Even Poets Need a Plan For Marketing Their Work

I feared the Marketing Your Writing workshop I attended today might be a dry MBA talk, or worse, an infomercial for the writing career coach, Tiffany Colter. (www.WritingCareerCoach.com) The workshop was engaging, practical, and at times, funny. Tiffany provided us with interactive workbooks where each participant identified what he or she wanted and the steps needed to achieve those goals. She discussed business plans and reasons why writers need this as much as any small business, particularly “Indie” authors who don’t have the benefit of an agent or large publishing house. Yet even writers who publish with mainstream publishers need to manage their time and money while promoting their books. She helped me identify my own roadblocks to getting writing done: TV, housework, my job, and most of all, not having specific goals. Now that I have it on paper, I have a reference point to check up on myself. Writing the stuff is easy, it’s marketing that hangs me up, but now I have some tools to help me increase my readership. “Dream big, but have small goals.” What Tiffany means is to have a large goal, divide it into manageable chunks.
This can apply to writing as well. Sure we’d all like to publish a book, but start by getting poems or articles published in journals. You won’t get rich, bur you will have an audience.

Exercise of the day: rewrite an existing poem(possibly failed or one that are on the fence about) using a different point of view. If the poem is in third person, redo in first or vice versa. Take it up a notch and write it someone else's voice.