Lizzie Chantree

Valentines romance reads for 99p/99c!

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Happy Valentines day everyone!

Curl up somewhere comfortable and download two internationally bestselling, fun filled, romance reads, for just 99p/99c each today! I hope they make you smile and that you have an amazing day. 

Both of the main characters in these books don’t always get things right when it comes to their love lives, and they don’t even really know that they are missing anything. Join in with the stores of Maud and Skye and find out if they find true love and can overcome adversity to finally be happy. You will also find out if Skye, my Nina School Mum, manages to let romance into her life without forgetting she’s a school mum now and breaking someone’s arm for getting too close!

99p/99c

Universal book buy link: If you love me, I’m yours: viewbook.at/IfYouLoveMe-ImYours

Universal book buy link: Ninja School Mum: viewBook.at/NinjaSchoolMum

Reviews:

If you love me, I’m yours:

” If You Love Me, I’m Yours “ by Lizzie Chantree is a tale of Maud an unfulfilled woman with great artistic ability …Dot a woman who struggled to fit into an artistic world that so easily was was conquered by her brother Nate an artist of repute and renown. In this story the characters search for and discover exactly who they are and what it is that they truly want outa life….and in the process find love and their own HEAs! A wonderful read…greatly enjoyed and Highly Recommended.’

Ninja School Mum:

‘Skye has a secret that is only revealed as the book goes on – I liked how her past story was revealed piece by piece, leaving the reader guessing until the end.
There’s much to enjoy in “Ninja School Mum” which isn’t all simply romance. Skye is lonely – and that isn’t helped by being ignored by the other mothers at the school gates; bullying also rears its ugly head; Skye is a loyal friend – as her new friend Thea discovers; and there is romance – with lovely Zack who also has his demons to fight.

I thoroughly recommend this novel – that combines lots of humour with the hard-hitting subjects of bullying and loneliness. The characters are memorable and I’d love to have Skye as a friend.’

My other books:

Universal book buy link: Babe Driven: myBook.to/LizziesBooks

Universal book buy link: Love’s Child: viewBook.at/Amazon-LovesChild

Universal book buy link: Finding Gina: viewbook.at/FindingGina



Monday Marketing.

/ lizziechantree / 6 Comments

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Happy new week everyone. I’ve been working hard on my latest manuscript and it’s coming along nicely. I’m about to write about my main male character in the story, but suddenly another minor male character has stepped up and appeared far sooner that I’d originally imagined. He obviously wants to be a bigger part in the story! I love it when this happens and it makes writing the new book so much fun.

I often support other authors on my blog, but it’s now booked up until the middle of the year, so I thought I’d open up some marketing posts to top tips from authors who can share their experience with you and possibly give you some insight into their own writing journey. The first tips are from Awen Thornber, who is a mystery and romance author.

Awen’s top marketing tips:

1. If your book is much more than just a romance, don’t have ‘A Romance’ under the title on the cover. It gives the impression that it’s just a romance. Sometimes the publisher might add this – but being a novice you might find it difficult to object. Try and raise objections early if you are unhappy with something and be willing to listen to your publishers reasoning.

2. Give the back blurb a lot of thought. Don’t rush this stage. Don’t have something on the back that isn’t relevant to your readers or the story as this might cause confusion, even if you think it will put your book in better categories. Research what will work for your genre and see what other authors are doing to be more visible with keywords. My book has the words ‘let’s dance’ on the back as this fits with the story, but on reflection, this may deter readers who aren’t interested in dance and narrows my marketplace.

3. The ‘Foxtrot’ in my book’s title is a nod towards the police/crime/intrigue part of the novel but I think it was too subtle taking the top two points into consideration. So my top tip would be to seriously think and look at the cover and title and how it appears to would be readers. Get several opinions before settling for the final wording. You only have a matter of seconds to attract a reader to your book out of a page of similar books for sale on Amazon. The cover is the all important sales and marketing tool. It’s the make or break for your book being chosen out of a larger selection.

Some reviewers have commented that despite not liking dance they were surprised to find they enjoyed the book because it was much more than dance. Other reviewers who don’t usually read romance enjoyed the suspense with the crime aspect. Your title, cover and blurb needs to reel in a wider and diverse readership. The wrong choice of words narrows it right down to a few. I realised very quickly when it was too late that my cover obviously targeted a reader who solely liked dance and romance.

