Category Archives: Marketing

A guest post by Jace Sanders.

There’s a bookstore not far from where I work, filled with older pieces of literature, many of them discontinued works of authors past. The words, messages, and stories they present were at some point in time considered brilliant, or at least relevant enough to publish. Its amazing to think of the countless hours spent plotting those words, writing, type setting each page, binding, shipping, and then promoting the books for sale. I love to get lost in the store, thumbing through the old pages, and gazing into a forgotten author’s mind.

With heroes like C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, and Victor Hugo, I’m grateful that their words made it to print for my enjoyment and education. I imagine that there were many great writers, never published because they didn’t know the right people, or make the right connections, or maybe they merely failed to finish their book.

In most ways, getting our words into a sellable format is a much easier venture these days. But just because a work is published doesn’t mean it is read.

It’s no secret that the world of writing and publishing has changed drastically over the past several years. We’d be fools to think that it won’t continue to change throughout our lives.

We’re not only competing with other writers for a chance to entertain a mind. We’re also competing against television, movies, radio and video games just to name a few.

For many writers, including myself, the goal of becoming a published writer has changed into developing a readership. It is one thing to be published and another thing to be read, discussed, blogged about, shared, and analyzed.

Let us discuss the four Ps of marketing (or the three Ps and the one D) and how they apply to developing a fan base and to writing in this day and age.

Product – Your product is your work and you are the brand. It’s important to write well, tell a good story, develop great characters, and have excellent prose. All of these help enhance the product. Branding is equally important.

Pricing – Pricing used to be a mathematical formula based on the cost of printing and promoting the books. With Kindles, iPads and Kobo Ereaders the cost of printing is nil. In many ebook platforms pricing can be somewhat arbitrary. I have seen many writers find success in promoting their works and helping their brand by offering discounts to a book for a time. This is most effective when compounded with adequate promotion.

Traditional publishing has its costs and still plays into the economics of book pricing. I’ve noticed that the Big Five are slowly becoming versed in the flexibility and cost benefits that come with epublishing.

Promotion – You are the brand. Take care what you put your name on and how you treat others. Pay attention to Genre. You may want to develop multiple brands under pen names.

Social media has made it much easier to find out about people, the good and the bad. In branding, consider setting up a fan page on Facebook, a twitter account, a YouTube channel, a blog, and a personal website. All of these are tools that can help generate brand awareness that in turn will help you better promote your products.

I have seen many, very effective Book Bombs used to increase product and brand awareness. This usually involves a discounted price for a limited time, followed by massive promotion of said discount using Facebook, Twitter, blogs and websites. Share the news with your friends and get your friends to share the news with their friends. Usually this helps to generate positive reviews and a fan base. Of course it helps if you have more than one product for them to look at.

I have participated in four successful Kickstarter campaigns for writers publishing their books. Collette already wrote a great article with everything you need to know about Kickstarter, so I’ll refer you to that, but I believe that this and similar platforms will have a significant place in the future of writing.

Placement/Distribution – The publishing industry has changed, and will continue to do so. To be effective in marketing our products we need to stay on the forefront of writing platforms. Take an indesign or another epub class online. Become familiar with tools like Scrivener, Audible.com, Kobo Writing Life and many others that help us develop our product and prep it for alternative forms of distribution.

You can start to build your brand today, even before you have a product to promote. Join groups, network, write on blogs, and find a tribe and/or build your own. Before you know it, you’ll have a following.

I set up a fan page on Facebook. Check it out and like it at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jace-Killan/359810990808236

Thanks for reading.

Guest Writer Bio: Jace

Jace lives in Arizona with his wife and five children. In addition to writing he enjoys music, photography, and anything outdoors. He holds a Masters in Business Administration from Utah State University and is the Chief Financial Officer of a biotech company.

Making Sure Your Ebook is REALLY Ready To Go

October 16, 2013

Frank Morin

Editing Frank Morin Marketing Publishing 1 Comment

These days publishing a book isn’t the roadblock it used to be. Many of us are e-publishing even while often still trying to land a traditional publishing deal. It is so easy to get a book out there – almost too easy.

I’m seeing some pretty wildly differing stats on how many books were published in the past couple of years. Bowker, the company that issues official ISBNs, lists the numbers of books published with those ISBNs, but many authors who only e-publish don’t bother getting an ISBN, so those numbers are woefully short. I saw one statistic that claimed 3,000,000 books were published in 2011, and estimated 15,000,000 in 2012.

