Out With The Old and In With The Informed

My Decision to Rebrand Instagram

Wow this was a bigger undertaking than I thought! The one thing I have learned in life is when someone offers you a gift, you never dismiss a gift that is beneficial. When a fellow author messaged me and asked me if I would attend her virtual meet, I genuinely thought it was just an opportunity to chat and network with new authors. I said yes mainly because I wanted to support her as a friend and author. Little did I know, this would be a gift of sharing knowledge in an attempt to help myself and the other authors that attended.

The amazing author is Zoie Seay from @booksbyzoieseay. If you don’t know her, I will tell you that you should follow her. She is incredibly smart, kind and her brand is one that will resonate with so many parents. Her book is called “The Luckiest Child”. It is the first time I have seen a book that supports children and families that are blended at the child’s level. It’s a great resource and the author behind it is brilliant. She did not have to share her knowledge, she didn’t have to share it for free. When someone does this, I try to get the most out of it, to let them know I appreciated them including me. I listened and took notes. She opened my eyes on how to better market myself on instagram. Her advice was so completely helpful!

I paused the work I was doing on all my writing projects. I realized I hadn’t properly put my book out to potential readers in a way that not only would get them interested but keep them interested. I was posting like every other author out there and not talking specifically to my audience. I also began to discover that Zoie and I were like minded. We could make an incredible team because ultimately we had the same goals. By Zoie inviting me to the zoom meeting it re-opened my eyes to the importance of making time to learn.

Jumping into being an author you are scrambling to get your name out there and get your books out there to feel justified in giving yourself a title. But it is a bigger uphill climb than I think a lot of people understand.

The author community is helpful but Zoie got a head of the game and took a marketing course. I had put that on the “I’ll do that later list”. But really I should have been doing that earlier because it got me to focus. I was wondering why my sales had pretty much stopped after Christmas. Yes, I got that January would be slow. Everyone over spends in December and now are exhausted from spending. But January is the time as a person in an indie career to find out how to do things better and then put it into motion in order to make things smoother when the spring season comes. Huge lesson learnt. Never stop learning!

But it wasn’t Zoie’s job to do the work for me. She was kind enough to share the knowledge. I then had to look at what I wasn’t doing, hone in on who my market was and make it appealing to them. I also had to take into consideration what projects I had coming. I could have easily rebranded my whole site to be adventure camping for kids. But that would have been a bad move because most of my upcoming books were not about camping. I also realized I didn’t give my first book enough interest. A great cover is great, but I had to give people more. So I took a dive into how to highlight the content without giving away the story. The ideas hit me fast, and I wrote it all down. I redesigned the book ads, almost like relaunching it. I keep the parts of my feed that people liked and re-design how I would present it. I then dropped things that people liked but weren’t original. Like posting author quotes and jokes written by other people. It was time to keep the funny and the thoughts but present it in a different and more original way.

Now this isn’t guaranteed to work and sell me lots of books, but at least I can now say I put my best foot forward. What I need to do next is get that next book done, because that next book will boost people's interest in me and actually add to sales of the first book.