Even better is to have a website for yourself as an author, and one for each of your book projects. The URL (web address) for your own site should ideally be your name with “.com” after it, but if you have a common name and/or that’s taken, go for .net or .biz. (.org is OK too, though that generally suggests a not-for-profit organization). For your book projects, you ideally want “title of yourbook.com” but if that is not available, go for a close facsimile (can you substitute “2″ for “to” or “4″ for “for?) OR something that suggests what the book is about. (I purchased RaisingBookworms.com for my book, but I also got GettingKidsReading.com as an alternative web address to bring people to the site for my book.)

You can hire a website designer to create your site for you, or you can do it yourself. Nowadays there are literally dozens of easy, do-it-yourself website options. I am not especially tech savvy, but I’ve done a bit of both. It’s a question of time. Whether you build it yourself or you hire someone to build it for you, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on it – and it doesn’t have to be very complicated. Nowadays, most people are using “open-source” (meaning FREE) website building programs. Among the most popular of these is WordPress (which I have just switched over to using.) But even Google has a do-it-yourself website option. My 13 year old son often helps me with website maintenance and could build a website very easily. Most kids know more about the web than we do these days, so finding a savvy teen to help can be a very cost-effective way to go.

The basic information you need to have on your author site is this:
• Your bio (and be sure to keep it updated!)
• Detailed information about your book(s), including a photo of the cover, synopsis, 13-digit ISBN number, price, any awards, honors and reviews, and most especially a link to where to buy it (we’ll talk about affiliate programs in another post, where you can make commission off of anything sold by being referred from your site). If you have multiple books, you should also offer a printable list of all the titles/ISBN’s that a reader can easily download and take to a book store.
• A media kit, consisting of a downloadable photograph of yourself and any and all news items related to you, press releases about your books, or articles that relate to you or your book. (Articles written about you or your book show people that you have a platform and are of interest. Articles that relate to your subject matter advocate for you and demonstrate the relevance of your topic or theme.)
• A calendar that lets people know where you’ll be signing or speaking, when your next book will be out, and any other newsworthy information. Google Calendar is great – and it’s free. Once you have it, you can copy and paste the code into numerous websites and/or link to it in multiple places (like Facebook, or any other social networking sites). This way you only ever have to update one calendar, and it automatically updates it everywhere it’s posted.
• Your blog – More on this in a later post, but it is hugely helpful to have a blog… particularly if you have a niche.
• Recommended reading lists of other books in your genre that you admire. This gives you credibility as a writer and a member of the industry.
• Fun stuff, like games or downloads. For example, if you’re a picture book author, can you convert one of your illustrations into a black and white line drawing that kids can download and color in? Can you come up with a quiz related to your story? A printable bookmark? Are there some games you can come up with? For our book, The Great American Mousical, which is about mice putting on their own show in the basement of a Broadway theater, we created coloring pages from the illustrations as well as trivia quizzes and theater etiquette lessons.
• An opt-in invitation, or subscription button, where people can join your mailing list. This is worthy of an entire blog entry (which I will get to!) but for now, you want to be constantly thinking about ways to build your list, and this is a critical piece.
• News about what you’re working on and what’s coming up next.
• A ‘contact’ link, so your readers, booksellers, and members of the media can reach you easily via email.

One final point. Having a website means nothing if people can’t find it. This is where the search engines (like Google) come in. And having a really slick, lots of bells-and-whistles website doesn’t necessarily correlate with more traffic. In fact, the ones that make use of a lot of flash and embedded video technology often score at the lower end of the traffic scale. Once you have a website, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with basic search engine optimization (known as SEO in tech talk). More on that later too.

Over the years, we have designed and/or made our own bookmarks, postcards, posters, flyers, brochures, bookplates, downloadable activities, games and teachers guides. We’ve even made mp3’s, t-shirts, mugs, note pads, umbrellas and mouse pads. These giveaway items are invaluable at book signings, school presentations, book fairs and any other promotional or marketing opportunity. They help attract people to your table and speak for you long after you have moved on to the next gig. One of the best resources in this regard is Modern Postcard.com. This terrific company makes not just postcards but bookmarks, flyers, brochures and posters of all different shapes and sizes. Their printing is high quality, their costs are reasonable, and you can do it all digitally. The more you print, the less expensive it gets. And once you’ve placed your initial order, reprints/re-orders are a piece of cake.

