My husband pointed me in your direction just as I’m trying to develop my plan to promote my collection of essays and short stories. Your post confirms a lot of my ideas about how to find my audience, so thank you. Got you bookmarked.

Jenn

Great insights. I’m a graphic designer and wanna-be writer. There’s a book for designers called “Talent is not enough.” I think the title says it all. And this accounts for your success. You’ve used your creativity to draw a community and promote yourself using the new tools. I, like others, have watched your career with interest these last few years, and continue to draw inspiration from your example. Thanks for doing what you do.

Anthony

Mur, I’m just getting to know your work through the podcast and on Twitter… to borrow a phrase, you make me want to be a better writer, and that’s saying something considering I just gave up my world to do just that.

Rock on!

It’s odd how this is syncing up, but today I attended a seminar focusing on social networking as a marketing tool. I followed some links suggested by the seminar speaker. Through those links I found this page:

http://tinyurl.com/cdebgq

Being a fan/listener of your podcast, I immediately thought of past episodes discussing self promotion. I hope the above link will be of interest to you and other new authors.

Thank you as always for your candid and inspirational podcasts!

There are so many offers out there of things you can read, hear or watch… there are so many interesting characters out there writing, talking, drawing and photographing wonderfull stuff – if you do not promote yourself and your work – chances are high that nobody will notice you – and nobody will start to help you with your promotion either, if you do not start it yourself.

But the moment you start – if you are lucky – you notice that it can be fun! Like Mark allready said. But it can be hard work, too. And it’s time consuming, too. But in the end you can not go without it.

Don’t use it with—as one of my co-workers from England says—”A bit o’sardonic morning cheer in your coffee.”

You’re there to tell the peoples how much fun you iz and how great your work iz.

But take a lesson from the actions of an unspecified popular writer of vampire fiction from a few years back (not me!) who made the wrong kind of impact: don’t use the publicity or community networking to blast fans who don’t like your work and never, EVAH, blast an agent or editor. That isn’t networking. That’s suicide.

They read these things, folks. They really do.

Anyway, this is fun! I can’t imagine why anyone would not want to dive into self-promotion. It’s a wide, mad world, and I’m loving it.

(Oh and speaking of which, I wrote about you on my blog. It’s not all nice, but I did profess my love for you, so that says a lot.)