Category Archives: Networking

Most professional authors have attended conventions as a fan before they were bitten by their muse. Some attend to sell books, sit on panels, and even do a reading or two. I’ve been asked numerous times how a new author can learn the secret handshake to get behind the table or podium instead of getting stuck in the back row of a crowded room.

The answer is: It depends on the convention.

Getting panel time is easier for the local conventions, and it is a good place to start. The budget for a 150-attendee convention can’t sustain bringing in a lot of headliners, so they usually focus on a big name or two to draw the crowds. This leaves plenty of room for a newly published author to get in front of an audience and polish their presentation. Smaller cons can also allow you to interact with folks who inspire you as a writer. When I started going to conventions again after a 23-year gap, I found myself sitting next to luminaries like Kevin J. Anderson, Connie Willis, Peter J. Wacks, C.J. Henderson, Carrie Vaughn, and Eytan Kollin.

Your attitude will help determine how far you’ll get. Approach a potential panel opportunity from the perspective that you will be glad to help the Con Panel Chair in any capacity. Never act like you’re doing the convention a favor by appearing in their midst. If you sold one pro short story or over fifty novels, remain humble and helpful.

Now that you’ve been invited to the other side of the table, here are a few things I’ve learned:

Be on time. You can be fashionably late when you’ve won a Bram Stoker Award®, an Edgar®, and a Hugo® or two. If you’ve won those awards, you’d probably be too professional to be late anyway.
Look the part. Be clean, wear reasonably decent clothes, and try to avoid the controversial t-shirts. If it’s part of your persona to be a smelly bum with less than three square feet of ripped t-shirt covering a beer gut, understand you won’t be looked upon with favor for the next convention.
Pay attention. When another author is talking, follow the conversation so you can contribute without repeating points others have made five minutes ago. When an audience member is talking, look at them and nod your understanding of their question. When a luminary is talking, pay close attention to how they interact with the audience. They’ve been doing the panel gig for a while, and you can learn quite a bit just by using your senses instead of using your smartphone to update your Facebook status.
Panels are not a competition. There is no need to one-up the previous panelist, and you are not getting paid by how many seconds you can keep the microphone in your hot little hands. Share with others, allow the other panelists to complete their thoughts or stories, and don’t forget to keep yourself on the topic of the moment.
Be appreciative. Always thank the other panelists and, most especially, the audience. Remember, the folks who are buying the books are the ones you want to make a good impression on, and you want to be remembered.
Be prepared. Unless you’re a last-minute addition to the panel, you should at least know who the other panelists are, what they’ve written, and you should make yourself familiar with the topic. Don’t forget to memorize a quick blurb about yourself for your introduction. I also like to bring a nameplate, some cards or treats, several pens, and a few copies of my latest work.
Be positive. Unless you have the funniest goth schtick going, you want to be remembered as someone who is fun, someone who compliments others, and an author who is professional. If you can contribute something funny, do so unless it is at someone else’s expense. Above all, never insult an audience member or the guest of honor.
Be yourself. Relax (as best as you can.) I like to imagine I invited a bunch of friends over to my back yard for a barbecue. If you have a phobia about public speaking, I would suggest taking a class, joining Toastmasters, or just focusing everything down to the person you are talking to and ignoring the rest. I find that making eye contact and smiling works best for both my nerves and the audience member stammering out a question.

Eventually, word of mouth will spread that you “give good panel”, and you will be asked to come back next year. Since there are usually several conventions in a geographic region every year, you may find yourself talking to volunteers from other events. For example, I attended Constellation Nebraska one year, and I met the chairwoman for a larger convention in Omaha. I was invited to attend OSFest, and they asked me to bring a few more authors from the Denver area. Along with Promethius Award winner Eytan Kollin, Peter Wacks, and Quincy Allen, I ended up on 13 panels, met two artists who I hired to do some book covers, and I made a lot of new friends.

If you are attending a convention as an audience member, take the time to seek out the panel chairperson. Let them know who you are, give them a professional business card with links for further information, and tell them that you are available if there are any last-minute panel cancellations. Make sure you give them your cell phone number and keep your phone with you (on vibrate only during events, of course!) I was on three panels at MileHiCon in Denver, and I made sure to tell the panel chair I was available for more if needed. Sure enough, an author had to cancel and I was the person she called to fill the open slot. They remembered I was accomodating, professional, polite, and that I helped them out of a jam. I was invited back the following year.

