A guest post by Marie Bilodeau.

Your new book is about to be released – yay! Give yourself a pat on the back, drink your celebratory drink of choice, eat some chocolate and then start thinking about next steps: promotion. Part of that promotional package includes a book launch, and planning could make all the difference. Here are a few things to think about (I like lists):

Timing
What else is coming out or happening in your launch city? For example, Karen Dudley, who writes funny as all get out historical fantasy set in Greece is planning her next launch in Ottawa during the same week as a full retelling of The Iliad at the National Arts Centre. Weather can play havoc with a launch, too. Not much you can control on that end, but something to keep in mind for outdoor and/or winter launches.

What you want attendees to say: My, that was a lovely, perfectly timed book release at which I purchased ten copies in celebration of the perfect timing.
What you DON’T want attendees to say: I don’t know why they released their Book of Love during the Annual Ninjas Attack Day. Dude, is that a throwing star sticking out of your head?

Venues
A restaurant, bar or coffee shop can be great venues so people can get their own drinks and food (keep your budget in mind!). All the better if you can get a private room or area – reading in an active spot can be tough. Independent bookstores also make great venues. I usually go for a bar, but my books lend themselves well to that atmosphere. Don’t get a venue that’s much bigger than your lowest anticipated turnout, or it’ll feel empty.

What you want attendees to say: Wow, that author is really popular. That venue was full/bursting at the seams/Godzilla-destroyed worthy (avoid that last one when at all possible).
What you DON’T want attendees to say: I heard crickets and joined their song of despair.

Food
If you do get a venue where you can buy/bring food, try to bring something appropriately themed. Mystery author Peggy Blair invited friends to bring a Cuban-inspired dish to go with her latest release of her Cuban-inspired mystery, The Poisoned Pawn. It definitely added flair to the event.

What you want attendees to say: That was a perfect seasoned drumstick to go with the release of When Good Chickens Attack.
What you DON’T want attendees to say: That cyanide wasn’t real, right? (Tempting for mystery authors, I know. This is why I put this example in.)

Promotional Items
At my first book launch, a friend made me these awesome coasters since it took place in a bar, and attendees loved them. Make sure to at least have bookmarks. Bookmarks are cheap and easy to share, and hopefully generate more book sales.

What you want attendees to say: Ninja stars are a wonderful accompaniment to my Book of Ninja Love.
What you DON’T want attendees to say (to their therapists): It was a book on the history of arachnophobia, and they handed us live tarantulas. TARANTULAS!! WHY!!!!

Spread the word!
Facebook Events are popular. Post the event in relevant, interested groups, as well (with permission from the moderator). Don’t forget to blog about it if you blog, and update your website (if you don’t have a website, read this post by Alice Black right now). Posters in the venue sometimes generate extra sales, and send out a well-crafted press release to local media.

What you want attendees to say: I believe I’ll attend this book launch.
What you DON’T want everyone else to say: Book launch?

Reading
You’ve found the perfect venue, timed your event, invited everyone. Now, turn toward the flow of the event. Usually there’s a reading. Get a microphone if you need one. Select a great portion of your story – you don’t have to read the first chapter. Pick a scene you love to read and that works as a hook. Practice reading before the launch. Remember to speak up, to pace yourself and to look up at your audience once in a while.

What you want attendees to say: I’m moved. I shall purchase every copy of this book, for I must share it with the world.
What you DON’T want attendees to say: WTF? Was that the end?

Get help
The worse thing that can happen at a book launch is not the lack of food or drink, it’s not the imperfect venue, nor the accidentally double-booked room. Rather, it’s a frazzled author. People can forgive things going wrong (to a certain extent). But if you’re a crappy host, they won’t forget that. Remember, these people are there to support you. So get the help you need with the details in order to ensure you can focus on what’s most important: your readers.

What you want attendees to say: The author was so charming I shall name my first child after him/her.
What you DON’T want attendees to say: I shall never again speak their name, no matter that my child is named the same. From now on, you shall be known as Child-of-Mine.

Expectations
I kept the most important for last. Keep your expectations realistic. How many people do you think you can get out in your hometown? Think of the max, and then halve that number. Keep your expectations low and be surprised if numbers surpass them. Launches in other towns are tough. How well known are you? How well do your books sell there? Can a bookstore or a group of friends help with promotion? If you’re not sure, don’t overstretch. A good hometown launch will go a long way and save you monies, especially if your publisher can’t afford to send you around the country. Keep it real and adapt for the next book, since you’ll have many in your fine career.

