You and Your Book Will Succeed–With Patience

This…will…not…be…easy.  I’m going to admit something to you all.  I didn’t think it’d be this hard.  Call it naivete.  Call it optimism.  Call it the sheer ridiculousness of thinking, dammit, that what I wrote would take off, like a rocket ship to Planet Lottery Ticket.  Anddddd, yeah. Four months after the release of Enemy in Blue, let me give ya some thoughts and insights into what this process entails.  The hope is that this will help some understand what’s coming their way if they publish, and help others who have done so realize, “I’m not alone.”

1. Writing was the easy part.  Huh?  I just finished 80k, 90, 120k words!  It took me 2 years to write my baby.  What you mean that was the easy part?  Writing is a joy, in my opinion.  I hardly ever had a day where I cussed and wished I was doing something else.  And, if those days came along, I just didn’t write.  No sense forcing something crappy onto paper.  On the other hand, once you’re published (by whatever means), the marketing, sales and promotion begins.  And, I can assure you of one thing–once you start those ghastly machines up, they don’t allow breaks.  You’ll be tweeting, updating your website, updating your status on Facebook, trying to get signings, trying to get your books on brick and mortar shelves, etc. etc. etc., NONSTOP.  Be prepared to work your ass off in the name of promotion.
2. This will undoubtedly be a long, strange trip.  Do a Wikipedia on your favorite band.  Most likely, they spent years toiling in small venues.  They pumped out album after album before one hit song took off.  Realize that your journey will probably be the same–with the superstar ending, we all hope.
3. There are tens of thousands of people trying to do what we’re doing.  Okay, not trying to be Captain Downer here, but this post is a small dose of reality, if anything.  Look at the sheer number of books on Amazon.  Look at all the authors Tweeting about their books on a daily basis.  This is a SEA, not a stream.  You’ve got to tread water, then build a super attractive yacht for people to hop onto.
4. The hard work will make it worth it.  Growth does not come through constant success.  When you get the first review of your book from someone you don’t know, and it’s a positive review, you will glow.  When someone asks you for a signature on their copy of your book, you’ll glow.  When you see your book on a bookshelf in a bookstore, you’ll glow.  But, each one of those things will take a tremendous amount of effort to achieve.
5. Patience is a virtue…and will be key to your sanity.  Seemingly, nothing in the book publishing world moves quicker than a snail’s pace.  You building your empire of words isn’t gonna be any different.  Just like when you wrote your book, do your best to recognize the small steps, otherwise the pace of the whole venture will make you mad!

In short, if you’re just starting out, please, please recognize that your success is commensurate with your effort.  And, if you’ve been playing the game, know that you aren’t alone!  Success has started to come to me and Enemy in Blue, but only with a tremendous amount of hard work. Best wishes to you and your fantastic book!

“Amazon Signs up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal”

If you’re an independent author, and are focused solely on getting to traditional publishing houses someday, you may be missing a BIG BOAT.  (I tried to write that like John Candy says, “Big…big bear!” in “The Great Outdoors.”)  Here’s an article with some background on the shifting landscape of publishing industry:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?_r=1

Build Your Twitter Following–Quickly!

You’ve got an account, you’ve chosen a background, and you’re ready to start telling the world your DAMN thoughts!  Eh, the world looks like that egg in your profile picture, right?  Zero followers.  I remember when I started my account, I was like, what the hay, who am I tweeting to?  Even at about 25-50 followers, I still felt sheepish about it.  The following tips are designed to help you build your following.  Or, if you’ve already got a decent start, to help you augment the foundation you already have!

A QUICK NOTE ON TWITTER ETIQUETTE

This has got to go first, because some people just dun get it.  Bullet point style, just in case you forget how to be a nice guy/gal in the future:

1. Try to thank every person that retweets your tweets, or that mentions you in a positive way.  Seriously, people don’t have to click that retweet button for you.  And, when they do, they are amplifying the scope of your tweet by hundreds or thousands of people!  For free!  You can’t get exposure like that anywhere else, that I know of.   If I retweet for someone and they don’t take the time to say thanks, guess what?  No mas retweets. So, make sure you give a gra-cee-as to those people, and try to do it shortly after they retweet, because people forget what they’ve done.
2. Be positive.  No one likes a downer.  Try to keep your conversations with people upbeat and try to engage in content that is helpful to others.  Now, I’m not suggesting that you become a lackey to happiness.  Sometimes this world can get a bit dark.  But, snap out of it and bring some exclamation points and smileys back to your tweets, aight?
3. Do NOT DM (direct message) people with a link to your book, blog, website, personal bank account (I will accept the bank account info) right after you meet them.  I’ve never clicked on one of those links, find it highly annoying, and tend to put those people on quasi-ignore.
4. Respond to your DMs in a timely fashion.  Again, people have taken the time to reach out to you, so take the time to engage in a little conversation with ‘em!
5. FOLLOW BACK.  This is probably the quickest way to get unfollowed.  You aren’t Alyssa Milano, you aren’t “Ocho Cinco,” you aren’t Ashton Kutcher.  Remember then, people are following you to hear your tweets, but they also expect to get some reciprocation.  I follow almost everyone back that follows me…common sense and a little humility.