As for the larger conventions, it may take a while to get your foot in the door. It helps if you were on panels with solid authors who remember you in a positive light. Send in a request for a reading or panel suggestions to the panel chairperson, along with your writing credentials and group affiliations. I usually include a link to the panels I sat on within the last year (http://guyanthonydemarco.com/panels/), and note the name-brand authors who were on some of the panels. If you keep in touch with other panelists, you can always ask if there are any open slots for upcoming panels. Sometimes it takes one person to remember you so you can get your foot in the door. Thanks to Peter Wacks and David Boop, two gents from the Colorado writing scene, I was able to get on panels at StarFest in Denver, which is a notoriously difficult con to crack.

The more panels and readings you do, the more people will remember your name and your face. If they enjoyed your events, they are more prone to read your latest book, especially if they can get it signed. That’s the difficult task…getting something published that shows off your talent. If you did your writing job well, the rest will follow.

About the Author:

Guy Anthony De Marco is a speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award^®; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.

A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia, GuyAndTonya.com, and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.

Getting Noticed

June 1, 2015

Colette Black

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Ever feel like a needle in a haystack? Perhaps more accurate, a needle in a huge pile of other needles. We write, we publish, we go to conventions and yet somehow reaching readers seems to become more and more difficult. Perhaps they feel inundated by the “buy me” media, they have their favorite authors and have difficulty branching out, or they just plain don’t realize how much they need our books. What can we possibly do to even have a chance at the love and authorly acceptance we so desperately crave…along with a few more book sales, please?

Those questions are the Fictorians’ June focus. We want to help you know how to get your books, stories, poetry, or whatever your creative work, into the hands of the people who can love them best. As much as I’ve looked for the perfect formula online, in bookstores, and in my supposedly creative brain, this seems to be the subject that stumps me the most. From my conversations with other authors, I think I’m not alone.

Last month we talked about the writing tools. Great month, by the way. So, we have everything in line to create a great book. Are we only writing for ourselves? If not, then how do we get these great masterpieces noticed?

This month we’ll be talking about the usefulness, pros and cons, and possible outcomes of activities such as:

Book Launches
Social media
Selling at conventions
Community contacts
Working with film makers
Targeting Indie Readers
And more…

So, let’s combine our collective needles of knowledge and I know that we can help eachother get to the top of the stack, the sun glinting off the spectacular surfaces of our books and catching the eyes of our potential readers.

I’m looking forward to this one, and I hope you are, too.

Business by the Numbers

May 27, 2015

Nathan Barra

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In order to be a professional author, to make enough money to live off your art, you need to treat your writing career with the same respect and diligence as you would any other type of business. Though it is possible to make money following intuition alone, it is very difficult to make consistent profits off feelings and hunches. For me, it seems like putting on a blindfold and stumbling around hoping to fall into a pot of gold.

Instead, businesses need to be able to quantify their success or failures objectively in order to make informed and useful decisions. Large corporations hire fleets of analysts to do this work for them. However, don’t let the math intimidate you! Writers, especially indie authors, typically don’t have nearly enough data to need someone devoted to the math. Additionally, there have been some very smart people who have already done most of the work for you. All you really need to do these days is to know which tools to use and which numbers to pay attention to.

Even still, I know how trying to dig into data can be intimidating. However, if you break the process down into 5 easy steps, it all becomes a whole lot more approachable.

STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR PRIORITIES
The first thing you need to do when approaching any statistical analysis is define what you care about. There are ways to quantify just about anything you want to know. In fact, sorting the useful information from the noise is often the hardest part of any analysis. Approaching your pile of data with specific questions will help you get specific answers. So, what is it that you hope to get out of your career as an author?

STEP 2: PICK YOUR TOOLS
There are tons of statistical tools choose from. Some are more intuitive than others, some more flexible, and yet others more comprehensive and powerful. Unfortunately, the more powerful the tool, the more difficult it is likely to be to use, and the more interpretation the results will require. Though it is a constant give and take, there are a few pieces of software that I think achieve a good balance and that I would recommend even for people who hate math.

One of my favorite pieces of statistical software is Google Analytics. I believe it to be one of the more powerful, flexible, and user friendly options available. Most importantly, it is free. After all, Google is the company made their fortune off being able to quantify the Internet. So, it only makes sense that their statistics software would also be top notch. Need help installing and configuring the software? The Google Analytics community is fairly robust. I’d recommend starting HERE. On the other hand Google Analytics has a lot of data and power. It can get quite involved and distracting if you let it. Be cautious as obsessively monitoring every page view can easily become a time sink.

