Let’s start at the beginning. Question One of the Creation Content Playlist: a content creation strategy program
Tell me about your business? I want to hear all your current and future plans as well as the marketing strategy you’re using and what is and isn’t working. Most of all, I want to know how I can serve you.
The Creation Content Playlist
The Current Situation
I’m a novelist. I’m currently working on a trilogy that is a mashup of cozy mystery and alien invasion story. I like a good mashup story, how two unexpected things can come together. I really like this combo because it taps into two features I really like in my books. The cozy part gives me characters I can relate to and a sense of community. I also like big questions and science fiction is designed to explore them.. This series follows a small group of humans who encounter aliens, the outer space kind, in the midst of a murder investigation. I really enjoy how these two groups interact and the questions that come out of those encounters. The ones I’m exploring here:
- What happens when you become disconnected from your history? How do you define yourself and live a life with purpose
- Is the above desirable? If so, how far would you go to maintain it?
- What happens when we lose control of the tech that lets us manage our world?
- Most importantly, how do you manage unexpected/unintended consequences?
While I am a novelist, I’m also a businesswoman. I’ve decided to go the self-publishing route, meaning that not only do I have to write the books, the cover, blurb and all the marketing are my responsibility as well. And that is why I’m here. This is part of my marketing plans. Not only to provide my readers a window into the real process of creating not only a book, but all the stuff around the books. But to SELL the books. Call me vain, but I don’t want to do all this work and have no one read them. I poured blood, sweat, tears and, most of all, love into them. They deserve to find their people, and this is about helping them do that. And since a goal without a plan is a wish, this is the content creation strategy piece I need to grow this business.
My World In Five Years
My current project, the Minor Invasion series will have found its people, but it will take time and consistency for that to happen. I accept that, and embrace that my people might not be completely obvious. But I find them, nurture them and grow them. And since I’m someone who likes goals to shoot for, I will have nurtured 100 true fans and onboarding more to get to 1000 in two more years.
The series is still doing well, book one, How To Survive A Minor Alien Invasion, is on perma-free and I’m producing audio versions and have lots of merchandise around it, including t-shirts, stickers and magnets. Why? Because I’m a business woman and more than one revenue stream is always a good thing. Besides, I’ll make sure that I have amazing stuff that people will love.
I will have three more books out, not sure which ones yet, but 3 more. I have ideas percolating, but don’t want to plan it out too much in advance. Writing is a mysterious process. I’ll write what the muses inspire me to.
Other, underdeveloped but possible ideas:
- I launched the podcast.
- I’m building a free the books movement (fights against bans)
- The writing women (a group I belong to that helps new writers get started) do one presentation monthly and we each get clients and leads from this project, plus a community we are directing via critique groups and other meetings.
Everything I do is about bolstering confidence in myself and my tribe. The confidence to express themselves and to authentically present themselves at events, to authentically show up online, to know you can write a book and employ the marketing you need to sell it. And I know this truth. My books are not going to stay in one place. I’ve got other plots to create, but all of them use genre to explore big questions in a way that feels natural without ever feeling pretentious, the way writing literary fiction would to me. No shade, some people excel at it, but I’ve been a genre reader all my life. Writing anything else wouldn’t feel true to me. And I write the best ones I can, always shooting towards brilliance, but aiming to hit better than before. It’s a journey. I want to not go on the ride alone. It’s that simple