Call to action - April Platform Challenge - Day 19

As part of the April Platform Challenge my task today is to ask you to do two things:

• Please click on the share buttons  - they are big and prominent at the top of the right side bar on this page

• Please sign-up for my email feed – see the little box just under the share buttons. It has room for you to type in your email address. Please click Submit when you've finished.

And one more thing that is not part of my assignment:

Please join me at the LA Times Festival of Books on the University of California campus either or both Saturday and Sunday June 21 and 22, from 12 noon until 2:00 pm. I’ll be at the Greater Los Angeles Writer’s Society booth number 970. Hopefully I’ll be signing lots of copies of my book: Leaving the Hall Light On: A Mother’s Memoir of Living with Her Son’s Bipolar Disorder and Surviving His Suicide (Lucky Press, 2011).

You can’t miss me. I’m the one with the long gray hair.

WOW blog tour stop No. 14

A perfect segue to my blog post on marketing yesterday…

Today Women’s Memoirs has posted my answers to their questions about:

MEMOIR, BLOGGING AND PLATFORM BUILDING
 Marketing and Promotion on the Internet.

http://bit.ly/kp6bAC

They say, “As many of you well know, at Women’s Memoirs we are as interested in the marketing efforts that go into the promotion of a new memoir as we are in the actual writing. After all, in most cases, writing the book is only half the job. We need to get our work into the hands of readers. We need a platform to which we can draw potential readers and a variety of tactics for making our presence known.”

And they are so right. I’m finding the marketing of the book as much work or even more work than the writing.

I am so grateful to Kendra Bonnet and Matilda Butler for inviting to post on their wonderful Women’s Memoir site today about my book marketing experience so far and on June 22 when I answered questions about how writing a memoir helped me heal after my son Paul’s suicide in 1999. 

http://bit.ly/koJPP8

Kendra and Matilda have been most generous and caring with my story. Thank you so much to you both!

And another big thank you to Robyn Chausse and Jodi Webb at WOW Women on Writing for arranging my amazing blog tour.