Additionally, if you use Word Press for your website, I’d also recommend installing Jetpack. It comes with all sorts of useful widgets, one of which is a basic statistics program. Though you won’t be able to do any manipulation or dig into the data very far, it’s often good enough to give you a general idea.

Finally, most publishing platforms come with some sort of basic statistics modules. This will allow you to track sales, geography of purchases and several other metrics. One of the limitations here is that you track exactly what the distributor allows you to track. Almost always, their statistics are better than what you are given access to.

STEP 3: TAKE A STEP BACK, WAIT, AND LOOK FOR PATTERNS TO EMERGE
Chances are that you already have an audience that is interacting with your web page. So, the very first thing that you’ll need to do after installing any new statistics software is to allow for time to pass. Initially, I’d recommend continuing as you were for three weeks to a month so you can get a feel for how your business runs before you make any changes. Without a baseline, you’ll have no idea what is “normal” behavior and what is a reaction to a change you make. I’d also recommend establishing a new baseline each time you make a major alteration to to your business strategy.

Once you get to the point where you start running social experiments (Step 4), you’ll need to be willing to take a step back from the keyboard. Statistics takes patience. You can’t reasonably expect your consumers to respond immediately to your actions. Also, the initial reaction of a consumer group isn’t necessarily going to be their long term response. I’ve spoken to several indie authors who have tried raising the price on their books only to see an immediate drop off in sales. At that point, many of them lowered the unit price in a panic and swore they’d never ask for more money. However, *some* of the authors who stuck it out and let their new price stand for a few months noted that their sales returned back to their original baseline or even increased! Patience is key. So is being willing to risk and knowing how much you are willing to risk.

SOURCE: http://xkcd.com/552/

The bulk of statistics is finding the long lasting, consistent patterns in the noise. You want a change you can believe in. Just because you see a big spike, doesn’t mean that one event was caused by the other, nor can you even say that the spike is significant. Let’s say you spend $100 on advertising and sell 15 more books than your baseline sales. The next week, you spend another $100 and sell 2 more books than your baseline sales. Chances are that there is some deeper explanation in the first spike that differentiated it from the second. Any consumer group is going to have patterns in how they choose to spend their time and money. Find those patterns that represent a real response and you’ll be able to take advantage of them.

Let’s take my own website, www.NathanBarra.com, as an example. When I first looked at my own baseline, I noticed spikes of activity first thing in the morning, for a couple hours around lunch time, and in the evening. Additionally, I tended to see a spike in views on Mondays. Over the course of the week, the number of page views slowly died out until no one visited over the weekend. These patterns repeated over a the course of the month, so I had faith that they were a true look at my audience. Once I had the baseline, I needed to understand what the patterns meant.

STEP 4: INTERPRET THE PATTERNS
Now it is time to go back to the goals we established in Step 1. Are you into writing to make money? In that case you should be tracking the Number of Units Sold and how many visitors Click Through from your website to a point of purchase. Additionally, you can gain some insight if you pay attention to your Audience’s Geographical Origin. If you plan to do a book tour, make sure you go to the places where you have lots of fans. If you have no readers in a particular region, try to find out why. Are your marketing dollars beings spent to reach the widest audience possible? Are your books even available to that audience? Do you need to devote more advertising money to that demographic? Additionally is your marketing proving effective? Do you see any spikes up to a new plateau or steady growth in purchases following a marketing push or promotion period?

Are you the kind of writer that just wants to get your stories in front of as many eyes as possible? Then focus on driving up the Number of Visitors (number of unique individuals that loaded any page on your website) and Number of Page Views (the number of total pages that were loaded). When combined with your web site’s Bounce Rate (the percentage of visitors who look at exactly one page before leaving), you can understand how your readers interact with your website. Additionally, you want to pay attention to your largest sources of visitors, particularly your referrals. These days, much of your audience will likely come from somewhere else, be it social media, Google, or a link a friend emailed them. These people are your Referral Visitors. They represent how often and how widely your links have been shared. If you can understand your biggest sources of referrals, you can know where to focus your efforts to get the biggest return.

