Blog Tours, and How to Screw Them Up

I've been indie publishing my novels for just over a year now and have had a crash course in how to do my own publicity (that was my motivation for going indie with one of my pen names, to learn how to do this.) Now, I have *not* made every mistake I'll touch on below, though I have made a few. To get a really good list of mistakes, I'm going to rely on a book blogger, my friend Ritesh Kala, who blogs from Mumbai, India and has done some truly fantastic reviews. Last year Ritesh had his fill of poor behavior by authors and wrote I Am a Blogger..., part 1. As you can tell from that title, it's a series of posts, but they're each worth focusing on individually - and this'll fill my agenda for blogging her on the Cove for a little while. I'm going to summarize Ritesh's issues in each one and give my own ideas for how to avoid these mistakes. By all means, click over and read Ritesh's post either now or after you read the rest of mine. He tells you what not to do, I'll explain what to do.

By way of introduction for any author who hasn't worked with book bloggers, this is one way to build publicity. When you've got some income, you can hire a blog tour operator to set up reviews and promos on book blogs for you, but when you're starting out, you might want to do all this on your own. I spent my entire first year as an indie author on a constant blog tour, querying every book review blog I could find. One of them was Ritesh's, and he reviewed my chick lit even though he'd never read one before and his review is the top rated one on Amazon for the book. He knows a thing or two about how to be a good blogger, and here's what he and others have taught me about being a good blog tourer.

I'll copy the outline of his post, using the same points:

1) Read the Review Policy. Sounds straightforward enough, so what could I possibly add to such clear advice? I've got two things:

a) Dig for that review policy. Whenever you click on a book blog, it may or may not have a tab labeled "review policy." Sometimes it's in the "contact" tab or the "about me" tab. Not all book bloggers post a review policy, but if they have, you better have read it. Take the time to make sure. 

b) You can break their policy but you must pay the price, and that price is an apology up front and a really good excuse. i.e. "I notice you don't normally review indie books, but you asked me about my books at that party we were at last night, so here's a synopsis and links for you." Emphasis on a good excuse. "My book is just so awesome, you'll want to read it anyway" is not a good excuse.

2) Draft Personal Review Requests. When you query a lot of book blogs, you will develop a one size fits most form, but you *must* personalize it. Ritesh has a hilarious but embarrassing example of a query he got once. Now, obviously, don't do what that writer did. Here's what I would also add:

a) Find the blogger's name if at all possible, and really dig for it. This can be hard, it may be in the "About Me" section, it may be in the "Contact" section, it may be on their Twitter account, their Pinterest account, their FB page, or their Blogger profile. Only open with generic, "Hello!" or "Dear Blogger" if it's *abundantly* clear that this person is staying anonymous on purpose. Absolutely the number one most important thing. 

b) Include every piece of information they ask for. Follow guidance in the review policy to the letter. Book bloggers get a lot of requests and can afford to throw every non-conforming one straight into the trash, so they mostly do.

3) Don't Attach Your Book to the Review Request. Now, I know one fairly big name book blogger who advises the opposite, to always attach your books, so I do that whenever I query him. I've found, for what it's worth, that "don't" is the more prevalent rule of thumb. While for some it's a convenience to have it right there with the query, most consider it presumptuous and it'll earn you a black mark.

4) Don't Assume Your Book Is the Best Thing Since Sliced Cheese. Or as we say in the U.S., since sliced bread. The gist of this one is, don't be arrogant. Don't bother with pointless hyperbole about how great you are. In order to sell a book, you need to find *your* readers, not jam the the book down the throat of every reader. Absolutely no one writes books with universal appeal, so bear in mind when you're querying that you're trying to assess, along with the book blogger, whether or not you're a good match for each other. Explain the premise of your book and the approach you took to it, and if they aren't interested, that is not necessarily a bad thing. You don't want to collect negative reviews from bloggers who aren't interested in the type of thing you write, and any book, with the wrong reader, will get a negative review.

5) Give out Review Copies. Frankly, this one surprised me, that Ritesh would even have to say this. I'll restate what he said, and then add a little more of my own point of view. To restate him: If you're asking for a review, you are offering a free copy of the book to the reviewer. That is how this works, with book bloggers or even with big name reviewers in newspapers and such. Some reviewers only review books they buy, but those don't take requests. Okay, so to add my own points on to that:

a) Don't worry about piracy. Listen, if your book sells, you are going to get pirated and not by book bloggers. Pirates have their own ways of hacking DRM or sneaking books off the gray market. It's one of the facts of the business, so being a jerk to people who offer you a service like a review won't prevent piracy and it'll alienate some of the people who can help you most. 

b) If you aren't willing to be generous, you are thinking too small. I say yes to every giveaway opportunity I'm offered and every book blogger who requests a copy from me gets one promptly. Furthermore, I will provide any format they want, including a paperback. There are some books of mine that, some months, only "sell" paperback copies when I send them to reviewers. In fact, that's one of my top reasons for doing paperbacks, to get into review sites that review those exclusively. All my giveaways are open worldwide on all formats, and yes, this can get expensive sometimes. Mailing out 30 books worldwide for a Goodreads giveaway a couple of months ago cost roughly half the month's revenue, so why would I do that? Because the reading public is far, FAR bigger than you can imagine. A top selling author can move thousands of books a day. It is easier to dream too small than to dream too big. You may not even realize you're doing it, so take a good look at your motivation for limiting your opportunities. My philosophy is grab every opportunity, and if you're worried about things like piracy of the ebooks people win, a simple way to deal with this is to learn how to autograph your own ebooks - just insert your autograph in the ebook file as a graphic. It might still get pirated, but it'll look a little stupid if it's autographed to someone in particular. A person might edit the file and remove the autograph, but anyone willing to do that kind of work for that purpose is going to get your book some way or another. That's an inevitable pirate. You can't avoid those. See my last point.

