Authors & Marketing: Sensitive Introvert to Shameless Hawker – Abandoning Erroneous Expectations

Donna W. Hill gives some sound advice regarding marketing.

The Heart of Applebutter Hill

So, you succumbed to that craziest of temptations and wrote a book. Now, whether you are one of the “lucky” ones who landed a publishing contract or you did it yourself, you’re starting to realize that you’re the one who has to do the marketing. The problem is that marketing is totally foreign to your innermost nature. There are lots of suggestions out there about building an online presence, developing niche markets, mastering SEO (search engine optimization) and snuggling up to industry professionals, but how do you get to a place where you’re at least halfway comfortable doing that stuff?

The Writer’s Mindset

Whether we’re embroiled in research or lost in our private worlds conjuring up scenes and scenarios, the writer is motivated by a few simple principles, and truth is at the bottom of each of them. We stare into our characters, and using our accumulated understanding of humanity’s…

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It Takes 100,000 Viewers to Buy a Book

The covers have never grabbed my attention – it’s always the words inside that matter most to me. Thanks to Nicholas C. Rossis and Chris McMullen for the information.

Nicholas C. Rossis

Chris McMullen recently shared some statistics which gave me pause.

He was making the point that every little bit helps, even the copyright page. But his main argument was that, even though the book title and cover can attract readers to check the book out, it’s the Look Inside that plays a pivotal role in the closing rate.

And then he asked the real question that should be bugging us: what percentage of customers who visit the product page actually purchase the book?

For a typical book, just 1 out of 1000 (or more) customers who see the book’s cover will actually visit the product page, and just 1 out of 100 or so customers who visit the product page will purchase the book.

This is an average book that sells once a week or so to a stranger. You put these ratios together, and it takes 100,000 strangers to…

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Front Cover Denuding.

When my novels ‘A House Without Windows’ and ‘The Daughter-in-law Syndrome‘ won Indie awards a few years’ ago, I couldn’t wait to add the medals to the front covers.

But recently I realised one thing:  All the winning bestselling novels / traditionally published books only have meritorious awards on the front covers such as the Booker Prize or a mention in the New York Times bestsellers’ list for example.  A small publisher I used to be with also implied that it was not a good idea to add the kind of Indie awards I had won to my front covers.  I didn’t agree at first, but now I realise he was right.

Thanks to the Writer Beware website I’ve since found out that many of these Indie ‘awards’ are given by marketing companies very eager to take our money and fool us that we are taking part in bona fide writing contests.  There are always a myriad of genres to pick, so that if your book falls into more than one genre, you get to pay twice to enter the contest!  Some of the ‘winners’ are actually picked out of a hat.  The awards sadly mean nothing to agents, large publishers, editors and readers, and so it was with a little bit of disappointment that I decided yesterday to remove the awards and in so doing I have returned the covers to their original state.

Once you enter these kinds of contests, you are then spammed forever afterwards with emails inviting you to take part in the next ‘contest’, which surprise surprise is not that far away.

What I am now wondering is whether there are any genuine and reputable Indie writing contests where judges sit down and read the entries and then select the best one to the best of their ability?  It would be nice to try and win the kind of contest that actually means something!  What do you think?  Do you know of any?

 

 

 

An Open Invitation for Submissions

Interested?

6 Submission Mistakes

Some good advice here for authors.

K.M. Allan

The hard work isn’t over when you type “The End” on your final draft, nor does it finish after months of editing.

If you’re a writer who wants to see your manuscript published traditionally, you’ll need to work on a submission package for agents and publishers. If you want to give your MS the best chance of standing out in the slush pile, that should include avoiding these 6 submission mistakes.

Not Checking It Every time You Submit

You might think it’s over the top to double-check a submission before hitting send if you’ve read it a million times and know for sure it’s correct, but you know what? That’s what the typos want you to think.

Those little gremlins are always there, tricking your eyes. I sent off three submissions last week, and on the third one, I still found a typo even though I was positive the…

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Creating an Audiobook Using ACX – My Experience – Part 1 of 3

Useful info from Don Massenzio on using ACX for the creation of audiobooks. I have several audiobooks which are with the royalty share option, so I did not pay anything for their production. I also placed a sample of my manuscript online for audition, and on average had to wait about 2 -3 weeks before somebody read it.

Author Don Massenzio

In a recent post, I described the process for striking out on your own and recording an audiobook. As I mentioned in that post (found here), I originally went down this post and didn’t like my result because of the quality of my voice.

The route that I took instead, was to use a professional voice actor and create my audiobook through ACX, Amazon’s audiobook platform.

This three part series will describe, in some detail, the process that I went through to create my first of two audiobooks. I hope you find it helpful.

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Step 1 – The Platform

This part of the process turned out to be a no-brainer. I was skeptical at first, however, because I had tried the exact same tactics in the past with no positive results. The overwhelming suggestion for a platform was to use acx.com. ACX is another one of those content publishing companies…

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Authors Beware

Last week I was surprised when I decided to submit a tweet for December’s  #PitMad exercise.  I had sent a few tweets in the past, but they had never been favoured by any agents.  However, to my surprise, within a short while of sending my tweet, it was liked by somebody I assumed was a literary agent.

Having been stung in the past by a few small publishers eager to make a fast buck, I decided to do my homework and check this person out.  I found out the ‘agent’ who liked my tweet is actually an ‘acquisitions editor’ from yet another small publishing company, where there is a distinct overlap between the authors and the staff members..

