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The following is a transcript of a free podcast interview with Joanna Penn of TheCreative Penn talking about Book Marketing.

Click here to access the free audio. The Creative Penn podcast has over 50 free audio interviewson writing, publishing options, internet marketing andpromotion for your book. It is aimed at authors, writers andpeople interested in books and publishing.You can see the fullbacklist of podcasts by clicking here. You can also Click here to subscribe on iTunes. Hi, everyone. This is Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn,and

today, I’m answering your questions on mar

ketingand promotion

.I absolutely love this subject which is quite surprisingbecause a few years ago, I knew absolutely nothing aboutmarketing and nothing about book promotion or any of these things. And I started to study it when I had my ownfirst book self-published, and it was just sitting there in thecorner, and I thought, I need to learn about marketing.So anyway, I have spent a couple of years learning about marketing,

I’ve

done a lot of courses, read a lot of books, and actually now, I really enjoy the whole idea of marketingand promotion, so I hope I can share that with you today because I know

a lot of writers

just think, oh my God, I don’t want to do this,

so I’ll be answering those questions.

So our first question comes from Gale in the USA.

Where do I start in making myself known as an author?

Brilliant question, and

it’s

, pretty core to every one of us. So I think there are 3 thingsyou need to do straight up.



You need todecide on your brand and your goals as an author and person.



You need to start a blog



You need to get social networking in some fashion.Those

are my personal picks for the 3 things you need to do immediately, and they don’t

have to take over your whole life, which is also important.

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So in terms of your brand, I think that’s really important.

Your brand for your onlineplatform is the words, the images, the look and feel of your site.

It’s what genreyou’re looking at. So for example, if you are a horror writer like

Scott Sigler versus aromance writer or, a spiritual writer, your websites are going to look pretty different, andfor example, you can have clouds and angels or whatever versus gory, bloody stuff.If you have different pictures on your screen, people are going to think different thingsabout you and about your writing.

So it’s really important to think about brand,

about the look and feel of your site, and what you want to be known as as an author.

So that’s really important first stuff. So have a real th

ink.The other thing to do is search around. Modeling is really good.

We all model writers

we like so find an author you like and check out what they’re doing online.

Chooseaspects of their site that you like. Obviously, picking someone like Stephen King is not

very useful because he is already a big author. He doesn’t need to do this stuff, and

someone like J.K. Rowling for example whose site, I think, is appalling; the Harry Potterone.

It’s

really terrible. It’s really over engineered.

But I would have a look at what types of things you want to do. So one blog that is reallygood for looking at is Zen Habits,and Leo Babauta there has got several books out of his blog. He got book deals because of his blog. And if you compare Zen Habits to a sitelike ProBlogger

,you’ll see

incredibly different look and feel, you know, what do you likeabout that ProBlogger?And Darren Rowse also has a book deal out of his blog (Problogger). Also have a look atspecific authors in your genre for fiction, and see how they do it. So many fiction authorscreate brand around their personality. SoJohn Scalzi is one,Neil Gaiman,and you know, people who actually blog about their lives and about them as an author. So have alook at them.

So that’s important, and also,

your brand needs to be sustainable and long-term

, so

it’s not just about your latest book. So in terms of making yourself known, this is goingto take some time. You’ve really got to be patient in terms of how long this is going to

take. So it needs to be sustainable.For example, I wrote my first book How to Enjoy Your Job. I started a website,http://howtoenjoyyourjob.com/ .I was building up that brand, and it

’s still there, but if you look at it, you’ll see I don’t

post there often. It’s not what I love. And then I started

The Creative Penn as a brand more about myself and that will continue when I writefiction, and you know, it sells those books as well.

So I cou

ldn’t sustain How to EnjoyYour Job because it didn’t go past one book so that’s a mistake I made.

So the next thing, you see 3 things there: decide on your brand, two, start a blog, and I’ll

talk about that in a minute why you should do that. If you just want to start for free and

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you want to try that, just get a free blog athttp://wordpress.com/ or one of those othersites,www.blogger.com,and just get on with starting. Just start somewhere, and as youbuild up content, you can then sort out the rest of it. And for social networking, choose aplatform that suits you. I personally like Twitter a lot so Twitter is my main one.Facebook obviously; these places you need to be at least, but you know,

choose a socialnetworking platform and go with it, focus on it.

So why these 3 things? Well, to me, they’re the basics of an online platform

, and in

terms of making yourself known as an author globally, that’s a really good way

to start.If you master those, they might be all you need, but you can also branch out, so forexample, with a podcast or another social network or forum or community or other thingsout the fact site. So hopefully, that gives you an answer Gale.A subsequent question on I guess branding is

, “

Would having a logo or visual image beimportant as a method for branding

”

from a listener in the U.S.Personally, I think you need some kind of image on your site because the plain free siteswith no images are

not very attractive, and you don’t feel like staying.

So I also recommend you use a picture of yourself

. We all hate pictures of our self.

Don’t worry. But it’s about connection.

People connect with faces

. So you need apicture of your face even if

you don’t like it very much, and you’ll be surprised. Yes, people will judge you, but people don’t expect

us to be movie stars. You know, you

don’t need to look like that.

Having said that, my face is on my websites, and what I use everywhere is a wedding

photo. It’s about the only time in my life I’ve had professional hair and makeup

! So Ibasically use that picture everywhere. Sitting here r

ight now I don’t look like that, but it

is still me.I also got a logo done mainly for my business cards because The Creative Penn is also abusiness I speak and do other things. So I got a logo done. It cost me around 300 Aussiedollars, which is probably around 200 U.S, and I just got a freelancer to do that.

But you don’t need to do that. You can just s

tart with a photo of you, a photo of yourbooks or something easy. You can also use this service likehttp://www.istockphoto.com/.You can also usewww.flickr.comcreative commons. Go to the extended search and click on the creative commons for noncommercial usage. So

you can’t sell them or anything, but you can use them on your site.

decide on your branding and then target your readers and your market throughimages on your site.

Images are incredibly important online. Text is brilliant for search

and people want text, and if they subscribe to your blog, then they’ll get text, but if theydon’t, the first thing people are going to arrive at your site is make a choice.