The Kobo Writing Life team is excited to announce our latest Facebook Live Q&A on October 17th 2019. From 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST, our takeover host, Tyra Burton, will be answering all your questions on the Kobo Writing Life Facebook page. If you can’t make the takeover, feel free to comment on this post with your questions and we can ask them for you! Keep reading to learn more about Tyra and her experience in the indie world, and get your questions ready!
Next week I’ll be doing an author takeover on Kobo Writing Life and I wanted you to know a little bit more about me before we meet online.
As a child, I would play stewardess and librarian in our living room. On the playground, I would twirl around and pretend to be Wonder Woman. And of course, Halloween of 1977, I dressed up as Princess Leia. Now that I’m older, and still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds is the top of my list. When you throw all these things into the blender you get a professor, author and gadget-geek – a Jill-of-all-trades with a side of ADD – which is probably how I landed in social media.
Back in the day, I started teaching about blogs and podcasts while figuring out how to create a Geocities website and chatting on AOL. If there is one constant in the world of digital marketing – it is that change is inevitable. Social media though frequently frustrating keeps me always coming back to learn more about how things work.
I started writing as a teenager and continued to do so when my academic life allowed. I joined writers’ groups, and eventually met my best friend and future co-author and presenter, Jana Oliver.
Skip forward – and Jana and I start doing workshops on copyright and then on social media. Eventually we were pestered into writing a book, Socially Engaged: The Author’s Guide to Social Media, that helped introduce authors to social media and author branding.
When Jana launched a series under the pseudonym Chandler Steele, we conducted an experiment to find out if an unknown author would be able to build a following with just a social media presence and good content. We discovered two things: Paid social can greatly increase your visibility when you have no platform to build upon and networking with other authors can be the key to build exposure for your author brand.
In truth, I love social media. The good and the bad. As an author and teacher, I understand how it can be used to reach people at just the right moment in time. The basic trick for social media is finding out where your tribe or target market is and where you enjoy being in the digital world. For me right now, that is Facebook and Instagram and I’ve gotten more heavily into producing podcasts.
I’m looking forward to answering your questions about target marketing, social media, podcasting, and author brand when I takeover Kobo Writing Life!
Tyra Burton is a social media strategist and co-author of Socially Engaged: The Author’s Guide to Social Media. A frequent workshop presenter and panelist, Tyra has presented at the annual conferences for Novelist Inc., Romance Writers of America (RWA), and the Atlanta Food Expo. Tyra was the social media columnist for RWA’s eNotes in 2015 and recently wrote for NINC. Her first fiction book, Penduli Station, was co-authored with Sherrie Fillion. Currently, she is working on a follow-up social media book as well as paranormal romance and fantasy series.
She loves dark chocolate, Jameson & Ginger Ale, and Ireland. She is mom to two dogs, Bandit and Shadow, and one cat, Clover. Her and her husband live happily in their house in the woods with their socially engaging fur babies.
