Category Archives: Business

A guest post by Terry Odell.

I’m delighted that I was invited to be here today to share some information about audio books. I’m a firm believer in casting as wide a net as possible, but the audio market was one I’d ignored, thinking it would be too expensive. Not so. I’ll share what I did, which is the easiest and cheapest way into the system. There are other routes, but I can’t talk about something I’ve had no first-hand experience with. Therefore, this post is about using ACX to create an audio book. While I was going through the process with 5 of my books, I did my own blog posts about each phase. I’ve included links for those who want more specific details.

The pros: Audio book sales have been growing in double digits. It’s a new audience. It’s easy to do. It’s a way to make a little extra money. There’s little, if any, up-front money required. Narrators are waiting. And using ACX puts your books at audible.com, Amazon, and iTunes.

The cons: It will take time. It’s a new audience, and if you’re a digital/print person, finding the listening audience is a new marketing effort. Income is unpredictable.

Of course, the big question is, “Is it worth it?” but I can’t really answer that. What I’ll do here is lay out the process, and you can decide if the time required would make it worthwhile for you. I’m not putting a roof over my head with my audio book sales, but I know others who are. And I’ve liked it enough to start production of my Mapleton Mystery series soon.

How to start.

ACX is part of Amazon. If you have a book on Amazon (and hold the rights to them), you’re already in the system. Just go to ACX.com and “claim” your books. Easy-Peasy.

Next, pick one of the books you want to turn into an audio book. You’ll get a bunch of screens asking for information. Most of it is obvious. Since I had no money to ‘hire’ a narrator, I chose the royalty split option. This means I only get half the royalties, but I have no out-of-pocket expenses. And, since it’s a split, narrators are likely to market the book. I was also lucky to have my books included in ACX’s stipend program, which means ACX gives narrators a bonus, so you’ll get more auditions.

Here’s where there’s a little more effort required: You have to ‘sell’ your book to narrators. There’s a box for description, and it’s smart to mention your ‘reach’ – social media, newsletters, blog, awards – anything that will let the narrator know you’re serious about your career.

Be sure you specify the genre of the book (I made sure my prospective narrators knew they’d be reading a sex scene) and any other specifics from the myriad ACX provides. Narrators audition by reading a short passage you provide, about 3–5 minutes of narration. I tried to find sections that had narration and dialogue between two characters so I could hear how they did the voices, as well as whether I could detect spoken dialogue from interior monologue from straight narration. Also, your audition script doesn’t have to be consecutive text, so you can pick and choose parts that you think will help you decide. More details here

Choosing a narrator. Can you record your own? Yes, but you need a professional recording studio. It makes a huge difference, and ACX will turn down projects that don’t meet their standards. One of my narrators showed me how she worked on Finding Sarah’s characters. No way could I have done that. More details here.

Keep things professional. As someone who hates saying “no” to people, it was difficult to be on the ‘send the rejection’ instead of ‘receive the rejection’ end of things, but since there are audio book listeners who won’t buy a second book if they don’t like the narrator of the first, or who choose books solely on the basis of the narrator, it’s an important decision. I tried to be professional about it and let my ‘rejected’ narrators know so they could move on. I was surprised at their response. More details here

Cover art. You can’t use your ebook cover for an audio cover. ACX wants them square. This was the only expense I encountered, and my cover artist did them for a pittance. More details here

What do the narrators think? I interviewed mine. Details here. and here.

Proof listening. Once your narrators recorded the book, you have to approve it. This is where most of your time will be spent, because you can’t ‘skim’ listen. I had my manuscript open and followed along word for word, although I know other who just listened. I’d written the books years before and wouldn’t have caught a missing word, phrase, or paragraph (it happens) otherwise. Sometimes the inflection didn’t sound ‘right’ to me. In a few cases, the character seemed ‘off’—too gruff, or too chipper for my visions of the scene. Also, although my narrators checked with me about words they weren’t sure how to pronounce, if they didn’t think it was a problem, they didn’t ask, so there were some corrections along those lines we had to make as well. A side benefit—sometimes the narrators caught mistakes in my manuscript (gasp!), which I was then able to correct in the other versions as well. More details here.

