It’s not going to be a surprise when I say, I like to write. But these days, being a writer also means that you need to tackle a host of other areas, such as marketing your books. I’m learning the ropes of book marketing, but mostly just concentrating on writing.
The first challenge I observed about book marketing was the technical hurdles I had to scale to start building an “author platform”. That meant hours learning WordPress, scrolling templates, learning Mailchimp, trying to figure out plug ins, etc. Every hour I did that, I was NOT writing.
So I asked for help. I asked other writers, they sent links to tutorials, and it did shave some time off the learning curve.
Thank goodness for the generous community of indie authors.
The next major challenge I encountered was having graphics. I had to hire a cover artist because no way was I planning to learn Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever other artistic types used. (I did however manage to teach myself Canva, simple enough even for me!)
When tackling things like setting up a Facebook banner, I realized, I just didn’t know how to get my book cover art into anything suitable for FB banners. I went to Fiverr to hire someone. It took forever to find someone and then I didn’t like the finished product at all. Then out of the blue, Derek Murphy of Creative Indie shared his Google slides. Then he posted a YouTube video. It’s all free. I was overjoyed. It was simple enough that even I could do it. I’m so grateful. Here is the link.