I’ve mentioned it before, but in case you missed it, until about 18 months ago, I worked in marketing. To be honest, I fell into the career: there was an Internet marketing company hiring writers locally, and I applied. I did it well, but I always thought it was something I did mostly for the paycheck.

At my first writer’s conference, I had one book almost ready to submit. Nothing with a publisher, no queries out—no “real” professional interest in selling books yet. And yet the classes that interested me the most? Marketing.

This was when I realized I actually like marketing.

And, like I said, I wasn’t bad at it. In fact, I was considered an expert (admittedly low-level). I spoke at a conference. I even got recognized once.

What’s the point? I hope that I learned something in all those years and efforts. And those things? They seem basic to me, but really, the general author population doesn’t know this stuff. And I’m very happy to share!

So, this year, I’m devoting Mondays to Marketing! I have a lot of ideas: we’ll start off with Marketing 101, then look at various online marketing tactics for authors including Facebook, SEO and blogging. We’ll also look at offline marketing a bit. We’ll do some of the ever-popular website reviews. I have lots of ideas and I’m very excited to share.

And (I hope) it won’t be just me: I have some really great friends who know a lot about marketing because they’ve been in the trenches for their books. They’ve tried a lot of different things and we’ll have them there to tell us what worked for them.

What marketing topics do you want to see on Marketing Mondays?

Photo courtesy of Top Rank Online Marketing Blog