The write up by Victoria Strauss on the threaded view in the Absolute Write forum says it all really:

I just reviewed an I……. W…. contract, and it’s pretty bad. Among other problems: an agent-of-record clause that empowers the agent in ways that may exceed the actual author-agent relationship; editing clauses that empower the publisher to edit and make abridgements without the author’s consent (the author’s only recourse is to walk away); vague language that makes it hard to figure out the meaning of some of the clauses, including the actual term of the contract; and language that empowers the publisher to bill the author for unspecified editing and production costs if the publisher decides the author is in breach or has missed a deadline. There’s also language that suggests that they compensate “referral agents” for sending authors their way.

I……. W…. appears to have published just 10 books since its 2016 startup. This is a really, really slow publication schedule–kind of hard to understand, given that there’s a pretty big staff for such a small press. The publishing schedule is also troublingly irregular, with several months’ gap between releases in some cases. For instance, they released a book in November 2016, then nothing until March 2017, and then nothing until August. It’s just not very professional.

The books’ Amazon sales rankings are dire, especially the Kindle rankings. Doesn’t look to me like a publisher that’s putting a lot of effort into marketing and promotion.  

So authors, beware when you take part in #PitMad next time.  It’s not always literary agents who favour your tweets;  sometimes it’s an ‘acquisitions editor’ from a small publishing company that Victoria Strauss has already checked out and given the thumbs down to.  You need to do your homework and find out if it’s worth sending off that manuscript you’ve worked so hard to create, or whether it’s better to self-publish.

From what I can tell by using a print-on-demand publisher/distributor like Ingram Spark and then registering my books with Nielsens, it’s only the same thing that many small publishers do anyway, and so you might as well pay Ingram’s fees, do it all yourself, and be your own small publisher and cut out the middle man/woman/person/ who is after a slice of your royalties.  Nielsens then add your books to Gardners, and hey presto, your books are then able to be seen by buyers from the big bookstores.  I’ve sold far more paperbacks via Ingram and their Advance catalogue in the past couple of months than any other sites where my books are on sale (one morning I checked my Ingram dashboard and I’d sold 27 books overnight!).

Of course I’m sure that there are wonderful small publishers out there who do care about marketing your book, and who do not want you to sign away the rights to your work for 5 years or more.  Also I’m after the one whose top priority is not how much money they can make from my work.  As I said before, I’m sure there’s a lovely small publishing company out there –  it’s just that I haven’t met them yet.

I’m still going to increase the word count on my story and send it to a few chosen literary agencies.  I’ll even take part in the next PitMad exercise on 7th March.  You never know, a bona fide agent might even ‘like’ my tweet!

 

 

 

How People Really Decide To Buy Your Book

Some interesting information here from Nicholas C. Rossis on ten reasons why people buy a book.

Nicholas C. Rossis

People judge a book by its cover. However, as every author knows, that’s not the only thing that makes them buy a book. Tucker Max recently explained in The Writing Cooperative what else influences their decision in a post we should all bookmark. As he points out,

Almost every potential reader will judge whether or not to buy and read your book before they have read one single word inside the book.

He then continues to explore the unconscious process of choosing whether to buy a book or not, breaking it down into a handy list, listed in order of what readers will consider, from first to last:

1. The title of the book
2. The recommending source
3. The book cover
4. The book description
5. Editorial reviews
6. Customer reviews
7. The author bio and picture (depending on where the picture is placed)
8. The length of the book
9. The book text itself (the “see inside” function…

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Am I a Real Author?

A thought-provoking post from Don Massenzio. IMHO I don’t think it matters how old you are when you start writing. I think the older you are, the more experiences you’ve had to write about.

Author Don Massenzio

When I jumped into the indie author scene, it was a calculated risk. Like I do with a lot of decisions, I looked at the pros and cons.

Pros:

• There are a number of platforms that are easy to publish your work on for little or no cost (Amazon, Nook, Smashwords, etc.).
• The royalties for sales are pretty decent. If you price a book on Amazon over $2.99, for instance, you will get 70% of what you sell.
• You can write at your own pace in whatever style you want.
• You can directly interact with your readers through many vehicles (blogs, mailing, lists, social media, author signing events).
• There is a fairly organized community of independent authors and you can learn from others and help others that are just getting started.
• My writing would be judged directly by the readers and not some low-on-the-totem-pole publishing house employee looking for the…

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Authors – What NOT to Do When Promoting in Bookstores

Thanks to Susan Violante for this info on promoting books in bookstores. Three of mine will be in a Waterstones’ store on the Isle of Wight in January. It’ll be very tempting to visit the store in January, but on this advice I think I’ll just stay on the mainland…

Book by Book Publicity

Susan Violante Managing Editor

By far the hardest thing an author has to learn to do when their first book comes out is promoting. I was lucky in that I had worked in retail in my younger years, so all I had to do was tap into my long-forgotten sales persona to sell myself to bookstores and other businesses where I hoped to do book signings or have them carry my book. Even so, I made a number of mistakes. Some molded the way I do things now…others I rather forget because they were embarrassing, but they do bring laughter to others when my husband tells the stories…Either way, mistakes are how we humans learn so don’t be discouraged by them. Below are some things I learned not to do whether through my own mistakes or those of others:

• Don’t expect to be seen by the Manager or Buyer of…

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