Category Archives: Self publishing

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #13: Host Your Own Reading/Book Launch

June 23, 2013 By in Promoting published books, Self publishing, Selling Your Book Tags: , , , , , , 7 Comments
Me, reading at Secret Handshake Gallery May, 3013 at a triple launch co-hosted with authors Kathleen Whelan and David Bateman

Me, reading at Secret Handshake Gallery May, 2013 at a triple launch co-hosted with authors Kathleen Whelan and David Bateman (Photo: A. Resnick)

Make it an event to remember

So many books are being published now that most of us will wait in vain for a bookstore owner or an established reading program to invite us to come out and strut our stuff. The good news is that we don’t have to wait for anyone to invite us. For very little money, we can put on an event any old time we want to – to celebrate the publication of a new book, or just to celebrate being writers.

If you are new to writing, most of your guests will likely be family and friends who have not been to readings and book launches before. They will come to the event out of curiosity in part, but primarily to share your excitement and toast your achievement. Your number one goal as host should be to make sure that when they get there, they  have a fantastic time. (In fact, if that is not your goal, forget about doing it at all. This event is all about you,  but it is also not all about you, if you get my drift.) With some planning and some thinking, you can make those who attend your event eager to attend the next book-launch or reading: thereby doing a service to writers everywhere.

The first thing you need is a venue. You can hold your event anywhere. Last summer, I was well into the planning of a picnic-style book launch in a ravine park when a few well-wishers insisted that I think about the weather possibilities and hold it inside instead. (I still like the idea of an outside reading. I think I’ll do it at some point.)

What we did instead proved to be a great alternative. We held the launch at a small art gallery in Toronto which was very reasonable to rent for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon (it’s called the Secret Handshake Gallery on Mutual Street, and it is managed by the noted Toronto poet and artist David Bateman).

It had a kitchen, which was handy for preparing tea and coffee, washing fruit, and arranging plates of crackers, cookies  and dips. The same kinds of facilities would also be available in apartment-building party rooms, someone’s living room, the basement of a church, a community hall, etc. You don’t actually need a kitchen — think a room in a library, or the back room of a pub.

The next thing you need is a date and time. Give yourself plenty of lead time: you need to order books that will be available for sale, and you need to promote the event.

Begin the promotion three weeks or so ahead. Don’t rely on Facebook and Twitter: these sites are not too effective in attracting actual people to an actual event – although you will get lots of back-patting there, which always feels good. Check out where established reading series publicize readings in your area and submit a notice there (Open Book Toronto and Open Book Ontario are good examples from this region). You should also post notices on writers-organization events lists and in other arts publications. Your local newspaper or neighbourhood journal may also list your reading for free. If you are going to be reading at an art gallery or library, they probably have their own promotional methods – handouts and on-line items – and they will likely add your appearance to their list even though you are hosting it yourself, in the hope that you will bring people out to see other exhibitions or events they have on offer. And don’t forget that great “old-fashioned” method for spreading news: the email.

You need some kind of refreshments. These can be very modest: tea, coffee, juice, cookies, bottled water. Or you can get fancier and add wine, cheese, grapes, beer, tacos and dip, steak tartare and oysters – whatever you want, depending on your budget, your audience, the venue and the time of day. It’s true that people who’ve had a drink are much more likely to love your reading and buy a book than are the (tee)totally sober, but you have to figure out whether the potential payoff is worth it. Remember that you’ll need to sell several books to pay for even one half-decent bottle of wine: for economic reasons if none other, you may have to convince your guests to buy your books by giving an excellent reading rather than by lubricating them.

You might want to introduce a theme at your gathering that is in keeping with the subject of your book. When I launched The Whole Clove Diet, I invited people to bring Nanaimo bars – a sweet delicacy which figures largely in one of the novel’s comic scenes – in exchange for a free copy of the novel. Not only food, but decor, costume and music can be customized to suit the subject of your book.

Mary W. Walters, Kathleen Whelan, David Bateman

To my left (your right), Kathleen Whelan and David Bateman, co-hosts and writers extraordinaire (Photo: A. Resnick)

You need books to sell (and autograph). This may sound obvious but I cannot tell you how many readings I have been to (including my own most recent one) where fate hung in the balance until the very day of the reading: would the books appear on a delivery truck in time for the event or not? Don’t give yourself a panic attack: order the books well in advance. (Of course, this problem will not occur if  you are dealing only in e-books, but I am not sure that you can hold a viable book launch if you only have an e-book. I could be very wrong about that. Perhaps I just haven’t thought it through properly. Reader input on this subject is welcome.)

You also need a book sales table, and someone to sell the books for you (that’s what friends are for). You will need to provide a float. If your book is $15, have some $5s on hand to give as change for the inevitable $20s you will receive. You might also want to prepare a handout featuring the title of your book and a sales link or order form as a takeaway for those who didn’t bring enough money – or in case you run out of books to sell.☺

You need an itinerary. Plan to read for half to three-quarters of an hour maximum, and figure out what time you intend to start. I don’t recommend starting right at the time that the event begins. It’s a party: not just a reading, so let people mix and mingle for half an hour or an hour before you read. (This also gives the latecomers a chance to arrive.) Think ahead about whether you want music playing in the background while people socialize. If so, you’ll have to organize that in advance as well. (It’s pretty simple to bring a laptop computer with a playlist on it and a couple of speakers, but someone has to do it.)

You need someone to introduce you. This person will need to get people’s attention when it’s time for you to read, invite them to be seated, turn off the music, etc. During the introduction, this person should point out where your books are available for sale and announce how much they cost. When it comes to your introduction, you might want to write it out yourself and email it to your introducer ahead of time, just to make sure that all the points you want covered are covered. If the person who is introducing you might be insulted by your writing your own blurb for him or her to read, you could send a list of points to cover. Or else you could hope for the best, and fill in any oversights yourself when it is time to read.