What you want to say: I had fun. This was great. I’d do it again.
What you DON’T want attendees to say: I’m never writing another word ever again because nobody cares or eats my cheese balls.

Guest Writer Bio:
Marie Bilodeau’s space opera series, Destiny, was a two-time finalist in the Aurora Awards and won the Bronze Medal for Science-Fiction in the Foreword Book Awards. She is also the author of the Heirs of a Broken Land, a fantasy trilogy described as “fresh and exciting” by Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo award-winning author of WAKE. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines and anthologies and have also been nominated twice for the Aurora Awards. Marie is also a professional storyteller, telling adaptations of fairy tales and myths, as well as original stories of her own creation. She’s a passionate advocate for paper airplane contests, peach desserts and caffeine consumption.

Writing Your Brand

October 8, 2013

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Branding Marketing Submissions No Comments

Too often we view marketing only as selling and we forget about presentation, tone and targeting an audience. Together, these things create a brand and branding is something writers rarely think about. A brand is what we become known for and it is what people will expect from us and they’ll either love us or hate us for it.

Sometimes, I watch the singing competitions such as The Voice and X Factor. I see people mustering the courage to follow their dreams and I applaud them for it. What distinguishes the finalists and the winner from the rest of the pack? It isn’t simply the singing – many of them are excellent. When you’re garnering audience votes, there’s got to be something more. Commercial appeal is how one judge on the X Factor summed it up – nice voice, but no commercial appeal. Is your writing nice but has no commercial appeal? But, what is commercial appeal?

On the singing competitions, there are specific things about the finalists that make them commercially appealing. Each one has a distinct style (genre, sound/voice, song presentation), target market (demographics) and tone (audience appeal, song choice, personal appearance, passion). Overriding all these is passion. You need to express passion whether you’re singing or writing. Are you missing the passion and depth to move an audience?

Let’s examine the factors from the singing competitions to see how we can apply them to the query letter, the story and our virtual presence. How we present ourselves in each of these areas determines how people perceive us (our brand).

The Query Letter
First impressions count – and the first impression we make is with the dreaded query letter. Most of us aren’t aware that we’re branding ourselves with this letter and that it determines our commercial appeal. Your brand is something that the editor/agent will glean from your letter. The specific information you convey plus overall feeling you convey forms your brand even though you don’t have a logo or jingle like commercial products do.

Tone: Is your letter polite and professional or obnoxious and whiny? Does the story pitch convey passion for the story and characters?

Style: Can you write clear concise sentences or are they run on, filled with dangling modifiers and metaphors trying to pack in too much information? If the latter, it makes you seem uncertain, not in command of craft, disorganized and lacking clarity in your story and that’s bad branding. Is your story pitch focused and clear? Does your letter convey that you understand the genre you’re writing in?

Target Market: The comparison pitch in your query letter positions your novel in the market and sets an expectation of what the editor/agent can expect. Do the works you’re citing accurately reflect your story’s style, tone, plot or theme? Who is your audience? Your audience is determined in large part by the genre or sub-genre you’ve chosen, your public presence and initial contact list.

Your Writing
Branding is what readers come to expect from you. That’s why author’s use pseudonyms when they change genres – each name is a brand for a specific genre – readers associate a certain type and style of book. A sub-genre is a very specific branding which writes for a narrower target market. Who is your target market? Will those demographics be moved by the passion in your work, your writing style and your messaging? For example, cozy mystery author M.C. Beaton has a very different audience than does Ian Rankin with his hard-boiled detective thrillers. Each author exploits different sensibilities within the mystery genre and has a writing style that appeals to a particular audience.

Sometimes an author whose book didn’t sell well (the brand turned bad) will use a pseudonym sell new work (rebranding).

Your Virtual Presence
Of course these all these things apply to blogs and any social media we engage in. Always think about your brand and how people will perceive you. As with your writing, they can interpret what they read and see only in relation to their personal context and experience. Therefore, your public persona on these sites is part of your brand and it affects word-of-mouth marketing.

Think about your favorite authors. What are they known for? What do they write and how do they write it? What is the tone, the language, the plot and messaging in their books? What do you expect to read when you choose his book?

Tom Clancy was one of my favorite authors. He was lauded by people in or connected to the military establishment because of the accurate details in his books. That was part of his brand and that’s what people looked for when they read his books. Plus he was an excellent story teller and writer and we’ll miss him for that.

Your brand is part of your commercial appeal. Be aware of it and make the most of it in your writing, in the business of writing and in your public persona.