Even if those numbers aren’t 100% accurate, I think it’s safe to assume millions of books are flooding the e-book marketplace. It’s so easy to e-publish that there are no quality controls out there. The sad truth is that many of the millions of ebooks flooding the market are terrible. I know several kids in high school and even middle school who proudly proclaim they’re published authors with multiple titles to their name. They look at me funny when I tell them I’ve been writing for years and just released my first ebook and ask what took me so long!

The problem is – if your book is one of the awesome ones, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get noticed and not lost in the flood. That’s why promotion and marketing is becoming more important than ever.

When e-publishing the most important marketing tool you have is your book. If you release a book before it’s really finished, before it’s well edited, without a striking cover, you’re tying an anchor around your own neck.

I’ve read more than one ebook that showed great promise. It was ALMOST great. But the author clearly rushed the process, lacked the discipline to do it right and polish it that last 5% that would have made it shine. And as a result, all that hard work was wasted because the final book was merely decent.

In today’s market, we can’t afford to have a decent book, an okay book. When e-publishing it’s vital to take the time to make sure our books are really ready to go. Here are a few things to keep in mind to help get your book there.

Complete more than one pass.

A good author with a solid plan can write a pretty good book in a single pass, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready for immediate release. It needs to be polished, fine-tuned, with each scene carefully reviewed to maximize its potential. David Farland is famous for making up to 10 editing passes for his novels, each one focused on optimizing different aspects of the story.

Take the time to really finish your book.

Get it professionally edited.

Many e-authors hate this step and manage to convince themselves that they don’t need it. Why bother actually investing in our work? Better to just release it and watch the money roll in, right?

Wrong. I can’t stress this one enough. No matter how good you think you are as a writer, no matter how much blood, sweat and tears you’ve already invested in the work, you’re not done. Readers can tell when a book is not professionally edited and they’ll feel cheated and never buy another of your books.

It was a humbling experience for me to see all the marks on a recent manuscript when the editor I hired returned it. I don’t think there was a single page without some kind of mark. I learned a lot, got insights into blind spots I never knew I had, and the resulting manuscript really shines in ways it never could have before. Totally worth the money.

Like anything else, know your editor. Some who claim to be editors aren’t worth your time. You may have to contract with a few editors on different manuscripts to find one you really work well with.

One editor I highly recommend without reservation is our own Joshua Essoe. Check out his website here.

Get a killer cover.

Again, good cover art is an investment, although it doesn’t have to be a ton of money. There are great resources out there for covers at reasonable prices. Michelle Wilber, the woman who painted the cover for my ebook Saving Face is a talented artist who is a personal friend. Many artists are willing to help with covers for ridiculously small fees as a way to help them also break into the market and be noticed. It’s a win-win situation.

Unfortunately many authors just download the first clipart they can find on free sites and slap on a title. Worse, some just download any image they like, even if they don’t have rights to it. Don’t fall into that trap. A good cover needs careful thought to present the right tone and brand, including the right font. This is huge. A good cover draws readers in, while a bad cover kills the deal before the power of your writing has any chance.

Format the book carefully.

Don’t just assume you can take your Word file and convert it into an ebook without more work. Bad formatting marks you an amateur and drives readers away, and Word is notorious for inserting tons of special characters invisible while in that program but glaringly obvious when converted to ebook format.

I learned a ton about that process while prepping Saving Face for release. I found some excellent resources to help. If you are willing to do some simple technical work on your novel, it is definitely possible to produce quality output.

If not, there are great resources out there that will prep your ebook for you for a reasonable fee. I haven’t used them myself, so I can’t recommend one over another, but you can easily get recommendations from other authors. With a little research you can find the one that best fits your needs and budget.

I used two resources primarily in my formatting project:

First was Cheri Lasota’s ebook Design and Upload Your EPUB. The Steps To Your Success. This excellent resource is available for only $0.99 and is well worth the cost. She discusses her approach for formatting an ebook, and walks an author through the steps of prepping a book and uploading it to both Amazon and B&N.

I also followed an excellent series of blog posts by Guido Henkel where he discusses in great detail his process. His is slightly more technical, and if you have some basic HTML ability, is excellent.

There are many other great resources out there, and it doesn’t really matter which one you choose, so long as you make sure you follow one of them and carefully prep your ebook.

Even after utilizing both of these sources and carefully reviewing the final product, I still found a couple of minor errors after releasing Saving Face. Thankfully both Amazon and B&N allow for updating a corrected manuscript. Just don’t use that as a crutch to not doing the work up-front because anyone who’s already purchased your book is stuck with the errors.

If you nail all four of these areas, most likely you’ll have a rock solid ebook ready for release. Coupled with brilliant writing, you’ve covered all the bases to become a player in the game.

Now, just need to figure out how to reach the 10 million readers I know are dying to buy my book . . .

