Thursdays with Amanda: Taking Topic Suggestions
Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
As Amanda is attending RWA’s annual conference in Atlanta at the moment, she isn’t sharing her usual Thursday dose of marketing wisdom. However, in a couple weeks she will be talking about all things related to street teams, so stay tuned.
For today, Amanda is asking for your input—do you have a publishing topic you want her to discuss on a future post? Any marketing concerns that need fresh insight? Please use the comments’ feature below to share your questions and ideas. Thanks!
8 Comments
I would love to hear about how agents can help authors who are very prolific. Can one publisher keep up with someone producing one or two serious novels per year? Would a publisher allow an author to work with another publisher on some titles if they were in a slightly different genre (magical realism for one publisher, contemporary fantasy for another, or more spiritual literary titles for one publisher, secular and more fantastic/imaginative for another), or would a publisher allow an author to self-publish every other title if they coordinated the release dates so they weren’t competing? How do agents handle these situations if the author doesn’t want agent-assisted self-publishing but only wants agent assistance for the traditional publishing deals? I’ve never heard anyone unpack this part of the hybrid author issue. Thanks!
I have a burning question about endorsements.
An industry insider said that the way endorsements are obtained from big name people is that the author actually writes the endorsement and emails it to the endorser for approval or tweaking. Although I don’t think that’s ethical, is it done? Is that they only way to get a notable endorsement?
Sometimes, I just feel so burnt out of the social media, platform building. I always love hearing tips about having a healthy balance.
I kept seeing the “Shelfari” tab on my Amazon Author Central page and finally took some time this past week to enter tons of information on my books. However I wonder if anyone is on Shelfari and if this was a good use of my time — especially since Amazon bought Goodreads. I believe getting info out about our books through as many streams as possible is like (as I recently heard it put by Brian Schwartz at the Colorado Christian Writers Conference) is like dropping bread crumbs leading back to the loaf of bread which is the book. Still, I wonder if ANYBODY is using Shelfari. Any thoughts? If so, how can we use Shelfari, and also Goodreads, to our best advantage? (There’s so much out there I can’t keep up on how each site works, let alone what to do with it!) Thanks, Amanda. I enjoy your Thursday (delivered on Friday) column.
Here are a some questions I would love Amanda’s insight on:
1. Is there a basic 1-2-3 approach on exactly which marketing strategies should be made by the debut author prior to the release of their first book? Is there a specific time frame for each component?
2. In terms of “swag” items, what are the pros and cons of certain items and which things seem to produce the most marketing return versus upfront cost?
3. Are there any free or low cost marketing ideas a debut author can utilize to help promote their book when they are working with a small budget?
Hope these questions make sense. I would love to see Amanda use any or all of these questions as possible topics so I could post and tweet as part of my WRITERLY WISDOM series…;~)
Thanks,
Donna L Martin
Thank you so much for all the insight, knowledge, and help you share every week. I’ve learned so much from hanging around you 🙂 OK, after months of wondering, I have to ask a question. I guess this is my internal editor that likes to keep things tidy. Thursdays with Amanda always comes to me on Friday. Does this bother anyone else? I’m sure it’s connected to the feed delivery system, but maybe the title should be Fridays with Amanda? But that wouldn’t work, because I suspect it posts on Thursday and is delivered on Friday. Oh, well, I feel better simply for asking the question. I look forward to your future posts, whether they arrive on Thursday or on Friday.
Mine are delivered to my inbox a day later too. I try to just come over on the right day, but sometimes forget.
Do you have a preference of a format for submissions when working with digital content? Are there differences between digital and print formats?