Mary Kelaher tells a gritty story about life in the cast of a family's shadow.


Mary Kelaher

You're over the first hurdle as a writer and you're finally writing consistently. Now what?

Join me as I trawl my way through all the writing tips, promotion tips and publishing tips to try and find the diamonds in the bedrock.

Girl in a field of grass

Monday, May 14, 2007

Mailing lists

Creating a mailing list goes hand in hand with telling people you are writing novel. I have been amazed at the number of people who have asked to read my book when I've finished and have given me their email so I could send it to them.

This included people I met:

* at work
* on the Internet through different groups
* at parties and over dinner
* at workshops

All you need to do to get started is to create a group in the Address Book of your email application.

Mailing lists are also useful if you decide to go down the Newsletter path later on. You have a ready made audience.

Now I'm not dumb enough to think that every person that has given me their email really wants me to send them my book to read, but hey you've got to start somewhere.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Free promotion tips

You don't have to spend money to find good ideas for promoting your novel. You can find plenty of web sites, blogs and newsletters about book promotion published by public relations and marketing professionals, and published authors on the Internet.

You can visit these sites individually, or you can use a blog tracking site such as Technorati or a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us to link to and access your favourite sites from one spot.

To get newsletters, all you need to do is to subscribe and they are generally mailed to you periodically.

The most useful promotion tips for the unpublished writer I have found are at:

Book Promotion Tips
Inspired Author