This has made it harder to market.

I hope this helps you all! From Awen. 

Foxtrot in FreshbyThreads of Awen

Book buy links for Awen’s books:

Foxtrot in Freshby

Threads of Awen

 

 

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Monday Marketing.

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Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

Happy new week everyone. Today’s post is about how you can help yourself with your marketing approach. When I published my first book, I didn’t know where to go to for help with marketing and I felt quite isolated. I then joined a book group called RRBC and also some Facebook groups and found that there is a lot of help out there. Here are my three top tips for marketing that have worked for me.

  1. Shout out about other people’s work on social media, but always remember to tag them in on it by adding their Facebook page name or Twitter bio name with the @ symbol in front. This disappears on Facebook once you type the name, but it tags the person you are talking about. More often than not, people will see that you are trying to help promote their work and do the same for you if they can. This is all about helping each other. It doesn’t mean spend all day tweeting or posting about other people’s work, but a few choice posts will make others see that you are willing to help them. They might check out your work, tweet about it, or share it on their Facebook timeline.
  2. Join groups on Facebook. You will often find people who have similar interests to you here, and if you are a writer, most groups about books will be full of other authors and readers of different genres. Just type something like romance readers book group etc in the search bar and ask to join. I have a book group and FB have just dropped 60 of my members without my knowledge, because they weren’t active, even though they may have enjoyed reading the posts. This seems to be a new thing, so if you want to stay in a group, be sure to post in it every now and them or join the group discussions. My book group is full of marketing tips for writers and book suggestions for readers. Lizzie’s Book Group. Feel free to join if you want to.
  3. Have bookmarks or business cards made up – not just with your business details, but make them interesting! You can put quotes, photos and anything that will make other people pick them up. Leave them in coffee shops, on notice boards and in shop windows. These are often free or cost as little as 50p per week to post.

Monday Marketing News.

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Today is very exciting as I’m featured in the beautifully glossy and very informative Writers’ Forum Magazine! Author and regular contributor to the magazine Paula Williams interviewed me for her blog and column and I was thrilled to have been asked.

If you haven’t come across this magazine before, it’s packed full of advice for writers and has news, competitions and workshops to get involved in.

writers forum

Monday Marketing.

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Happy 2019 everyone. Here are my marketing tips for today. This post is about setting new goals for yourself. Promotion and marketing can seem so daunting, but putting pressure on yourself to write and find new readers can cause extra stress, so these tips might prevent that from happening.

  1. Set yourself small and achievable goals to help make marketing seem less of an uphill struggle. Give yourself tasks like: Add 50 Twitter followers in a week. Build and promote your Facebook fanbase by getting 20 more likes in a week. Obviously scale this to how active your accounts already are. You might think adding 1,000 followers is achievable, so give yourself realistic targets.
  2. Set up tweets about your book/writing twice a day. Make them different and interesting.
  3. Submit your book to at least three blogs, magazines, review sites per week.

Challenging ourselves with small goals helps us to stay focussed and when we meet those targets, we feel good about it and want to try harder. If we have too many things to do on our lists, we can feel overwhelmed and then nothing gets done at all. Stick with what works and discard anything that doesn’t’t bring the results you are aiming for. Just add a different topic to the top of the list. Have a great week. From Lizzie.

For tips about repetition in marketing click here.

It’s almost Christmas!

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Hello everyone. It’s almost Christmas and I’m sure you’ve all been thinking about, or have already done some festive marketing. I have been asked to design a lot of Twitter adverts recently and have also made some for the people who have appeared on my Introducing page on my blog. They are a great way to liven up Tweets and statistics say that people get more retweets on Twitter if the tweet has an image. So my top tip is to include a photo or graphic image to your tweets. There are lots of programmes where you can design them for yourself, or download free images if you don’t have your own.

If you are unable to design your own, I charge £10 per design for  jpeg twitter ad. You can contact me from the contact page on this blog and all you need to supply is your book cover and a review quote or the text you’d like included, including your Twitter @ name and your website or blog address.

Don’t forget to join in with my #CreativeBizHour Christmas party on Twitter with me, @Lizzie_Chantree tonight, 8-9pm GMT. Just add the # to tweets and replies to chat to join in and tell us all about yourself and your work. It’s a wonderful place to share creative ideas and the hashtag trends regularly, so your work might be seen by different people and one varied timelines.

