Tools For 21st Century Authors

Someone on a Yahoogroup I am on pointed out that many of the authors who complain about poor sales of their books do little or nothing to promote them.  I tend to think she is correct, but the other part of this is that people are often remarkably unresourceful.  They say self-disempowering things like "I am not computer literate" and leave it at that.  As far as I am concerned, they have no one to blame for their poor sales but themselves.

The fact is that there is a ton of help out there, one of the beauties of the Internet is just how much and how easily garnered.  I just had this book delivered wirelessly to my Kindle 3.  Thanks to its being text-to-speech enabled, the publisher's/author's choice, I will be able to read it.  And I plan to get good and useful information out of it.  If I have to be open to and ready to learn something new, then so much the better.  Maybe this is why my first novel, published independently, has sold many times the average number of self-published copies?

The book is SOCIAL MEDIA FOR AUTHORS SERIES: FACEBOOK PAGES, written by best-selling author Jon F. Merz.  It set me back a huge dollar and ninety-nine cents.  I will read and report back here, but my point in this post is that there are so many resources like this one.  Whether anyone will buy your book as a result of your Facebook page for it I don't really know, but since the essence of marketing is giving people every opportunity to hear about it, it seems like a cheap opportunity. 

There is a saying in marketing "You are always marketing."  I converted this to "You are always recrioting volunteers" when I wrote and trained on nonprofit issues, after hearing one volunteer resources manager complain that they A. couldn't get any volunteers, and B. had no time for recruiting them.  When I managed the volunteer resources of one organization, it was common to find me standing in line at the supermarket where I would strike up conversations with people, mentioning what I did.  Since the most common reason people give for not bolunteering is "Nobody asked me" I, in essence, asked, or at least presented the option in the most attrractive manner.  Yes, I got volunteers as a result.  Before I left I had trippled the size of the program.

Why would that not apply to my novels?  Why would an author not use every means to acquaint readers with their existence and do it efficiently and in the best light?  I am convinced most advertising does little more than acquaint potential customers with a product, perhaps reminding them if they already knew.  The ad people think they are tricking us into buying a new car.  maybe they are.  But it's the consumer's decision.. once they know about a product, they can decide to buy it.  That goes for books, and how can we expect people to want to buy if they have never heard of the book?

So go to Amazon, whether .com or .co.uk or elsewhere,  and look at this book, then look around on the page to see others in a similar vein.  Everyone knows my rule.. never say you can't or don't know how to do something without adding the word "yet" to the end of the statement.  I don't know how to do a Facebook page for my novel -- yet!  But this book will help me learn.

Etiquette of PR: Make It Easy for Them

If you want someone, a blogger, a reviewer, a radio host, anyone, to help you get the word out about your work, there is one cardinal rule of etiquette -- make it easy for them.

I help folks maarket their work, whether novels or music files, in a number of ways.

1. I have a sort of catalog site called medieval-novels.com .
2. I invite authors to spotlight their work with excerpts on Today in Medieval History .
3. I invite smsll unsigned Celtic musicians to send me their mp3s to air on my online station, and will publish information on them on the related blog on MySpace.

And I am sure I do other things I just don't remember right at the moment.

One thing I can tell you, on behalf of all folks like me who like to network with and for other creative people, is that you should make it as easy on me as possible if you want my best effort.

Here are some suggestions:

Don't send me to a web site to download anything or to read about you. I'm plenty happy to help you out, but I am busy doing my own thing, including hellping others out, and the less wandering about the Internet I have to do the more likely I am to get to your request in a timely manner and the more generous I will be.

Don't send me excerpts or other material as part of an email. An attached file is fine. An excerpt, for example, in an email will wind up requiring that I fiddle with the formatting which with my lousy vision is even more time consuming than you might think.

In general, you want to eliminate any extra steps for someone you want to have help you get the word out about your book or music. That goes for everything and everyone. If you want a radio station or other media to help you, call them back when they call you.. immediately. Otherwise they will lose interest and go on to something and someone else.

