Jolene's Writings Around the Web

Getting Free Publicity for Writers - Author Debby Grahl, a South Carolina Romance Author, used networking at workshops and conventions to her advantage. She took the bull by the horns and asked one of her tablemates at an event she was attending if she would be willing to write an article about her for that person's online magazine. Lo and behold it was called PINK! and Debby is one of their "Featured Women" in their January 2024 online magazine edition.  It just goes to show that if you do not take a chance and ask, the answer will always be, No!

Recently I volunteered to start the Writers Alliance of Gainesville's Marketing Coalition sessions back up for the writers group. Zoom is probably one of my favorite tools that I use to help me learn new stuff as well as help others with their own writing journey. To provide help to more of the members I created a YouTube Channel for the WAG group as well. We had a session in December talking about Amazon Author Pages and creating custom links to share on your own website and social media posts. This month we talked about Facebook profiles and creating Facebook public business pages for our writing business. I created a presentation for the session but that did not go over as well. Instead, it turned into a more free-form question-and-answer session as well as showing the different areas of Facebook. There is just so much to learn that we cannot get it all done in an hour's session. Just as an FYI - when you create a new YouTube Channel there are a few limits to uploading vid

There are still some holiday book sales happening. I like the tools that Smashwords provides for indie authors. They have a couple of grand sales events and invite their authors to participate. They also provide graphics, a couple codes, and more to share with your readers. Now that Draft2Digital has purchased the company you can utilize these marketing tools from your dashboard. So, if you are not currently a Smashwords author you do not have to join just to take advantage of these tools.  Sadly, they are only good for eBooks though. There are other free tools for authors to use throughout the year and we will talk about those in later posts. For now, enjoy the video I created for one of my clients and posted to our Southern Dragon Publishing YouTube Channel to help her host these promotional materials. She does not wish to get another social media account and we respect that. She does well with her blog posts and Facebook page. 

This is an excellent interview with one of our local North Florida authors. Mr. Davis is the Keynote speaker of the upcoming Sunshine State Book Festival being held in Gainesville at the University Hilton Hotel during the last weekend of January. - Check Out their Website for more information: https://sunshinestatebookfestival.com/

 Happy New Year!. We are all hoping that 2024 will turn out to be a great year for us all. For all my writer and reading friends out there I hope you get more writing done, publishing and marketing your stories in the coming year. For the readers we hope you will read more stories published by Indie Authors as well as our very own local North Florida Writers!