Your Greatest Resource

I sometimes work with students or clients who’ve published independently and want to know how to market their novel or memoir. I rarely have the sort of answers these writers are looking for at the ready, and so I was glad when I stumbled on this post from author and blogger Molly Greene: Book Promotions That Work. If you’ve just published something, and you’re wondering what you should do next, this is a short but handy list. It’s a good place to start, and a lot of writers need a good place to start because a lot of writers have exactly zero interest in marketing. Most writers just want to write. As well they should. Even with the good days and bad days, writing is mostly good. It feels good to sink into that dream. It feels good to forget about your day and your job and your bills and follow the stream of a story. It feels good to stop worrying what other people think about this or that and only wonder what you think of this and that.

And it feels good to listen to your imagination and intuition. They come up with such interesting ideas, ideas you would never have come up with bumping around your day, grousing about the government or your in-laws. How reassuring, when you go deep into that dream called a story and the imagination and intuition take over; how nice to know you don’t have to come up with every little idea by yourself.

Which is why, I when I teach marketing, I don’t start with lists, even good one’s like Molly’s. I don’t want any author to lose track of their greatest resource. This resource is not on any website or in any class or any writing magazine or writing book. It can be found exactly where the stories you are marketing were found, and it is always waiting there with another great idea.