When I first embarked on the journey of writing a book, I thought it would be straight forward. Write the story in chronological order, send it to publishers and cross my fingers someone wants to publish my book. Man, I was so naïve. Over the past year, I have abruptly learned that there is much, much more to this process. It truly is a marathon.
One year ago, I had the honor of being part of Joy Eggerichs's Publishing Punchline’s Cohort which coaches authors through an intensive month of writing, editing and brainstorming (not necessarily in that order). The goal is to get a book proposal polished enough to submit to literary agents. The process pushed me to my limits and helped me understand that there is so, SO much more to getting a book published than just writing the book.
At the end, I had a beautiful 40 page book proposal ready to go, but I have not yet sent it because I was missing an important piece to the puzzle. Better online presence. I was advised that my book proposal would look more appealing if I could hit a few marketing goals prior to submitting it. Here are some of the goals:
- Publish on-topic articles – Here are the articles I have published so far. I am trying to get one more about raising a child with a disability, but this is what I have so far:
- Motherly "Having micropreemie twins taught me it’s OK to grieve for babies who are still alive"
- Scary Mommy "I gave birth to 1 lb twins"
- Love What Matters "Woman gives birth to twin preemies at 24 weeks, ‘We knew this would be the greatest fight of our lives’"
- Grow email subscribers to 5,000 – I am only at 2,000 followers so far, but am going to try some campaigns soon to hopefully help me hit this goal.
- Establish a platform – Last week I hit 500,000 total followers and can hardly believe it. My followers are from Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook.
Technically, I have reached all my short term marketing goals with the exception of 5,000 email subscribers. It truly is a tough one! I am hopeful that 2023 will be the year I hit this goal so I can send my proposal off.
Thank you for following along.
