Building a Dream Team Part 2

A couple weeks ago we talked about building your “dream team” and the people that make up your Dream Team. The readers, friends and industry professionals to add to your list and empowering them to go out and SELL your books—simply by the almighty word of mouth that is still the #1 way to reach readers.

So now you have the team, how do you best work with them?

If within your power give over the administrative work to someone who can do the follow up, ask for reviews, provide the prepared social media updates and remind your Dream Team of their duties, when things get too quiet.

Why should you do this? I’m definitely not saying that you can’t play both roles in your Dream Team, however, when you have clear definitions between who is the “taskmaster” and who is the “praiser” your team won’t feel as though they are getting mixed messages from you as their leader. If you can’t have someone helping you out, then keep your posting requests to your team to 1 or 2 times a week and maintain the work to praise ration of 1-2. Be conversational and grateful, so it’s not all about “me, me, me”. These people are giving a lot of time and energy to help you promote your book. 

Keep your interaction genuine and you’ll have a team ready to promote your book to the ends of the earth!

Provide your Dream Team with ready made social media updates they can easily copy and paste.

In that same vein of thought:

Build structure into your promotions

Have dedicated weeks for promoting on each social media. Example: a week dedicated to:

o   Pinterest

o   Twitter

o   Facebook

o   Blogging

o   Google+

Pick the social medias your team are good with and provide them with material to promote your book on those venues.  

By building structure into your promotional process you’ll better direct your Dream Team and not leave them so wide open and overwhelmed by the big wide world of social media

It might feel as though you’re doing all the work for your Dream Team. Writing them social media messages, creating images, telling them where to go and what to do, etc. But think of it this way: You would be creating this information anyway and asking the huge world of social media out there to do you a favor and help you. And some people might, but not all and not very many. And they certainly aren’t going to help you over and over again. Your Dream Team is a targeted force. They are built and structured to tackle and chip away at the ambivalence of social media. They are going to consistently go out and over and over again promote you and your book and this will get noticed. 

Spread yourself thin, you won’t do any one thing well. Go at a goal with a targeted force and you’ll make incredible strides.

Keep updates calm and not frantic/panicked/urgent for results.

Really, I don’t need to expound on this point much further than that. You’ll have some last minute sales and details that either slipped by you or snuck up on you that you will want your team to promote on quick notice and it’s those kind of notices that you don’t want to slip past your Dream Team because they have started tuning out the chatter on social media telling them everything is high emergency situations.  

So, now you have a better idea of how to work with your Dream Team and the material you should be providing to them to best promote your book.

Next time we’ll talk about empowering and rewarding your Dream Team and why you should consider doing something like that.

Do you have any questions you’d like answered in upcoming posts?

CLICK TO TWEET:

You've built your team of readers to help #promote your book, so how do you work with them? http://bit.ly/1Pp9w61@C_Herringshaw #authors #publishing

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Casey Herringshaw is a homeschool graduate and has been writing since high school. She lives in colorful Colorado where she gets to live her dream stalking--er--visiting with her favorite CO authors.