I hope this gives you some insight and a place to start thinking about doing an audio book.

You can win one of Terry’s audio books! Go to her website here, pick which book you’d like, and tell us in a comment. On Tuesday, June 30th we’ll announce the winner here and on our fictorians fb page.

Terry’s Bio:
From childhood, Terry Odell wanted to “fix” stories so the characters would behave properly. Once she began writing, she found this wasn’t always possible, as evidenced when the mystery she intended to write turned into a romance, despite the fact that she’d never read one. Odell prefers to think of her books as “Mysteries With Relationships.” She writes the Blackthorne, Inc. series, the Pine Hills Police series, and the Mapleton Mystery series. You can find her high in the Colorado Rockies—or at terryodell.com.

How to Get Noticed on Kobo

June 24, 2015

fictorians

Branding Business Conventions Guest Posts Mark Leslie Lefebvre Marketing Networking Professional Behavior Publishing 3 Comments

A guest post by Mark Leslie Lefebvre.

You’ve heard it before, you’ll hear it again. Maybe this time you’ll remove yourself from the attachment you have with your beautifully bouncing “baby” of a book and listen.

Getting noticed starts with a good cover. And not just a good cover, but an excellent cover. And not just an excellent cover, but an excellent professional cover. And not just an excellent professional cover but one that appeals to your target audience – respectful of the genre you’re targeting.

Let me be brutally honest here – and it’s not easy to say, but it’s something I’ve seen time and again. I have authors who, on Kindle, are selling reasonably well, some of them selling exceptionally well, who approach me and ask why they’re not selling much or at all on Kobo. Then I look at their books and the first thing I see is a cover that makes me cringe and start trying to come up with ways to avoid telling them I think the cover is horrible.

It’s difficult to tell someone their baby is ugly – but it’s even more difficult to present a less than professional looking book on any of our featured spotlights or main pages.

Why am I harping on about something I’m sure you’ve read a thousand times? Because it’s true. Kobo’s website is far more merchandised than a site like Amazon – and as such, getting a human’s attention and holding it long enough to get them to read the synopsis and then check out the price all starts with a great cover.

And that’s one of the main ways that titles get selected for various features on Kobo’s website.

The metadata that you enter is another way to stand out as professional. It can also help you with helping us convert readers of one book in your series to the rest of that series. Entering consistent series title data plus the volume number in that series can lead to this. There is a great article posted here that outlines some of the benefits. (Selling More of Your Series Books on Kobo)

Here’s an example of how a series title is displayed, helping customers see that this book is connected to others.

Kobo is using this data not just for enhancing the merchandising, but also sending reminder emails to customers who are currently reading or have recently completed reading a book that’s identified as part of a series.

Below is a sample email derived automatically from a reader’s catalog of titles.

There are plenty of other feature spots that we are highlighting indie author published titles within.

One of them is the permanent FREE EBOOKS landing page – conversion here works best with series books; offering the first one for free (which you can do through Kobo Writing Life for as long as you want) and enticing customers into the next books in that series.

Other merchandising spots are KOBO NEXT and KOBO NEXT GREAT DEALS (typically $4.99 and under)

Kobo also runs monthly discount “publisher sponsored” features in which authors allow us to discount their titles to customers using a coupon code. In them, the publisher then gets paid 70% off the discounted price. Here’s an example of one that ran in mid June 15, 2015.

But what I’m most excited to share is that we are building in the opportunity for authors to be considered for various promotions like these directly within Kobo Writing Life. An easy way to think about it perhaps is as a “BookBub Built Right into Kobo Writing Life” – meaning that when promotional opportunity comes available, if your book already has the right price point, is in the right category and available in the right territory, you’d see if it was eligible for a forthcoming promo and, within just a few clicks, submit the title for consideration. We’re pretty excited at how this will open up the ability for authors to be included in various promos that we continually run throughout the year.

To take full advantage of this promotion, you’ll need to be signed up for Kobo Writing Life – your directly published titles will be the ones eligible for the various promotions that we are already starting to schedule as much as 2 or more months in advance.