FOLLOW 25-50 PEOPLE/DAY

On to the meat of building those followers!  I’ve gained about 500 new followers in the last two weeks simply by performing this daily task.  Where to find ‘em, you ask.  Hashtag searches.  Assuming we’re all authors here, search things like #authors, #amwriting, #writing, #amreading, #thrillers (or your respective genre, or not), #books.  Then, you can search some of the more specific writing handles such as #IBCBookCollective or #IAN1.  Obviously, there are hundreds if not thousands of handles you can search, and I couldn’t possibly list them all.

Once you get into the search results for the respective hashtag, start clicking on people’s names to pull up their profiles.  If people have a lot of tweets but not many followers, may not want to follow them, as they are not taking the time to engage new people.  And, quite honestly, you want people with networks.  If people have the opposite, i.e. a lot of followers and not many tweets, again, that’s a reason not to follow them.  Finally, if the people have a lot of followers, but aren’t following as many people, then you may want to skip them.  There are some exceptions (i.e. high profile people in publishing, agents, etc.), but not too many.

Stick to this discipline as if you were training for a marathon, and I guarantee you’ll see results in times as short as 1-2 weeks.

POST THINGS THAT MATTER

Your book matters…to you.  Yeah, yeah, it will matter to some people, but NEVER as much as you.  So, if that’s all you tweet about, guess how much people are gonna care about your tweets?  Instead, take the time to read articles and post the helpful ones up.  Read blogs and direct your followers to them.  Start programs that help build other authors up.  For instance, I started the #AmazonLikes hashtag, where an author can tweet their book’s Amazon link and get free likes/tags on their Amazon page.  This has helped many authors build up their book’s stats, and has correspondingly helped me form many new relationships.

You can connect with someone like @RachelintheOC (an excellent author and very helpful one, at that) about your content to promotion ratio.  In a nutshell though, you want to be tweeting more about content than promo, because people get sick of nonstop promo.  More on @RachelintheOC below!

YOU CAN UNFOLLOW PEOPLE, TOO

When I first started using Twitter, I would try to compare my “following” and “followers” lists, manually, to see who was not following me back.  Apparently, I like using the abacus for math as well.  There’s a simple service at www.justunfollow.com which will analyze your account for you, and identify the people who have not followed you back.  Depends on your tolerance for jerks (kidding, kinda), but you may give people anywhere from 3-7 days to follow you back.  At that point, consider giving ‘em the boot!

TAKE SOME CLASSES ON FURTHER TWITTER DEVELOPMENT

The most helpful class I’ve taken on this topic yet is one led by @RachelintheOC of the Indie Book Collective.  It’s called the “Social Media for Writers” workshop, it’s free, and Rachel is cool as all heck.  Here’s the direct link: http://indiebookcollective.com/IndieBookCollective/Workshops.html.  She will literally walk you through, step-by-step, how to set up your account, pick a background, optimize your profile, start working with hashtags, and start setting up lists (something I intentionally did not address in this blog post, because lists are their own demon and may be addressed separately in the future).  In short, take an hour and a half of your time, and avail yourself of this great workshop.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and/or successes on Twitter, so comment or contact me if you are so inclined

“The Death of Books has been Greatly Exaggerated”

Interesting empirical data regarding book sales over the last 10 years or so in this article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/30/death-books-exaggerated

Branding, and Why you Write

If you write for yourself, you’re gonna be alone.  And, you probably aren’t gonna sell more than 15-20 books, to poor souls who feel compelled to read it because of a close relationship.  Now, perhaps you’re someone like Denise Richards, who has a fabulous self-story to tell that derives from your amazing aesthetic appeal and your ability to perform hot lesbian scenes in big Hollywood movies.  If that’s you, get out of here and leave us alone.

For the rest of us, that want some modicum of success in selling our stories, we need to write what we are passionate about, but also with our readers in mind.   To get these points across, I’m combining two interrelated topics: (1) why you write, and (2) branding.

WRITE WHAT YOU LOVE, WHILE ALWAYS BEING RESPECTFUL OF YOUR READERS

Let’s dispel something right off the bat.  I’m not suggesting you should write what you think other people will like.  You should write about what you love, and in a genre that feels like home to you.  If you see steamy romance in your head, then please, take us into your boudoir.  If you crave the life of a spy, then 007 us!  But, while actually writing, you need to always be mindful of and respectful to your readers.  Specifically, what does that mean?  Here are some examples of what to avoid:

Excessive use of big words only shows you’re a Delta Bravo.  No one is reading a book to see how many words you know.