Even if only one or two people show up, carry on. Poor turnouts happen to lots of writers, even those who are invited to read by established reading programs and bookstore owners. No matter how few there are, you should read anyway. Those people came all the way across town/around the world/down the street to hear you, and you want to blow them out of the water. Also, reading to a very few people will be good practice for when you become as famous as Margaret Atwood and you have people lined up down the block to hear you read.

(I encourage you not to read like Margaret Atwood does, however. She can get away with a deadpan delivery, but most people cannot. Further to this bit of gratuitous advice, in my next blog post I am going to talk about how to give a good reading. Too many writers don’t and there is nothing worse than a boring or inept reading. The only comparable experience in my life was a philosophy class I took at university where the lectures were delivered at 8 a.m. by a prof who leaned against the blackboard with his eyes closed, and spoke like Margaret Atwood reads. He seemed to still be half asleep – his half met my three-quarters and no knowledge was transferred.)

You need a photographer. (This is also what friends are for.)

You need people to help you clean up afterwards. These same people should take you for a drink after all the cleanup is done so that you can celebrate the celebration. For if you have done it properly, it is only when your well planned, well delivered, fun event is over that you will actually be able to start enjoying it yourself.

______________________

Note to my FaceBook friends: I’m taking a break from Facebook, which has lately been turning into more of an addiction than a pleasurable diversion.  If you think some of our mutual Facebook friends would be interested in this post, please post the link as I can’t do that at the moment. Thanks. – Mary

Do We Have an Obligation to our Books To Market Them? A Legal Precedent Involving a Family Shrine Provides Some Food for Thought

April 10, 2013 By in Promoting published books, Publishing, Self publishing, Self-publishing, Selling Your Book Tags: , , , , , , 11 Comments
Kim Velk

Kim Velk

a guest post by Kim Velk

Note from Mary: I am delighted to welcome guest blog-poster Kim Velk, a regular reader of (and comment contributor to) The Militant Writer. Our exchanges via the comments and then email led to me to ask her to put her thoughts down on paper for the enjoyment and provocation of us all. (Update April 16: Kim’s first novel, UP, BACK, AND AWAY, is now available! Yesterday was publication day! Congratulations!) Here’s Kim:

In my day job I am a lawyer. And while I don’t practice corporate law, I have often found myself thinking of the fundamental idea underpinning the law of corporations – and never moreso than when I consider how I am going to approach the task of informing the indifferent world that I have a book (or soon will) that I want it to buy.

If you’re reading Mary’s blog, you are very likely in a similar circumstance: that is, trying to figure out how – or maybe even whether – you should peddle your book to a public that, let it be said, really doesn’t care. This is a not a happy place. The writing part was hard enough, but at least we signed up for that. This next part, this selling bit, that’s another matter. It falls somewhere on the scale between distasteful and odious (at least for a lot of us). Our writerly unicorn spirits aren’t equipped for the rough and tumble of the floor of the bourse! We wrote because we’re writers! We’re not ad men, or PR people, or entrepreneurs.…

Yet, even for those who are traditionally published, we all know (or have heard), that the big world of books demands author participation in the selling part these days. For the self-published (we the semi-despised, the rich pickings for those with author marketing services to sell), we are really on our own. No agent or marketing team for us. If our poor little books are going to go anywhere, we’re the ones who have got to shift them.

I don’t have advice on the best way to do that. (Waving at Mary here. Thanks Mary for your excellent advice on this blog). In fact, I haven’t even tried to sell a book yet and I may be altogether crap at it. The task looms in my immediate future, however, and as I have tried to face it, I have turned to the guiding light of, yes, corporate law.

That’s what I came here to share:  an idea that I hope may at least put some heart into those of us who quail before that dismal marketing endeavor. Courage, mes amis! The Privy Council worked out a little trick of the mind a long time ago that may come in handy for us now.

Legal Fiction Is a Mighty Fiction

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council served historically as the highest court of appeal from Britain’s colonies and it still serves in that capacity for “Crown Dependencies, the British Overseas Territories, and a number of Commonwealth member countries.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

I went to law school at McGill University in Montreal and as a result I was exposed to a lot of legal precedents generated by the English House of Lords and the Privy Council. (Canadians could still take appeals over to London until after World War II). A friend of mine took the French language corporations class (one of the awkward charms of the McGill faculté de droit is its bilingual nature.) She told me that in the first lecture, the very correct Belgian professor explained how, once upon a time, a family in India fell to feuding over who would have what duties and responsibilities for maintaining the shrine of a family idol.

No one was doing what he was supposed to do. Offerings were skipped, dust and dirt collected. “L’idole” was being shamefully neglected while the family feuded and pointed fingers. The dispute was at last carried to the Privy Council back in England. In a powerful flash of insight, some brilliant councilor required the litigants to take a new approach to their god. They were to “incorporate” it – that is, imagine it as having a body, a corpus, as being an entity unto itself, one that was separate from its keepers and one that was owed duties of care, loyalty, and good faith.

The councilor thus re-imagined an inanimate thing as a real, living thing, and one that required something like a guardianship. Its keepers were recast into what would eventually morph into directors of a corporation. As such, they were obliged not to look out for their own selfish interests, but for the best interests of the entity they served. Et voila – the legal fiction gave birth to the “legal person.”

Fast forward a few hundred years, and this idea has remade the world. Of course the history of corporate law is a lot more complicated than I just made it seem and any real corporate lawyer or legal scholar who stumbles in here is probably shaking his or her head over something I have said, but the Big Idea is what I wanted to convey and only for the limited purpose I’ve already described. (By the way, the occupy Wall Street protestors who railed against corporate personhood were really missing something basic in their attack. This trope of the mind [and the law] has made many things possible that might never have been achieved: universities, big events, nonprofits, you name it. Of course, it has also allowed lots of evildoers to hide behind their corporate structures, but that’s someone else’s blog post.)

One Way Forward

OK class. What does all this mean for us? I think it means that we might best approach the business of book marketing by, at least some of the time, separating ourselves from our work – by thinking not in terms of what we can face, or what we want to do, but what is our duty to the book? What is in its best interests?