If you want a web site to focus on your recent release, make sure you include everything they might want to use" images, text, ordering information, an excerpt, reviews, important details.

I am writing this because it is not uncommon for folks to take me up on an offer to help, but too often I have to follow up with one or more requests for information. A musician whom I asked for information for a blog entry about his group told me where to find it online. Wrong. It was his job, as the recipient of the publicity, to send it to me. An author sent me an excerpt of her novel in the body of an email. Wrong. A plain text file is what I needed. Another author asked me to choose a section of her novel to spotlight. Wrong. She needs to take that time, not me.

In my case, there is another step people need to take, and that is to send me digital files and not send me a print item. I will have to go through several steps to make print into an accessible format as I am severely visually impaired. I have always noticed that many accommodations for disability make life easier for everyone, so why not offer the digital copy to every person you ask to write a review or do an interview with you, etc.?

Why do I do the favors I do? I believe in what you are all doing, writing novels and making music. And I just like to hellp people. Sometimes, like with medieval-novels.com, I get a small referral fee. In another case, Radio De Dánaan, I actually pay Live365 to be allowed to broadcast. It balances out, but in the end, I think I come out ahead because I am doing what I love.

If you can make that love run smootly for me, I will appreciate you all the more.

Two Waycooll Things for Historical Novelists!

Promo Paks: Nearly-Free Marketing for Authors (New and Improved!)
By Janet Elaine Smith

Whether you publish your book through a traditional publisher or on your own as a "free range" author you are going to have to do some mighty marketing on your own. Unless you are a Star like Stephen King or J. K. Rowling, the publisher ain't gonna do much of it. That's why this book is such a treasure. It is as useful to the independent as the signed author. It is sensible, practical and easy to put into action. And it is filled with information, addresses, tools and ideas. As a mostly pretty shy person, no really, I especially appreciated the part where Smith tells you exactly what to say when you walk into a bookstore to get them to carry your book. If it is a POD book and with curling lip the manager says "Oh it's a POD book" for instance, Smith says to point out, "Yes, but that means you don't have to buy a whole case... just two or three." This is a woman after my own heart... drop the defensive response and look at things from the other person's point of view.. and speak to their advantage. Get this book! You need it.

"Historical Novelists Do It in the Past"

Here's an icebreaker to grease the way into talking about.. and selling.. your novel! Available through CafePress, you can have this provocative message put on a t-shirt, cap, tote bag, stickers, magnets, a mug or any of plenty of other items. Just imagine walking into a bookstore with this on. Or a library. Or any number of other places. Who could resist coming over to you and asking you, "Are you a historical novelist? What do you write?" Believe me, I know... it's happened to me. If you are as proud of your books as I am of mine but as shy, you will be grateful that you don't have to put yourself forward, but simply beam with pride and answer their questions. You can find this design and other historical novelist and medieval theme items on the Shield-wall Productions store at CafePress.com.

Indie Book Marketing: Some Early Insights

e have just started the discussion in earnest about the marketing gap between traditionally published books and indie books. (Join us at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indiebookmarketing.)

There will be a great deal to discover and discuss, but by and large our first efforts seem to reveal that most traditionally published authors do not get as much actual marketing help from their publishers. If this is accurate, the problem may turn out to be not that indie authors are not served but rather that no authors other than the blockbusters are served.

We continue to explore and discuss what we perceive as the Marketing Gap. Here are some observations we have made so far.

1. Editing services. Not exactly marketing, but certainly has a negative impact if your book shows that it was not thoroughly and expertly edited, from historical accuracy to location of commas. Traditional publishers do this as part of their contract with an author, while indie authors must either perform the editing themselves or if they are smart pay for editing by a professional. And that ain't cheap.. and can make or break an author's ability to self-publish.

2. While it appears that traditional publishers don't do muych of what an author might think of as marketing, they do provide promotional materials, says janet Elaine Smith . Bookstores receive piles of it directly from publishers and from distributors.

