Generally if something you’re doing helps them sell more books, they’re okay. Still ask though.

1. Write Lots of Books.

First up let me say that I wouldn’t even know about this one if it wasn’t for Robyn Sullivan. I interviewed her awhile back and she spilled the beans on what does and doesn’t work with marketing e-books. You can read the whole interview here, and another one here.

One of the many things that stuck with me that she’s said is that authors who write more books tend to sell more of each book than those with just one. This seems to be a cross referencing effect. I buy your first book, love it and then go looking for other things you’ve written.

Anecdotally this seems to work best for series, as opposed to multiple stand alone titles, however the effect is still present as long as you’ve written more than one book.

There is one trap to avoid though; fans of your comedy romance novels probably aren’t up for your gruelling horror opus and if you write YA or middle grade you might want to consider using a pseudonym for your paranormal sexy time novels.

Of course if you write urban fantasy then having a horror novel under the same name isn’t going to be nearly as big a deal.

2. Social Media

This could be a post all by itself, but I’ll cut it down to the bare basics for this one. Using Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites can help you develop an audience even before your book comes out. It’s very easy to get it wrong though, and the majority do.

The easiest mistake to make is to do nothing but try to hock your books. If every second tweet is you begging me to buy your book, I’m quickly going to get sick of that and block/unfollow/unfriend you. You are far better of using social media the way you probably do now anyway. Post about yourself, your friends the cool stuff you find online. Once you’ve got followers and friends who are interested in you as a person, they won’t mind if you OCCASIONALLY send out a message about your books.

3. Competitions

Competitions are funny beasts. Every single one of them is held under different rules, with different prizes attached to them. For the most part the ones you can enter of your free will (as opposed to being nominated) are for short stories, although this isn’t a universal rule.

If you win a competition then it can be a big feather in your cap, and it can help both publicise and legitimize your work in the eyes of readers. It can also be a good thing to have in your query letter if you’re pitching an agent.

The golden rule with competitions is to read the rules, then read them again, then get someone else who likes you to read them for you. Some competitions charge you to enter, and if this is the case, make sure the potential prize is worth the cost of entry.

Also be very, very careful what happens to the rights to your story if you win (or even if you don’t). Are you prepared to give up the rights to your story so the people who run the competition can put it in an anthology? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all, in fact it can be hugely beneficial, however you need to be informed about what your work will be used for before you sign away an rights.

4. Rushing Amazon

If you’ve spent any time on social media you’ve probably noticed this phenomenon. An author, about to release an e-book, gathers their friends, family and fans together to all buy the ebook within a short amount of time.

The purpose of this is to try and get the book into the Amazon top 1000 (or Top 100) at least temporarily, because once you’re in the top 1000 Amazon starts promoting your book for you. It’s usually short lived, but it can be enough to get a small launch some much needed attention.

I think this is worth a try if you can muster enough people who are prepared to time their purchases exactly. I don’t have any concrete numbers as to how effective this is however anecdotally it can give your numbers a big boost and provide you with what is effectively free advertising.

5. Paid Advertising

There are umpteen different advertising systems online, and for the most part, I’d warn authors to stay away from all of them. There are exceptions, if you know how to design an advertisement (and by this, I mean you work in advertising or you can pay someone who does) AND you have a top notch website ready to sell your book for you it MIGHT be worthwhile.

I’m not an advertising expert, however I do know that the only way I’ve been able to make my writing make financial sense is to keep my overheads to a minimum. If you have allowed yourself a monster marketing budget then you could certainly give this a try, but I personally think if you have the money to do that you’d be better off using a dedicated book marketing service (see below).

6. Goodreads Giveaways

Goodreads (www.goodreads.com) is both an excellent resource for authors and a dire trap for new players. At its heart, Goodreads exists as a giant independent reviews site, allowing readers to recommend books to each other (or warn others away). It has a great many other features too, but it’s the review and recommend system that’s of the most use to an aspiring author.

The reason this can be a trap is that Goodreads is a service for readers, not writers. Comment on a readers review of your work and the Goodreads community will turn on you like an angry bear. Same goes for almost anything you can do to directly promote your work to readers within Goodreads…

Except for this: Goodreads is a fantastic place to do a book giveaway. Using the contact system in Goodreads it’s possible to announce competitions and giveaways of your work. This can help spread the word about your novel and garner you reviews that will help others on Goodreads find you.

