Hello beautiful people! Sorry that I have been MIA the past few weeks. I was in Spain last week for the baptism of my bestie’s kid. I had the honor of being Godmother to little Ana Lucia and since I was only there over a long weekend – I had to take advantage of my time with them as much as possible. You may recall my blog post about going to the wedding in Sevilla back in 2015 – if not, you should read up on it. I promise there are lovely pictures. Sevilla is beautiful and a place I recommend everyone visit (especially if you love history).  Unfortunately for you lovely people, while I did take a lot of photos – they are of my goddaughter. I say unforfunately because the bestie wants to keep photos of Ana Luchee off the interwebs and I respect her wishes as a parent so the most I can offer you is a photo of the dress my goddaughter wore to her christening….before she took an epic shit in it. At the church. Right before the ceremony.

Did I mention that the dress is over 100-years-old?

Anyway, when I was first drawn to the dazzling life of traditional publishing – one of arguments I made towards that decision was marketing. I figured that with a publishing house, I could just sit back and write and the house will do the rest…..

er…..wrong. Sort of.

You see, with today’s oversaturation of social media – every author is expected to do some leg work in marketing. Of course if the house feels that your book is going to be a huge financial hit (for the house) then they are going to put more money into marketing your book. If not, well…you need get a platform up and running.

What do I mean by platform?

I mean you gotta first – get a blog or a website. You need a centralized place where you can post information about yourself, your books, tour information (if any), or pug information (like on my site). This was one of the reasons why I created this blog (aside from keeping my relatives in the know about my activities since moving to Germany). Eventually I will get this damned book publish and you can come here concerning more information aboout future books and travels and pug adventures and so on.

But is that all?

It’s a start, but you should also get a few social media profiles to pad your online presence. I have a Facebook page for this site but I have never really done much aside from post a few photos of Abner and continuously upload my posts from the site. As far as writers go, there aren’t many on Facebook. If you want to find writers – you go on Twitter.

Holy hell is it a different world. I avoided Twitter like the plague for the longest time, but once I got on and started stalking my favorite authors – it’s pretty cool. I still haven’t made much of a dent as far as followers go, but I still haven’t devoted as much time as I probably should. The other big social media giant is Instagram. If you are more of a visual person – like me, Instagram is suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper fun.

There are other social media sites that you can use but don’t get bogged down by trying to take on so much at once. Being on social media is only to enhance your presence and bring your work to the people who want to read your stories. You need to find a balance in maintaining an online presence without taking away precious time from what you’re really here for: to write!

What about you, fellow writers? I am a big Twitter and Instagram fan but I know there are more out there. What social media platforms do you use?

Bis nächste Woche!