Why Authors Need a Marketing Cheat Sheet
~How to Keep Your Marketing Info At Your Fingertips~
Do you have a marketing cheat sheet? I do. Last year when I released my first book in the Skin Quartet series, Beneath the Skin, I had no idea how to go about marketing it. I hosted two well-attended book signings. I sent out some tweets. I posted on Facebook. I guest visited two blogs. That was it. But I knew that there was much more I should be doing.
So all last year, I took workshops, read blogs, and tried to educate myself on modern day book selling techniques via the web. I explored BookBud and similar discount e-book sites. I joined Netgalley, Romance Reviews, and several other review sites and learned how they worked. I upped my presence on Goodreads. I took a Savvy Authors course on Facebook Ads, Jessica Clever’s workshops on using social media, and I subscribed to every marketing site I could find.
On August 18th, I released my second romantic suspense, Close to the Skin, published by Wild Rose Press. Here was my chance to put into action all I had learned. But before I could do that, I realized that I needed to have at my fingertips a whole kettle of information about myself and my book. This was the info needed to fill in ad requests, give to bloggers you visited, people you asked to review, and more.
Now I am a fairly orderly person. I have nice tidy document folders in my Dropbox arranged in subgroups either alphabetically or by date. I rarely have difficulty finding something. However, in setting up my marketing, I found I was continually pulling up the same materials and tweaking them to fit the number of words requested. It was time consuming and boring. So I developed what I call my marketing cheat sheet.
What is a Marketing Cheat Sheet?
My marketing cheat sheet is a single word document that lists all the info that I need to market my books. I started out with the obvious categories and then added new ones as they were needed. Here is my current list of headers and sub-categories. Everything listed here is something I used in completing forms and ad applications and so on to publicize my book. I continue to add to it daily. Feel free to copy it and adapt to your own needs.
AUTHOR INFO
- Address
- Kindle Email
WEBSITE/ URLS
- Readers Club Signup Page URL
Google Analytics#
Rss Feed URL
KEYWORDS FOR AUTHOR/GENRE
- Phrase 1
- Phrase 2
- Phrase 3
CONTEST WINS
AUTHOR BIO
- Twitter Bio 100 Characters
- 100 Words
- 120 Words
- 159 Words
- 200 Words
- 350 Words
- 2500 Characters (475 Words)
- 4000 Characters
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
- Amazon Author Page
- Goodreads
- Google Plus
- Tumblir
FACEBOOK STREET TEAM URL
_________________________________
BOOK TITLE #1
PUBLISHER INFO
COVER DESIGNER
BOOKFUNNEL LINK
WEBPAGE for Book URL
# of PAGES
BARCODE
BISAC subject headings
ISBN
AISN
BOOK COVER URL
LOGLINE
PITCH
BLURB
- 100 characters (Twitter)
- 250 characters
- 400 characters
- 112 words/754 characters + spaces
- 350 words
- 4000 characters
EXCERPT
REVIEW QUOTES 4000 character maximum
KEYWORDS
BUY LINKS
- Amazon
- B&N
- iTunes
- Kobo
- Google Play
- Universal Buy Link
- Goodreads
AD WORDING
Click here for a PDF version Author Marketing Cheat Sheet
Making the Cheat Sheet Easy to Use
Now scrolling up and down what eventually became 20 pages of info was no fun. So I utilized a processing trick that has been so helpful in outlining my novels. I used Headers. By making every main category a Heading 1 and every subcategory a Heading 2. I can use the FIND tool to create a list along the left side of the document. Each Heading is clickable and will take you instantly to that spot in the Cheat Sheet.
The second thing I learned to do was to open the Cheat Sheet first thing every morning when I opened my word processor. That way the Sheet sat on the far left, ready to yield its data throughout the day. Need a 100 word bio? It’s there. Need the ISBN? It’s there. Works like a charm!
This looks like a great organizational tool!
Thanks for sharing.
You’re most welcome, Ana.
What a great idea. I have most of this information in separate Word documents and it can take an age to pull everything up. I don’t know why I didn’t think of something like this myself, but I’m so glad you did, and thanks for sharing.
Glad you found the idea useful. That’s what I was doing opening ten million word docs every day. Yuck.
In many ways, this is similar to the media sheet I use. Just missing the marketing. Thanks for sharing.
That’s the cool thing. Once you have it started, you can keep adding to it. Using the headings makes a really long document a breeze to use.
Great idea! I can always use some help with marketing. My least favorite thing to do.
Me too. I hated dredging all that stuff up just about every day.
Wonderful idea! I’m always pulling up link or info. This should work much better. Thank you!
You’re welcome. It’s great when we can make our marketing work easier and get more time for writing.