Vantage Points
LiveWriters chats with Dan Blank of WeGrowMedia
Q: You are the founder of WeGrowMedia, where you help writers and other creatives develop a human-centered approach to marketing and reaching their audience. What is one simple marketing step that new writers often miss out on? Why do you think that is?
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A: They wait to long to learn how to talk about what they create, and engage with other people around that. Their reasons are often logical. Perhaps they feel it is better to wait until their writing is "finished" or until someone reputable publishes it for them. But by this time, it is too late. They are rushing to shout about their work without having developed an audience supporting who they are and why they create. What I would encourage new writers to do is two-fold. First is to regularly share what you create and why. You can do this on social media, an email newsletter, video or so many other channels. The second is to develop professional colleagues. To do so, don't vie for the attention of "influencers," instead identify who else writers and reads the kind of work you create. Email them, follow them on social media, find small ways to engage.
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Q: Based on your experiences, what do you see as the link between writing and podcasting? How can one benefit the other?
A: The impetus for writing and podcast is often similar. Usually it is focused on either storytelling or educating. So many podcasts have embraced long-form storytelling or interviews. Likewise, there are lessons to be learned, sometimes directly through a topic, and other times as the moral of a story. This is similar to why people write memoir, fiction, and nonfiction. The person who listens to a podcast may have the same goal of someone who reads a book: to escape into a story, to connect with the world in a new way, and to learn something in the process.
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Q: Tell readers about your book. What inspired you to write it, and what do readers most often tell you they admire about it?
A: The idea behind Be the Gateway happened unexpectedly. Several years ago I was recording daily videos for some writers I was working with, and one day I came up with this idea of our careers as writers being akin to a gateway that we build and walk people through. I started recording a video and riffed on this idea. The writers I was working with loved it, so I wrote a public blog post about it too, and I kept getting great feedback.
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It's intriguing for me to consider that I have the moment of ideation captured on video for this book. The concept is basically to make marketing feel like an authentic and approachable pursuit for writers and artists. The book is broken down into three parts, giving practical ways to understand how to communicate what you create and why, how to better find and get to know your ideal readers, and then how to engage with them in a manner that feels natural. All the while, developing your platform as a writer and understanding how to market your books
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