Instead, are you trying to build a steady and faithful audience? If that is the case, you need to encourage Repeat Visitors (people who have been to your page before) and Organic Visitors (those who typed your URL into their browser directly). You want the ratio of repeat visitors to new visitors (called your audience’s Rate of Return) to be as high as possible while you minimize the Days Since Last Page View.

Keep in mind that you won’t often be able to manage to make progress on all your goals simultaneously. When I first started NathanBarra.com, I wanted to get my page out in front of as many readers as possible, with the long term goal of establishing a steady audience. To that end, I started experimenting.

STEP 5: DESIGN AN EXPERIMENT AND RETURN TO STEP 3
Now that you have an idea of what “normal” is and what it means, you want to try to rock the boat a little and see what sort of waves you can make. Going back to my NathanBarra.com example, the first thing I did was change the amount of lag that I allowed between when I scheduled a post and when I first advertised it to my target audience. In the beginning, I saw that almost all my audience came from referrals that occurred after my media blast. I then went back posting and advertising near simultaneously. After a while, I started to wonder if I had become better established with a larger group of readers. I once again started delaying my media blasts and found that I had a steady flow of readers visit my page after I posted, but before I advertised. The things I had been doing to boost my audience had been working!

The key here is to change as little as possible and to wait long enough to observe meaningful results. If I were to spend see a spike in sales after a blog tour during which I also ran a BookBub campaign, which source of advertising should I focus on next time? There’s no real way to know.

Once you’ve made a change, return to Step 3. Wait, gather data, and then interpret the results. I would always recommend repeating any experiment at least twice. If you repeat your actions and see the same result, you can be confident that what you are seeing is real. If the results are different in consecutive experiments, then try to find out what is really causing your audience to react the way they did. Additionally, you need to take time to evaluate if the change you made supports your goals. If so, consider permanent implementation. If not, lesson learned, don’t do it again.

The key to any good statistical analysis is good interpretation. Take your time to think through all the possible reasons for the change, suing your experiments to hone in individual elements and actions. The longer you work at it, the more you’ll be able to determine from your results. Eventually, you will be so in touch with your audience that the statistics will just be a spot check to ensure that your audience is reacting the way you expected they would. Once you get to that point, you’ll understand why businesses focus on the numbers and leave the hunches for the amateurs.

About the Author:
Though Nathan Barra is an engineer by profession, training and temperament, he is a storyteller by nature and at heart. Fascinated with the byplay of magic and technology, Nathan is drawn to science fantasy in both his reading and writing. He has been known, however, to wander off into other genres for “funzies.” Visit him at his webpage or Facebook Author Page.

Should the Socially Awkward be Professional Writers?

April 6, 2015

fictorians

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A guest post by David Boop.

Despite what jocks, preps and princesses might believe, not all nerds are created equal. Just like any pool of people, some rise to the surface while others languish in the shadows.

Is this fair? Heavens, no. Is it reality? You bet your sweet bippy.

Whether or not you believe all persons are the same in the eyes of God, it is a truth that we place people in mental categories within our minds. Smart – Stupid. Safe – Dangerous. Normal – Awkward. It is easy to drop those we meet into virtual file cabinets of our brain to help us determine how much effort we’ll spend on them.

I grew up a geek in small town Wisconsin. I was verbally and physically abused by my classmates for it. This is a common experience among creative types, including writers, artists, and filmmakers. (Musicians seem to get away with more, I have no idea why. You can be a dork, play the guitar and somehow still be cool.)

It started with my last name, Boop; a funny sounding, easily picked on name. When you have a name like Boop, you’re put into a category of clown, even if you’re not one. My name was used as a swear word around my school.

“I’m going to go take a Boop.”

“I’m going to Boop you up!”

“I Booped your mother last night.”

I didn’t make things any better by not growing out of comics, action figures, video games, cartoons and science-fiction novels. I found very few people to share these interests with in a school focused on athletic excellence. Dating was next to impossible. I was told by a friend on Facebook that there were warnings not to date me or risk being removed from the popular crowd. Girls called me a “goon” behind my back. But this wasn’t solely due to my nerdy proclivities.

I was and, in many ways, still am socially awkward.

I didn’t walk the walk, nor talk the talk. I wasn’t into the same things other kids were and thus didn’t have the vernacular down. Slang eluded me. I came from a conservative household. It is hard to be a “good boy” while feeling pressure to lose your virginity, drink and raise hell. I finally caught up to my peers at nineteen when I went into radio, started working nightclubs and doing stand-up comedy. I finally understood what it took to be popular and that meant being a crazier bastard than everyone else in the room.