Here are some examples of Twitter ads I’ve designed:

 

 

SEO and time saving tips for authors.

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Hello everyone. I hope you had a relaxing weekend. For my Monday Marketing post today, I thought I’d offer some tips on something that can really save time for other bloggers and website owners who might be promoting your work, and hopefully improve SEO rankings on blog posts and website articles.

I found out years ago about the importance of naming your photos. I have blogged about this many times but it still happens a lot and it’s a simple thing to change. When people send me photos to appear on my blog, or social media feeds, they sometimes send them titled image001 image201 Book cover 4, picture in Spain etc! When Google search for content, they are always looking for something original, not only should you add your own content to posts to make them stand out and fly up the rankings, but the titles that you give your photos are so important. Not only do they register as the name of the photo and not another image001 or book cover 4, but they stand as an original image that you have given a name to. For example, I have called this photo, Lizzie Chantree author photo:

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This means that if I send this picture to someone to use on their website, they don’t have to spend hours trawling through photos to try and find the one I have sent them that they saved to their blog posts file, or other author files ages ago. They can simply search for photos with my name and all of the picture I have sent them will appear. If I am searching for a book cover an author has sent me earlier in the month that I have saved to an author file, I can easily spot the book’s name, but there might be over 100 book covers 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc. Simply naming your photos when you save them to your computer saves bloggers, website owners and anyone sharing your work a lot of time and energy and it also helps Google to recognise it. This means that they might be more likely to keep photos that aren’t clogging up their computers and confusing them with the same names and perhaps when they are uploading someone else’s photos to a blog post, they might think of you again as you are so easy to work with and provided professional content, that they can simply search for and find. Have an amazing week everyone!

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Monday Marketing. 3 Quick tips.

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Hello everyone. I hope you had an amazing weekend. On Friday, and over the weekend, my publisher did a free book sale with lots of their authors. I was lucky enough for the two books I had in the sale, Ninja School Mum and If you love me, I’m yours, to both rise to #1 on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com in multiple categories on the first day of the sale. Ninja School Mum is now #11 on the bestsellers lists in paid sales and IYLMIY is in the top #42. I decided to go all out and try some new ideas for the sale, so here’s what I did for the sale:

  1. I redesigned all of my social media headers. This was time consuming, but across all of my platforms the theme matched. As it’s nearly Christmas, I made them festive. Whichever page you looked at for my social media, you would have seen a complimentary design. I offer a design service for anyone who doesn’t know how to make social media headers or graphics and ads, but you can make free designs on places like Visme or Canva
  2. I made myself a slogan. I chose, ‘A gift for you!‘ This told my readers that I had something for them, to say thanks for being such wonderful readers. It also fit perfectly with my Christmas theme.
  3. I made Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, blog posts. These all matched my social media headers. I made several, so that I didn’t spam my timeline with the same content over the three day sale.

 

Twitter header:

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Facebook header:

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Facebook and Twitter timeline graphics:

Instagram post:

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#NaNoWriMo

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Hello everyone. I’ve been busy editing a manuscript whilst attempting to begin a new romance novel for #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), 2018. So far I’ve managed about 7,300 words, but I’m not pressuring myself with the daily writing targets, as I’m multi-tasking. I really enjoy seeing how everyone is getting on with either joining in online, but with other writing projects, or sharing their word counts on social media and writing group forums.

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It is sad when anyone posts that they can’t keep up or are not reaching their own daily word goals, as the fun of the writing challenge for me, is not about reaching the winners 50,000 word total, but in getting something new well underway, be it with a few thousand words or a full manuscript. I have seen people join in with word sprints, where they all sit in their own offices or homes at the same time and see how much they can all write in the same time frame. Also there are groups forming in cafes and libraries all over the country to have write ins, and friendships are forming over mutual support of a new plot line and character ideas. The writing community is full of wonderful people who are so generous with their time, that it really is the best job in the world for me. Happy writing everyone!

 

 

99p Romance Reads!

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Hello everyone. Both of my latest books, Ninja School Mum and If you love me, I’m yours,  and also my very first book, Babe Driven, are all 99p/99c for three days!

If you love romance reads that are full of sizzling storylines, girly gossip, beautiful locations and some seriously sexy men, then grab some new reads today!

Book sale meme 2 by Lizzie Chantree

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Book Links:

Ninja School Mum

If you love me, I’m yours

Babe Driven

 

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