3. Libraries generally make acquisitions decisions with the aid of a select group of journals. As a rule these journals do not rebiew self-published books. So even if the author sends the galleys of a book prepublication as required, they likely accomplush nothing more than paying the postage.

Now remember, we are only in the early stages of discussing and coming to any conclusions about all this. The barriers we uncover are not insuperable. But you have to know a wall is there before you can climb it.

Join us and help find the barriers and the solutions!

Analysis: Indie Book marketing - an ad hoc group exploring the marketing gap between traditionally and indie published books.

For a group specifically to share book marketing ideas, see Writer2writer Marketing Books.

Analyzing Indie Book Marketing

The following is a post I placed on a writers group in response to a report from a major event for romance writers and publishers in London.

I am part of a movement which has a steeply uphill climb but I still think it is worthwhile for reasons I could wax eloquent about for hours.. indie or alternative publishing. It is in response to what the author was talking about, the narrow standards of corporate, for lack of a better term, publishers. Yes, the other term for what we are promoting is "self publishing" but it has in this era of the Internet a great deal of potential.

I and others in the alternative publishing movement feel that corporate publishers are doing a great disservice to readers, particularly readers of genre fiction. The very fact that writers are told that publishers will only consider books about historical women means that anyone out there who might like to read about purely fictional people who have modest everyday lives or about historical men of an era really gripes me. Maybe those books won't sell gazillions, but readers still want to read them. And self published does not automatically mean crap. Each book deserves to be judged individually.. and readers are the ones who should decide. That's what I believe.

So I published AN INVOLUNTARY KING myself. Of course there are disadvantages, but they are all disadvantages that can be overcome. That is why the organization Independent Authors Guild was formed and even more specifically why I set up a working committee yesterday to analyze book marketing opportunities for indie authors. If you are interested, here is the skinny. www.independentauthorsguild.org and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indiebookmarketing/ .

For some reason the embracing of indie film making and indie music recording has not been extended to indie book publishing. That's part of the movement, to shift that situation. The latter group I mentioned was formed to look at only one aspect of indie publishing, how to improve book marketing for indie authors.. with any book getting the same space on, say, Amazon, as any other, it is purely getting the word out that keeps indie books at a disadvantage. We want to examine the tools and resources in a methodical way to see how we can get or make access for those whose work does not meet the corporate publishers sales criteria.

You know, one book I highly admire is Brandy Purdy's THE CONFESSION OF PIERS GAVESTON. She does things with first person narrative that made me sit up and look. She has little if any chance of having that book published unless she did it herself.. Even though her other book, which will now be called THE BOLEYN WIFE was actually picked up by a traditional publisher - female, historical, first person, and Tudor -- the publishers all say of GAVESTON that no one will reader a first person narrative by a man, especially a gay man. So this marvelous book would never see the light of day. Except.. the author had the courage to face the bias against self publishing. I thank the literary gods she did.

The publishers have to be realistic, especially these days, but since "these days" also shows an increase in library use, I am glad there are people who are creative enough and willing to be risk takers to get their work out there so readers aren't cheated. No one is going to get rich off this.. except maybe intellectually. So being a born problem solver I look not at regretfully bowing to the inevitable but instead to be part of the solution and find a way to strengthen the alternative. Power to the people and all that.

Will I publish DEATH IN EAST WELLOW as an indie book? I won't pretend that would be my first choice.. I will try to get an agent and a publisher, but my guess is that that will be a waste of time. If it works out, then wow, cool! If not, I will have,. I hope, helped level the playing field for indie authors.

Each of us has to choose.. though ultimately the choice is the publishing industry.. I honor whatever choices you each make.

Nan Hawthorne
http://nanhawthorne.blogspot.com

Just Waiting for the Book Sales to Roll In!

This appears in the Consumer Blog on the latest edition of EE/TIMES. The author is Nic Mokhoff, Research Editor.

