Author Sarah Prineas wrote a guest blog-post I appreciated on Shrinking Violet Promotions. It's called I Will Be Your Friend But I Will Not Be Your Fan: A Rant About How Authors Use Social Media Promotion. I took time to read through the comments as well as the post, as they provided some good counterpoints to the rant. Prineas follows up that post with Solutions: One Way to Deal With the Self-Marketing Frenzy, Plus a Shout-Out to Publishers.
I am reticent to do self-promotion for my online shop because I am easily overstimulated, and operate from the assumption that you are easily overstimulated as well. Still, I would like for people to find my shop easily through internet searches when what I offer is what they want. I've considered a paid ad, but as one who doesn't often click on ads, I wonder how prudent the expense would be.
Enough about promotion! I am happy that I now have a childhood favorite book called Little Witch, by Anna Elizabeth Bennett. I plan to read it to my daughter after slogging through the rest of The Road to Oz. I enjoyed rereading the first few books as an adult, but despite the presence of Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter,I realized I was Done With Oz when we came to the chapters with the head-throwing Scoodlers.
The Busker:
- Saints and Spinners
- I am a musical storyteller in Seattle, Washington. I make embroidered wool felt dolls: Alkelda Dolls. Full disclosure: I am neither a saint nor a textile-spinner.
GermanDolls
A fellow NaturalKids artisan
Willodel
A fellow NaturalKids artisan
Shoot the Breeze!
Alkelda Dolls is on Facebook.
The Flickr photostream is here:
www.flickr.com
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More fellow artisans!
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4 comments:
Oz is scary.
I embrace self promotion, even though I'm kind of shy. I want to be a lit star!
Oh, I'm a horrible person with whom to discuss this; I managed to go all the way through an MFA program without ever doing a reading. How does one do that? Through guile, my friend. Sheer guile.
I've never done a reading AT ALL. I was dragged into doing a book signing by Those Who Know Best - and that managed to be okay. So, it might be okay for you to make up a sort of internet flyer and take out ad space in an online magazine or something, or a school catalog sort of thing, since your dolls are related to a particular school's way of doing things. For me, as long as it's passive, it's not overstimulating, necessarily.
LSM: I embrace people with no fear promoting me, while I dig my toe in the ground and say, "Aw shucks, you shouldn't have." It's not something I can count on, though, so I have cute mini-cards.
Tanita: Those are good suggestions. I'm impressed you got through a MFA program without one reading. I've done only one reading, and that was to promote my senior project. "Refreshments will be provided" were the key words to the large turnout.
You have the cutest mini-cards.
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