Of course, with children’s books we want to think primarily about items that have kid appeal. How creative can you get? What can you come up with that relates to your book that you can print on and/or give away inexpensively? Think about balloons, pens, pencils, rulers, bubbles, stickers, craft items, toys, coloring books… the possibilities are endless. For these kinds of items you can use a source such as cafepress.com or zazzle.com. They will print your graphic, logo or message on any number of items that you can either buy at cost and give away at your events, or you can create your own virtual “store” that you can link to from your own website, sell the items and actually make some cash and get promotion at the same time.

Oh, we haven’t talked about creating your own website yet, have we? Stay tuned…

Having a niche means being known as “The Person Who Writes X,” as in “Oh, that’s the person who writes those talking truck books” or “That’s the person who writes those steamy vampire novels.”  When you have a niche, you can still do other things – you don’t have to limit yourself  – but having a particular area of strength and reaching out to that specific community can be hugely valuable when it comes to building a marketing platform. It’s otherwise known as “target marketing.”  And once they’ve bought one of your books, chances are they’ll buy another.

For instance, if you know a lot about cats and you write a series about cats, then you have a built-in audience of cat lovers out there that you can reach out to. You can market your book not just to families who love cats, but to cat rescue centers and pet stores, anything that specializes in cat.  Maybe a cat food company would be interested in using your book as a giveaway item, or maybe you could do a signing at your local SPCA or veterinarian’s office or pet store.

One of our niches is the arts, which my mother and I both have a background in and which is a recurring topic in a number of our books.  So when we wrote The Great American Mousical, which is about a troupe of mice who live and perform below the boards of a venerable Broadway theater, we marketed the book to “show-folk” in every way we could think of. We stuffed the book in give-away bags at the Tony Awards, we became Amabassadors for Kids Night on Broadway, we reached out to theater memorabilia stores in Times Square to see if they would carry the book and to Playbill magazine to see if they would do a feature on it.  We created trivia games for theater fans and a mouse dress-up-and-put-on-a-show game online. We wrote articles on theater etiquette and offered links to theater camps for kids on our website. We’re even developing a musical theater adaptation of the book for family audiences.

In the publishing industry, they call this “special sales,” and most publishers have special sales divisions whose job it is to reach out to non-bookstore type places. But our experience is, you’ll have a lot better chance of success if you come up with ideas of where to pitch to yourself.  It’s your area of strength – even the best special sales departments won’t know the places to go in your niche the way you do. Every niche-marketing approach we did for Mousical we came up with ourselves. So think outside the box… Whose your audience? Where do they hang out, what do they buy, what do they like to do? Then come up with ways to sell or promote your work there.

With that in mind, it’s imperative that you make sure your manuscript is in the best possible shape before you even think of submitting it for publication or representation. Here’s how:

1)   Join a writers group. Get honest feedback from fellow writers on an ongoing basis. Find one in your area, or start one yourself.  It’s all about getting together on a regular basis – usually weekly – and reading each other’s work aloud, then feeding back.

2)   Take a writing course in your genre. Whether in a classroom, as part of an adult education program, or online, a good writing course is an opportunity to further develop your material. MediaBistro.com has online courses for authors, and many university writing programs will accept non-matric students.

3)   Hire a freelance editor. I know I’m biased – but this is really key. The Society of Childrens Book Writers and Illustrators (wwwSCBWI.org) maintains a terrific list of freelance professional children’s book editors. You might also check out EditorialFreelancers.com, Elance.com and Guru.com. Whether you go for a simple evaluation or a comprehensive line edit, it’s worth every penny – and will save you so much money, time and heartache down the line. A good editor will not only help you polish your current manuscript, he or she will also help you be a better writer on your next one.

