatGPT as an artist’s assistant, share that article on Insta, FB, LinkedIn
- Write an article for my Greensborough Drive newsletter (my personal newsletter) about the project. But what should the actual topic of the article be? And should I rename that newsletter to just be my name?
For today I’ll work on the first two items. I feel positive having surveyed some options for the future.