Tag Archives: marketing

Congratulations! You’ve gotten that short story accepted to an anthology. You’ve sold that novel. You’ve decided to indie publish.

…Now what?!

Presumably you’re hard at work writing the next story, the sequel, the following project. This doesn’t mean your first fledgling is going to learn to soar all on its own. Even if you’ve not gone the indie route, a large share of publicizing and promoting your work is going to be up to you. That’s because people can only buy books if they know that they exist, and nobody is ever going to be as invested in your own success as you are.

Unless you’ve got a degree in public relations or a job in marketing, you may not have ever promoted anything before. You might be like me…a writer who’s had her first professional sales this year, three of them in fact, and once the contracts have been signed and the copy edits completed, realizing you finally need to get serious about promoting yourself and your work. This month, the Fictorians and their guests will share our personal experiences, discoveries and lessons to give you a “from the ground up” look at marketing your new publication.

How do you organize a book launch party? Promote your work at a con? Create a media press kit?

What’s the most effective way to use Facebook and Twitter for promotion? How about Kickstarter? An author web page? What options does Amazon offer indie authors? How do I avoid being “that guy” whose every forum post ends with “buy my stuff” until I don’t want to see anything about him, or his stuff, ever again?

Most importantly, how do you strike that balance between promoting your published work, creating new stories and still having some semblance of a life?

If you’re going to write professionally, you need to understand that writing is a business. Authors, particularly new authors, don’t have the luxury of focusing solely on writing and letting someone else handle all that “other stuff” (like promotion, contracts, finances, etc). Tempting as it may be some times to stay in your Writers’ Cave, if you want anyone to know that you’re writing stories that they would want to read, you need to crack open the cave door and venture outside for some promotion. I’ll come along on that journey with you. My first order of business is to create a proper biography page right here on the Fictorians site. I’ll let you all see it when it’s done.

You’ve worked hard. You’ve created something good, something you’re proud of. Someone has offered to buy it; or you’ve decided to send it out in the world yourself, directly to readers. Now it’s time to let everyone know that you’re ready to share it with them–that you’ve made something worth buying. That they can expect more from you in the future.

I’m learning to speak up, to speak out, to show the world what I have to offer. Come along with us!

Promotion (in more than one sense)

September 28, 2013

David Carrico

Nothing serious today. I just wanted to take this Saturday opportunity to state once more that my first novel, a collaboration with Eric Flint entitled 1636: The Devil’s Opera, will be available in bookstores on Tuesday, October 1^st. It’s the latest installment of the largest and longest-running alternate history series in print today, which began with Eric’s novel 1632, which was published in the year 2000.

I did Fictorian posts about the writing of 1636: The Devil’s Opera here and here. And I did a post about the publisher’s innovative e-book marketing approaches here, which mentioned the early availability of the e-book edition of the novel. So you can relax—I’m not going to rehash any of that. What I do want to mention is something else interesting that the publisher—who is Baen Books, by the way, one of the more innovative traditional publishers around, in my opinion—recently did in connection with the release of the novel.

1636: The Devil’s Opera didn’t appear out of thin air. It didn’t spring full-grown from the brow of a literary Zeus. No, the novel utilizes two different sets of characters that I had been writing stories about for and in Grantville Gazette e-magazine, and Grantville Gazette and Ring of Fire anthologies since 2004. The novel is built upon the foundation of those earlier works.

What Baen did was have me gather all of the earlier stories, do an edit for consistency and to fix continuity errors that had been identified since their original publications, and publish them as an e-book under the title 1635: Music and Murder. Twelve stories, ranging from short story to short novel in length, amassing over 200,000 words, are now available in a unified edition which was released earlier this week.

This amounts to the creation of a prequel volume to 1636: The Devil’s Opera. I didn’t think about this much at first, because I was so pumped about getting the stories out in their own volume. But it finally dawned on me that what Baen has done is create a second volume very closely related to the novel, and pitched it as an e-book at a very attractive price point of $4.95. People who are fans of my characters—and there is a sizable group of those—will buy the e-book without even thinking about it much. That’s understood. But Baen’s perception is that the readers whose first encounter with the characters is 1636: The Devil’s Opera will more than likely want to read about their earlier days in the universe, and voila, Baen just happens to have that available as well. Smooth marketing.