Some other things you can do to assist with getting noticed on Kobo include:

Attending events and networking and liaising with other authors and industry folks. Even if you aren’t at an event that a Kobo person is at, you might end up making a connection of a connection – it’s a small industry and authors are fantastic at helping one another. There are easily dozens of authors that have been introduced to me through authors I already know.

Publish directly to Kobo Writing Life rather than coming in through a data aggregator. We are constantly sifting through new titles entered into our database, always looking for that next “hidden gem” that we can spotlight for our customers.

Pricing. Where 99 cent novels seem to be the way to go on Kindle, Kobo doesn’t use books as a “loss leader” – eBooks are the ONLY thing we sell, and our prime real estate needs to be dedicated to books that we can actually earn money on. Imagine that we have the choice to feature one of two great fantasy novels. One is 99 cents and the other is 9.99. Remembering that Kobo keeps 30%, which one do you think is a more sustainable title for us to spend time featuring?

Mark Leslie Lefebvre Bio: Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the Director of Self-Publishing and Author Relations at Kobo. He was hired by Kobo in 2011 to make it easier for indie authors and small publishers to get their work published to Kobo’s global catalog (which is available in 190 countries). Mark and his team launched Kobo Writing Life in July of 2012 and it now represents between 10 and 18% of Kobo’s weekly unit sales, larger than any of the major publishers. Mark is also the author of speculative fiction and Twilight Zone styled horror under the name Mark Leslie. His latest books include Tomes of Terror: Haunted Bookstores and Libraries and I, Death.

Expanding Your Convention Horizons

June 22, 2015

Guy Anthony De Marco

Conventions Guy Anthony De Marco No Comments

When I re-started my writing career after a long hiatus, I had to figure out how to get back into the convention circuit. My base of operations shifted from upstate New York to the Denver area, so I didn’t know any local authors and I had no idea what conventions were in the area. Most importantly, I didn’t know how much it would cost.

I wasn’t too concerned with meeting new local authors, since I figured once I discovered where they lurked, we’d say hello. I trundled off to Google’s House to search through their drawers of data. I wanted to focus my search on conventions that involved the genres I was interested in. My horrible search string was this:

Yes, it’s written in geeky Google-ese. Translating it to English: Look for conventions in Denver or Colorado Springs for any of genres I listed. (If you’re interested in learning some tips for using Google to research things, see my Fictorians post on Advanced Google-Fu.)

I found plenty of local conventions, and my conventioneering career was underway. I reached out to the contacts I found on the con websites, offering my services on panels. The ones who asked me to sit on a panel received my highest priority, assuming they compensated me with a membership ticket. The ones who weren’t interested I put on a check-next-year list. Since I had no problems talking to a large audience (I used to teach at the college level, which helped me with my public speaking chops), programming directors heard that I “gave good panel.” I made a page on my author website that covered what panels I attended for which con, and I even made sure to include a list of fellow panelists. Sometimes it helps to name-drop.

After a few years, I was known to a large segment of the local con-going crowd. Most didn’t buy my books (I would be writing this from my island paradise if only that were true), but enough people remembered the Guy in the grey beard who made people laugh on panels. Folks would stop me in halls to say hello, and even the occasional celebrity/Guest of Honor would interrupt a conversation with a fan to say hello to me by name.

I figured I had saturated the local market with my branding efforts. I was wondering what to do at that point when my brilliant wife, Tonya L. De Marco, suggested that I start expanding my convention horizons.

Cue a Homer Simpson “D’oh!” That made sense.

I had to figure out where I could travel and remain in my budget. I decided on expanding east of Denver, for no other reason than there was more real estate in that direction. I didn’t want to fall off of the edge of my map, since it’s turtles all the way down. (Bonus geek points if you got that reference.)

I picked a couple of cities in Nebraska and replaced Denver and Colorado Springs in my Google search statement. It turned out there were several vibrant cons in Lincoln and Omaha. The first one I went to, CONStellation in Lincoln, wasn’t interested in me at first. I attended as a regular Guy just to experience what the con had to offer. The second convention I contacted, Omaha’s OSFest, was interested, and I was invited to attend as a panelist.

