It was hard to say our Farewell to all the new friends and familiar ones on our last day at the conference. After announcements and worship we began with another excellent class by Brandilyn Collins. This 2 hour class on Restraint and Control was super special to me as she chose my WIP and also one for Sara L. Foust to share her ideas at how to make the openings of our scenes better by leaving out the unnecessary words and reminded us that the”verb is the most important word in your sentence.” Brandilyn is a master at this, so we both appreciated the advice very much. And the rest of the class said they wanted to read these stories so that made me and Sara very happy! Hopefully the books will be finished and will be out in a year or so.
After lunch I was able to take another very helpful class on Creating a Marketing Plan with Hallee Bridgeman. I had talked to Hallee about marketing before so knew she was very knowledgable, but I was amazed at how much she packed into one hour! I didn’t get a picture with Hallee at this conference, but will share this one from another conference taken with her husband Gregg Bridgeman. 
Here are a few of her tips:
- Write a mission statement for your writing.
- List of describe niche markets.
- Describe your services.
- Spell our your marketing and promotional strategies.
- Create a marketing budget. She suggested 10 % or less of last month’s royalties.
- Identify the competition–what are other authors doing?
- Monitor results.
She then ranked the types of marketing she discovered work best by asking readers why they buy a certain book and ranked them in this order:
- They know the author
- From a friend offline
- From a Goodreads friend.
- Goodreads recommendations
- A bookstore
- Amazon
- Library
- Goodreads browsing (Note to self–do more with Goodreads!)
- Newspaper
11. Facebook. Are you as surprised as I was how little Facebook helps book sales? She says it doesn’t usually affect sales much except on Release Days.
Hallee also talked more about Release days and other things to do on social media. She uses apps to pre-post information. And reminded us to make sure you keep your friends updated on your writing without sounding like you are just trying to sell books!
She said something that works well for her is to giveaway books for free, and if the person likes your writing, they will often buy your next books in the series. If you check out Amazon, you will see Hallee has several free books (at least one for each series).
Sorry I can’t share it all, but I will give you a tip to take any class Hallee does on Marketing! You’ll be glad you did! And to attend KY Christian Writers Conference next year! I couldn’t believe the variety of classes they had for all kinds of writing–even songwriting! So, now I will say Farewell again until next Friday.