Hmm. What might this mean? Doing what we can to see the book reaches its potential? Getting it to an audience for whom it will have some meaning, or to whom it will give understanding, joy, or entertainment? (We all gotta serve someone, like the song says, and this includes our new little rectangular or digital legal people.) Perhaps also securing for them some future? (They will live after us, even unto our children’s children.) I think this question of goals requires some soul searching for us all. Once those are identified, the next question is: how is this to be done?

As noted, I’m still trying to work this out for myself. One thing I hasten to add, despite all I have said here, is that the public imagination does not much separate a creator from his or her work. What we do by way of marketing will have repercussions for our books. This may mean forbearance in some arenas. As Mary has noted, if we turn off readers with a lot of ham-fisted hard selling on Facebook or Twitter, for instance, we are likely doing our books a disservice. We really have to think about what’s best for them – and the answers may not be easy to find.

Maybe we owe our creations a little bit of money, if we can scratch it together, to spend on marketing (if we can find a reputable vendor). Maybe we need to try to interest editors of various publications, or an agent who will take on the book or its writer. All that is TBD. The only thing that this concept makes plain is that doing nothing is not an option. Nothing = a dereliction of duty.

And in Conclusion…

We have sweated over these books, and lavished our care and our attention on them. (If you haven’t, never mind about everything I just said. Do yourself and the world a favor and just put whatever you have written back on the flash drive and leave it there.) For the rest of us, our books live now, and they are owed some respect – from us first of all. To be cringing or pusillanimous about introducing them, in the best way we can manage, to the world beyond our writing rooms is a disservice to ourselves, and maybe worse, to our creations.

Kim Velk lives in Vermont with her husband, two children, and a terrier.  She works by day as a lawyer.  Her first book, Up, Back, and Away, is about a Texas teenager sent back to England in 1928 (on a vintage English three speed).  It will be out on Amazon later this month.  She blogs at www.quartersessions.blogspot.com and www.lasthouse.blogspot.com

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #11: Don’t Give Up

April 2, 2013 By in Fellowship of writers, Independent publishing, Promoting published books, Publishing, Relationships with writers, Self publishing, Self-publishing, Selling Your Book, Websites for writers, Writers Web Sites Tags: , , , , , , 24 Comments

Mary W. Walters Militant Writer(With a special P.S. for fiction writers)

This can be a very discouraging undertaking, this book promotion business.

Most of us didn’t set out to be book publishers, business managers, and self promoters – we set out to be writers. We wanted to communicate with readers, to tell a story, to express our dreams, hopes and nightmares. But however well or poorly we have done in the writing of our books, these days it is only the beginning. Even getting what we’ve written published is only the beginning. It’s the promotion that is the long, long haul and it can wear down the most determined and self-reliant among us, and devastate those of us who are lacking in confidence already.

For some of us, the writing is what sustains us: it is what we are meant to do. It is what gives the rest of our lives meaning. (I am one of those.) But a work of art (or wanna-be art) is only complete when it reaches its audience, as far as I’m concerned. And nowadays whether we are self- or traditionally published, the need to promote ourselves and our work eats up way too much of our writing time (such as it is in the first place, for most of us). And when it doesn’t eat up the time, it eats up our morale.

The Courage to Write

It has long been my conviction (like for 20 years or so) that it is necessary to have a whole lot of self-confidence in order to write a book. It takes gumption to complete any book, and as much courage as vision to complete it with any élan. When our self-confidence is eroded, we run into writer’s blocks, procrastination and all the other impediments that (in addition to our jobs and families and friends) can prevent us from writing well – or indeed from writing at all.

The problem, we are discovering as we put on all these new hats (publisher, publicity person, agent, bookseller), is that it also requires courage to promote a book or to promote oneself, and that our courage is threatened at every turn. Every time we check the sales stats on our books, or peek at the visitor-counters on our websites, our morale is likely to take a hit. Those hits affect not only our desire to keep promoting our books, but also whatever confidence we might have had stored up for writing the next book.

Some people probably decide to give up on promotion, but they are shooting themselves in their heads to spite their faces (or however the expression goes).  (Those who publicly announce that they are “giving up” or that they have been defeated are really only taking a new promotional tack. Check out this bit of self-promotion written under the guise of “being a failure” that recently appeared on the Salon website. Clever marketing.) To stop promoting means to disappear completely off the promo circuit, and the only result of that is  . . .  nothing. You sell even fewer books. And no one really cares but you. (The result is similar – or even worse, if that is possible – when you allow yourself to whine in public.)

Keep on Truckin’

In short, the only options are to a) move forward, and b) to sink without a trace. Which leaves only option a. And the only way to move forward is to “keep on keepin’ on.”

It helps to stay in touch with other writers who are doing the same thing we are, in places like this and other sites where people go to commiserate and encourage and share tips, rather than to promote themselves. (One might argue that I established this blog to promote myself, but I assure you that the strategy is not working. I have noticed no sales resulting from the blog, not even any clicks through to my books despite the 50,000 hits The Militant Writer has received, and therefore I claim innocence – albeit inadvertent – in the blog-as-marketing department.)

Ironically perhaps, I think it helps to be a writer in this strange new digital world of book sales – by disposition, writers are better equipped than most to take on solitary uphill battles where we slip backwards more often than we move forwards, where no one cares but us if we get anywhere, where giving up is really not an option: we do what we must do. It could therefore be argued that those who give up on book promotion are not real writers. :) (I am prepared to hear arguments that contradict this point of view. In fact, one of this blog’s regular readers, Kim Velk aka Woolfoot, is going to write a guest post on that very subject one of these days.)

It also helps to get enough sleep. Sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of evaporating self-confidence as well as care, and everything looks more do-able in the morning.

A Special Note to Fiction Writers

I have followed down link after link of tips on book promotion, as I am sure you have as well, only to find myself reading lists of strategies that relate primarily to non-fiction. Certainly some of the suggestions can be applied to fiction as well, but most non-fiction (with the exception of some creative non-fiction) is easier to promote than is most fiction: there is no doubt of it. Whether it is how-to, biography, history, memoir, even philosophy or psychology or economics, non-fiction always has an obvious hook that is more likely to interest the media – both social and traditional – than is a “made-up story.”