Working the Convention Circuit

October 15, 2013

Quincy J. Allen

Conventions Marketing Publishing Quincy Allen Superstars Writing Seminars The Writing Life Writing Tools 4 Comments

This is one of those “you should” blogs that, if you know me, you know I generally hate. But I’m going to do it anyway because I’m willing to take the heat for being a hypocrite for a topic I believe is worth the sacrifice. So here goes, and it’s a bit of a daisy chain, so bear with me.

If you’re a new writer, with at least a handful of published short stories to your name or even a novel or two, then you should give serious consideration to working the convention circuit.

Back in July of 2009, I got laid off from an IT gig and decided to chase a writing career. The first thing I did was write some short stories and submit them. I also wrote a novel—the less-than-well-known Chemical Burn. Over the past four years, these efforts have borne fruit. However, if they were all I accomplished in that time, the odds are I wouldn’t be writing this blog right now for the simple reason that the folks at The Fictorians wouldn’t know who I am.

Let me explain.

In October of 2009, I attended MileHiCon, a local and well-established genre and writing convention with a strong author-track. As a result of my participation, a number of wheels were set in motion. MileHiCon is where I met Kronda Seibert and the “heart” of the local steampunk population. As a result of that meeting, I was able to write three episodes of a steampunk Internet radio show and laid the foundation for the Penny Dread Tales anthology series. I wouldn’t be writing steampunk if it weren’t for that convention.

At MileHiCon I also met Sara Megibow of the Nelson Literary Agency (which had benefits later) as well as David Boop who has introduced me to much of the Front Range writing community in one way or another. This also led to my involvement with the Broadway Book Mall.

At a convention in 2010 I met Peter J. Wacks, which opened the door to a contract for Steampelstiltskin with Fairy Punk Studios and laid the groundwork for a relationship with an international best-selling author (more on that later). I also started picking up a fan-base and found a home with the steampunk community. As a result of that, I established a recurring attendance invite with AnomalyCon and locked in “premiering” each new Penny Dread Tales (PDT) anthology at the convention. PDT has now become a staple at the con, with a growing list of “bigger-name” contributors as a result of its growing exposure. It was in this cycle of cons that I also met Guy De Marco for the first time, and that relationship opened up even more doors.

2011 was more of the same, and in 2012, I extended my reach a little and—thanks to Guy—hit OsFest in Omaha Nebraska. That’s where I met Travis Heermann. It was also in the 2012 con season that I met Angie Hodapp (also of the Nelson Literary Agency), and that opened doors to making a proposal to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Board of Directors as well as teaching a seminar on writing action scenes (with Travis Heermann) at the Colorado Gold Conference this year.

2013 saw my reach deepen into the writing community. I’ve met writers, agents and publishers. I’ve got a growing list of contacts, fans, and even editors asking for my work. My relationship with Angie Hodapp and Sara Megibow over at the Nelson Agency opened the door for me to submit a query directly to Sara, and while she didn’t accept that manuscript, the door is open for me to submit directly to her when I finish my next manuscript.

On top of it all, at CoSine in Colorado Springs this year, I met for the first time Kevin J. Anderson. You may know that name. As a result, I now do book designs and eBook conversions for Word Fire Press, and as a result of that chain of events, I’ve been able to work on books by authors like Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson and, coming soon, Alan Drury. I even did a WordFire Press version of the eBook for Clockwork Angels. My work with Anderson also got me into Superstars, which led to me being invited to become a Fictorian.

The daisy chain goes on and on, so what’s the message here?

That if you’re planning a career in the writing biz, you should start meeting, greeting, and carousing with people in the writing biz. That’s how you make contacts. It’s how you open doors. That’s how you create opportunities for your writing projects.

Most people think the writing business is all about getting “picked up”… about writing a manuscript in solitude, submitting a query, and finding out six months later that you’ve been offered a contract by an agent or even one of the “Big 5.” I won’t deny that this method works… but you’d have as much a chance trying to get struck by lightning in a thunderstorm.

The odds are against you, so how do you up the odds?

You hit the convention circuit, plain and simple.

Kicking out a Kickstarter

October 14, 2013

Colette Black

Business Colette Black Interacting With Fans Marketing Publishing 2 Comments

Kickstarter is crowd-funding, right? Not promotion. It’s more than both of those things. Let me explain.

So, you have a finished novel and you want it to see the light of day. You have some options: get an agent to love it and leave it in their hands, go directly to a publisher, or publish it yourself. My book, Noble Ark, had gained interest from agents and then found a wonderful one. She was putting the book out to the different publishers, but I pulled the book before I’d given it enough time to sell, deciding to self-publish. I loved my agent, but she’d told me herself that she wasn’t a Young Adult agent and everything else I had written, and was writing, was YA. So I decided to seek traditional publishing for my YA material. My New Adult book, Noble Ark, I would self-publish.

