New Year Resolutions for the Indie

What are your New Years traditions? Normally my hubby and I do something a little fun to celebrate, an annual dinner party at the home of dear friends. My sister and her husband also are there, along with my BFF from high school and her hubby and all our close friend. Starting the year with friends who are really family is the best. Jonna always goes out of her way to treat the vegans as well as she does the carnivores.

And as always on New Years Day, I feel good, because I don’t drink alcohol, so no hang-over here.

So what are my goals for this New Year that looms fresh and untrammeled before us?

My goal is to create and implement a marketing plan for my books.  This is something I have attempted, but have always become side-tracked by life, and never got back to it. From what I've read on the internet this involves a combination of things:

1. During January I'm going to create a plan-of-action, and map out my strategy. Once I know the answers to the next two questions I will be able to develop a plan of attack.
2. I will identify my audience.  This is hard--I write for my own amazement, so I'm not sure what my audience is! But I will spend some time figuring that out, and I will blog about the process.
3.  I will figure out what makes my books different from all the other books out there, aside from their obvious, amazing wonderfulness. This is also difficult!  Apparently, I wrote my books while in a trance. I say this because the minute someone asks me about them, my mind goes blank and I have no idea how they got here, or what they're about. I will probably blog about the process of talking coherently about my work at some point, too.
4.  I will budget $$ for better advertising. I found a list of some good sites on KindlePreneur, both free and paid for, but you have to endure his blatant self promotions to get to it. Still, it’s worth the annoyance, and who knows, you may want to buy one of his products. My Goodreads ad was not worth the money by any means, and I won’t do that again. I haven't done a Google ad yet.

Here is the link to that page: List Of Top Book Promotion Sites: Free And Paid
I admit I'm pretty lousy at blatant self-promotion. But I intend to make this a good year for honing my marketing skills in such a way that I can sell a few books without annoying my friends. I am taking to heart a lot of what I have learned from Emily (Lee) French and Jeffrey Cook, and also from Thomas Gondolfi.

I see the New Year as a brand new beginning marketing-wise, with endless possibilities. In completing and publishing my books and building the small following I have gained, I've already achieved dreams I never thought possible, and now a new year lies before me. How wonderful to know that anything can happen!
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Connie J. Jasperson is an author and blogger, and can be found blogging regularly
at Life in the Realm of Fantasy.

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