Because of this, perhaps, I was particularly disappointed to have wasted an hour of my life on a webinar entitled  “Create a Marketing Plan to Sell More Books” put on by CreateSpace, of all companies. (For the uninitiated, CreateSpace is the publisher of choice of most of us self-published authors who choose to create a paperback version of our books. You’d think they’d know that most of their customers are small-time authors, primarily of fiction.)

I was going to save you an hour of your life by telling you all the reasons why there is no point in listening to the replay of the webinar if you are a) a fiction writer and/or b) on a small or nonexistent promotional budget. However, another blogger saved ME another hour of MY time by writing a most eloquent explanation of why Brian Jud’s message is irrelevant to most of us. (Hint: Jud has been selling non-fiction, how-to books for decades and has built up a critical mass and a bank account to support the promotional tactics he suggests: most of them are far beyond the resources of most of us and irrelevant to any book with a literary bent. Take this suggestion of his for example: you should hire an accountant and a lawyer before you go to the bank to apply for a loan for the funding of your next book. All I can say to that is Hah!) Thank you, Ellen Larson, aka The Constant Pen and author of the sci-fi mystery In Retrospect, for an excellent summary and critique.

As Ellen does on hers, I have been making an effort, based on my own self-interests, to make the tips I present here on this blog specifically relevant to fiction writers—even if the majority are also relevant to writers of non-fiction – and I will continue to do that. If anyone finds other sites that are specifically directed at promoting novels and short stories, please let us know. Thank you.

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #10: Turn Your Book Into A News Story

March 19, 2013 By in Promoting published books, Self publishing, Self-publishing, Selling Your Book Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

Book Promotion TipsAs we all know, all is not well in newspaperland: journalists are being laid off left and right, daily papers are getting smaller, quite a few of them have gone – or are slowly, painfully going – under.

People just don’t consume news the way they used to: by which I mean all at once, in one package, from one source, once a day. We no longer wait for the news to land on our front porches, or to arrive in a coin-release box at the end of the street: we go hunting for it on the Internet. Since people aren’t reading newspapers the way they used to, advertisers aren’t buying ads in them, which means that the papers have to cut and cut, and on it goes.

If you’re a writer (no one else much cares about this part), the situation appears to be particularly dire when it comes to books coverage. “Books editors” have all but disappeared, and finding a books page or even a single book review in a newspaper is less likely all the time. For those who have self-published, the situation seems even more discouraging (although we have to admit that no one forced us to self-publish): almost all of the books that do get reviewed are from traditional presses.

Perhaps A Silver Lining?

In considering the implications of the decline of the print media, I’ve made some observations that could perhaps add up to a window of opportunity for those of us who find ourselves promoting our own books at this particular point in time. The situation could be very different even two years from now, but at the moment, with a bit of creativity, we might be able to put these points to use in ways that may not only help us to sell books, but may also solve some problems for the people who are running the skeleton staffs of the world’s remaining newspapers:

  1. The print media have not disappeared completely. Lots of people are still reading newspapers on the subway, in coffee shops and doctors’ offices, on park benches and maybe even in their bathrooms.
  2. Most of us approach the papers we read differently than we used to. When I sit down with an actual newspaper these days, I tend to skim over items I’ve already read online (i.e., most of the news stories), and look instead for editorials and other opinion pieces, investigative journalism and those items known as “human interest” (to distinguish them from items of merely ferret interest, I suppose). I’m also more likely to read an article all the way through in print than online, because when I do sit down and open a newspaper, I’ve usually got a cup of tea at my elbow and have already mentally committed some time to checking out what’s inside of it.
  3. In addition to daily papers, there are weekly and monthly specialty newspapers, some of them subscription-based but many of them free: community and small-town newspapers, real estate papers, seniors’ newspapers, advertising flyers that break up the monotony with brief general-interest articles, etc.
  4. Since there are too few writers left on most newspapers staffs today, I am guessing that editors might be having a hard time generating items of local or general interest for the papers that do remain. Rather than ignoring it, if a compelling story falls into their hands that is already well written from a journalistic point of view (intriguing, apparently objective, answering the who-what-when-where-how questions, etc.) and that is about the right length for what they need, they might just sigh with resignation if not relief, and run it.
  5. Most people who are working on newspapers have an interest in writing and writers: many of them are would-be book writers themselves — even those who edit the automotives section or cover regional politics. An interesting subject line in an email might just attract such an individual’s  attention, and compel him or her to call you for an interview.
  6. A story about a book that appears in some section of the paper like “City News” or “Lifestyle” is going to reach a lot more potential buyers than is one that appears in a cultural silo, such as the Arts and Entertainment section or The Weekend Reader.

Two Plus Two = Just a Hunch

There has got to be a news story relating your book somewhere, even if it is only “Historic novel took took twenty years to write,” or “Nightmare inspired fantasy,” or “Author swears erotic novel is invention; husband begs to differ.” If there isn’t, maybe you can create one (“Book launch at swimming pool makes big splash”). (I’m sure you can be more creative: the more creative the better, in fact.)

Once you’ve written your news item, Google “daily newspapers Canada” or “weekly newspapers North Dakota” or “newspapers Roman Catholic” – whatever suits your fancy – and start sending out your story. In my brief experience with this type of endeavour to date, at least I feel as though I’m working on book promotion, even if it has so far failed to bring forth any fruit.

Who knows? If all else fails it might lead to another news story: “After 500 media releases without a single nibble, despairing writer seeks refuge in new novel.” Now that has a human-interest ring to it, don’t you think?

Update: After you’ve read this post, go immediately to the first comment below, from Marcus Trower, and read it. I was writing about my hunches on this issue in this post; he provides some genuine, practical advice from the field. THANK YOU, Marcus! (I’m hoping he’ll do a guest post at some point.) (I love the Internet.)