7. Book Bloggers

Book bloggers are quickly becoming the gatekeepers for self published work. Whereas previously agents and publishers would act in this capacity, in the era of self publishing most potential readers will check out online reviews before buying your book.

So how to you get someone to review your work?

Well, all that practice writing to agents with query letters is going to come in handy. Bloggers and reviewers are inundated with requests from authors to review their work and as such most of them work on a pitch system not that different from the way agents do it.

So the same rules for book bloggers apply:

• ·         Always research who you’re writing to and email them accordingly, no one will thank you for a mass email.
• ·         Your pitch letter should be short, give the reviewer an idea of who you are and what your book is about. Try and include some of the flavour of your writing style in the pitch.
• ·         Again, research. Don’t send pitches for horror novels to people who only review historical romance novels.
• ·         Remember that reviewers are doing you a favour by reviewing your book. Even if they hate it and give you one star, ALWAYS be polite and professional when communicating with them.

I’ll do a full post on this soon as I think it needs a more in depth article.

8. Marketing Services

I only know of one that’s consistently gotten good reviews, which is Author Buzz run by MJ Rose. I haven’t used them personally, however MJ did give me some excellent advice when I queried her on behalf of another author, and I have heard nothing but good things about them.

9. Blog/Website

You need a blog. No excuses, no outs, you need one. If I can’t find you online, I won’t buy your book. There is just too much stuff out there for me to look at and as a reader if I want to know about you the first thing I’ll look for is a blog. It doesn’t have to updated every day, but it does have to have updates.

Same deal with a website, and you can combine the blog and website into one entity. If I go looking for your book I want to be able to find a central hub to look at both the book I’m looking for and anything else you’ve produced.            

10. Tagging

Tagging is Amazon’s system for finding books. Let’s say I produce (somehow) a vampire paranormal romance.

If you want to help me out, you might go to Amazon and, using their tagging system, add the words “vampire” “paranormal” and “romance” to my novels Amazon page so when potential readers go looking for new vampiric sexy time books Amazon can find mine.

This is extremely worthwhile. If you’d like a more in depth look at tagging and how to do it, I suggest taking a look at Tag My Book. While the collaborative tagging isn’t running any more, the site itself is a wealth of information about tagging and how it can help you promote your book.

Tell me, how do you pimp your book to the world? Do you have any tips for the rest of us? Let me know in the comments.

The winners are… Sarah, Nasim and Tony Noland! Congratulations and thank you. I’ll email you later today to get your prefereance of e-book.

Thanks again to everyone who commented. If I was fantastically wealthy you’d all be going home with prizes. ***

I can take rejection. No matter how mean, how blunt, how impersonal the rejection, I’m game.  

 I’ve been told I’m weird in rejection letters. I’ve been told I will never amount to a hill of beans by English teachers, writing tutors and complete strangers.

 And it does hurt, believe me it does hurt, but I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve trained myself to Not Care TM because that’s what you’re supposed to do right?

Harden up?

 Right?

 Well yes, you do have to be hard. If you want to be a writer you’re going to have to go through the pain of rejection over, and over and over…but there might be a danger in making yourself to inured to rejection. I have become inured to it, I barely bat an eyelid now when I get a no, but I’ve come up against a new problem…

 I can’t handle praise, at least not graciously.

 I’ve been fortunate of late that some of the stories I’ve been putting out there have been getting really nice comments back. And I have no idea how to take it. What am I supposed to say here?

 Just saying “thanks!” doesn’t seem like enough, but gushing over the praise seems pretentious. This isn’t an advice blog, this is me asking what you do when someone’s being nice to you?

 Let me know in the comments. If I deem your comment the most useful I’ll buy you an e-copy of your choice between Chuck Wendig’s Irregular Creatures, Stacia Kane’s Be A Sex Writing Strumpet or Peevish Penman Press’s The Handbook Of The Writer Secret Society.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unholy Magic is the follow up to Unholy Ghosts, and part two of Stacia Kane’s urban fantasy series. I thought City Of Ghosts was excellent, everything an urban fantasy should be.