This is where Kickstarter comes in. It’s crowd-funding to help make artistic projects happen while giving back to those who contribute. I particularly like this explanation from the About Kickstarter page, “Mozart, Beethoven, Whitman, Twain, and other artists funded works in similar ways — not just with help from large patrons, but by soliciting money from smaller patrons, often called subscribers. In return for their support, these subscribers might have received an early copy or special edition of the work. Kickstarter is an extension of this model, turbocharged by the web.”

Why take this route?

1) Funding: Who can afford the costs that publishing companies put out for a book? And trust me, you WANT to compete with these publishing companies. With Kickstarter, everyone comes together to supply that funding, while everyone gains something from the process. It’s a win-win.

2) Promotion: What better way to get friends, family, and fans involved with what you’re doing. They have a stake in it, because they’re making it happen. This is exciting stuff, people! And getting everyone involved is what we’re always doing as writers, and what we’re talking about for the month. This is the essence of promotion.

3) Connections: As I let people know about my project, I’m connecting with friends and fans that I’ve been too busy to stay in contact with. They have busy lives, I spend all my free time writing, and we understand how that happens, but those good intentions to talk or get together have continued to fall by the wayside. Kickstarter has given me an opportunity to reconnect. It’s also given me a topic of conversation to create new friendships. Who knew that the receptionist at my car repair shop is an artist? She asked about my weekend, I mentioned putting together a Kickstarter, and now we both have new fans. Her work is edgy and interesting and I wish I’d known about it sooner. (Find her on Instagram at: thee_empress23)

Since this is promotion month, let me make some suggestions on promoting a Kickstarter. Many of these come from Kickstarter guru, Heidi Berthiaume, who will be putting a book together–via Kickstarter, of course—on how to run and promote a Kickstarter. Her help has been invaluable. (Full Discolosure: some of these suggestions come from Kickstarter and many are my own opinion.)

When you get close to release, let your fans know that a Kickstarter is on the way. Take this opportunity to introduce them to the concept.
Don’t think you can put up a post on fb or twitter and be done. This project is professional, but also personal. Send personal notes, email or IM, to everyone who might be interested. Make sure they understand the basic points: they pay nothing unless the funding goal is reached, there are pledge amounts to fit any budget (make sure that’s true when creating pledge amounts), full funding is required in order for your project to go forward.
Don’t ask for help, ask for participation in your great project. Focus on rewards they earn in the process of bringing your art to life.
Ask for help. Contradictory, I know, but this means go to the professionals you’re friends with, who already have marketing venues: the people with blogs, podcasts, etc., and ask them for suggestions. They’re familiar with getting the word out and may be able to help you find other avenues for promotion.
Don’t overwhelm, but don’t neglect. You don’t want every word people hear out of your mouth, or read on fb, to be Kickstarter. Put up regular content, but don’t harp on the cause. At the same time, people need to be reminded. Add something to the Kickstarter and let people know it’s there. I’m considering lengthening my video, and/or adding some bloopers. Throw out the occasional progress report. Get a short video from your editor or artist, talking about why they’re excited about your project and post it. Remind people in interesting ways that aren’t annoying. Remember, you still want these people to be your friends, whether they participate or not.
As it gets close to the ending date, build momentum. This is when the posts might come a little closer together, as you encourage everyone to reach a little farther to get the goal, or to attain a stretch goal. This is where you might put in add-ons, individual rewards people can add to what they’re already getting, in order to build interest. The perfect example of this is Tracy and Laura Hickman’s Sojourner Tales Kickstarter. It finished with over 200% funding, but in the last couple of weeks they were putting in add-ons, offering video chats with the authors participating in upcoming stretch goals (like Kevin J. Anderson), and put up a you-tube game play sampler. And they made sure everyone knows they can still join in by going to their website.
Almost forgot this last important bit—timing. Don’t start a Kickstarter in the middle of a government shutdown. A lot of people who would have contributed, have told me they’re waiting for the shutdown to end so they have a paycheck to work with. December is also usually not a good time for a Kickstarter, as everyone is thinking about Christmas. So think about what is going on in people’s lives and time your Kickstarter better than I did.

I hope this helps some of you understand Kickstarter a little better and be prepared to make a success of it. Another suggestion the Kickstarter team makes on their website is to participate in funding a Kickstarter before you start one. I volunteer mine, because I’m nice that way.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/203246974/noble-ark-how-it-should-end.

If you want to know more about my Kickstarter process, you can go to my blog, Black Space, where that will be my focus for the month.