___________

I am looking for someone to do a guest blog post on book promo blog tours. Experience (with blog post tours) necessary. We want to know: How you set one up. What you do. What you offer other bloggers in exchange. What the outcome has been for you. If you can write such a piece, apply within (i.e., at mary at marywwalters dot com)

I am also looking for a few people to talk to about their experiences with video book promotion (YouTube or other) – either as the focus of the video or as a consumer of author videos. What is most effective  format? How long should they be? What should they be about – the book? The author? Does anyone actually watch these things? If you can help, contact me at mary at marywwalters dot com.

Graçias.

Establish a S.M.A.R.T. book promotion goal

March 12, 2013 By in Bestsellers, Promoting published books, Publishing, Self publishing, Selling Your Book Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

iStock_000018615175XSmallBook Promotion Tip of the Week #9: Figure out how many copies of your book you want to sell before you start promoting.

(You can always adjust your targets later.)

After floundering around in the book promotion literature for quite a while now, and blogging about what doesn’t work, I am learning that one principle is more basic than the rest: if I don’t set some promotion goals for myself, I’m never going to get anything done. I could continue to research promotion forever, rather than doing anything about it.

Not that I’m giving up the research, but I’ve decided that even if I haven’t read and learned everything that’s out there yet (by a long shot), the moment has come when I must start to make a focused effort on the actual promotion.

A key word here is “focused” — because I’ve also come to the realization that the goal I set for myself cannot be “to sell books.” That just isn’t a very “SMART” goal.  If “to sell books” is all I’m striving for, I’m never going to get anywhere. It’s like setting myself the goal “to lose weight” or “to read Tolstoy” or “to learn another language.” Those are ultimate goals, but they are not specific, measurable, attainable, relevant or time-sensitive goals, which is what SMART stands for (more on S.M.A.R.T. goals later).

First I need to decide what I want to do with my promotional efforts. Do I want to get to number one (which I think is the general hope that most of us have as we set off on our non-specific promotional adventures)? If so, what does this mean? Do I really think I am going to sell 300 copies of my book EVERY DAY on Amazon? According to this article on Salon, that’s what it takes to make a book an Amazon bestseller. I must face whether that is my specific goal and intent, or whether that is a pipe dream.

And even if that IS my goal, then how many days of 300 sales/day am I aiming for? Would I be satisfied with 300 sales for just one day? – enough to get my book to the top of the Amazon list just once, at which point I could legitimately say (for promotional purposes) that my book had been an “Amazon bestseller” (as in, “My book was once an Amazon bestseller”)? How much practical good is that going to do me in the long term?

Maybe it is The New York Times bestseller list to the top of which I wish to climb. That one is far more prestigious, of course, when it comes to putting a plug about it on my promotional materials. The NYT list is based on weekly sales of books and ebooks across the USA, and no one really knows how many copies of each book must be sold before you make it to the top of that particular mountain, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than I can realistically plan to sell at this point.

Maybe I just want Don Valiente to top the list of bestselling Westerns on Amazon for a day, or for The Whole Clove Diet: A Novel to appear and then stay in the top-ten list in women’s fiction. Maybe I’m eying a local newspaper’s weekly posting of the top ten fiction books sold. (Or maybe I’ve written a family history and I’m not interested in top-ten lists at all: maybe I’ll be happy if I sell ten books, period.)

According to whomever wrote the Wikipedia entry on “bestsellers,” the term is relatively recent and means so many different things in different contexts that it actually means nothing. The entry points out that, depending on the venue, in the U.K. a “bestseller” can mean anything from 4,000 to 25,000 copies sold. In Canada, 5,000 copies sold (ever) constitutes what we call “a national bestseller.”

Why do the numbers matter anyway?

There are a couple of reasons why the numbers of copies of books sold matter (quite aside from the royalties that accrue). First, purchasers do respond to books that are at the top of bestseller lists, even though such lists have nothing to do with quality. (I go back to my Fifty Shades of Grey example which proves that book-buyers can be total sheep exhibiting no taste, and no sense of literary or even erotic discernment whatsoever.)

In addition, and of equal importance, in the case of Amazon when you reach a certain level of sales, the site starts recommending your book to other people who have bought or looked at similar books – which means that Amazon is now doing some of your promotion for you.

And yes, once your book has made a bestseller list, you can call yourself a “bestselling author,” and no one can ever take that away from you. (Although I guess they can demand to know which list you were a bestseller on, and for how long, and they could ask you that in a radio interview, so be prepared.)

It is for such reasons as these that some writers are paying to get onto bestseller lists which – as I reported last week – you can do if you have enough friends and money.

Does the number of books you want to sell affect your promotional efforts?

I think it does, even if you aren’t aiming for the top of a bestseller list. This is the crux of the question when it comes to this week’s Book Promotion tip.

In recent days, I have been thinking about S.M.A.R.T. goals. This is a term which has been in use in the business world for decades, and which I keep coming across in my reading about marketing and even in some of my editing for clients. The acronym stands for  Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-sensitive. Many experts consider these five attributes to be key indicators when it comes to establishing and attaining goals in such areas as personal and professional development, project management, employee performance, etc.

If your goals don’t have these five attributes, such experts would point out, how can you possible attain them? “Selling books” has none of those attributes, and therefore it’s a lousy goal. (For me it also leads to madly riding off in too many directions at once, as I have several books to sell, not to mention my podcasts on grantwriting, and dozens of places I could sell them, and dozens of ways I could approach the promotion in each case.)

So for me, here is what I am setting as my first S.M.A.R.T. goal: Within six months, to attain at least thirty days of sales of at least ten copies a day of The Adventures of Don Valiente and the Apache Canyon Kid (Kindle version). I have chosen this number because I estimate that this will get us onto the “top 50 Westerns” list on Amazon for those 30 days, which will help to propel us towards ongoing sales with diminished effort.

This goal is Specific because it says I am going to focus only on Don Valiente and ignore my other books for now, and it also sets a specific number of sales per day for a specific number of days.

