~How to Keep Your Marketing Info At Your Fingertips~

Do you have a marketing cheat sheet? I do. Last year when I released my first book in the Skin Quartet series, Beneath the Skin, I had no idea how to go about marketing it. I hosted two well-attended book signings. I sent out some tweets. I posted on Facebook. I guest visited two blogs. That was it. But I knew that there was much more I should be doing.

So all last year, I took workshops, read blogs, and tried to educate myself on modern day book selling techniques via the web. I explored BookBud and similar discount e-book sites. I joined Netgalley, Romance Reviews, and several other review sites and learned how they worked. I upped my presence on Goodreads.  I took a Savvy Authors course on Facebook Ads, Jessica Clever’s workshops on using social media, and I subscribed to every marketing site I could find.

On August 18th, I released my second romantic suspense, Close to the Skin, published by Wild Rose Press. Here was my chance to put into action all I had learned. But before I could do that, I realized that I needed to have at my fingertips a whole kettle of information about myself and my book. This was the info needed to fill in ad requests, give to bloggers you visited, people you asked to review, and more.

Now I am a fairly orderly person. I have nice tidy document folders in my Dropbox arranged in subgroups either alphabetically or by date. I rarely have difficulty finding something. However, in setting up my marketing, I found I was continually pulling up the same materials and tweaking them to fit the number of words requested. It was time consuming and boring. So I developed what I call my marketing cheat sheet.

What is a Marketing Cheat Sheet?

My marketing cheat sheet is a single word document that lists all the info that I need to market my books. I started out with the obvious categories and then added new ones as they were needed. Here is my current list of headers and sub-categories. Everything listed here is something I used in completing forms and ad applications and so on to publicize my book. I continue to add to it daily. Feel free to copy it and adapt to your own needs.

AUTHOR INFO

• Address
• Email
• Kindle Email

WEBSITE/ URLS

• Readers Club Signup Page URL

Google Analytics#

Rss Feed URL

KEYWORDS FOR AUTHOR/GENRE

• Phrase 1
• Phrase 2
• Phrase 3

CONTEST WINS

AUTHOR BIO

• Twitter Bio 100 Characters
• 100 Words
• 120 Words
• 159 Words
• 200 Words
• 350 Words
• 2500 Characters (475 Words)
• 4000 Characters

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

• Amazon Author Page
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Goodreads
• Google Plus
• Instagram
• Tumblir
• Linkedin

FACEBOOK STREET TEAM URL

_________________________________

BOOK TITLE #1 (Add listings for each of your books)

PUBLISHER INFO

COVER DESIGNER

BOOKFUNNEL LINK

WEBPAGE for Book URL

# of PAGES

BARCODE

BISAC subject headings

ISBN

AISN

BOOK COVER URL

LOGLINE

PITCH

BLURB

• 100 characters (Twitter)
• 250 characters
• 400 characters
• 112 words/754 characters + spaces
• 350 words
• 4000 characters

EXCERPT

REVIEW QUOTES 4000 character maximum

KEYWORDS

BUY LINKS

• Amazon
• B&N
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Google Play
• Universal Buy Link
• Goodreads

AD WORDING

Click here for a PDF version  Author Marketing Cheat Sheet

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Making the Cheat Sheet Easy to Use

Now scrolling up and down what eventually became 20 pages of info was no fun. So I utilized a processing trick that has been so helpful in outlining my novels. I used Headers. By making every main category a Heading 1 and every subcategory a Heading 2. I can use the FIND tool to create a list along the left side of the document. Each Heading is clickable and will take you instantly to that spot in the Cheat Sheet.

The second thing I learned to do is to open the Cheat Sheet first thing every morning when I open my word processor. That way the Sheet sits on the far left, ready to yield its data throughout the day. Need a 100 word bio? It’s there. Need the ISBN? It’s there. Works like a charm!

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How do you organize your author and book data?