Taglines

by Rebecca Talley

Sheralyn Pratt, our public relations director at CFI, has been conducting online classes in an effort to help us learn how to best promote our books. The classes have all been useful and informative.

In our last class, Sheralyn challenged us to create a tagline that we could use in our marketing efforts.

For example, Wendy Paul, author of 101 Gourmet Cupcakes in 10 Minutes, has as her tagline: There's Always a Reason to Bake. It's simple, straightforward, and easy to remember. It also directly targets her audience. She uses it in all of her marketing campaigns.

Coming up with a tagline seems like an easy thing to do, right? Well, it's not as easy as it looks.

For a successful tagline it should be:

1. Specific
2. Simple
3. Easy to remember
4. Targeted to your audience

Once you come up with your tagline, Sheralyn suggests you attach it to everything: websites, blogs, business cards, ads, flyers, anything you use to promote your books. The idea is when someone reads your tagline, he/she immediately thinks of you.

Even if you write in different genres, you can still use a tagline.

I've written a YA novel and a romance, both targeted at the LDS market. My current work-in-progress is LDS women's fiction. Even though the books are in different genres, my target market is LDS so that's what I concentrated on. After many attempts, I came up with:

LDS Fiction Inspired by Life.

I've added it to my website and my blog and plan to add it to my business cards.

Here's a challenge for all of you: create a tagline and then post it to the comments so we can discuss it.