Story Marketing: How to Have Fun Marketing Your Fiction Book

1. Story Marketing Introduction: As an author, you have to push through a lot of self doubt, crashed in nation and editing to complete your novel. But it's all worth it to bring your story toe life and finally see your book available for sale on bookshelves. But as time passes, you notice that your book continues to just sit on the bookshelves. You try to be patient, but as the days pass, you get more and more discouraged. You didn't spend months or even years writing your story on Lee Toe. Have a few 100 people read it. You might buy some books to learn how to market your novel. You try to do what they tell you, but it's frustrating. Not only are the results minimal, but you want to be writing, not selling. Can't someone else do this for you? If you book itself published, marketing is entirely your responsibility. But even if you're a traditionally published author, publishing houses do very little marketing for their authors. And today all authors need to take responsibility for promoting their books if they want their stories read. The good news is that marketing doesn't have to be something you dread. In fact, you could have fun marketing your fiction books. Really, despite your past experiences, marketing your novel can be fun. I'm going to show you another way to share your book with the world. That way is story. Marketing story Marketing focuses on sharing your story instead of selling your book, What's the difference? You stop asking readers to buy your book and instead focus on giving them what they want. An opportunity to enter the world of your story by providing additional content about your story. You draw readers deeper into your novel. You create content that allows your readers to discover unexplored parts of the story setting. You create opportunities for your readers to interact with your characters and get to know them. Better is your readers consume story marketing content. They become hungry for your books. In this class, you'll learn how to create story marketing content that attracts and keeps readers captivated in your stories. During the class, you'll have fun creating an easy piece of story marketing content that you can share with your audience to attract more readers. You don't have to have your story already written. In fact, I encourage authors to create and share story marketing content while they're writing their stories to help build anticipation for its release. If you'd like to sell more books and have fun doing so, and I encourage you to enroll in story marketing today, I look forward to seeing you there. 2. You're an Author, Not a Marketer: stop trying to be a marketer. Uran author. I realized that may seem like a strange statement in a course about story marketing, but please hear me out. I've helped many nonfiction subject matter experts who has struggled like yourself to market their product or service. They found it difficult because they were experts in team performance, computers, cake decorating, alternative healing or some other topic. But they were not experts in marketing. They served their customers well. But the moment they switched from serving their customers to selling to their customers, they became awkward and ineffective. In addition to not being skilled at marketing, it was also something most of them dreaded doing that caused them to procrastinate their marketing efforts. This combination of inexperience and procrastination made it no surprise there. Previous marketing efforts were largely ineffective because of their passion to promote their product or service. They tried to become marketing experts and discipline themselves to do more marketing. But doing so pulled him away from what they did best and often drained them of energy. There's a better way. Use your strengths, not your weaknesses. Uran author, Not a marketer. You're imaginative and creative. You built a captivating world. Readers will enjoy exploring. Use that world and your imagination creativity to draw readers into your story and make them hungry for more. 3. The Benefits of Story Marketing: the benefits of story marketing story marketing has three main benefits over traditional marketing. Number one story marketing is more enjoyable for your readers to consume. Does your audience want to read another email or social media post where you encourage them to buy your book? Probably not, but what they enjoy getting to know their favorite character. Better for discovering some previously unknown aspect of your story world. Definitely. Story marketing is fun to consume, so your readers are far more likely to pay attention to it and pass it along to their friends. You can spend a bunch of money and time trying to compete and be heard above all the other distractions your readers are exposed to on a daily basis. Good luck with that. Or you can deliver content. Your readers will not only open and read, but will be anxiously waiting to arrive. I'd recommend the ladder number two story Marketing is more enjoyable for you, the author to create. I'm going to take a wild guess that you enjoy creating your stories. Sure, it could be hard for us starting work at times, but we're authors because we love to explore the stories we create. Once you get a feel for story marketing, you may find your having more fun doing the story marketing than writing your actual books . Story. Marketing allows you the freedom to explore aspects of your characters and stories you had to ignore to keep the flow of your book moving along. But now, with story marketing, you have a reason to revisit, explore and have fun presenting other