My newest marketing/branding strategy (of a potentially infinite number of possibilities!): I applied to be a contributing member of Blogcritics.org. I got the idea when Mayra Calvani’s review of Mortal Touch was picked up by Blogcritics and subsequently went all over the ‘Net, including the Boston Globe’s online version, Boston.com. I can post happily away on my own blogs but they’ll never get the kind of exposure I’ll get from Blogcritics. I read over the guidelines and e-mailed the publisher, Eric Olsen–and misspelled his name. Gods, was my face red or what when I realized I’d been that stupid! But he forgave me, because he e-mailed back yesterday saying welcome aboard.
But Blogcritics.org is a serious online “magazine.” Among the many requirements is that I have to post my first article…within 24 hours of receiving Eric’s e-mail. That’s one way to separate the dilettantes from the live ones, I guess! It is acceptable to post a previously published article for the first one, but after that they want everything you submit to be exclusive to Blogcritics or published there first. I chewed over what I might write…and with amazing speed that only a 24-hour deadline could have triggered, I whipped out a 890-word review of the new movie, “Beowulf.” Blogcritics wants substantive content, by the way. They didn’t give me a maximum word count, but they mentioned a minimum: at least 200 words. I also should post at least once per week.
So, I’ve been letting the review “rest” a couple of hours before one last read-through and then it has to go up by 6:00pm. (Ideally, I’d let a piece “rest” for a day or more, but this isn’t writing, it’s journalism *heh*.) After that, I have to add Blogcritics links to my blogrolls and links lists, and join the Blogcritics members’ Yahoo group. Whew. It’s exciting! But…whew. Then, I’m joining the IPNE Board meeting conference call at 6:30pm.
Someone posted to [self-publishing] listserv today bemoaning how much it takes to “build a platform” as an expert (according to one source she was reading, which, she didn’t yet realize, could be fairly assessed using her own judgement, and not treated like a cast-in-steel prescription). Well…it does. I’ve already spent years “building a platform” as a vampire/paranormal expert and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Aaron Shepard (Aiming at Amazon) replied to this poster, saying that there’s really no point in doing all that work (to build a platform and “brand yourself” as an expert) at all unless it’s a subject that you’re so passionate about, you’d do it anyway, whether you stood to make money from it or not. I have to agree with him, and it’s certainly true in my case.
It’s still one HELL of a lot of work. Whew.
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