Meandering, flowery and overly descriptive prose.  No one cares if you can describe the minutea of the entryway to a plantation.  As Hemingway said, “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

Too much character development.  I saw this in a book I recently read, and it killed the flow of the story.  Remember elementary school?  Show AND tell.  So, tell us some of the aspects of your characters through narrative, but don’t forget to show us the personalities, traits and characteristics of your characters through action.

Get off the soapbox.  Another example from the same book I just referenced.  With some frequency, the author seemed to venture into her own thoughts and beliefs, and to force them out through the mouths of her characters.  Nothing is so disruptive, and correspondingly rude, to your reader than forcing them to hear your beliefs.  If your characters don’t believe it, don’t write it.

These are just a few examples, with the thrust being that you need to build trust with your readers through respectful and straightforward writing.

Part of building that trust is also respecting the fact that your readers will come back for more because of the brand you develop.  Do you have a series with a main character?  A series with a main world?  Do you have a specific, and unique, style of writing?  Think Jose Saramago with his lack of punctuation (which drives me nuts, but it’s certainly central to how he writes).  If you do, this is a large part of what will ultimately become your brand.  If you don’t, you may want to consider the fact that most successful authors have a niche genre or an identifiable set of characters that they stick with over a series of books, or their entire career.  Sticking with your brand, and in doing so, sticking with what people have come to trust you to write, is central to success.

I got the next analogy from a recent concert by a rock band called Soundgarden.  They were wildly popular in the 1990′s, but largely fell off the radar for the last decade.  Their falling off (with fans at least) can be attributed to two things, in my opinion: (1) they changed their “sound,” becoming more mellow on their last album, and (2) when asked about the band and touring, Chris Cornell (the lead singer) replied, “We really enjoy it to a point, and then it gets tedious, because it becomes repetitious. You feel like fans have paid their money and they expect you to come out and play them your songs like the first time you ever played them. That’s the point where we hate touring.”  Guess what though Chris, that’s just the point.  And, it leads to our second rule:

ALWAYS BRING IT AS HARD AS THE FIRST TIME

We expect our favorite musicians to bring it like the first time they ever brought it.  Why?  That’s why we first fell love with them.  Can the love evolve?  Sure.  But, the passion and same general sound needs to remain.  When that passion fades, or even diminishes in the slightest, people can sniff it out like fresh dog crap on their shoes.  Same goes for all of us as writers.  One of the greatest example of having a brand, and then sticking to it and bringing the noise just like the first time, is Stephen King.  Brand?  Horror.  Then, in pretty much each book he writes, King brings the horror with the same ferocity as he has his entire career.  Getting back to Soundgarden, what about that concert I just saw?  It was amazing.  The venue was in a frenzy for two hours.  People were stomping, pounding the air with their fists, and intermittently turning to strangers and their friends with ear-to-ear grins.  Why?  Soundgarden brought it like the first time, and they won each of us back for that night.

An implied part of the discussion so far is time.  A brand does not come overnight.  Soundgarden developed its sound over time, and their brand really came to fruition when grunge became popular in the early 1990′s.  Likewise, it was only after countless novels that we knew King was a master of horror, or that we knew Koontz was a master of suspense thrillers, or that Ludlum could deliver a spy story like no other.  On to the final rule!

DEVELOPING YOUR BRAND WILL TAKE EQUAL PARTS CONSISTENCY AND PATIENCE

McDonald’s (which I could devour right now, or just about anytime for that matter) is the quintessential example of branding in our country, if not the world.  The golden arches.  If you need a dollar menu, or a cheeseburger, or a place to hit the head, you look for the golden arches.  Driving through even the remotest parts of the country, you know what you’re in for if you see the golden arches.  Similarly, people need to be able to know, and trust, your writing.  Building your own brand is going to take time (McDonald’s started in 1955) and consistency (think, Big Mac–nothing more consistent than that burger).  But, a commonality with nearly every successful writer is a brand.

In short, if you can combine writing that respects your reader, while at the same time respecting why your reader loves you in the first place (i.e. your brand), then success is just around the corner.

[This blog isn't a vacuum.  Take the opportunity, if you're a writer or an aspiring writer, to leave a comment as to the reason(s) why you write!]

“The End of Borders is a Win for Technology, Authors and Readers”

My favorite quote from the article: “A recent blog post from editor Alan Rinzler details why now is the best time to be a self-publishing author and it’s all about the ability to create buzz.”

http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/26/the-end-of-borders-is-a-win-for-technology-authors-and-readers/

Get on board people!