This goal is Measurable because six months from now (mid-September) I will be able to tell whether I have attained the goal. I can see on my KDP page how many copies we are selling. (I can also track our progress vis á vis other western novels on Amazon. If we need to up the sales numbers per day to get to the top 50, we can do that.)

This goal is Attainable — with an attractive promotional campaign that targets readers of Westerns, given a consistent promotional effort for six months that (at no significant cost to us) positions our books in as many places as possible, I believe that this goal is attainable.

This goal is Realistic. It allows for the fact, for example, that if I send out a review copy of Don Valiente, even if someone does review it, the review will likely not appear for three to four months at least. On the other hand, hitting The New York Times bestseller list is not a realistic goal. I don’t even think that getting into the top 10 list of bestselling Westerns on Amazon would be realistic, when I consider the competition. And I know me: if a goal doesn’t seem realistic, I am going to give up on it very quickly.

This goal is Time-Specific. I have given us six months. (I am now putting a memo in my calendar to report back to you here then, and let you know what happened.)

Do you have a SMART goal for your book promotion? Do you want to declare it in public here so we can cheer you on?

Do you think that setting goals is necessary or of use?

Let us know! I love your comments and so do my readers.

Next week: a book promotion tip that is more specific — that takes less time to write. :)

Fiction in 2013: The Ugly Truth (and a call for patience)

January 21, 2013 By in Bestsellers, Blogging, Book reviews, Editors, literary, Independent publishing, Literary Agents, Novels, Promoting published books, Publishing, Self publishing, Self-publishing, Writing awards Tags: , 35 Comments

iStock_000015635745XSmallOkay.

So I was going to write a post about the sorry state of fiction publishing during this transition period, as we watch the established presses, gatekeeper agents, chain booksellers and respectable book review outlets grind through the death throes of their former heyday — those days soon gone forever when they got to decide what books we should read.

I was going to detail a few of the horrors that one former “mid-list writer” (me) witnessed as she set off on her lonely road to self-publication, and witnesses still as she trudges down the even more harrowing and thorny trail of self-published-book promotion. Several of the appalling sights I’ve seen have contributed to a precipitous decline in my faith in my fellow human beings, such as:

  • New lows for the publishing industry. Traditional publishers have “evolved” from basing their guesses about what books they should publish next year on last year’s bestseller lists, to basing them on the lists of top-selling self-published novels — whose authors they then race to sign. How ironic is that?
  • Sticking fingers in the dam as the ship goes down. Almost all traditional book review outlets, booksellers, awards competitions and funding agencies continue to refuse to review, sell or reward self-published books on principle, no matter what the track record of the author or the quality of the self-published book (why? Because they might have to THINK if they were to become more open? How much easier it must be to simply proceed as they always have done, by accepting only those books published by traditional presses?). This makes book promotion for former mid-list writers very difficult, but it also means that readers who are wise enough not to participate in on-line review forums never hear about self-published books with any literary merit;
  • The Crap. Oh, the Crap. I draw your attention here to the hundreds of thousands of works of so-called fiction that have been released into the marketplace in the past few years by self-published writers who are incompetent, inexperienced, badly edited, and/or merely ignorant or boring, many of whom grow apoplectic and even threatening if anyone suggests that they don’t know how to punctuate, much less how to write (This enormous garbage heap is offered as justification by publishers, booksellers, review outlets, awards organizers and granting agencies for continuing to proceed as they do, and I do not argue that it is a major issue. However, a bit of diligence on the part of these institutions could sort the wheat from the chaff – sorting is not THAT difficult – but who has time to be diligent when your house is crumbling around you?) ;
  • False Positive Reviews. Then we have the proliferation of ridiculously positive, 5-star reviews of the aforementioned Crap now posted to Amazon.com, Goodreads, book-review blogs, and other book-related sites. Most of these patently fluffy reviews have been written by the authors’ well-meaning but inexperienced, uninformed and not widely read friends and relatives. One book-review blogger favourably compared an utterly talentless writer to one with the world-class stature of, let us say, a Jane Austen – a comparison that was then, of course, gleefully quoted by the writer in subsequent promotion. Now, if you were an unaware book buyer and a fan of Jane Austen, would you know to proceed with caution? I don’t think so. (Yep. It’s a zoo out there. Be careful where you step);
  • Books that sell on reputation and gossip rather than content. These are the Honey Boo-Boos of the current literary world. Take, for example, the Fifty Shades series, which has sold an astounding, gut-wrenching, nauseating 68 million copies so far. (Lest anyone accuse me of sour grapes, I have no qualms admitting that I am fifty shades of green over E.L. James’s book sales, but I would never, ever want to be associated with such bad writing, even in exchange for a lot of money. Thank you anyway, Mephistopheles.) As far as I can tell, this phenomenon MUST be due to the lack of literary reviews of the book, for why would anyone spend good money on a totally unerotic, misogynistic, implausible piece of shit? The only possible explanation is that  is that 67.32 million of those 68 million purchasers bought the book by mistake. I’m telling anyone who hasn’t yet made the error: I bought the first book in the series. I read as much as I could stand. I threw it in the garbage. Don’t waste your money. Read Anaïs Nin or someone else who can actually write erotic fiction instead);
  • Review Police: Then we have the packs of on-line sleuths, most of whom hide behind pseudonyms, who apparently have an intense dislike of writers in general and suspect us all of being guilty of the most nefarious crimes, particularly ones pertaining to reviews. (I have personally been the victim of their sordid and senseless attacks when I stupidly ventured onto their forums to point out the errors in their thinking. Like two-year olds, their arguments are not constrained in any way by the need to use logic, and they will therefore win all arguments). Among other things, such individuals believe to the very cores of their Neanderthalean little hearts that if you have received a free copy of a book rather than purchased it, you are incapable of writing an objective review of it. This opinion of course invalidates every review that has ever been published in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail , the London Review of Books, or any other respected review publication: since the beginning of (literate) time, reviewers have not paid for books they have reviewed; they have received the free review copies that have been sent to the publications by the publishers. The “review police” seem to have very little to do with their lives aside from hunting down authors they can report to the Amazon gods for having engineered positive reviews for their own books – or, better yet, of having written such reviews themselves, using false names. Such witch hunts commonly occur on the Amazon Top Reviewers Forum (which is not exclusively about books, but also talks about reviews of toilet plungers and whatnot; here is, however, a charming recent thread that reveals the biases of many of the habitues of the forum) and The Kindle Forum;
  • Overkill Response by Amazon: Last fall, Amazon responded to accusations by these sleuths by deleting thousands of reviews by writers, inflammatory or not. Here are the details, as set out in the New York Times and The Telegraph;
  • Last but not least, it doesn’t help that at least one traditionally published author has admitted to actually doing what we are all being accused of doing: not only has R.J. Ellory written reviews of his own books and posted them under pseudonyms, he has also used fake personae to slag his fellow authors.