aspects of your story. You could enjoy doing crazy things. When you start marketing this way, procrastination will almost entirely disappear. You're going to start looking forward to doing story marketing. Don't be surprised to find yourself waking up in the middle of the night with a great news story marketing idea you want to share with your audience. You could have fun talking to other authors as you brainstorm Interesting new ways to impart your story with your audience. How can you help your readers get to know your characters? But what fun way is, can you further explore the setting with your readers? Number three story marketing helps you create better stories by delving deeper into your characters and other aspects of your novel story. Marketing helps you write more captivating books. If you find yourself stuck at some point while writing your story, create a piece of story marketing content related to the character or question you're struggling to gain. Clarity on the process will often help you find the answers you're looking for and get you unstuck. Traditional book marketing pulls you away from the process operating your novel, but story marketing helps you write a better book and complete it faster. If you find it difficult to create story marketing content from your character's perspective, it's likely a sign you need to take a step back and get to know your character better in order to write a great story. Each of the story marketing ideas from the character's perspective can help you flesh out a more fascinating character. Readers will want to get to know as you're improving your ability to write a great story. You're also creating effective marketing material by creating story marketing content. While you're writing the story, you'll grow interest in your novel before it's even published Story. Marking helps the reader, the author and the book. It's a win win solution 4. Story Marketing Categories & Principles: I'd like to group story marking content into four different categories. The 1st 1 is characters. There's a lot of different ways you can create story marketing information in regard to your characters. You can create content about the character by sharing information with readers about their background, but what they like, they dislike things that you couldn't include in the story because it would have just slowed it down. Another way to create story marketing content related to your characters is to do it from the character's perspective. Now this could be a lot of fun. You can create a Twitter account and then start tweeting on behalf of your character. This is nice because you can really start interacting with your readers and they get to interact with your character or maybe create a board on Pinterest and pin things that that character would really pin. The second story marketing category is setting and more now. This, of course, includes the setting of your story. You can share pictures from there. You could go on a trip there and share information. You can let them know more about that place or that time in history that once again you couldn't put in the story cause it would have slowed things down if you chose us some historic period. There's probably all sorts of fascinating things that you could share with your readers. Or maybe you did a mystery. And you know all of this stuff that you had a research about forensic science. Or you could write about all sorts of different things and be able to share a lot of interesting background information with your readers that because they like your story, they probably would also enjoy learning more about it. You can also create study guides, but club guides. You can share book highlights and quotes all sorts of things. The third category is you, the author. Often readers want to know more about the author. Now, if you're a little shy about sharing things about yourself, I can understand. But readers want to understand why you, the author wrote what you did there, gonna want to know what spawned that idea in your head. Was there some experience you had that encouraged it, or why did you choose that place or that time in history? The four storey marketing category is your readers specifically how to increase interaction with your readers. There's all sorts of fun ideas from creating contest where they give ideas, suggest names for future characters or places. You can ask them to suggest what actors or actresses should play the different characters in your story. When your book is made into a movie, there's all sorts of possibilities. So just to refresh the four storey marketing categories are your characters, the setting and more you, the author and your readers. The number of story marketing ideas is only limited by your creativity, but I'd like to share some story marking principles for generating your own ideas. Number one. Don't sell your book. Share your story number to help your readers become part of the story. Placed them in the setting. Let them interact with and really get to know your characters. Number three. Draw your readers deeper into the story. Uncover the best nooks and crannies. Number four. Keep your readers snacking on your story. Be their comfort food number five. Apply the same writing principles used in your stories show don't tell hooked them in and all the other writing principles you've learned. Number six. Think outside the box. Use your creativity and imagination and finally, number seven have fun making story marketing content 5. Creating Story Marketing Content: in this class. I'm going to help you walk through the steps to create your own piece of story marking content. And