Last year, members of She Wins Society were surprised with awards in the mail honoring their contribution to the community. Imagine my excitement about getting Most Poetic Sister. Scrolling through pictures on my phone, this one stuck out as we prepare for our Conference and Awards Ceremony on November 9th!
It also revealed to me the role that photographs and images play in our joy.
Images are not only suitable for memories; they are silent whispers of time, capturing fleeting moments of joy and weaving stories without words. Pictures are pockets of bliss that freeze laughter and emotions we can experience whenever we look back at them.
Sometimes, when I want to experience joy in a difficult moment, I look at snapshots of a happier time. Each frame holds a fragment of elation, and in their stillness, they evoke the essence of joyful energy.
Remember, we are accepting submissions for this year’s poetry contest on Joy from now through December 1st! Get started by subscribing at yecheilyahsannualpoetrycontest.org.
Are you really promoting your self-published book?
Or does it just look and feel like you are promoting your book?
If you are only telling people you wrote a book, but you are not telling them what the book is about, you are not really promoting your book.
If you only show us the cover of the book but do not educate us about the content and core message, you are not really promoting your book.
If you only post Amazon links to social media but do not discuss the book and what we can learn from it, you are not really promoting your book.
These things can be a part of book promotion. Still, alone, they do nothing to generate enough interest in people to want to buy the book, and that is what book promotion is:
A culmination of your activities and strategies to create awareness and generate interest in your book.
This includes but is not limited to:
Advertising: Paid Ads (or just ads in general), digital or print material, website or landing page, etc.
Publicity: Interviews, book reviews, media coverage, guest blog posts, podcasts, etc.
Social Media: Building engagement with readers through entertainment and educational content using any of the many social media platforms. Blogging can also fall under this and is a powerful tool for community.
Events: Conferences, Author Talks, Book Signings, Book Fairs
The purpose is to create enough buzz to interest readers to purchase the book.
Anytime you share a review from someone who reads your book, you ARE promoting your book.
Anytime you create content (graphics, excerpts, videos, etc) that educates or entertains people about your book’s message (nonfiction), characters, or plot (fiction), you ARE promoting your book.
Anytime you talk about the book on a podcast or in an interview, you ARE promoting your book.
Anytime you share your journey and what it was like writing the book, you ARE promoting it.
Anytime you write on a topic that is relatable to the things we can find in your book, believe it or not, you ARE also promoting the book.
We can do many things that look like book promotion on the surface but are ineffective in raising awareness among our readers about the book’s topic and why it’s important to them.
But I hope this post gets you thinking about deeper ways to connect with your audience!
Poetry Business Network Meeting in Atlanta this Weekend
I had an amazing time this weekend at the first in-person Poetry Business Network meeting in Atlanta. As I told my email list folks, it was refreshing to fellowship with people in person and to glean from the wisdom of legendary poets like Georgia Me (Def Poetry Jam), Rewop (who I met at the Poet Life Fest in 2022), and Taalam Acey.
The passion everyone displayed was empowering and helpful in motivating me to rescue my pen from the shadows and immerse myself deeper into Atlanta’s vibrant poetry community. Listening to these poets made me realize there is a lot I don’t know and helped me to understand the importance of knowing the individuals and the history of those who contributed to the development of the craft. It is not just about the writing. Studying the industry that houses these arts and their role in our evolution is also equally important. Imagine saying you are a poet and not knowing Gwendolyn Brooks or Maya Angelou.
It helps to sharpen your writing skills when you know more about your topics and community.
That said, I am excited to announce this year’s poetry contest is now open to accepting submissions!
You will have until December 1, 2024, to submit your poem. Our theme this year is Joy, and we will award our three finalists with cash prizes ranging from $50 to $150! For details on entering, please click on the link below, and be sure to share this with the poets you know!
If you log into my Instagram account and go to my for you page, you’ll see tons of pictures of pregnant mommies, infants, and babies.
I didn’t mean to do this. I watched one video of a cute little baby, and now my search bar looks like I am trying to adopt somebody’s chiren.
Even then, it didn’t occur to me that October is a month when we raise awareness of a special kind of loss.
Even as my heart grew sad over some of the pictures, I still did not realize why I was watching this.
My personal journey begins with a miscarriage in the summer of 2020 and then two ectopic pregnancies between 2021-2022. I experienced pregnancy three times (even going through surgery), but there is nothing to show for it.