So, yeah. It’s a pretty disgusting time to be a fiction fan – as I am, both as a writer and a reader. I remember a bookseller once telling me (about 30 years ago) that she didn’t bother to take ID from book purchasers when they wrote cheques because they were all so honest. The nature of the beast seems to have changed, and I am very sorry to be seeing it.

What I was going to do was to just advise everyone to stay away from fiction–even mine!–until this all shakes down. If you can’t trust what is being published to be good, and you can’t trust the reviews to be honest, much less representative, then what’s the point?

But then I reminded myself that this IS just a transition stage. I reminded myself how far we’ve come in the past four years. I remembered how I’ve noticed that several of the newly published writers I didn’t feel were very good seem to have given up on their dreams to become millionaires from writing the next knock-off Twilight, and stopped plugging their books everywhere. It seems likely that many others who are not “real writers” will follow because this is (as it always has been) a hell of a lot of thankless work.

I thought about Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours and reminded myself that I’ve been at this fiction-writing stuff – working at improving my writing – for more than thirty years now. I reminded myself that I finished my (first) half marathon back in the 1990s , and lost 30 lbs last autumn, by keeping on and keeping on–no matter what. Giving up on writing, even for a few months or years, is not an option anyway: I love to write. A writer is who I am.

I told myself that within another few years, there will be a new and much better system, in which the readers will find the good books for themselves from among all the self- and traditionally published books that are released, and then will tell the rest of us about them on book blogs that we will come to trust to point us in the best direction for our own personal reading interests. Within a few years, really good editors will offer to put their imprints on self-published books they’ve edited and liked. There will be awards programs that are open to both kinds of fiction publications. Writers who have established presses and agents will stop dumping and ignoring on principle those of us who are not dragging around similar litters of dependents. (See, for example, this.) We will have book review outlets we can trust to cover ALL good fiction writing, no matter where it comes from, and booksellers who will recognize their new roles as community gathering places for book lovers rather than as gatekeepers.

It will take a few more years for the evolution to shake down properly, but it will happen. And I am optimistic, despite my dismay and discouragement right now, that the world is going to be a better, more open and less expensive place for writers and for readers. And that we will once again be seen as a group as honourable people who are kind and supportive of one another.

So I decided not to write that depressing, bleak, discouraging blog post I had been thinking about after all.

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #5: January 4, 2013

January 4, 2013 By in Independent publishing, Promoting published books, Publishing, Self publishing, Self-publishing, Selling Your Book Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

Gold starCause a Ruckus

Do something that will attract attention and preferably cause a few (of the more intelligent and discerning) people (i.e., your ideal readers) to cheer you,  but will cause even more people to get so aggravated with you that they start write-in campaigns from bases in bunkers on writing forums and other blogsites that point out in blindingly mundane, uninformed and narrow-minded detail that you are ignorant, misguided and rude, and that if you think you are so hot and know so much, you should just prove it.

I have done this once before, on April 17, 2009, when I (rightly) denounced most literary agents and publishing companies in my first-ever blog post for The Militant Writer: about 4866 people stopped by in a single day and nearly 400 wrote comments – many of them in an effort to explain to me what an idiot I am (however,  those commenters in fact proved only that they don’t know the meaning of the word “irony,”  that they were utterly unaware of what was happening to the publishing industry at the time, and that they would do anything to suck up to agents such as Nathan Bransford, Janet Reid and others, in the faint hope that those august people might deign to even look at their work). That post (and its comments: I didn’t censor or repress any of them) has been read at least in part by 18,000 visitors to the site since I published it.

Unfortunately, I had no books online to sell that day. But I do now.  And now I have another article planned that should have a similar effect. I intend to put it up, right here, one week from today, if not before.

So wait for it… Wait for it…. Wait for it….

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #3: December 16, 2012

December 16, 2012 By in Promoting published books, Publishing, Self publishing, Selling Your Book, Websites for writers, Writers Web Sites Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Gold starBe Everywhere You Can

Take advantage of free on-line exposure.

In addition to keeping your profile information updated on your website(s) and your blog(s), find locations where you can copy and paste (and/or refine) your biography. For example,

  • Get yourself an author page (in addition to your reader page) on Goodreads;
  • On Amazon.com, make sure you have a photo and a profile on Author Central and  Shelfari;
  • If you belong to a writers’ organization (as I do to The Writers’ Union of Canada) or some other professional association, take advantage of the opportunities for promotion on its site;
  • Post a profile on Google+.

I am not talking here about social media–Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like–where it is important to engage with other subscribers on a regular basis. I’m talking about places where your bio will simply reside, like wallpaper, where readers who are interested can easily find out more about you and find a link to your website(s) or your book(s). And btw, if you stop visiting a website that you used to frequent, as I have authonomy, for example, there is no reason to remove your profile.

Keep the bios interesting, brief, to the point, and professional. For example, I don’t see much reason to post personal details in an online bio, such as my marital status or the number of children I have: this information has nothing to do with my writing.

Make sure you keep track of where you’ve posted these bios and diarize a visit to each of them every three months or so, in order to keep them (and your photo) updated.

