To Market, To Market, To buy a fat pig

Read all the way to the end...and play along...and I'll put your name in a drawing for a signed copy of Cowboy Christmas.
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Also, if you've GOT Cowboy Christmas and have a request from my backlist we can work a deal if I've still got copies.
Now TO MARKET
If only marketing was as easy as buying a fat pig, herding it home, raising it, turning it into bacon and porkchops, cooking it. Ah, those were the good old 'marketing' days.
The learning curve on marketing is hard for me. But now I've almost got a system. I thought I’d talk about it today and, if you’ve got better ideas or FASTER ideas, please tell me.
First I've got to tell you all about my SHINY NEW WEBSITE. YAY!!!
MARY'S WEBSITE
The western look of my site is all part of Barbour Publishing branding me as a writer of Romantic Comedy with Cowboys.
I never dreamed they'd use a real branding iron, but no one said getting a book published was going to be all fun and games.
I also have a NEWSLETTER. Camy yelled at me the other day because it was hard to find. So I fixed that.
I hope.
Camy is scary so I try to obey her quickly.

Word Press-one blog there Petticoats & Pistols
Facebook-Personal page, fan page
Twitter
Shoutlife
If I’m doing it right I should be able to have my online appearances, book signings, book releases, etc. show up on these with some simplicity.
I’m going to talk about the really easy stuff today, which is using the automatic posting functions of Facebook. (forget I said easy. I managed it but it was painful and messy and required several visits to the ER. It is only easy in the sense that I did succeed in doing it and no one was killed)

When I schedule an ‘appearance’ whether a blog interview or anything else, I always, fanatically, rigidly go and put it on my Yahoo calendar. I’ve created a Yahoo group with only myself as a member. I use almost exclusively the calendar and click on the SEND REMINDER button to remind myself a day ahead, a week ahead, and hour ahead, whatever I deem necessary.
I include in those email notices, links and/or directions or requirements I need to meet. Am I doing a book giveaway? Am I supposed to post the blog myself of send it to someone. If so, who.
Then, immediately after I schedule that, I go to my personal blog Real Life Petticoat Ranch and create a very, very simple blog post about whatever event I just wrote about in my calendar. I mean SIMPLE. I can add more later, but I get that blog post written and SCHEDULED to post at the appropriate time. (I am so full of ... well, even the euphamism that comes to mind doesn't really belong on this blog...let's just say, I'm a disorganized freak who is lucky Tina is a SAINT and she keeps reminding me, then apologizing for nagging. I do regret giving her that cattle prod for Christmas though. Never really thought she'd use it on me.)I have figured out a way to get my blog to post to my facebook page.
You do this on Facebook by going to the bottom left hand corner and clicking on APPLICATIONS. You’ll get a lot of possible applications, including Blogger and Twitter. Click on them and follow the orders to post your blog to your Facebook page, do the same with Twitter. (I have NOT however figured out how to post blogs and Twitter posts to my Facebook Fan Page--anyone know how to do that? Use small words, and direct commands. Maybe threaten me in some mild way...a rolled up newspaper maybe. That's proved to be effective in the past.)
Every morning I check my OWN BLOG, seriously, and it tells me where I am, what blog I'm doing. Usually I'm aware of it all, and I often go in to my blog dashboard to add stuff so I notice what's already there. BUT recently (and this is partly what inspired this post) I had a great example of me going to my blog, and YIKES there was a reminder for a radio interview I recorded a while back...it was scheduled to be on in about ten minutes from when I checked the blog. So I got to listen to myself. My blog loads to Amazon automatically, too. I’ve got an author’s page there. I also load Seekerville to Amazon.
Twitter has to be done at the exact time you want it to post. I can’t find any scheduling ability on Twitter. So, using my own blog again as a reminder, I go directly to Twitter, post mostly just links and a very few words and THAT loads to Facebook automatically, too.
The real trick is slapping that blog post up ON THE SPOT when I make the commitment. If I'm going to fumbling anything, I do that. But if that's in place, the rest usually follows.I wish I could automatically post a blog to Shoutlife and to my fan page on Facebook. So I need to do those manually and often forget.
I wish I could figure out how to automatically post my Word Press blog, Petticoats & Pistols, but I can't seem to. I found the application but it doesn't seem to recognize my password/username. If anyone knows how to do that, please tell me.
Shoutlife is a Christian Facebook but it doesn't work and play well with others. If I want to post some event there, I have to do it manually and tend to skip that one most of the time.
There seems to be no end to the connections you can weave, but you do NOT have to make it harder on yourself than absolutely necessary.
So marketing, what do you think? Any tricks? I’m open to advice. Tina, that cattle prod thing...ouch...but you know...it's working. So sad.
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