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. It is a time to remember the women who have experienced loss through:
Miscarriages
Ectopic
Stillbirth
Infertility
Embryo Loss
Molar Pregnancy
Infant Loss
Child Loss
Neonatal Loss
Surrogate Loss
Failed Adoption
SIDS
Blighted Ovum
Chemical Pregnancy
If you’ve never heard of these, this is a great time to research them, to reach out to women/parents you know who have experienced loss, and to overall educate yourself about PAIL.
How often have you heard a traditionally published author say, “I’m a traditionally published author?”
They might say they are a published author but not a traditionally published one. That’s because there are millions of traditionally published authors.
In the same way, introducing yourself as a self-published author does nothing to help the person understand what you write.
It is not bad to call yourself a self-published author or to be proud of that. However, since many self-publishers have smaller budgets, we often desperately identify how we published instead of what we published to get people to take a chance on our books. But this strategy does not work well.
When I pitch schools and bookstores to carry my book, I rarely introduce myself as a self-published author. They will already know this when they look up my ISBN.
Instead, I discuss the book and why it is a good fit for their audience.
Instead of telling people, “I’m a self-published author,” and pushing your book in their face, identify your genre, book, and how it serves your target audience.
You can do this in one sentence:
Original: “I am a self-published author of three books.”
Revised: “I am the author of The Stella Trilogy, a Historical Fiction series that explores African American History, civil rights, and the struggles of Blacks in America.”
This has been a constant question in the back of my mind. It is not something anyone has asked of me personally, but something that the subconscious, always overthinking part of my brain asks when it wishes to second-guess itself. And, in the rebuke of these thoughts, I answer:
“Why not joy?”
I do not mean always being happy when discussing cultivating a spirit of joy. No one is always joyful in the basic sense of the word. I do not mean toxic positivity or whatever that’s supposed to mean.
In the same way that we embrace anger, grief, and frustration (which are normal and have their place), we can also embrace more joy and gratitude. If sadness and depression suck our bones dry and drain our life force, then joy and gratitude can be a powerful life-saving nourishment.
As I’ve said in Black Joy: “Nobody talks about society’s addiction to Black trauma / how much more profitable it is to talk about pain than poems/depression than joy.”
This constant cycle of death and war is draining to the soul and rotten to the bones. Where do we find or hold onto our sanity without joy? Have we forgotten that it has always been here with us? If enslaved people found joy, why not us? Or do we believe we are that special of a generation that we can survive without it?
In “The Role of Joy and Imagination in a Revolution,” author Marii Herlinger writes: “White supremacy culture values objectivity, overworking, and neglecting self-care — joy interrupts that. White supremacy culture teaches us to be individualistic, self-serving, and distrustful of each other — love interrupts that. Therefore, joy, imagination and love are revolutionary tools which actively defy capitalism and white supremacy.”
Sounds like a page out of Tricia Hersey’s book!
Speaking of Hersey, in the same way that resting more does not make one lazy, nor is it the same thing as being idle (you can be well-rested and still do the work), more joy does not make one blind to the atrocities of the world. On the contrary, it can help one to see things more clearly by stepping outside of the chaos. As Jaiya John puts it, “It can be a revolutionary act of love for yourself and others to not let yourself be sped up by the pace of a toxic, anxious, frantic, desperate, traumatized culture. Stay slow, my friend. Everything beautiful in you is gestating.”
This year, our poetry contest theme is joy, so I want to give you more to consider as you pen your entry!
The Latin word for Joy is gaudium, meaning to rejoice. Think of a time when you found joy in the unexpected. How did that make you feel? In what ways did you rejoice?
I cannot wait to read/hear your masterpiece!
We accept entries from October 21st through December 1st!
We are excited to announce that this year’s poetry contest will begin later this month and run through the end of the year.
This time, we will choose semi-finalists who will be highlighted on our social media. From those semi-finalists, we will choose three winners from the poets with the highest ratings by the judges.
It’s about to be a time!
The entry rules, guidelines, and list of prizes are now available on the website. (Remember, we have a website for the contests now!)
We are also doing something different: We are having the interview with the winners (semi-finalists and finalists) on Instagram Live! Words are too powerful to be limited to paper, especially when expressed in this medium. To quote Maya Angelou, Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.”
So that is what we will do!
I got my Sidney Shaw voice ready to ask, “When did you first fall in love with poetry?”
The PBS Blog 