#ROW80 More Progress in My Marketing Education

If you're going to be different,
embrace your inner tiger

I am focusing on this #ROW80 on somewhat unconventional goals. I succeeded in breaking my habit of stalking my sales numbers. That's a big breakthrough.

Originally, I wanted 30,000 words by October, but I had to go back to my roots. I am not a full-time writer. I can't be for another 2.5 years. I have a daughter who is 28 months old. I AM a part-time writer. And I need to repeat that over and over again. Also, my book lineup changed. So a novel I wasn't planning on working on until next year is suddenly next in the docket.

I also have a mentor in Melissa Foster. I am lucky. Very lucky. Melissa takes the time nearly every day to check in with me, see how I'm doing, and we encourage each other. She is a vast wealth of knowledge, and the best part is, she helps me be the best author I can be, not just a carbon copy of herself. We are both similar in how we tackle anything and everything in the world, but we look at things very differently. Yesterday, a marketing opportunity came up and I was very proud of myself for passing on it. It was only $25, but the amount of work involved wasn't something I was committed to doing. Melissa let me know that for where I am, it made perfect sense to pass on it and that's something that took her a lot longer to figure out.

Melissa and I (plus some other awesome ladies she knows) are working hard on bring the WoMen's Literary Cafe up and running. This weekend I was knee-deep in webform field configurations on Drupal. And I still have some more work to do. Yeah. That was one of the biggest reasons I passed on the aforementioned opportunity...my talents and time are better spent on the WLC. Some people know me as that "out-of-the-box" girl, and I am! We're going to take those fun things like #TrickorTreat4Ebooks and make them free or dirt cheap for authors to participate in. I'm a huge believer in sweat equity!

And on those lines, I needed to step up my Twitter game. I have many great posts here and two on my reader site (it's going to get some much needed TLC in the near future) and I just started automating Tweets. I was very resistant at first, because well, it feels a little like cheating. But the reality is I don't have all of the time other writers do, so I NEED to use every tool available judiciously. That's important. For $5 a month I can bulk upload tweets with hootsuite.com. I will probably do a more in-depth post on this. But basically the rules are:

• No duplicate tweets in one file
• No more than 50 messages per file
• Tweets must be in increments of 5 minutes (on the 5 minute mark, so 07:10, 07:15)

As a very methodical person, I realized I could do a maximum of 4 hours of Tweets if I took advantage of every slot. But that's spammy. So I think I'm going to tweak that. I created an spreadsheet, custom formatted the date block, set a Data Validity control on column B for no more than 100 characters, and the third column is for links. You're supposed to use quotation marks around each field, but I found it works without it and they just screw up my links sometimes if an extra one slips in. So when I export to a CSV (and only the active sheet will, so I use my other sheets in the file for frequently used links and to set up the next cycle of tweets (so I can make sure if I need to promote like an article or somethign, I can make sure it runs every 8 hours or 12 hours etc.).

Exporting to CSV it looks like this:
30/10/2011 13:35,My latest #ROW80 update:More Progress in My Marketing Education,http://eawestwriting.blogspot.com
30/10/2011 14:15,The satire in Veggietales makes me chuckle. That and Silly Songs With Larry.

I don't use commas in my Tweets because it will mess up the Tweet (maybe THAT'S what the quotation marks are for...). And I don't use up every spot. I also put in non-link Tweets. The nice thinking about this is I can schedule days in advance and actually take a day off or two from Twitter without losing momentum. I'm using Refollow.com to make sure I follow everyone who follows me. :)

So that's the latest. #TrickorTreat was a rousing success and on Tuesday, I'm part of the COME BACK TO ME book launch which will be HUGE. It's the first promotion by the WLC and make sure if you're interested in being part of future promotions Melissa and I put together you register at http://www.womensliterarycafe.com/user/register (It's WoMen's Literary Cafe, for both men and women. We're going to be reaching out to readers, reviewers, authors, bloggers, editors, agents, and other publishing service providers to make a positive community where if we all work together, we can do anything!). In about two weeks the details of our next promotion will come out, including ways to coordinate marketing efforts together for free.

A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby. CANCELLED is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.  WIP: PAST DUE A nurse, crippled by debt, takes a part-time job in medical investigation only to find the man she's dating is a fraud!  (status: outlining)