It is vital to get exposure and target the right readers for your writing, tell us about your marketing campaign? I’m exploring several different options here:
- I’m in the process of constructing a “virtual blog tour” where I’ll guest on other related blogs about the book and about the process of becoming a self-published author.
- I’ve engaged a blog tour company – Orangeberry Book Tours – to syndicate some of my articles to other blogs in my niche. My hope is that this will not only help me gain SEO exposure, but also some positive reviews for my book.
- I’ve sourced some advertising through Facebook and also through some indie publishing sites, such as World Literary Café, The Kindle Book Review, and Digital Book Today. This is as much about SEO as it is about sales, but I’ll be closely monitoring the outcomes of these adverts to see what effect they have.
- I’m using my own author platform through my blog (http://www.cormackcarr.com), as well as through the specific Vital Vocation blog (http://www.vitalvocation.com) which relates directly to the book. I’m tweeting from my author Twitter feed (https://www.twitter.com/cormackcarr) and from the book’s Vital Vocation Twitter feed (https://www.vitalvocation.com). I also have a Vital Vocation page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/vitalvocation) which is doing well (1000+ fans and growing).
- I’ve announced the blog to my own mailing list.
- I’ve constructed a set of Vital Vocation “memes” featuring a collage of the book’s cover with other photographs and some quotes from various parts of the book. These are proving popular on Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/cormackcarr/) and are being shared on Facebook.
Tell us about your new book? What’s it about and why did you write it? My new – in fact my first – book is How To Find Your Vital Vocation: A Practical Guide To Discovering Your Career Purpose And Getting A Job You Love (http://www.viewbook.at/vitalvocation). It’s a career guide, designed to help readers discover what they were designed to do with their lives – and then to help them go about getting it done.
I believe everyone has a talent (several in fact) and a happy life and career become possible when they start using those talents. I don’t just mean the big dramatic talents that famous people have. I mean the things we’re naturally good at. For some, that will be singing opera. For others, that’ll be flower-arranging. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s your talent and you can find a way to put it to use.
I’ve been in the position of being unhappy in my work, and I’m now very happy in my work. I got from there to here by identifying and using my talents, finding the values I wanted my work to support, and moving into an environment that allowed me to express myself in the most constructive way. It’s a process that I discovered as much by accident and instinct as by design, but I’ve been able to package it into a process that others can use to do the same thing. I continue to use it to refine my own career, and I use it to coach and train my clients.
Many others have now used this process now and I’m happy to report that all of them have moved closer to their ideal work as a result. It’s simple, but very effective – and a lot of fun. The exercises in the book are revealing and creative and I’ve had fan letters about the exercises alone!
If you could have a dinner party and invite anyone dead or alive, who would you ask? There are so many great people I admire. I’d be a bit nervous to do this, though. You never quite know how people are going to be in real life. What if they turned out to be horrible? My favourite dinner party guests are the ones I invite now – good friends and family. And maybe the Buddha. He’d probably help everyone keep calm and not get stressed. We could all do with some de-stressing, right?
When you are not writing, how do you like to relax? By being with friends and family, listening to music, watching great American sit-coms, practising yoga, going for walks in nature, reading…and thinking about what I’m going to write next…
Do you have any tips on how writers can relax? That’s a very individual thing, isn’t it? For me, I have to make sure I schedule breaks. I can easily sit and write for hours at a time and that’s not always healthy. Of course, when inspiration strikes, you sometimes just have to go with the flow…
How often do you write? And when do you write? I don’t agree with the old chestnut that “you must write every day”. I do write every day (sometimes several times a day) when I’m working on a project, but when I’m not, I’m happy to take a break and let my writing muscles have a rest. When I do write, I tend to find that I write best later in the day – but I’m pretty disciplined when I have a deadline, and if that means writing at 6am, that’s when I’ll be writing!
Do you have an organized process or tips for writing well? Do you have a writing schedule? When I’m working on a big project – like my book – I plan the process, but I never treat a plan as being written in stone. Plans are sometimes more fiction than reality, but they can be really helpful in getting us into action. I tend to set myself some sensible deadlines including publication dates, and work back from that to look at the milestones I need to achieve to get there by that time. I also break things down into word-count targets too, although I find I don’t often to stick to these. Sometimes I write much less than my word-count, but that balances out with other days when I write four times as much. I wrote about the process of planning my first book on my blog: http://www.cormackcarr.com/2012/08/20/how-to-plan-your-first-book/
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Genre – NonFiction / Careers
Rating – G
More details about the author
Connect with Brian Cormack Carr on Facebook & Twitter
Website http://vitalvocation.com/
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