The Organised Author #1

This month I am taking part in a fantastic series of daily challenges created by my esteemed indie author colleague, Cindy Tomamichel, as part of our Sparkly Badgers Unite indie author writing group on Facebook. It's designed to help you focus on becoming more organised as an author and will also act as a handy guide to make sure you haven't forgotten anything crucial to your marketing efforts.

So far we've covered the following topics:
1. What is your platform?
2. To Do Lists & Planning
3. Platform focus and author brand
4. Using your author brand focus


What is your platform?

Create a list of every social media platform you currently have a presence on as well as the number of followers. Then consider which ones you don't like using or are relatively inactive on. Is it worth maintaining platform? Would your efforts be better spent elsewhere?

Knowing where your followers are will also show you areas you may wish to build your following. It's also a great way of checking where your followers are growing and where they are not.

Make sure you have a list of all your social media links in one place, easy to copy and send out to future interviews, articles, blog posts - anyone who asks for them.

Now that you've decided which social media sites you use the most, make sure you've created an email signature with those links included so that every time you email someone they know how to get in touch with you.


To Do Lists & Planning

Whether you love them or hate them, lists are handy. Choose what works for you - pen & paper, tick lists, a diary, the latest phone app, google calendar - just make sure you use it properly and that you don't fall into the procrastination trap.

Don't spend ages writing a list of all the things you think you need to do because it will take forever, it will depress you and writing the list takes you away from actually doing the tasks.

Platform focus and author planning

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your snappy tagline to describe your writing?
• What is your genre?
• What images best suit your brand?
• What else are you interested in? It's important to be able to talk about interests other than 'buy my book'.

Joanna Penn has a helpful article - 7 Best Ways To Build An Authentic Author Brand - that you might like to explore further.

Using your author brand focus

Now that you've spent some time focusing like a laser beam on your author brand it's time to make sure all that good work gets distilled into your author bio. Think about whether your bio reflects your author brand, would you buy your books?

Kindlepreneur has a helpful article - How To Write A Compelling Author Bio - that you might like to explore further. 

If you've found any of this helpful and would like to know more, get involved with The Organised Author event over on Facebook, all indie authors are welcome. Or perhaps you'd like to join our Sparkly Badgers Writing Group. I will, of course, post again next week with the next batch of activities. Let's get organised!