Young Adult/Middle Grade Author RA Jones Shares Tricks, Apps and Tools of Marketing to Kids
A Welsh writer with previous success in the adult thriller/suspense market, RA Jones dove into the kids’ market last year with brilliant, spooky fiction for middle grade and young adult readers published by Lucky Bat Books. Since then, he’s been exploring online book promotions, finding way cool apps, sites, podcasting, blogs, reviewers and more, and has agreed to share his findings with us.
Coming soon: Second books in both the Merryweathers Mystery and the Artefacts series by RA Jones.
LBB: What book promotions and marketing are showing the greatest promise and success for you in the Middle Grade and Young Adult markets?
RA Jones: Great question
I knew when I started all this that MG was one of the toughest nuts to crack as an Indie author because my reader is usually not the person buying the books. Less so with YA, but you get my drift. My goals have been to get some good books out there and create a platform, which effectively is ‘everything you do online’, so as to raise awareness that you exist as an author. And let me say now that I haven’t reached my goal yet, but then I don’t expect to after just six months. I’m in it for the long haul.
So it isn’t easy and it takes a bit of effort. You need to be able to slap down your guilt (you should be writing instead of wasting time on the Internet!) and your ignorance (I’m never going to understand social bookmarking!).
But if you do it a bit at a time, soon you’ll have a lot of irons in the fire.
more to come…..