Step one, particularly if you are just starting out or are new to writing for children, is to make sure you know the market you are writing for, and its specific styles and requirements.

I continue to be amazed by how many aspiring children’s book authors are ignorant about or just plain out of touch with today’s marketplace.  Many of us take inspiration from the books we loved as kids, but it’s also important to realize that times and trends have changed considerably since “Goodnight, Moon” and “Make Way for Ducklings” were published.  Familiarize yourself with what’s selling, and what the current as well as the classic styles, trends, and approaches are. See how your book fits in. Pay attention to the balance of text versus illustrations, the number of pages and/or words, the subject matter being dealt with. Be especially aware of what’s on bestseller lists and winning awards. Research the competition in your particular genre or subject matter, and include that information, along with why your book is different and fresh, when you make your submission.

There are literally dozens of resources to help you in this regard. Here are just a few with which to get started:

• Annual Publications, such as Literary Marketplace (it’s expensive and updated every year, so check it out from your local library) and Children’s Writers and Illustrators Guide (published by Writers Digest). These are essential tools to know what’s happening not only in the marketplace, but also at the publishing houses – who’s moved where, who’s soliciting what, what the latest submission guidelines are etc.
• Weekly Trade Publications, like Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal. Both also have daily digests (PW Children’s Book Digest is essential reading) and blogs that are invaluable.
• Membership Organizations, such as The Society of Childrens Book Writers and Illustrators  (www.scbwi.org) – a must. For a nominal membership fee, you get access to all kinds of resources, support and opportunities, both on their website and in the welcome kit you will receive.
• Web resources such as jacketflap.com – a social networking sites specifically for childrens book authors. Mediabistro.com is good too, in that there are online classes, job listings and other opportunities for writers.
• KidLit Blogs and MomBlogs– A veritable powerhouse in the industry. More on these later!
• Conferences, festivals and trade shows, such as BEA, ALA etc. We’ll get into those in more detail later, too.
• Bestseller lists, especially the New York Times (childrens books are mostly only available on the online version of the Times bestseller list), IndieBound and Publishers Weekly.
• Awards – especially all those sponsored by the American Library Association (www.ala.org) such as the Caldecott and Newbery.

Perhaps most important of all:

• Spend time in the kids sections of libraries and bookstores and be a sponge… and,
• Hang out with – and read to – kids. Nothing will better teach you what works, what doesn’t, what makes them laugh, when you’ve got them, and how quickly you can lose them!

We learned this the hard way. My mother (and co-author) and I naively imagined, when we began our collaboration, that writers wrote and publishers published.  We thought our job was to try to write a good book, and then to show up for whatever was asked of us in terms of marketing and promotion – but to leave the logistics of all that to those in the various in-house departments whose job it was to organize it.  Those early efforts barely broke even. We soon realized that we stood a better chance of selling our books, and being able to write more books, if we got proactive about the sales and marketing ourselves.

We have experienced firsthand the vast chasm between the relative failure of some of our books (albeit arguably worthy ones) that we took no real responsibility for helping to sell, and books that we got behind with every creative idea and resource we could muster, which subsequently ended up on the bestseller list or going into reprints.

Because I also moonlight as a freelance children book editor, I know we are not alone in our experience.  Emerging and established writers still dare to hope that once the book is written, their work is done. It’s now about finding the right agent or publisher who will take it to the next step while we go back to work on the next project. But the truth is that writers today have to do a lot more than write – if we want to keep writing, that is, and if we want to experience high sales (and royalty) levels instead of high return levels.

The good news is that new developments in technology and fresh approaches in marketing have made it considerably easier than it would have been even ten years ago for writers to chart their own publishing course.  It’s also fun – strategizing marketing and promotional ideas to support a book can actually be as creative as writing the books themselves. It’s just a question of applying the same level of imagination to our marketing plan as we do to writing our stories.

Over the next few weeks I will be blogging about marketing for children’s book authors on what I call “Marketing Mondays,” in preparation for a Marketing Webinar I’ll be offering in January.  I’ll also be continuing with my weekly blog series on writing children’s books.  Stay tuned!