Web Design Hell

October 7, 2013

fictorians

Guest Posts Marketing The Writing Life 5 Comments

A guest post by Alice Black.

Okay, all you writer-types out there, I want you to take a deep breath. We’re about to get into some heavy stuff: Websites. If you aren’t familiar with the Oatmeal’s commentary on web design I suggest you go look at that now. It’ll come in handy later.

This post will run you through the pros and cons of having a writer’s website for yourself and your work, as well as taking a look at how best to approach the strange beast that is a ‘successful website’, even if you’ve never written a line of code in your life.

Why should I have my own website?

A personal website lets you raise your hits by having a direct address to point people to, and also by increasing the number of references to you that a search engine will pick up on. It’s not just fans who will be looking for your website but editors, and agents too.

That sounds awesome! But…

What should I put on it?

Good question. Each writer is different and so are their needs. For example I’m just starting out with one story published, whereas GRRM is one of the most prominent writers there is right now. What our websites do, and what they have on it will be different.

My needs are: simple navigation, who I am, what I write, and status updates about important news.

George R.R. Martin‘s needs are: consistent branding with his novels, merchandising space and a blog for his fans to keep up with his thoughts and upcoming releases.

So take a moment and list the things you want to get from your website. If you’re not sure what you need, the list below covers the basics, and you can always add or remove things later.

Who you are
What you write
Where to find your work
Where else the user can find you

Now what?

Now we have our list of what we need on our site, it’s time to go and actually set up a site. There are two main options you can follow: Pay to have someone else do it, (like GRRM) or do it yourself.

I’ve made a table below to help figure out which option is best for you.

	Paid professional	DIY
Cost	$500 – $3000	free* – 100$
Custom look and feel	Unique to your brand, completely customizable. You get what you pay for in quality.	Some customization, unless coding the site from scratch.Reliable navigation with preset templates.
Scope	Limited only by what you are willing to pay.	Limited by the effort you are willing to put in.
I was a Romance writer but now I write Horror. I need to change my website!	That’ll be another couple hundred dollars.	Your site has time if you do! You can swap to a new template, or if you coded by hand… it’ll be a while.

So Building my own…

There’s a whole bunch of different options from Wix to Weebly, Blogger to WordPress. For today, let’s look at two of the most common website builders that offer free accounts: Weebly and WordPress.

Basically it breaks down to how you want to use your website. Are you comfortable with formatting in a text box (like word document) environment? Then use WordPress.

Or would you rather drag and drop items in and move them around until you’re happy? Then use Weebly. There are some further differences, so I made another table for you, comparing the two below. Keep in mind this is only the currently available information, and plans change year to year.

	Weebly	WordPress
Cost	Basic: FreeStarter: $48/yrPro: $96/yr	Basic: FreePro: $99/yr
Storage Space	Basic: < 500 MBStarter: 500MBPro: 2GB	Basic: 3 GBPro: 13 GB
Templates	100+ (unclear if they’re all free, or some are premium)	Basic: 144Pro: individually priced, $60-$80Third party: individually priced
Ease of use	Very Easy: drag and drop	Easy: Very similar to word processor
Customizability	High, Allows for HTML	High, Allows for HTML
Domain	alice.weebly.comalice.com for $	alice.wordpress.comalice.com for $18, able to be added to a basic account
Statistics	Basic: number of hitsStarter: referrers, which pages are seen and how often in last 30 days	Basic: Referrers, Number of users vs number of views hourly and then daily
Mobile app	Yes	Yes
Ads	No	Basic: MaybePro: No

Okay, I have an account on Weebly/Wordpress

Great! We’re getting there. But before us lies the path of Design which many an unwary author has fallen into. Remember that Oatmeal comic? Good. Now is when you sit down in front of your screen and take a good hard look at your design skills. Unless you are legitimately comfortable using photoshop and/or familiar with the tenets of good design, use a free template/theme. Most let you customize the headers and backgrounds.

Commandments of [Writer] Web Design

Comic Sans is the joke of the typography world; don’t use it.
Limit yourself to two fonts per page: 1 for headers, 1 for text. Using a third font for your Site title/logo is also OK.
You can use Serif or Sans Serif fonts for headers, but use sans-serif for bodies of text.
Dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background. Pick one that fits your genre.
For text over a textured background, be sure that the text is readable. Step back a couple feet and see if you can still see the letters clearly.
Don’t use images that you aren’t licensed to use. It’s the same as a website putting your story up without asking, and not linking or crediting you.
For the love of all that’s holy in the internet, please do not put music on your website. At least music that automatically starts when the page loads. Very little can make a user click ‘back’ as fast as the blare of music into our earbuds.
Test and Preview the design before going ‘live’ (which means the world can see it).
Links away from your page should ALWAYS open in a new window, otherwise you’re directing traffic away from your site instead of supplementing it.
Update, Update, Update! There is nothing more frustrating for users than an out of date website.

