How to Pivot
Posted On April 25, 2020
I just sat in publicist Dana Kaye (love her!) free one-hour Q&A on Crowdcast. I asked her what was the one thing she’s learned regarding marketing during this pandemic outbreak. She said that the clients who pivot tend to do better. I keep hearing about pivoting, but what is that really? Since I’m a former point guard, I started thinking about pivoting and basketball. I even watched a Facebook Live video of a basketball instructor going over different aspects of pivoting. Here are two things I noted:
1) You have to practice pivoting. So even if you know that you have conduct book marketing differently in this season, you can’t magically switch strategies and have it work seamlessly. If you are going to do more virtual programming, practice with Google Hangouts, Zoom and Crowdcast.
2) Depending on your unique challenges, you are going to have to pivot differently or perhaps pivot multiple times. A nonfiction author will have to pivot differently than a novelist. A novelist with a large following on Facebook will have to pivot differently than an author with hardly any social media presence at all.
There are a couple things from Dana’s session that made me think. One was that people’s schedule has been affected due to the pandemic. Those with children are busy overseeing their education during the day–so perhaps holding a Facebook Live for parents should be scheduled in the early evening or weekends. (This is just an example.) Also that you should not seek to get people on one social media platform to follow you on another. You will be spreading your readers too thin. Instead, if you don’t have that many followers on a certain platform, perhaps you need to figure out ways to create content that will specifically interest them. And social media is not about getting people to directly buy your book. It’s more about nurturing your readers and slowly increasing readership, one reader at a time.
I’m currently working to complete my Chicago novel but I can’t wait to experiment with videoconferencing. I also need to consider what I’ll be including in my new newsletter that I’ll send at the end of May. A lot of pivoting will be involved, but in some ways, pivoting has been part of my life for a long time.
Photo: My now 10-year-old nephew before the pandemic. Can’t wait to play basketball with him again!
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