 

Advanced Marketing for Your Book (Getting Media Coverage)

Let’s go back to the analogy we started with…building a book is akin to building a house.  You picked a lot, put the foundation in, framed from there, put the sheathing, siding and roof on, drywalled the interior and then beautified the interior with tile and other acoutrements.  (I will disclose that I was very happy to just use that word.  So much so that I used italics.  The small pleasures.)  All right, to get colloquial, the crap’s in place, but all you’ve got is a beautiful house on a piece of land.  Same with your book.  Actually, probably worse with your book, because your book is just one in a sea of flotsam.  And, you’ve got to get people to pick your flotsam out from the rest.  Time to let people know about it.  There are hundreds (if not thousands) of ways to do this, but a good one is your local press.  How to get to those buggers though…

PRESS RELEASE FOR DUMMIES

First of all, you need one.  Don’t just send an email to a reporter or editor saying, “Yo, Adrian, got my book, wanna cover it?!”  The press release is what the reporter or editor will use to: (a) get hooked on your story; (b) get information about you; (c) get information about where they can research your story further.  I’m not claiming to be an expert in PR, but here is an example of what I successfully used for an upcoming release/signing party:

DENVER, COLORADO – July 19, 2011 — Rogue Books, LLC will host a release party and book signing on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. to celebrate the publication of Derek Blass’s novel entitled “Enemy in Blue.” The book release party will take place at the Ice House Tavern Lodo, 1801 Wynkoop Street, Denver, Colorado.

Derek Blass will sign copies of “Enemy in Blue,” a timely and intense cop thriller. The story begins with the videotaped murder of an illegal immigrant by an allegedly racist police officer. The murder draws Cruz Marquez, a young lawyer, into an action-packed journey to preserve the evidence. His success depends on surviving the Chief of Police’s sinister plotting, assassination attempts by a deranged hit man, and the raw force of Sergeant Shaver—his enemy in blue.

About the Author:

Derek Blass lives in Denver, Colorado. He studied English and Economics at Duke University and earned a J.D. from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He received the “2011 Outstanding New Hispanic Attorney Award” from the Colorado Hispanic Bar Association and has been designated as a “Colorado Rising Star” by Super Lawyers Magazine since 2009. He was elected to serve on Mayor John Hickenlooper’s Denver Latino/a Commission for four years, two of which he was a co-chair. He was recently asked to help start the Denver Chapter of the Colorado Latino/a Forum, a powerful Colorado-wide Latino/a organization.

Get the picture?  Short, sweet, and everything a reporter/editor would need to know on one page.  

CUSTOM TAILOR ALL OF YOUR TRANSMITTING EMAILS

Every publication or media outlet you will send your release to has a different mission.  Some may be edgy and avant-garde (I’m gonna burst at the seams if I can think of a third fancy word/phrase to use in this blog).  Some may be conservative.  Every one of them focuses on a certain target audience.  What’s that mean to you?  Custom tailor your pitch to them.  It’s just like when you apply to jobs, or in writing, submit queries to agents and publishers.  You can write a general cover letter/query, and you can correspondingly get back a bunch of rejections.  Or, you can do your research to better understand the job or agent/publisher, and then tailor your correspondence to them accordingly.  Which one do you think works better?  No-brainer, huh?  It’s the same thing with press.  Do your research on what the media outlet writes about and looks for in terms of stories, and then tailor the email transmitting your press release to parallel your research.

NUMBERS GAME..AGAIN…AS ALWAYS

Bombard is probably the correct term.  Imagine a bomber in WWII dropping its payload.  That’s you.  Here’s where the commitment lies, because if you agreed to research each media outlet to tailor your transmitting email, and you agree to bombard, well, you’ve wittingly or unwittingly agreed to do a healthy amount of work.  That’s what it takes though.  One week a media outlet may be in production, the next week they may be looking for stories.  One week your topic may not be relevant to a certain media outlet, but that may all change in two months.  These are just a couple reasons why you need to bombard, and not just pick and choose.

To sum it up, draft a concise, informative press release, research who you are sending it to and custom tailor a transmitting email to them, and then let loose with your payload!

“How to Become a Top Ranked Book in Amazon’s Kindle Store”

Some great tips from an author that is finding success on Amazon, and helpful resources for marketing at a low (or no) cost:

http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/author-interviews/how-to-become-a-top-ranked-book-on-amazon%E2%80%99s-kindle-store/

How to Pitch Your Story–Upper Level Marketing

Let’s get into the higher level marketing courses, the elective courses if you will.  Check out this blog (written quite a while ago, but certainly still relevant) on how to deliver a pitch of your story.

http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/book-marketing/a-perfect-pitch-a-sure-strike-out/

“If I Were a Newly Self-Published Author, What Steps Would I Take to Succeed?”

Insightful blog from Bob Mayer, an author with 20 years of traditional publishing experience, and 2 years of indie publishing experience.  Take a look at the blog he  just posted today: http://writeitforward.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/if-i-were-a-newly-self-published-author-what-steps-would-i-take-to-succeed/#comment-1772