As always, I welcome your comments on this post. Specifically, I invite you to add other suggestions of places where you have posted author information about yourself –at no cost to you — for interested readers and book purchasers.

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #2: December 9, 2012

December 9, 2012 By in Promoting published books, Publishing, Self publishing, Selling Your Book Tags: , , 2 Comments

Gold star

Reach out to your readers

Increase your online profile and attract new readers by commenting regularly on other people’s posts about issues that relate to the subject of your book (without actually pitching the book itself. You won’t make any friends if you do that. Just make sure that the signature on the comment includes a link back to the website where you promote yourself and your book, and that your comment is so interesting that no one will be able to resist clicking through to find out more about you.)

  1. Use your search engine to find subject matter that relates to your topic (in the case of my books about grantwriting, I might Google, for example, “funding proposals,” “grant writing” and “grant deadline”), and
  2. when you find an article, a blog post, or a forum topic that relates to what you have written about, read the item and then make an intelligent comment. (You do need to read the item because in order to attract interest, you must figure out where the article writer or the original poster is coming from, and you need to find a hook in the article – some specific issue or statement – that you can refer to in your response.)

If your book is non-fiction of any kind, this exercise should be fairly straightforward. If you have written a novel or a book of poetry, on the other hand, you may have to sit down and actually think about what subject matter you would like to explore with other individuals online. In the case of  my most recent novel, The Whole Clove Diet, again my approach is fairly obvious: I can search for forums about body image, blogs about food addiction and news items about the latest diets, and I’m there. But I can also explore other aspects of the novel by searching for “addictions” in general (there is an alcoholic in the novel whose approach to booze has a lot in common with Rita’s toward food)– or even ”stepmothers,” as my main character is one of those. For my first novel, The Woman Upstairs, relevant topics would include “mother-daughter relationships” and “family conflict.”  Even “oppressive WASP Ontario childhood” would fit the bill.

Keep in mind that using actual quotation marks will help you with a search: if I search the two words “funding” and “proposals” together without the quotation marks, I get a result that can go far outside my area of focus. If I put quotation marks around “funding proposals,” I get only sites that contain those two words in the text­ in that order: which is what I want.

Also keep in mind that you are not looking for other writers with this initiative. In my experience, writers are not great buyers of books written by writers they have met online. Most writers have their own agendas for what they want to read. So don’t bother searching “my first novel” – it won’t get you anywhere productive because people who are writing about first novels today are a dime a dozen (or even more in some cases).

Remember that the idea here is to contribute to the online discussion about a subject that matters to you and to other people, not to make a sales pitch. You want to become part of the online community that is writing about an issue you have explored in your book.

You aren’t likely to make immediate sales of your book this way, but if you become a person who is known to make intelligent comments on a specific subject area, you will eventually attract readers.

You have to give, many times in most cases, before you will receive.

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #1: December 2, 2012

December 2, 2012 By in Book reviews, Independent publishing, Promoting published books, Self publishing, Self-publishing, Selling Your Book, Writing awards Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Gold starDemonstrate Your Excellence

If you are the author of a well written, well edited, self-published book, you need to help it get the attention it deserves. There are lots of people who will assume that just because your book is self-published, it must be crap – poorly written drivel featuring lots of typos laid out incompetently on the page.

Since there are, in fact, many “indie” published books fitting that description to a T, it is very difficult for most self-published authors to get their books reviewed by established media. To take advantage of this situation, some book-trade publications (including the erstwhile respectable Kirkus Reviews and Publishers’ Weekly) are now selling reviews for what I consider to be way too much money  ($425?? Are you kidding me? What’s the point? How is even a good review from one of these outlets–and the price doesn’t include any guarantees that the review will be positive–going to improve your sales? You’re still not going to be eligible for most awards competitions, and most established booksellers still aren’t going to stock your books. Furthermore, your average readers couldn’t give a damn about Kirkus Reviews or Publishers’ Weekly–if they even know what they are). As far as I’m concerned you can spend your book-promotion budget, if you have one, much more wisely.

To help get your wheat to stand out from the chaff:

1) Submit your book to every awards program for published books for which it is eligible that you can afford. (Some awards programs are also quite expensive, and may not be worth the investment, especially if there are likely to be so many books submitted that winning becomes a crapshoot: check out the previous years’ winners of these competitions. But don’t dismiss award competitions just because they cost a bit of money: there are certainly administrative costs involved–including, we hope, some payment for the judges.) Don’t overlook local and regional competitions, and those specific to your genre (e.g. western, historical fiction, speculative fiction). Google to find them (“writing competitions self-published books, steam punk” for example). You may not win, but you may be a finalist or semi-finalist, as The Whole Clove Diet was in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Competition four years ago, or you may not be even a semi-finalist but may still get a great review from a judge that you can then use in promotion (as I recently did from the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards);

2) Look for groups of readers that are giving their stamps of approval to well written, self-published/indie books, and submit a copy of your book for their review. Leaders in this field include the folks at the Book Readers Appreciation Group (B.R.A.G.): their readers evaluate books that are nominated or submitted, and the ones they find to be of sufficient quality receive a B.R.A.G. Medallion and appear as recommendations on their site. Such notice can bring side-benefits aside from the actual selection: not only was The Whole Clove Diet a B.R.A.G. Medallion honoree (which is an accolade I can and do use in my promotion and on my website), the news of its status was also tweeted by the B.R.A.G. organizers and mentioned on their Facebook page. Recently the novel was also named a B.R.A.G. Book of the Week, which gave it even more attention.

Aside from B.R.A.G., there are many other sites that are devoted to helping readers sort the worthwhile from the junk in indie/self published books. (I invite you to add your recommendations of such sites as comments to this post for the benefit of other writers.) In a world where agents and publishing houses are no longer the gatekeepers they once were, readers need to help other readers find the best new writers and books around. When they get themselves organized into groups (or become individual book review bloggers), the work they do benefits us not as readers, but as writers too.