The “good boy/crazy bastard” dichotomy has carried over into my career as a writer. Yet, thirty years later, the tables have reversed. Now the popular kids want me to be a good boy; always be politically correct, sensitive to minority and women’s rights and not to sleep around at cons.

Wait! That’s not fair! I just got this down. Filthy mouth, bad jokes and loose morals meant popularity. How and when did that change? These new rules are the same rules my parents tried to instill in me as a child. You mean they were right? (Please tell my child that someday I might be right, too. Please?)

And so I shift again, not always as quickly or effectively as I’d like. I’m still that awkward kid, trying to get the vernacular right. Still trying to prove I deserve to be one of the cool kids.

With the accessibility of publishing and the growth of the genre market, writers who may never been that socially awkward kid are finding success, and thus have no frame of reference to what we’ve been through. And they’ve been given a platform called the Internet. There are too many watchdogs with too little compassion for people like me who don’t always “get it.” Writing used to be a solitary craft with very little exposure to either other writers and/or fans. Back then, when authors did get together, everyone was socially awkward and more forgiving. They welcomed the weird with open arms and it was a safe place to be wrong sometimes.

Now that geek is chic, some people claim ownership of all things nerdy and say that nerds shouldn’t be creepy or inept, holding themselves up as examples. Shows like The Big Bang Theory and King of the Nerds poke fun at what are very serious issues for some nerds. People say they want a Raj or Leonard in their life until one tries to make friends with them and they’re turned away and shunned. It has been my experience that there are writers with little-to-no tolerance for those not playing at their level mentally, socially or politically. Any mistake in judgment is highlighted and waved in front of millions. If the offender does not fit into their definition of “acceptable,” then they should be attacked, banned, kept from getting published in certain circles, despite any skill they might have.

And, to be honest, in some cases they have valid reasons. They are writers who don’t know when to lower their voices, use tact, pay attention to their audience. I have been accused of many of these things, and while I’ve learned and adapted, many others haven’t. Some of these writers are not used to being around the opposite sex, or try too hard to be liked by their peers. They miss social cues, speak out of turn and don’t know when to back off. And when they find themselves in the sights of the socially adept, they have no clue why. Even when they have a light-bulb moment, they don’t know how to change. Most times the damage is already done. They lose friends, contacts and opportunities.

But don’t misinterpret what I’m saying that there aren’t dangerous people out there that need to be exposed. The predators who pretend to be what they are not. These are not socially inept people, they are sociopaths and bringing them out in the open is everyone’s responsibility.

Not all non-socially awkward people are evil and not all socially awkward people are saints. If I’ve learned one thing, there are plenty of buttheads on both sides of any disagreement. Heck, I know I’ve been accused of such by both sides. But we’ve all been bound together by this need to express ourselves creatively. Some of the most imaginative people I’ve read can barely carry on a conversation. Should they be ostracized for what may be the hardest thing in the world to them? I don’t think so.

Despite the challenges, I’ve adapted. I’ve learned to hold my tongue under most situations. I’ve developed patience and looked for deeper understanding when dealing with people in social circumstances. As I change, I’m building better relationships with other writers who understand, those who “get me.”

It’s worth it. I want to make writing work. I have to. The goal is worth the effort. Does that make me smarter than some? Does that make me better than others? No. I’m far from perfect and I still make mistakes…

And that just makes me human.

About David Boop:

David Boop is a bestselling Denver-based speculative fiction author. In addition to his novels, short stories and children’s books, he’s also an award-winning essayist and screenwriter. His novel, the sci-fi/noir She Murdered Me with Science, will return to print in 2015 from WordFire Press. David has had over forty short stories published and two short films produced. While known for Weird Westerns, he’s published across several genres including media tie-ins for titles like The Green Hornet and Veronica Mars. His first Steampunk children’s book, The Three Inventors Sneebury, had a digital release in 2013 with a print release due in 2016. David tours the country regularly speaking on writing and publishing at schools, libraries and conventions.He’s a single dad, Summa Cum Laude graduate, part-time temp worker and believer. His hobbies include film noir, anime, the Blues and Mayan History. You can find out more on his fanpage, www.facebook.com/dboop.updates or Twitter @david_boop.