Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  Lead with your strengths. Are you a great public speaker? Propose a regular feature about children’s books to local news stations with you as the host. Do you have a gift for teaching? Set up workshops for writers’ groups and teach writing classes at the local college or writing clinic. Lead with your strengths, establish yourself as an expert in those areas, and then run with the opportunities that evolve.

  Making time for marketing

  Take it from a busy mom of triplets: Marketing is doable. If you’re strategic about your goals, you’re practical in your choices, and you remain committed, you can fit in marketing.

  I didn’t build my platform overnight, and you probably won’t, either. That’s okay, because publishing isn’t an overnight-sensation business. If a baby step is all your life allows right now, then take that baby step with confidence. Marketing in small but manageable chunks is far better than biting off more than you can chew. Here are some tips as you decide what to tackle and when:

  Choose a starting date. Use the time before your manuscript is finished to build your base online presence through social networking. Your book-specific strategizing should begin 6 months prior to publication. Turn strategy into action at least 3 months prior to publication.

  Focus. Don’t try to do it all. Focus your efforts and your message. Are you trying to be the expert on something related to your genre, story topics, and themes? Then focus on that as you build your online presence and network. If you want to become known as an expert blogger, then focus on providing frequent and engaging content and getting people to follow your blog and link to it. If public speaking is your strength, focus on drumming up appearances, building great speech content for schools and writers’ groups, and wowing your audiences so they’ll tell others about you . . . right after they buy all your books.

  Allocate marketing time. Block out marketing time, with set days for set tasks: Monday: 30 minutes blogging, 1.5 hours writing. Tuesday: 10 minutes on Facebook, 15 minutes in the writers’ forum, 1 hour writing. And so on. Keep your schedule realistic. Don’t jump in and out of tasks throughout the day. You’ll just feel scattered, and when Friday comes, you’ll have six things only partially done. How about reaching Friday with three things totally checked off your marketing to-do list? Tackle the other three next week.

  Be accountable to Father Time. Use a timer. Seriously. Use the alarm on your computer or buy an egg timer. And be as tough with yourself as you were when you put your characters through the wringer. A timer may sound rigid, but keep this in mind: Being a writer can be a hobby, but being a published author cannot. It’s a job, and jobs require commitment, structure, discipline, and follow-through.

  Know yourself. If you’re a person who likes to read when you’re eating, read articles or blogs about craft or the biz at lunch time. If you’re a midday slumper, designate that low-energy time as your reading block.

  Take a break. Do your marketing in separate pushes instead of year-round to give yourself time off. Book promoting can be exhausting and seem never-ending. Efforts pay off, but you need a break periodically to keep your energy up. That may mean dedicating the final days of every month to reviewing the results of that month’s marketing and planning the next month’s marketing tasks. Or perhaps you can schedule a several-day block of time every couple of months to assess, strategize, and launch the next marketing push.

  Above all, be realistic. If you can’t fully commit to something, don’t do it. Life goes on even if you don’t participate in all 17 social-networking venues you’ve identified.

  Have something to say. Formulate a message that you can believe in and that has universal appeal or meaning. Maybe your message is a theme, such as telling stories that help readers feel good about themselves. Or maybe it’s a mantra, such as “I tackle the issues that tackle teens every day.” Or perhaps it’s a mission, such as promoting teen literacy. Everything you do as a promoter should in some way tie into your message.

  Act with focus and think long term. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the marketing possibilities out there. Focus on your strengths, your message, and your goals. Just as writing a novel takes time, so does marketing it — and marketing yourself. Be patient and persevere.

  You can measure the strength of your platform by the number of blog subscribers and visitors, website hits and newsletter subscribers, social media “friends” and “followers,” and book sales that represent your readership. You can also gauge platform strength with the less statistics-friendly but still meaningful support of your communities (the writers’ groups or other organizations in which you’re an active, well-known member, for example).

  In this section, I discuss some of the tools you can use to build your platform.

  Creating a professional website

  You don’t have to speak HTML as a second language to have a website, but you do need a website, and you need to set it up with a specific goal in mind. Do you want your website to stand as a bulletin board or a clearinghouse of all things you? Or do you want people to keep coming back to your site, in which case you need to keep things new, and coolly so? Your goal determines what your site should look like and which features it should have.

  The basic elements of your website are your books, bio, and contact information (your own or your publisher’s or agent’s). However, even if you want a low-maintenance billboard-like site, the more information you offer, the better. Provide content that’s as captivating as your YA novels, which may mean adding features such as the following:

  Book excerpts

  Reviews

  Book club guides

  Interviews and articles about you (in full or as links to other sites)

  Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

  A news page with updates about your signings and awards

  Your website is one of your few chances to interact with — and market directly to — teen readers. Consider that as you choose the look and function of your site. Teens like interactive websites with quizzes, games, book trailers, blogs, and downloadables such as book club guides or sample chapters. An edgy look and feel goes over well with this audience. Young people are web-oriented and particularly quick about going to a website, so reward them for taking the effort to view your site, and use the opportunity to entice them to buy more of your books.

