Arts & Entertainment, Writing
Promoting Yourself
Lesson time 05:53 min
Bob gives recommendations on how to promote yourself as a writer through school visits, book fairs, and social media.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Get Out There • Use Social Media
Teaches Writing for Young Audiences
The Goosebumps author teaches you how to generate ideas, outline a plot, and hook young readers from the first page.
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Well, most children's book authors cultivate a fan base by doing school visits. You might start out just locally. Or you might have your publisher find schools for you to visit and do classroom visits or assemblies of the whole school. And this is a wonderful way-- what a nice thing that kids are all together all the time. Adults aren't. Adults aren't in school. Kids are so much easier to reach, because they're all together. And then they can talk to each other, and they can tell each other about books. And that's a wonderful thing for a kids' author. So I would always say, start with the schools. You know, school visits are so much more effective than bookstore appearances, as far as familiarizing yourself to readers. The other thing to look for when you have-- when you actually have a book out and you're ready to sell it, and you're ready to show it to people, and you want people to know about it, is to look at all the book fairs that take place all around the country. There are many of them, many of them. And many of them look for authors. The Miami Book Fair, the Tucson book fair, which is really good and has 300 authors, the "LA Times" book festival has over 300 authors come. There are many local-- Tampa/St.Petersburg book festival, with a lot of Florida authors come. They're always over, and it's a great way to be there, appear there, sign books there, appear with other authors, go on panels. These book festivals, I think, are invaluable, and just a great way to introduce yourself and to be around other authors and to meet the crowds. Most children's books are bought by parents and librarians. So it's nice to be able to get in touch and find ways to let them know that your book is out there, because most kids don't buy their own books unless it's a school book fair or school book club or something like that. And even then, the parents are involved. So it's very important to try to reach parents and teachers and librarians as much as you can. I use social media a lot. And I think more and more authors find that they really need to do this to get out the word about their books. I'm on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. But I enjoy all of that. I mean, that's really fun for me. But even for authors who don't enjoy it that much, it's very important, partly because in a lot of publishers, the marketing department and the publicity departments have been cut back. And a lot of publishers expect you to do your own marketing. They expect you to do your own publicity. And they expect you to have your Facebook page to sell your book, and your Twitter. And they want you to do it. And the nice thing is that having those things helps. It really does help you sell books. I'm on Twitter all the time. And I'm always thinking-- am I selling too much? Am I using it too much for marketing? So I do a lot of other stuff. I make sure that I don't just say, hey, this book is still available. Hey, only 12 shopping days till Christmas-- here, bu...
About the Instructor
Award-winning novelist R.L. Stine wrote jokes and funny stories for 20 years before he switched gears and became a horror-writing legend. Since then, the author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series has sold more than 400 million copies. In his first-ever online writing class, Bob takes the fear out of crafting fiction. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, you’ll learn new ways to conquer writer’s block, develop plots, and build nail-biting suspense that will thrill young readers.
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R.L. Stine
The Goosebumps author teaches you how to generate ideas, outline a plot, and hook young readers from the first page.
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