A to Z as Marketing

       When I did my first Blogging from A to Z April Challenge in 2010 I had no idea that my simple stunt would still be going strong seven years later.  At the time I was merely trying to gain attention to my few month old blog and acquire new followers.  After my announcement on Saturday March 26th, 2010 of my intention to blog from A to Z starting the following Friday, there was an immediate response from my few readers that they'd be willing to join me for the month of blogging.  In a matter of five days nearly one hundred bloggers from around the world had signed up to join me.  Most of those lasted through that first month of A to Z.   The success of that first April indicated to me that we had something with great potential on our hands.

       From the outset, one of my primary impressions was that the A to Z Challenge was to a great extent about marketing.  I was trying to "sell" my blog to a wider audience in order to reach more readers.  At the same time, I was building a community of other bloggers who desired a similar goal.  The concept worked.  I gained followers as did the other participants.   But not only did we build that participant community, the event attracted an even larger number of observer readers, many who joined us for the event in subsequent years.  A to Z was a blogging phenomenon with a generally favorable reputation.

      Looking at the A to Z Challenge from a writer's perspective, this April event can be a great tool as well as a learning experience.  Marketing instills fear in the hearts of many writers or anyone else who relies on reaching out to the public.  It's something most of us have to accept whether we are in business or merely trying to get others on board with whatever we might want to interest them in accepting from us.  Marketing your own products is a necessity that doesn't have to be something to dread.  Rather than a chore, make the marketing a fun challenge.  If you can get your potential audience invested in what you are doing, you can get more publicity and more importantly, sales. Writing takes creativity, but so does fun marketing.  The process of selling your story is a new story where you and your book are the main characters and the marketing plan is the plot.  Believe in your writing enough so that others might be inspired to help you promote it.  Successful marketing requires innovative strategic thinking.

       Using my own experience with the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, you can find ideas that might assist you in developing your own personal brand and your marketing plan.  Many writers with blogs have used the Challenge as a way to promote themselves and their books.  Maybe the results will seem inconsequential at first, but remember that the content on your blog becomes part of your résumé in a sense.  A to Z builds content and helps develop writing skills.  In the course of the many past Challenges, a number of books have actually been published based on the posts written in April.   The April Challenge can be a boon to writers as well as others in many ways.  

        If you're a blogger and have never tried the A to Z Challenge, I encourage you to give it a shot in 2017.   Participate well; finish strong and I can almost guarantee that you'll feel good about your achievement.  But even better, you will accomplish a marketing feat for your blog that may make business marketing in general much easier and provide you new ways to look at marketing.   You don't know until you try.

          Have you ever thought of the A to Z Challenge in terms of marketing?  Have you yourself used the Challenge as a marketing tool for yourself?   What ideas can you think of in order to use A to Z as a marketing tool?



 

I'm Not a Blogger (an #atozchallenge story)

Today we welcome 2016 A to Z Challenge survivor author Martin Reaves with some thoughts on "not blogging" and his A to Z experience. 

I’m not a blogger

.

Seriously, I’m not.

Odd that my words should continue to unspool before your eyes, isn’t it?

Well, they did the same under my fingers, and have done so for years now.

I keep telling myself I’m not a blogger, I don’t grasp the format, I don’t understand why anyone would want to hear (read) what I have to say.

So I write novels. Blame my characters if you get bored; after all, they told me what they wanted to say.

Books and stories, that the ticket. Not blogs.

No juicy rants about politics or—Heaven help us—religion.

But…

Ah yes, but.

Detractors be damned, blogging IS writing. It is the brain (or the Muse, or what have you) speaking through the fingers to an unknown and faceless someone. My stories generally start with a bare notion, a fleeting nudge of feeling that there might be a story if I start writing RIGHT NOW and don’t stop until that nebulous nudge is through with me.

Blogging is no different. Screw outlines, all I need is an opening sentence. Something to move the cursor forward.

Wanna know what the sentence was for this post? Wanna know exactly what it was that sent my fingers scampering over the keys?

Ready?

Here it is: “I’m not a blogger.”

I sat here, wondering what on earth I had to say to my fellow A to Z’ers. I scanned several other A to Z posts, saw the crafty lists, and thoroughly enjoyed those breezy, enchanting posts.

And I thought to myself: But I’m not a blogger. My blog posts generally have to do with my writing; my current work-in-progress; my ongoing review blog concerning movies about writers.

I’ve been not blogging for years now. And the more I don’t do it, the more natural it seems.

Exactly why did I start not blogging in the first place? Well, looky here…a list (albeit a very short one) emerges.


Why Martin Doesn’t Blog


1) To Keep From Writing. Think blogging is tough? Try writing novels. Sometimes the words thumb their collective noses at you and decide they’d rather not play right now. I find in those dark times that I can always write some random sentence (“I’m not a blogger,” for instance) and keep going stream-of-consciousness-style until something takes shape. Not blogging was my favorite way of not writing.