I realized that whenever you do something new, you can sometimes feel a little daunting. And so we're gonna take this a step at a time. So the first step, not surprisingly, is to choose your story marketing idea. You could create story marking content about your characters could create about the setting or the time period. You could share something about you yourself, the author. You could create some sort of content that would help your readers interact with the story or yourself more. But the key is to choose a story marketing idea that will help readers immerse themselves further into captivating parts of your story. Ask yourself, How will it draw readers deeper into your stories? And what about it will motivate your readers to share it with their friends? One of the great things about story marking content isn't just that you have fun making it , or that your readers have fun and consuming it. But because your readers have fun consuming your story marketing content, they want to share it with their friends and this is key because so often with marketing words pushing it on our readers, it's boring. It's all about us, not the readers and how they're going to enjoy things. But if your readers are enjoying things, they're going to want to share it with their friends, and then you get your own volunteer marking force. And that's how books really get out to more readers through word of mouth. Now, if you're still struggling to think of some story marketing ideas, I have some resource is for you, and the next lesson I'm going to introduce to you just on a high level, some story marketing ideas to get you started. Also, you might want to view my other classes in the story, marketing Siris on skill share, where I go really in depth and share a lot of ideas. I also recommend reading the book story, marking how to have fun marketing your fiction book where I cover 50 story marketing ideas and even talk about some of the techie side of how to implement a love this And then finally, I also recommend visiting the story marketing hub. If you go to Leah and barry dot com for its last story. Hyphen marketing Hyphen ideas. Authors can come and share their story marketing ideas, get feedback and see other authors ideas for story marketing. I'm sharing 50 story marketing ideas in my book and through these classes, but I recognize that all of you have so much creativity and imagination and can come up with tons more amazing story marketing ideas. So I created this so you can come share your ideas. Learn from each other, and one benefit also comes from. This is if you share your story marketing ideas and have a link to the content you created on your website. And social media and other people will see it. Click on those links and learn about your books and your characters and want to become readers of your books. Once you've chosen your story marketing idea, Step two is to outline the content. Now, a key part here when creating story marking content is to not overthink this. Don't make it into some huge project, so keep it simple. For example, I decided to just create some story marketing content to help my readers get to know the main character and power revealed And so I asked, just in the main character, What do you like most about Bellingham? And I asked him, cause he had in the first book, just moved to Bellingham for my outline. I just did a bullet point nature, his new friends and maple Bacon donuts. If you don't know about them, you've got to try it. Once I had my outline, which only took me a couple moments. Then I created the content. You can create a written piece of content like a block post. You could create a video, choose what you want. So my case I created a block post. I took my outline, and I just wrote one paragraph for each of the things he likes most about Bellingham. And when I wrote them, I kind of link them into aspects within the story to help those who haven't read it yet. Want to read the story and learn more about it, but also to help those who have read the story kind of connect with the story again? And then I even talked about Maple Bacon donuts and included a link to the Real World Rocket Donuts, where they make the maple bacon doughnuts that I found some pictures with Creative Commons licenses so that I could put those into the block post. I chose my idea. I outlined it. I created the content, and now step for is to publish the content. I opened up my WordPress install and created the block post with my content, added the images and published. It was able to do this in just a handful of minutes. It's quick. It's simple. It's not something over thought, but it helps my readers get to know Justin better and be more interested in him and connect now that I've created this block post. Also, keep in mind that there's no reason why I shouldn't reuse this content. It's a good idea. Once you published, for example, a block post shared on Facebook, tweet about it on Twitter, maybe a credit image of this content. So take those three ideas and create a little image with them listed there and put it on a Pinterest post. And that image could even be shared on Facebook can elsewhere. I could even create a YouTube video that was really quick and simple touching on the same topic, so to summarize, when you're creating your story marking content step when you want to choose your story marketing idea to outline the content. Three. Create content and then for publish it. So now that you know the four steps to creating your own story marketing content in the next lesson, I'm going to share with you some ideas on different types of story marketing content you can create. 