So what can we learn from this? Well, the big lesson is whether we are publishing in a traditional model or an independent model, when we’re getting ready to release something new, we should look at our works inventory and see if there’s anything there that we can release or re-release or otherwise promote to leverage off of the new release. If we have related works, by all means put them forward. Failing that, promote works that are thematically similar.

It would be great if the publisher will get behind it, as Baen did in this case. But even if they won’t or can’t, there’s no reason why anything we have available for indie publishing can’t be promoted.

Leverage off the new work by any means you can. Take advantage of any attention you can get. It’s just good business.

So, in closing, here they are: 1635: Music and Murder and 1636: The Devil’s Opera. Feel free to acquire one or both, and let me know how you like them, either here at Fictorians or at http://davidcarricofiction.com/.

Enjoy.

Coming Soon to an Internet Near You

July 14, 2013

David Carrico

Business Marketing Publishing No Comments

For those of you who are alternate history fans, if you haven’t checked out the New York Times best-selling 1632 series (a/k/a Ring of Fire series) created by writer Eric Flint, you are missing something. It currently amasses over six million words in print, with more being added on an almost monthly basis.

The first novel is titled 1632 (hence the series name), and its original edition can be downloaded from Baen Books (the publisher) for free in every common e-book format, and a couple that aren’t so common. Check it out here.

The newest novel in the series is 1636: The Devil’s Opera by Eric Flint and David Carrico (yours truly). It will be published in hardback edition for $25.00 and e-book edition for $9.99 in October, 2013. I did a Fictorians post about the writing process of the novel here.

The reason for this post is to let you know that you don’t necessarily have to wait until October to read it. Baen, of all the traditional science fiction and fantasy publishers, was the first-and for a long time was the only-publisher who embraced e-books. Beginning well over a decade ago, every book they publish is offered in every available e-book format (including Kindle and Nook) in addition to the hard copy edition. Every e-book that Baen has published since the very beginning was published without DRM security being loaded on it. And once you buy an e-book from Baen, you can install any and every format of the e-book on any and every electronic device you own at any time. Plus, they keep track of which books you have bought and you can re-download fresh copies anytime you need or desire to.

In other words, Baen has been doing the e-book thing right since way before most publishers even thought about doing e-books.

But in addition to the regular e-book edition, they offer a couple of additional options that no other publisher has provided to date that I’ve seen, and these are the things that you may want to take advantage of now.

First of all, there’s this thing called an e-ARC. ARC, of course, is Advance Reader Copy, and prior to e-books, that was a preliminary copy of the book based on the submitted manuscript without a final edit, printed quickly on cheap paper and often with no cover art, for the purpose of sending to reviewers. These editions are highly prized by certain collectors. They are also highly prized by rabid fans who want to know right now what happens in the book, without waiting until the official publication date. People have been known to pay hundreds of dollars for an ARC from a popular author. Well, several years before he died in 2006, Jim Baen, founding publisher at Baen Books, had a crazy idea and offered an e-book ARC edition of a couple of popular forthcoming books. As with paper ARCs, the content was lacking the final edit, but they could be had several months before the official publication date. He pegged them at $15.00, which was two and a half to three times his then-current regular e-book prices. As you may suspect, they sold amazingly well, and have become a part of the regular publishing cycle for many of the new novels published by Baen Book. The e-ARC for 1636: The Devil’s Opera can be viewed and ordered here. Just remember, if you spot a typo, this isn’t the final edited version.

The other option is this thing called bundles. Basically, beginning about three months before the publication date, Baen offers a bundle of all the e-books that will be published in that month for a reduced rate and for a limited time. You have to purchase the whole bundle at once, but you typically get the books for a much reduced rate over the $9.99/$8.99/$6.99 of the single e-book prices. For example, the October 2013 Monthly Baen Bundle is priced at $18.00, and it contains five new novels and one novel that is having its mass market paperback edition released in October. This is a significant savings over the $51.94 total single e-book pricing of the six novels. The bundle release process is a lengthy one: in the third month before official release, you receive the first half of each book in what is essentially the e-ARC edition; in the second month before official release, you receive the next fourth of the e-ARC edition; and in the month before official release you receive the full text of the final edited version identical to what will be in the hard copy edition. To view and order the October 2013 bundle go here.

All things considered, I’m proud to have my first novel published by Baen Books, a truly forward-thinking traditional publisher. And in Baen’s case, that’s not a contradiction in terms.