1b) Because It’s Easy. Wait…what?

Yeah, there’s the truth within the lie…or vice versa. Because the truth (or the lie) is that I should be writing every day. But sometimes I don’t feel like it. But I can always write something if I give it structure ahead of time. Hold on, didn’t he just say he likes to start with a sentence to see where it goes?

Indeed. But that only works once in a while. Try that on a regular basis and the result would be a chorus of irritated yawns. This is where the A to Z Challenge came into play. 26 posts; scheduled; clockwork. This was terrifying until I came up with my format. Make it short. Hell, make it Haiku. Honestly, I don’t know why that was easy, but it was.

2) To Figure Things Out. Some ideas are not meant to be stories. Some are not actually ideas at all, but random musings. Ruminations, if you will. Occasionally I attempt to come to terms with some horrific crap I perpetrated years ago. I have channeled that confusion and self-loathing into any number of stories (see Relative Karma and Relative Sanity), but there came one of those Dark Nights of the Soul when I imagined the Other Me as a beast that I kept chained. To learn from him; to study him and make sure he never got out again. I began to realize this Darker Me, hunched and drooling in a dark corner of my muse’s basement, was fueling my writing. That post became Chaining the Beast in the Basement of the Muse. Check it out HERE.

3) Because I Love Writing and Writers. I am endlessly fascinated with the mechanics of writing and the processes of those who do it well. I never get bored reading what writers have to say about the craft. And I am a bit giddy when I stumble on a movie that has something to say about the writing life.

So I began compiling a list of movies that deal with writers/writing/the writing life. And I began watching these movies and offering my opinion in review form as to how Hollywood treated those hacks and scribblers. I entitled the series Scribblers on Celluloid and if you haven’t had enough yet, feel free to check out the introduction HERE.

What is the point in all this? It would seem to be a simple admonition to find out what it is you are not doing at which you are half competent.

And then, regardless of what the haters may say, continue not doing that thing with a passion.

I am not a blogger, and I intend to keep it that way.


For more from this author, visit Martin’s website by clicking HERE.

Visit Martin’s Amazon page by clicking HERE.

      If you'd like to contribute a guest post to the A to Z Blog please let us know and we can discuss your idea.

Themes That Rocked! Insightful Writing Tips from Chrys Fey

Please welcome Chrys Fey, author of Hurricane Crimes and the upcoming 30 Seconds!


You posted writing tips – what made you choose that theme?

I post writing tips all the time on my blog, so I decided to stick with that theme for my first A to Z Challenge, but I used topics I wasn’t planning on blogging about anytime soon.

Which letter was the most difficult?

Surprisingly enough, it was letter “S”. At first I planned on blogging about song writing, but came to realize that topic is vast and that not many writers may want to know about song writing. I chose the supernatural genre as the topic for “S” a few days before it was to go live.

Which tip was the hardest for you to learn as a writer?

The hardest tip for me to learn actually had nothing to do with grammar or how to make my writing better. It was about having patience. I was so ready to publish my first book—at a young age—that I was rushing toward that goal before I was really ready. Then when I was in the querying process, desperately trying to get anything published, my impatience doubled. I soon learned that it’ll happen when it is meant to happen.

Which one do you think most writers miss or ignore?

I always say a writer should do A LOT of research about their story, and about publishing. Many aspiring writers ask me what they should do to get published, but that’s a hard question to answer because the process differs from person to person. There are some things that all writers should know to do, such as the importance of building credentials, how to write query letters, and where to look for agents. Except countless aspiring writers don’t know they need to do those things, because they didn’t do any research before diving into their dream.

That really is a great question though, Alex. I would be interested to hear what everyone else thinks.

Which letter got the best reactions?

In regard to the number of shares, that’s a tie between my posts Quotes about Writing and “Z” Words to Add to Your Writing, which also received the highest number of comments. All of my posts got wonderful comments, though.

Which one was your favorite?

I love all of them, but the one that is most special to me is the one I wrote about my mom, Inheriting the Writing Gene. I truly believe she is the reason why I am a writer today.

Are there a lot of vegetarian writers out there?

There are certainly more than I thought there were! I was amazed at how many bloggers commented on my “V” post to tell me they are also vegetarian or vegan.

If you participate in the Challenge next year, do you have a theme in mind?

I am definitely planning on participating next year, and I do have a theme in mind. I don’t want to spoil it just yet, but I will say I’m borrowing the theme from my (future) Disaster Crime series. ;)

Disasters would be cool! Hopefully not disasters in writing. Thanks again, Chrys!


Co-host Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh is the author of Amazon Best-sellers CassaStar, CassaFire, and CassaStorm, and his blog can be found HERE