Nan Hawthorne, a successful historical novelist, was born with Stargardt's Disease, a form of macular degeneration that causes the deterioration of a person's vision over time. Nan has been partially blind her entire life; now with 20/1200 vision, she has learned to live with the disease but has had to constantly rely on others for help when reading and researching.

In fact, to accomplish this, she had to go through the laborious effort of mailing every research book she needed to a third party service that converted the lengthy tomes into spoken word in order for her to complete her research--a frustrating and time consuming endeavor.

Hawthorne has a Plustek BookReader V100, a reading device that has both text-to-speech and optical character recognition. She was impressed with the dramatic results she achieved even from her very first attempt.

"Now I am able to buy the books I need and read them whenever I want. It has dramatically changed my life," said Hawthorne.

Nan Hawthorne is the author of An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England. She is currently working on the first of a series of historical paranormal mysteries.

Glad to hear i am successful.. articles like this may be self-fulfilling in their prophecies.

How I Made My Book Trailer

It sure didn't feel like it at times while I was makng it, but it really wasn't that hard! The comments I have gotten on it seem to indicate that in spite of this, I pulled it off well. You can watch it here.

I started out by thinking about what would make people watch, watch again and send my trailer to their friends. My novel, An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England, has appeal for different people, but what images and sounds would appeal to a large number of them. I can tell you now that the trailer I made first will not be the only one. But the first one is for those people who might find the action adventure side of my book interesting. I knew then that I would want to find video of battle, specifically of shield wall battle from the Dark Ages. This was the hardest part of this whole project. I finally located a group in France called La Compagnie du Frankland, which reenacts life in Charlemagne's Frankia. I negotiated a price for one minute of the video. I put together a licensing agreement and their representative agreed to the terms.

Next came sound. I was able to find sounds of a sword battle and a lovely clip of a sword being drawn from a scabbard on AudioSparx. The same site had some lovely Gregorian chant which, while not exactly correct for my period, evokes the feeling I wanted to impart. Then I needed a spoken teaser for the book. I discovered that poet and teacher Liam Guilar, though living in Australia, has one of those British voices that are hard not to swoon over. I asked him to record a couple sentences I wrote. He has gotten as many lovely compliments from the trailer as I have!

The next problem I ran into was that I could not figure out how to make a short video clip from the long one. I don't know if my software won't do that or whether I just couldn't figure it out. I suspect it is the former, since I think the software is for making videos out a home productions. I decided to save stills from the video, choosing ones without "civilians" in modern clothing or other less effective shots. I mixed in a couple of photos from iStockPhotos.com.

Then it was time to throw all of this into a hopper, shake it up and see what hopped back out. I had never used Windows Movie maker(R)before, but it was fun to learn. I had quite a hard time at first making the audio and video stick together. Either I had the audio file or the video file, never the completed video. That is when I had a bright idea.. I had made a video of cat pictures just for fun. I used their "auto-movie" tool and that worked just fine. So I took the video items I wanted in the final trailer and the completed audio track with sword sound, Liam's narration, and the sword battle sounds and did an auto-movie. It turned out terrific! I was able then to add titles, rearrange the images, add some effects and transitions to the video that actually make the stills look like video if you don't look too hard.

I clipped and modified and adjusted and watche the video to my heart's content until I thought it was good. My husband advised, "Remeber that you don't have just one go-round. You can make as many of these as you want." That allowed me to hit "Publish Movie" and start uploading the final result to YouTube, Facebook, my own blog, and to tell everyone and her brother about it. I plan to turn the audio track into a promo on my radio station, Radio Dé Danaan.

This was so fun and satisfying that I fully intend to make more movies!

OK, I know.. you want to know how much I spent. I could give you an exact figure given some time, but let's guesstimate. I paid $100 for the licensing of the video, no more than $40 for the other photos and sounds. Liam made me a gift of his vocal honey. MovieMaker came with my new computer. So other than an incidental or two, which I can't even recall, I spent less that $150. I can foresee spending a lot less for future trailers. This means that there will be no barrier to my wonted dabbling.