Promote yourself |

Pen and money I could have titled this post: Promote yourself more.

However, most writers don’t like self-promotion so they tend not to do very much. If this is the case with established writers, it’s definitely the case with new writers.

Right from the start of your career in business as a writer it’s important to remember that you will have products to be promoted. These are most obviously your books and your features.

In my case it’s my books, the features I write, the training programmes I produce, our e-learning modules and so on.

When you have a book published, your publisher leads on the promotion of that book and you assist.

You also need to promote yourself. The responsibility for promoting yourself rests with you.

Promoting yourself

Some writers would love to avoid this task altogether. They would like to hide behind their products: their published works. They would like to remain anonymous and in the shadows. They would love to avoid marketing and sales and promotion.

This is definitely a poor business decision.

If you don’t have a business persona, you really can’t become an expert in anything. If you don’t have a persona, you will struggle to differentiate yourself from other writers. This is one of the reasons why many writers have difficulty in making money from their work.

The new writer’s challenges

As a new writer, you have a problem. As yet, you don’t know enough about how your career will develop to allow you to build your personal brand. You don’t know what you want people to remember about you.

I’m clear in my mind that I write about career development, self-development, work-life balance, entrepreneurship and so on. That means I’ve written books on related themes. However, I am also very clear about who I write for, so three of my four books have been written for teachers. The other book, a training manual, was written for professional trainers.

Now, because I specialise, publishers approach me. I have had several invitations to write more books for teachers. I also write numerous feature articles on career development and personal development for journals which serve the education world.

These features reinforce my personal brand. They also promote my brand and my name.

It will take you some time to develop your persona, as a new writer.

That doesn’t mean you can avoid promoting yourself until you know who you are, who you serve and what you want to write about. It does mean you want a flexible and relatively inexpensive way of promoting yourself now.

I still use a virtual business card to help me to do this.

Virtual promotion

When I meet people in a business context I give them a business card, which is fairly standard practice. My card sets out the usual details: name, business details, telephone, website, e-mail and so on.

However, I work in more than one market segment, so I am immediately presented with a problem. Do I need business cards for each market segment? Do I have to differentiate my off-line work from my on-line work and so on?

My answer is to have a website that I only promote via my business card. Thus, the people who tend to visit that site have already met me. This website has one page only. I consider it to be by virtual business card.

So what do I need on my virtual business card?

Well, most obviously I need a photograph, so that people who have met me, but may not remember me, have the opportunity to see my face again.

I list my other websites and my blogs, too. This means that I don’t make any secret of the fact that I work in two sectors. I actually use that to build business in both market segments.

Using a website in this way is inexpensive. It’s practical and it’s a good way of building a web presence, too. This website is the bedrock of my business’s promotional activities.

Here’s the link.

Here are the links to my two most recent books, too.

How to take charge of your teaching career

Work-life balance: a practical guide for teachers

This is the fourth instalment in a series of ten posts for new writers.