Hello and welcome back to my blog.

Today’s topic will be about how not to spend too much money. This can be in regards to buying the writing craft books, conferences and marketing.

The best way to do this is to budget your money and stick to it. For writing craft books decide where you need improvement in your writing whether it’s in plotting, dialogue or characters and buy that book first. For example buy one book a month and study it hard and use the exercises in it to improve. Then when you have that down buy the next book in line to improve in the area that you need and/or want to improve in.

For conferences, decide how many and which ones you want to attend in a year and come up with a slush fund account to save your money in. Look at how much the price of the convention ticket will cost, then the hotel and plane tickets, also figuring in for how much you will be spending on food and put a little away each month for the cost of the trip. If the conference is local to where you live this will be easier as you will only have to spend money on the ticket, gas or public transportation to and from the convention and food.

As far as marketing goes, the best bet is to start with free marketing options such as posting to social media accounts, or writing articles or writing on your blog.

If you have the money then paid marketing options such as Facebook or Amazon ads will be a good option. But with paid marketing consider it like you’re engaging in speculative investing and only spend the money that you can afford to lose.

When and if you start making money from your writing it is a good idea to take a certain percentage of that, like 10 to 20% and roll it into marketing your business either through the aforementioned ads or through paying people to do Youtube book trailers or pay people on places like Fiverr or anywhere else to promote your books for you on their social media platforms.

The Fiverr option can be great, all you need to do is spend five dollars on a gig – you can always divert money you would spend on coffee for the month and put it towards getting your book promoted. While there are no guarantees that you will make money on paid marketing option ask how much money buying coffee will make you?

To raise seed money you can do your own Fiverr gigs or write for content mills and other paid writing options and then roll that money into your business. There’s too many to list here for this article, that will be the subject of another post.

I hope this helps and make it a great day.