It’s hard enough to be a writer, you may say.  Do I really need to be a blogger and marketer also?? Well, no, if you are Anne Lamott or Kathleen Norris or Mary Karr.  But if you are not already established, you may benefit enormously by understanding some of Seth Godin’s principles. By embedding the video he republished on his blog, I hope to help memoir readers and writers benefit. And I am giving him permission, a concept he coined, to continue marketing creative publishing ideas.

What do you think? Will you try any of these ideas? Did you get inspired?

1.  To learn more about social media by practicing it.

2.  To educate myself about the genre of memoir by reading 100 memoirs and reviewing them for a group of people also interested in memoir.  To be curious in public about our age’s fascination with personal narrative in all forms.

3.  To collect published stories and mini-memoirs of my own in one place so that interested readers can find them and that I can organize them with tags and categories for potential future publications.

4.  To find new friends–writers and readers who travel a similar path, interested in similar topics.

Evidently, Gretchen Rubin had similar goals on the subject of happiness.  She’s miles ahead of me, however, in using media to create interest in a book under construction.  I enjoy her proficiency.  The most brilliant piece of writing and marketing I have seen for some time is this YouTube “one minute movie.” It also happens to be a video that parents should watch once a month:

Rubin’s book on happiness will be published this fall by HarperCollins, so she is focused now on marketing. She’s got a blog with movies, newsletters, a fan site on Facebook, and she’s trolling for “super fans”–volunteers who will help spread the word. If you click on the movie, you will be invited to join the newsletter. Pretty sophisticated stuff and lots of fun to watch.

I may become a fan on Facebook so that I can observe what’s happening. I am interested in both her subject and her skill at finding and engaging blog readers who will then become book readers and then even more devoted blog readers. Ah, the wheel of life.

Who are your favorite published author/bloggers. What other uses of social media to promote books are you seeing online?

What happens when we ask how “hot” the word “memoir” is?  Apparently hot and getting hotter:  When you search the word, you can discover all kinds of information–a history of the search volume over the last five years, the countries where the search is hottest, and how the search volume compares to news mentions.

One function that allows you to compare two words to each other.  For example, let’s look at memoir and autobiography.  Usage of “autobiography” is going down.  “Memoir” is advancing.  Take any two words you are interested in and spot the trend.  Here is “spiritual” and “memoir.”  Just for fun, try “recession, bling.”

Isn’t it cool to have this way to find out which words are hot?

Anybody have another Google application you want to share?