Guest Writer Bio:

Alice Black has a degree in Interactive Multimedia Design and experience teaching multimedia to technology to adult students. She writes SFF and Horror and has a short story coming out soon with Wily Writers.

Sweating the Small Stuff

October 4, 2013

Gregory D. Little

Conventions Gregory D. Little Marketing The Writing Life No Comments

I was twenty-one when I read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. At the time, I thought it was embarrassingly obvious advice for such a supposedly renowned military mastermind. “Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.”

“Oh please,” twenty-one year old me thought, rolling his all-knowing eyes. I was set to label Sun Tzu “Captain Obvious” and never look back. But I’m older now (just a teensy bit), and I’ve learned that when the pressure is on, we often forget the most obvious, self-evident courses of action entirely. So it goes with war and with things closer to home for the Fictorians, like networking.

When I was younger my dad gave me a piece of advice I’ve never forgotten. We’ve all heard the old axiom “you never get a second chance to make a first impression,” but my dad put it in more numerical terms. He told me about the three twelves. When meeting you for the first time, a person will be able to form an impression based on your first twelve inches (your face), the first twelve words out of your mouth, and the first twelve seconds of the exchange. Now my dad has spent his career in the business world, and his advice was meant primarily for job interviews. But in the writing world, when we are meeting agents and editors at conventions, what we are really doing is kicking off a sort of protracted job interview. And first impressions can make or break you.

Writing is like any other field of human interaction. It’s often not what you know, but who you know that’s important. Every time you smile, introduce yourself and shake a hand at some event that brings the people of our field together, you are hopefully sowing the seeds for a friendship, but you are also adding another potential link to your growing chain of contacts. It may sound clinical, but it’s important you keep both aspects of any relationship in mind in the early stages.

Now, my dad’s advice may need to be tweaked a little for our industry. In the business world, personal appearance is very important and deviating too far from the standard suit and tie is frowned upon. Writers are a little more relaxed in this regard, I think, owing to the more eccentric personalities that permeate the writing world. Mary wrote an excellent piece detailing branding earlier this very week, in fact, so check it out if you haven’t already. This advice applies more to those who have yet to establish themselves and who are simply trying to meet agents, editors and fellow writers. It’s important to dress as if you are a professional who is ready, if needed, to discuss professional matters. What that means in context is that if you are going to a convention that has a sizable fan contingent (say, Worldcon) and you want to indulge in some cosplay, you may want to set aside a day where you walk around in your Iron Man costume and another day where you dress, if not necessarily formally, at least nicely, looking like a professional, not a fan. If you are attending a convention that is almost exclusively business-oriented (World Fantasy Convention) then it’s best to leave the Spock ears at home entirely.

You’ve heard all the stuff I’m going to say before, believe me. Nothing I’m about to tell you is going to widen your eyes with sudden awe and understanding. But if you clam up like I do when trying to impress someone, it helps to remember the small things. Things like:

-Don’t dominating the conversation with talk of yourself.

-Avoid invading someone’s personal space.

-Take cues from the other person’s body language. If you go up to introduce yourself and catch them at an obviously bad time (this happened to me at last year’s World Fantasy Convention) politely extricate yourself as quickly as possible and be on your way.

-Practice basic hygiene.

There are many others, but they all lead to the same general result. What you want is to leave a positive impression of yourself on everyone you meet, something that says either “should the opportunity arise, that person would be pleasant to work with,” or in the case of a possible fan “wow, that person is really nice. I should check out their work/continue reading their work.” I hate to make it sound so clinical. It almost comes off as mercenary. But remember, this isn’t just a fun gathering of like minds you are attending, it’s a business trip.

And advice extends beyond the world of meeting people in person. When you submit stories or novels to agents or editors, be unfailingly polite. If they send you a rejection, do not respond at how only stupid people would fail to understand your genius, no matter how much your raging id may think so. The world of publishing is a small one, and the last thing you want to do is end up on someone’s black list.

There’s another quote I’d like to leave you with, one I’ve heard attributed to many successful coaches. “If you take care of the little things, the big things take care of themselves.” So devote a little time to sweating the small stuff. You might be surprised at what comes of it. That Sun Tzu guy may have known his stuff after all.