Unholy Magic is better.

The plot follows Church debunker Chess Putnam as sh attempts to balance a career as a Church sanctioned witch/fraud squad with being a very unsanctioned drug addict.

Addiction plays an even stronger part in this novel than it did in Unholy Ghosts, and there is a withdrawal scene about halfway through which is downright harrowing. If you ever need to scare the bejesus out of a kid in regards to drugs get them to read that scene.

One of Stacia Kane’s strengths is that no matter how strange things get with the surroundings (sex magic, ghosts, movie stars and fake hauntings) she keeps the book centered on its characters. While there is a wide cast of miscreants to enjoy the focus is usually on either Lex, Chess’s on again off again drug dealing boyfriend, and Terrible, chess’s on again off again enforcer friend and occasional lust mate. Terrible in particular is a joy to read, and seeing his character switch between fearsome killer to actual human being is one of my favorite parts of the series.

We also get to see more of the Church than we did in Unholy Ghosts. Stacia Kane shows more of the Church’s absolute dominion over humanity as well, and she leaves it as a gray area as to whether or not it’s a good thing. She also shows more of the afterlife, including the Church run spirit prisons (read: torture chambers) that the Church uses to enforce post mortem punishments on the souls of the dead.

It’s hard to discuss too much more of the book without giving away plot points, but rest assured that the ghosts are scary, the characters interesting, the violence and drug use both necessary and affecting and the sex scenes smoking.

What more do you want?

Highly Recommended.

What We Can Learn From Web Cartoonists

Web comics changed the world. If you think traditional publishing is in turmoil you should see the strife the comics industry is going through. Web cartoonists started putting their stuff online for free, and the comic reading public responded.

Of course because they were giving away the comics for free they had to make money in other ways.

A good example of a cartoonist doing it right is Jeph Jacques of www.questionablecontent.net (not really that Questionable, but not really work safe either (depending on the day).

Jeph has advertising on his web site and he sells a line of t-shirts and books of his cartoons as well.

There is no reason a fiction writer can’t have a website that carries advertising, and t-shirts for sale that have a link to their work, yet very few authors do.

If it’s true that only 5% of authors make a good living from their work, it could be because we aren’t thinking big enough and monetizing our work as much as possible. Of course you will need to be very sure of your merchandising rights as regards the contract you have with your publisher (hey, there’s another reason I want an agent in 2011) as it may be t-shirts ect that tie in to a particular work are only able to be printed by the publisher themselves.

If you do give your publisher merchandising rights, make sure you get something for them.

However my point is not so much that we should all be selling t-shirts, but that we should all be thinking of the different ways we can bring in extra revenue. I still contest that publishing isn’t dying, simply changing, but it’s a traumatic change and anything we can do to put more money in our pockets is a good thing.

I’ll look at more of these revenue gathering ideas in the future.

Do you have any good ideas for authors struggling to make a buck? Let me know in the comments.

This works better for non fiction than it does for fiction. Non fiction has more specific niches, and the audiences in those niches is usually bigger than in fiction. It’s also easier to write to a specific crowd when you’re doing non fiction, you suffer less competition from the big publishers.  In fiction you will often find yourself writing for a genre audience rather than a niche audience.

Not that your toaster based erotic masterpiece isn’t a niche book, it’s just that its subject has a small audience (I hope. I’m unwilling to Google this.)

For fiction, a better bet is the built in audience. Authors who can capitalize on a built in audience tend have built up a following, either through traditional publishing or some other public endeavor  and then moved to promoting their own work. Their audience follows them from their past work to their new work…and then at least in theory the money flows.

Example:  J A Konrath of The Newbie’s Guide To Publishing

Joe Konrath recently offered the publishers of the wold a deal. He’d stop talking about self publishing e-books if they’d pay him a million dollars in blood money. Only a man confident in his income stream would do that.

Or possibly a crazy man. Konrath’s got a beard you could hide a goat in so it could be both.

Konrath built an audience through his traditionally published works and his online presence and then he dove headlong into e-book publishing. Self publishing only e-books used to be thought of as a mugs game, but Konrath is living proof that it can be made to work, and work incredibly well. It is worth remembering though that Konrath works incessantly to build his brand, write more books and leverage the audience he has into the audience he wants.  A writer trying to mimic his success by going in cold will be in for a bad day.