I’ve only been back to CONStellation once, where I shared a dinner table and conversation with Elizabeth Bear. I had so much fun at OSFest that I talked to the convention chair and helped to build an author panel track. I asked around my gaggle of Denver-based author friends and came up with a group that was interested in traveling to Omaha. The group returned for a couple of years until this year, when they were no longer interested in having us set up the author track (the new programming chair decided to go with an online submit-your-own panel methodology).

No worries, I thought. Look, there’s more unexplored territory on my map! Utah has a huge convention called Salt Lake Comic Con (SLCC), and there’s one in the other direction near St. Louis called Archon…

I opened my browser, found the names of the convention chairs, and fired off an email. I’m now attending SLCC as a Special Guest, and I’m waiting on a reply from Archon, one of the oldest fan-run conventions.

I’ll keep you informed as my horizons expand…

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.

Laugh! and Get Noticed!

June 19, 2015

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Interacting With Fans Interacting With Professionals Professional Behavior Self-Awareness No Comments

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
Shakti Gawain

Writers are fun loving people with countless interests, who love a good joke, and truly are kids at heart. Yet, we can feel overwhelmed when we’re in the public eye at book launches and conventions, or when we approach and agent or publisher. Our effervescent, perfectionist selves, our I-wrote-an-awesome-book selves, crumble in a public spotlight. It’s not about our craft (we work hard at that), or our ability to complete a project, nor is it about putting our literary babies up for criticism (we’ve jumped that hurdle a few times to get the manuscript ready). It’s that we’re perfectionists and we all strive to write the next best seller.

Ah, yes. I had written the perfect pitch and had practiced the perfect delivery. With my perfect pitch in hand, I went to my first convention and encountered a publisher’s representative. What was my book about? he asked me. Well, I was prepared, wasn’t I? I had polished that pitch, memorized it and practiced it until I could recite it anywhere. And then….

… FAILURE! For so many reasons it escaped me (I wasn’t doing dishes, taking out the garbage, reciting it to a blank wall – who knows?). I rolled my eyes back into my head in an effort to mentally read my perfect pitch and I was suddenly, totally mortified. I had blown the perfect opportunity! Solution? Run? Turn a deeper red? I looked him in the face and laughing, I said, “Now that that’s over, let me tell you what the book is really about.” And so I spoke from the heart all the while laughing inside over how silly I’d been.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugene Delacroix

That encounter didn’t get me the sale but I got a great chortle from the publisher and I had a good conversation with him. But most importantly, I learned to laugh at myself and relax. Publishers, agents and book buyers don’t have it easy trying to find the perfect book either. So once you understand that they have as much at stake in the moment as you do, it takes the pressure off needing to be perfect. Besides, you just want an opportunity to submit the manuscript or for prospective readers at your sales table to buy the book to read later. How does laughing at yourself accomplish that?

Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.
William Bridges

It’s about being true to yourself and sparking a relationship which in turn creates loyalty. Who are we the most loyal to? Those we are most comfortable around, not those who make us feel squeamish. Think of your best friends. You laugh, you discuss, even argue from time to time and you know what’s important or meaningful to them. So it should be with those we are trying to impress. Like with our friends, we need to listen, ask questions, converse and laugh at ourselves and with them. That’s what creates relationships and opportunities, not a perfectly recited pitch.

So, don’t be so hard on yourself. Laugh at yourself. Laugh with others. View your encounters as if you’re developing a friendship. Ask them what’s important to them. Ask about their interests. Don’t forget to smile. Above all, laugh and relax. But what happens if they aren’t interested in what you’ve written?

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is a reaction, both are transformed.
C.G. Jung

A negative response doesn’t mean that your work isn’t good or whatever the awful thing the voice inside your head is sniping. It simply means it isn’t for them or that you’ve got a bit more work to do to answer their questions. You can choose to address the issue or not. You can choose to purse the relationship or not. But what you can always do is laugh and revel in the wonder of how although we are all the same, we are so different.

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
Louise Bogan.

If you’d like to read more great quotes and learn to overcome limiting beliefs and fears that inhibit the creative process (and keep you from laughing), I recommend you read The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron.