Ooh, if I had a dime for every writer I met who says shamefully, “I can write, I just can’t market my own stuff!” Suffice to say, I’d have a lot of dimes. If you’ve said or thought something similar, then I propose you learn these new rules for writers who say “can’t.”

It’s possible you may not yet know HOW to market your work (and we can always help with that part!) but yes, you CAN.

1. If you can write, you CAN market. The definition of marketing is: the action or business of promoting and selling products or services. When you write something, you are promoting an idea, and that’s a service. Your book is the product. You already have an audience in mind who would enjoy or benefit from hearing those ideas. That’s marketing.

2. The internet was built for YOU. Frankly, there’s no one who can benefit MORE from social media marketing than authors. Why? Because it’s free, it’s bountiful, it has the ability to drill down to YOUR audience and it’s primarily a medium of written words. You already have the literate advantage – use it!

3. Marketing is a numbers game. Don’t get caught up in too much “I need to be on Pinterest” or “Why don’t I have two million Facebook fans?” Instead, begin working in the areas in which you feel most comfortable, whether that’s Facebook or Twitter or Goodreads or Google+ or Linked In, etc. And rather than focusing on being the “top dog” — focus on considered connections to like-minded readers.

Then, pick a number. Your number may be 3 or 5 or 10 or 50 or 100. My number is 20. I endeavor, through WHATEVER channels, to make 20 new connections a day. Meaning, at the end of the day, 20 new people will know/see the name, “Where Writers Win.”

I know, between blogging and clients and endless Winner Circle research that I’m not going to get to every social media channel every day. Some days it may be Twitter, other days it may be Facebook, etc. But 20 new emerging authors will know our name.

At the end of a year, that’s over 7,000 new connections. And, as we’ve quickly learned by doing this, those 20 new connections always include a handful of folks who share our news with their own tribes, vastly multiplying the number.

By slicing off this huge space into manageable, bite-sized chunks, just like plodding through a novel at 500 words a day, you’ll find your “just can’t” will quickly turn into a “sure can!”

Give it a try… you’ll soon be telling other emerging authors there’s no such thing as “can’t.”

Creator of Where Writers Win, Shari Stauch has been involved in publishing, marketing and PR for 30 years. She is also the principal author of the WWW blog, and speaks at conferences around the country. The Where Writers Win team’s newest collaboration is The Winner Circle – vetted book review directories, book clubs and other cultivated resources for emerging authors.