I highly recommend you check out The Newbie’s Guide To Publishing. You’ll learn more than I can ever tell you about the process of self publishing and what it takes.

Tomorrow I’m going to take a look at one of the biggest pitfalls of self publishing and why,  for me, I still think the best thing would be to find an agent and sell a book to a publisher.

Why go through the pain of writing, editing, querying, negotiating and promoting when you can just self publish and your book will be right there, ready to read within a few weeks (or hours)?

I’ve helped people got through the self publishing process, and it can work, but it is a dark path strewn with landmines, monsters, deep holes and vanity presses. For almost  everyone, including me, I think avoiding self publishing like the plauge is the best advice…

But there are a very few exceptions, and I wanted to mention them here.

Person who might be able to give self publishing a go number one: The Polymath

A polymath is a jack of all trades, but without that pesky adendum that suggests you are master of none. This person can write and edit their own work with a high degree of objectivity, then they can switch hats and become a marketing guru, a web designer, a publisher and an artist all before knocking off at midnight for a glass of wine and a lie down.

These people are beyond rare. A lot of people think they are this person, and they really aren’t. If you have any doubt about your abilities in any of the areas I mentioned, then you are going to have to start outlaying money to bring your book up to a professional standard.

That’s that deep dark hole I mentioned. You can throw a lot of money into self publishing and never see a cent of it back.

Example: Carrie Bailey of Peevish Penman

Carrie put together the “The Handbook of the Writer Secret Society.” and is self publishing it by turning herself into a small publishing press. She’ll probably deny it, but having read through her site I think Carrie comes under the polymath heading.

The Handbook of the Writer Secret Society is truly excellent, and Carrie’s journey towards self publishing is fascinating just for the sheer quantity of stuff she’s been able to do. Did she get help with some things? Sure, and the handbook is an anthology as much as a guide to the arcane rituals of writerhood, but being able to pool your resources and delgate tasks is another one of the polymaths skills.

I’m going to do a full review of The Handbook of the Writer Secret Society in a few days and you’ll see what I mean but go and have a look at Carrie’s site to see just how much she’s done in a very short space of time.

This article is getting long, so I’m going to make this a multi parter. Next time on People Who Could Give Self Publishing A Go: The person with the built in audience.

Things aren’t going so well for everyone though. Twitter friend and fellow writing enthusiast Wulfie needs some help. Wulfie is good people, and she’s not just begging for cash, she’s offering some high end writing/editing services at stupidly cheap prices. She’s qualified and keen so this is a serious bargain.

So here’s the deal,  go to Wulfie’s website here at Shadow Writes and buy some of her services.  You benefit, she benefits and frankly, everyone wins.

If, like me, you’re not in a position writing wise to buy anything she;s offering, then re-blog/re-tweet/shareher site and get this news out to people who are int he right position.

Thanks, and remember you never know when you might need help, and often it’s people you’ve never met who come to your aid.

Andrew

I cannot be stopped.

This time it was Joe Hill’s excellent novel Horns. I should warn you that the review has some mild spoilers in it, so if you want to remain unspoiled, that i not the review for you.

In other news I seem to be writing every day still, which is a good habit to be in. I’ll let you all know as soon as my first draft is done.

I may also dance a short jig.

I’d almost like to say I’ve been being slack, but I’ve actually been working my tail off writing my current work in progress. This one’s actually going well, and I don’t hate myself every time I re-read what I’ve just written. It’s been good to get the feeling of writing every day back, it means if I ever do miss a day I’m not consumed by guilt, and can get right back to writing instead of fretting about writing, which doesn’t work.

I read some poems of a friend of mine for a second time yesterday. I’d already read them once a few weeks ago (sorry to my friend who loaned these to me MONTHS ago) and really enjoyed all of them, but I found that I got more out of them with a second reading a few weeks after the first.  I’m mentioning this because I rarely re-read novels (unless Terry Pratchett wrote them) and I now wonder how my impressions on certain books might change if I read them again now. Would, like my friends poems, I get even more out of them a second time through?

I don’t know, but I’m going to have fun finding out.

As soon as I’m done with this draft…