Session Description
Ask authors who their readers will be and most often you’ll hear, “Oh, everybody!” Wrong, unless you have $1 million dollars and a huge staff to market your book! In this session you will learn how to: (1) laser-focus your audience by gender, age, region, income, education, hobbies, etc, to maximize your marketing time and dollars, (2) identify media outlets they use and how to communicate accordingly, (3) develop champions and give them tools to help you sell books, (4) develop a book club tour.
Lisa Weldon
Lisa Stapleton Weldon, a graduate of Auburn University, has spent a lifetime in advertising in Atlanta. Her hobby? Walking cities and sharing the stories she finds.
At age 58, Lisa took a month out of her life to learn the new tools of her trade, social and digital media. She sliced of map of Manhattan into 20 pieces with the goal of walking one piece per day until she covered the entire island. At night she pored over instructional videos and blogged about the neighborhoods she’d walked. The following year she replicated that 30-day journey in Paris, and has since walked Shanghai, Istanbul, and several counties in Central America. Huffington Post featured her walk of Paris on the front cover of their “Living Fearlessly” section. Oprah’s network Harpo Productions invited Lisa to share her story with guest Cindy Crawford.
Her first book Twenty Pieces earned awards from 2022 Nautilus Books and 2021American Best Books. Her current project is Blood Sisters, a historical novel based in Mobile, Alabama, the city she calls her hometown.
She is a fellow of the Hambidge Center and the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts and a content creator for Melissa Gilbert’s platform, ModernPrairie.com. Lisa is a featured speaker and guest in numerous podcasts and online shows.
Her greatest joys in life? Her three grown children and a brand new grandson!