  Before you design (or redesign) your website, review the websites of your favorite authors. Note the features the sites offer, the things you like about the sites, and the things you don’t. Creative minds come up with creative websites, so you can get great ideas. But as with every aspect of marketing, don’t feel you have to do it all. Adopt only the features that serve your site’s goals, your overall marketing strategy, and your time and skill level. Strive for a clean, easy-to-navigate website with engaging content. Make your website look professional; it represents you, after all.

  You can find plenty of website templates, even free ones, to give your site a polished look. Just sign up with a web host (a company that acts as a virtual landowner, letting you park your website on its piece of the Net) and pay a small fee each month for basic service. Hosts have whole sections of website templates to choose from. You can cut-and-paste your information into the template of your choice in a very short time. Or you can upgrade to fancier packages with lots of bells and whistles — or rather, widgets, as the programs for the add-on features are called. Creating a basic and professional-looking website is surprisingly easy.

  If you don’t want to use a stock template, you can hire a web designer to build you a personalized site. The designer creates your site, updates it for you as needed, helps you get a web host, and takes into account search engine optimization (SEO) when building the site. SEO refers to ways you can rig your website to pop up more often when people do searches on the Internet.

  Starting a blog

  A blog is an online journ
al that you can update anytime you want with any information you want and that invites readers to respond via a comments section. Most writers include blogs as a component of their websites, embedding them within the actual site or linking the two via buttons that visitors can easily spot and click. Blogs are easy, dynamic, and valuable platform-building tools. They let you get personal with your readers, talking directly to them in a casual, in-the-moment manner that isn’t possible on a comparatively static website that allows no interaction. And because readers can post comments, they feel a direct connection to you.

  Win followers by holding a contest

  Online contests drive traffic to your website or blog, widening your audience and increasing book sales. Who doesn’t like a free book? Or a free local speaking engagement, or a free t-shirt, or a character named after them in your next book? Offer people something they want, and they’ll take the time to enter. Here are tips for a successful contest:

  Choose a theme. Have an anchoring reason for holding the contest, such as a holiday, an important date in your story, or your site’s anniversary. Celebrate a milestone for your book with a contest, for example, or hold a contest in honor of Banned Books Week (the last week of September) or National Poetry Month (April in the United States and Canada, October in the United Kingdom) or even National Good Neighbor Day (September 28). Use whatever’s appropriate to your books, your site, and your readership.

  Choose prizes people want. Make the contest worth everyone’s while. Prizes can be speaking engagements if you want to target local booksellers, teachers, or writing groups. For teens or general readers, choose t-shirts, signed books, or even fuzzy dice if fuzzy dice are in your story. Be creative. Be fun. Just make sure you’re giving away something people would want and reflects well on you. And hey, FYI: It’s illegal to offer a prize only for people who buy something from you. It must be a “no purchase necessary” contest.

  Post clear rules. Tell folks exactly what they’ll win, what they need to do to enter, the deadline for entering, and any other rules associated with the contest. If you’re collecting e-mail addresses, tell people what the addresses will be used for. This being the Internet, you’re likely to get some international entries, so include a country restriction in your rules if you don’t want to spend the money to send the prize overseas.

  Make it child safe. There are laws regarding e-mailing with minors and collecting their personal information. Because you’re a YA writer, assume young adults will be entering your contests. Keep everyone on the right side of the law (and in compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) by including a very visible line such as “If you’re under 13, submit a parent’s name and e-mail address.”

  Make it easy to enter. The simpler it is to enter, the more entries you’ll get. Always ask for an e-mail address to notify the winner. (Remember, keep it child safe!)

  Make the contest easy to manage. If your contest goes the way you hope, you’ll have lots of entries. Keep it manageable from the get-go. For example, if you let people enter by posting a comment at the bottom of your blog, the comments section can get messy with all the entries and questions about the contest and wishes for good contest luck and what all. Instead, have people send entries to your site’s contact e-mail account using your website’s Contact Me button and form. Or set up an e-mail account just for this contest, providing that e-mail address in the entry instructions. Tell entrants to write a specific phrase in the subject line of their e-mails for easy identification (like “Launch Party Signed Book Giveaway” or “Pick Me!”), and then just drag those e-mails into a folder for storing until the contest deadline.

