Alison Garwood Jones

I sat down with Sarah McDonald of the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies to talk about my new graphic novel, I MISS MY MOMMY. Highlights include:

• How I discovered spot illustrations were the perfect format for processing grief.

• Why launching a book in the Age of AI — when Google search is “scrambled eggs” — presents a lot of challenges and opportunities. The biggest opportunity is to sell direct to your audience so you can own your audience data (and the distribution) and continue marketing to them. Amazon doesn’t tell you who bought your book, nor do traditional publishers. This frees up authors to learn how to be content entrepreneurs.

• I’ll be taking these lessons in audience building back my classes at the University of Toronto, and directing students to the work of Joe Pulizzi. They already know Joe as “the godfather of Content Marketing,” and now he is inspiring authors, like me, to bypass 3rd party sellers and distributors and build direct relationships with your audience via blogs/newsletters and self-published books. — H/T Tilt Publishing, Lulu Press, Inc.

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