6. Story Marketing Ideas: if you're struggling to decide what piece of story marketing content you want to create for the first time, I thought I'd share with you a few more story marketing ideas to get you started and to trigger your own ideas, you might want to do something related to your characters, likes or dislikes it be something they like or don't want to do. Could be related to food, anything you want and then try to link it into the story. If possible, do the thing that they do or don't want to do, and then share with your readers your experience. Another fun idea is to write a weekly or monthly advice column. But have your character right. The advice column. One fun option is to go visit the setting of your story and then share with your readers the experiences Thea Ventures you have when you're there. When we write a story, we often have to do a lot of research, whether it be researching some historic period or researching how something works or information about a place that we're setting the story in. We usually can't share a lot of that research within the story, so why not sure within your story. Marketing. You've already done the work. Have fun sharing it with your readers. Also, consider including stories about what led you to become a writer. A lot of Raiders air, fascinated by the idea and the life of writing you can share with, Um, the challenge is the successes. You experience the ups and downs, but you can also share stories of what led you to become a writer. What writers influenced you? What experiences did you have that drew? You were pushed you to become a writer. Another thing that readers may be interested in is to know what are your favorite books or characters or movies when they're interested in you as an author. But also, if they like your books, there's a good chance they may like the same books that you like, and so it can give them ideas for what to read next. Another fun thing to do this. In addition to sharing your own stories, ask your readers to share their own crazy stories about things that may relate to the story you wrote. This allows you to get to know them better and to allow readers to comment and interact with one another. And finally, like I talked about before, ask your readers to suggest which actors and actresses would be best to play the characters in your story. If it was made into a movie, we can all dream right, and it could be fun to get a sense of what your readers envision your characters to be. And why not get ready for when your book is finally made into a movie. If you're still struggling like I suggested, either check out my other classes in the story. Marketing Siris. For more detailed suggestions for story marketing ideas, read the book story Marketing How to Have Fun, Marketing your Fiction book or check out the story hub at Lee and bury dot com fort slash story marketing ideas. They also encourage you toe post in the discussion below. If you have questions if you want feedback, I'm here to help 7. Summary & Putting Your Learning Into Action: Let's quickly review what we covered in this class. First, Share your story. Don't sell your book. Use your strengths, not your weaknesses. Draw your readers deeper into your story and make them hungry for more. Try to make a point to use the different story marking categories, including your characters, the setting and more you, the author and your readers. And once again, don't forget. Have fun while creating your story marketing content. Before we dive into the project and talk about creating your first piece of story marketing content, I'd like to ask you to please take a few seconds imposed to review. Doing so will help bring this class to the attention of other students and give them the opportunity to learn from it. You can post a review by either clicking on the link above the video and the black bar or in the link below the video that says Late review Thank you very much. Now it's time to create your own piece of story marketing content. Action is essential toe learning, So to encourage you to take action, I want to send a gift to everyone who posts their project, and that gift is the Story Marketing Reference book, which contains all of the checklists, worksheets and guides I created for the book story marketing. It also includes recommendations for the best online tools to help save you hours of time and lots of other helpful Resource is so everyone who posts a project, I will send that resource to you for free. So just a reminder when you're creating your own story marking content, you want to first choose your story marketing idea, outlined the content, create the content and then published the content. And for this class, then also, please share it as your project within the class. Now, if you haven't ever posted a project before, all you need to do is first click on your project below the class video, then in the form below. Enter a title for your project that includes some project details in the project workspace , and it's even fun to upload an image of the project. If you have time and you have one and then down below, click the blue Create button. That's all there is to it, and those who post their projects that I look forward to giving feedback to all of you. I also encourage each of you to provide feedback to each other. If you've only so far shared your project with the class. The now I encourage you to promptly share the content with your readers. Thank you very much for taking this class, and I encourage you to create and share your project. Please post a review and please keep on learning and you can check out my other classes to help you do so. Have a great day.