  To keep things low maintenance, you can do a random drawing contest in which you assign each entry a number based on the order it came in and then use a free randomizer website to generate the winning number. If you want to hold a contest where people write something, as in “The Best Opening Line Contest,” limit the number of entrants to keep your workload small. Be sure to state who will be judging the contest.

  Promote the contest. The whole point of a contest is to bring new readers to your website, so get the word out. Post an announcement on your website and blog and then announce the contest (with a link to your announcement post) on your social networking sites. Ask family, friends, and other contacts to forward the news, along with the link to the contest announcement. You’re giving something away, so they won’t mind spreading the word on their social networking sites. Consider offering additional entries to anyone who spreads the word about the contest, as long as they send you a link to the blog or social networking entry they used to do so.

  Don’t use some general contest announcement website. You want to hook potential blog readers and book-buyers, not just any Joe who’s looking for a freebie and hasn’t picked up a book since he was a young reader himself. That may pop up your site’s traffic numbers, but it doesn’t gain you the long-term readers you’re aiming for.

  Some writers balk at blogging because they think they must fill their blogs with big treatises about writing. You don’t! Use your blog to post reviews of your books, news about you and your books or about topics within your books, tour schedules, and photos from book events (but avoid posting pictures of kids’ faces). Kids love it when you give them shout-outs on your blog after school appearances or post extra information or links that you promised during the visit (a trick that brings the kids to your website after the event). You can link to other authors’ sites and they’ll respond in kind, building a virtual network. You can even hold contests on your blog. A blog entry doesn’t have to change the world; it just has to personalize you for your readers.

  However you use your blog, view each blog post (or entry) as a writing sample. Be anecdotal, educational, and entertaining, but don’t be revealing or provocative. You want readers to like you, not debate you or get into your family dramas. Teens will be reading these posts, so keep them G-rated and rant-free.

  Best of all, a blog is free marketing. Most web hosts offer free blogs along with their website templates, and there are plenty of free blog hosts out there that you can link to your website even though you maintain the blog separately, such as Blogger or WordPress.com. Just type “blog hosts” in your search engine to pick one, or ask friends which blog hosts they use. Blogs are incredibly easy to get up and running.

  Connecting with social media

  Social media is the umbrella term for those websites that let you interact with other people in real time, forming communities and groups of contacts in full view of everyone else. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are some of the most prominent, but each serves its own niche group. JacketFlap (www.jacketflap.com), for example, is aimed specifically at children’s book publishers and creators. And KidLitosphere Central (www.kidlitosphere.org) brings together children’s book bloggers. Goodreads (www.goodreads.com) is an enormous meeting ground of booklovers that offers an Author Program designed to connect authors and their target audience. Every site’s individual popularity waxes and wanes, the but the overall trend is here to stay: These are communities where information is spread easily and freely.

  Social media is a useful marketing tool because it allows you to spread news about your books to a large group of people in an instant. It’s great for connecting with people, allowing you to build a network and expand your platform. But be careful: You can also lose a lot of time in social media (it’s addictive!) or risk your professionalism by revealing TMI (too much information). Potential editors, agents, and publishers can read your entries, as can writer colleagues, gatekeepers, and even young readers. Be wise about what you post.

  Don’t gather young readers into your social media circle. Online predators are a serious security risk for teens, and despite your good intentions, such contact can get you into trouble. Instead, set up fan pages in the online communities that kids can follow. Post book news, not personal commentary.


  Writing articles

  Writing articles for appropriate magazines or for local papers is a wonderful way to build your platform and get the word out about your novels. Your articles shouldn’t be about your book, though. You plug your book in your byline or in a short author bio at the end of the article.

  Magazines and newspapers want you to offer their readers information, not a long advertisement. Write an article about a topic you’ve mastered through writing your book or about something you learned in the writing process that’s potentially edifying to others. For example, if your novel is about a boy aspiring to be a competitive eater, write an article about competitive eating or eating disorders in boys. This is a great way to raise your credibility and standing as an “expert,” and people feel good about you because you’ve given them valuable information.

  People aren’t so keen on your repeatedly contacting them to push yourself and your books. But if you offer them something — information, entertainment, giveaways, your support of their news and endeavors — they’re usually happy to hear your news and spread it to others. Word of mouth leads to book sales. Keep this in mind as you market yourself and your books.

  Publishing a newsletter

  Publishing a newsletter spreads your name, keeps it in front of people, and enhances your image. Your newsletter may contain features about the craft of writing or the topics in your books, or it may offer news about your book events or your website or blog. A newsletter also features articles by guest writers who will return the favor by plugging you and your newsletter on their own websites, blogs, and social media.

  Here are a few newsletter tips:

  Limit your newsletter to a few pages. That way, people can read it in one sitting.