Last night I went to an excellent talk by Roger Kondrat about social media and blogging at Creative Herts, a network for creative professionals in Hertfordshire. Roger’s main prediction, and I agree with him, is that blogging is here to stay, and will evolve as the technology evolves.
Many members of Creative Herts group are professional artists, and these creative professionals share many similar challenges when it comes to marketing their work as authors. One visual artist explained to me that he was only able to work mornings because of his RSI and therefore as his output was necessarily limited, he was unsure how to grow his business. We talked about the prices he was setting for his work and I think by the end we both agreed that the obvious way forward was to test some price increases for his work and see if the market would bear it. He said he felt what was holding him back was the idea that his work wasn’t worth it.
In a way, we are lucky as authors that our work can be reproduced for mass distribution and we can leave many of the commercial decisions to our publishers. However, we still have all the challenges of a crowded, busy marketplace in which it can be very difficult to get our work noticed and we too only have so many hours in the day or other constraints on our time and resources.
It can be hard, but if you undersell yourself, the primary person who will lose out is you. You are worth it. So when you are considering what fee to charge for your next public appearance, or for that article you’ve got to write, ask for what the market will bear, rather than relying on your own self-perceptions.
Marketing for Authors 2.0 