The Devil’s Opera

March 16, 2013

David Carrico

Branding Craft & Skills Marketing Publishing The Writing Life The Writing Process 8 Comments

This is a combined public service announcement and post.

My first novel will be published in October by Baen Books. The title is 1636: The Devil’s Opera, and it’s a collaboration with Eric Flint.

The cover-illustration by the great Tom Kidd-is here.

Pre-order from Amazon here.

That concludes the public service announcement. On to the post.

Several of my fellow Fictorians urged me to give some idea of the process by which the novel was written. To do that I’ll first have to give you a bit of background on the 1632 series of which it is a part.

In 2000, Baen Books published a novel entitled 1632 by Eric Flint. The elevator speech version of the plot is a cosmic space-time warp rips a small blue-collar town out of 2000 AD West Virginia and drops in it eastern Germany in the year 1631, which just happened to be in the middle of the Thirty Years War, possibly the bloodiest European war before WWI. The resulting series is about how approximately 3,000 regular people from the future not only survive the event, but begin to change history.

This was the beginning of what has become one of the most successful alternate-history series in publishing history. To date: over six million words; twelve novels (including the above) in hard copy; thirteen anthologies in hard copy; and forty-six issues of an e-magazine called The Grantville Gazette.

I don’t have space here to give you the history of this phenomenon. If you’re interested, go to http://1632.org/ and read. The short version is that Eric did something very bold and potentially risky: he opened the 1632 story universe up to fan writers, and offered to publish and pay for the best stories that were submitted. That was the genesis of the e-magazine The Grantville Gazette.

GG, as we call it for short, will publish anything that is a well-told story that fits within the guidelines Eric has laid down for stories in the universe. Current payment rates are 5¢/word, which is professional standard rate by SFWA guidelines. (See http://1632.org/ again if you’re interested.)

I started writing stories in the universe in 2004. Within a couple of years I was part of what Eric considered to be a core group that consistently turned out good stories for GG on a pretty regular basis. (My fifteen published solo works total over 200,000 words and range from a 2,000 word short short to a 52,000 word short novel that was serialized.) Nonetheless, I was astonished when Eric approached me via email one day and said we should do a book together.

You have to understand that Eric is always on the lookout for writers he can help develop and help get a foot in the door in the publishing industry. Of the twelve novels published to date, I believe ten of them were produced in collaboration with seven different authors, plus I know there is another one close to completion with an eighth partner.

This is not a writing factory scam where someone else does all the work and Eric slaps his name on it at the end and collects all the money. In one partnership, I know that Eric worked with another professional writer and they divided the work. In the rest, Eric was senior author and the other partners were junior. I believe those all followed essentially the same model Eric used with me, so from this point on I’m just going to talk about my experience.

After the idea was broached, there was a certain amount of discussion as to what the book should be: a combination of stories from both of us, or a novel. Eric settled on a novel pretty quickly. So then we talked about what the novel should be about. I have two different series of stories going in GG with different but intersecting character groups in the same city. Eric said we should use one or both of the character groups in the novel in order to tap into the fan base that already existed for them. I had just finished a 27,000 word novella with one of the character sets, so I sent it to Eric. He agreed we would use that as the center pole for the novel.

The next step was to build the outline. That ended up taking a fair amount of time, because what worked best for me was to sit in the same room with Eric and talk everything out, ask a lot of questions, and make notes, and it took some work to get our schedules to intersect.

I wrote the first draft. That is Eric’s standard practice with junior authors, for them to write all or most of the first draft.

Eric read the first draft, decided what changes needed to be made. He fixed some things himself, which produced the second draft. Then he assigned some changes to me, and I produced the third draft. Then he did the final polish, producing a fourth draft (approximately 169,000 words), which he then submitted to Toni Weisskopf, the publisher at Baen Books. And as announced above, Baen will have it on the shelves on October 1.

Someone asked me what Eric got out of the deal. Two things: he got to pay forward to a friend, and he got a good novel in his series with his name on it with much less demand on his time.

What did I get out of it? A novel in a good series with my name on it. 🙂 And by working with and under Eric, I learned things about outlining, plot development, mystery novel memes and tropes, chapter size and arrangement, proper levels of descriptive language and dialog, and on and on.

I also got to demonstrate to one of the best publishers in the business that I can write quality work and deliver a finished product without going through the slush process. Priceless.

http://davidcarricofiction.com/

http://baen.com/

http://www.grantvillegazette.com/

http://1632.org/