I highly recommend Ritesh's whole series of posts, beginning with: I'm a Blogger... part 1. In my next few posts here on the Cove, I'll go through the rest of the series, point by point. And authors, please do add tips and tricks you've learned in the comments section below!

Making my own book trailer

Okay, so last year I decided to take my unpublished chick lits and indie publish them, because I had nothing to lose. They weren't making any money sitting on my hard drive, and agents and editors all told me that they liked my writing, but that no publisher was touching chick lit with a ten foot pole, not for a new writer. Furthermore, they're Mormon chick lit. I'd already published one book with one of the major LDS publishers and at the end of the day decided it wasn't worth the hassle for the very limited exposure I got in such a tiny, regional market. So, why not see how it worked in the national market? Fast forward eight months and I am making more money from my indie novels than I am from my science fiction short stories, and I've been paid pro rates on my short stories for years, but the gap keeps on widening as the novels sell incrementally more each month. I never thought I'd be a self published author OR a chick lit author. It's funny the twists and turns life takes sometimes. Nowadays I love being both traditional (as Emily Mah, the science fiction/fantasy author) and indie (as E.M. Tippetts, the LDS chick lit/YA author) and what I especially love about being indie is all the skills I have to learn. I know so much more about how a book goes together, gets seen by readers &tc. nowadays, which can only help my traditional publishing career, I think.

So I decided to try to make my own book trailer. I should have kept my first ever draft, but I saved over it. When I realized that it was worth showing a before/after, I did save one of the older drafts.

The images are from Shutter Stock, which is also where a lot of cover designers get the raw material for their cover art (including me), and the music is from Premium Beat. Since I don't have the talent or resources to do a live action trailer, I knew I had to invest a little into getting professional images, and especially into music. Premium Beat does movie trailer music, as in what people in Hollywood literally buy for their trailers. The site has a cheaper rate for us small time indie folks. What is absolutely critical in any business you start up is to be thrifty, not cheap. The idea is to get good value for money, not avoid spending it altogether. If you can only afford a slideshow trailer, then you pay good money to make it the very best slideshow trailer you can afford, and if you can do live action, invest in making it look professional. Having a bunch of your friends in a park speaking Old English with people throwing frisbees in the background is a complete waste of your money. Having no trailer is better than having a bad one.

Sooo, I had to see if I could make a "not bad" one. Here is the first "final draft" version I created:

As I said, the above trailer was my first "final draft", where I thought, "Okay, that'll work". Only it doesn't. There are many, many flaws in it, but the ones I spotted were:

1) No reference to my website. Oops. Duh. I should have that in there because this trailer is embedded in other sites all over the net, including Goodreads, Facebook, and Amazon. It's therefore not enough to mention my website only on YouTube, as not everyone will even see the YouTube page.

2) The text flashes by too fast in parts: Now this is a hard one. My problem is that I'm a speed reader, as in a super speed reader, as in I read Twilight in one day and part of another book too. When the last Harry Potter novel came out, my husband and I were both reading it on a plane. I sat on his right because I was soon one page ahead of him, and within an hour, I was half the book ahead of him. Therefore, I do not have a good concept of how long it takes people to read the text. If they can't read it, that's really ineffective. I'm not sure I was able to fix this one entirely, but I think I made it better.

3) The placement and formatting of the text is weird in places: "Her boyfriend is devoted" has a weird indent in part of it. "the senior class psycho" displays right over a large white portion of the picture for a long time, and worst is the end. I have my sand castle image there, and you'll note the title and my name are positioned to crash right into it. All of this was due to my using Microsoft Movie Maker and it's not intuitively obvious how to position text with that program. I finally figured out that if I had blank lines before or after the text, that would move it up or down the screen.

4) Poor timing of images: I couldn't fix all of this because I don't really know what I'm doing, but where possible I tried to line up more of the image changes to the beats in the music. I think Microsoft Movie Maker offers very limited capability on that score. Some of the images are too slow, like the diary excerpts. You don't actually need to read those, so those can flash by much faster and just give the gist.

5) Too much text in some frames: I really was conscious of how long the whole trailer was because a lot of ones I've seen go on too long. But I figured out in the end that this was a scripting issue more than a trailer editing one. Trailers that go on too long try to cover too much of the plot and get into subplots. Here my experience submitting manuscripts came in very handy. I only talk about the central plot with just a few hand waving hints to subplots in the setup. Given I'd kept the script tight, I could afford to take more time to display less text per frame and keep it on screen long enough for the person to absorb it.

Is the final product perfect? No it is not, but I think it is better, and given it's my first ever book trailer, it's not a complete disaster. See what you think:

On Publicity

A friend of mine tweeted this link that is supposed to be a spoof of an author self promoting. It is hilarious, but alas, not much of a spoof. People really do go to extremes to promote their books. From my viewpoint, this has been veeery interesting to watch. I started my writing odyssey as a Clarion West student and from there was invited into a high caliber writers group, full of writers who were published the traditional way, by publishers. Some of them are quite famous. Ten years ago, anyone who wanted to be a real writer didn't get their hands dirty doing self promotion. The writer's job was to write. Some gained a competitive edge by hiring publicists, sending out review copies, doing interviews, setting up signings and that sort of thing, but would never, ever go around flogging their books.

Then came the indie movement, and with it a whole new species of writer. One who can't access the traditional publicity channels, so must find other ways to stand out from the crowd. The result, a lot of people resorting to extreme and even underhanded measures to get word out about their book. People will get their friends to leave comments on Amazon - and I don't mean friends who liked the book and are just nice people. I have a few of those. I mean a legion of "friends" who're out to stuff the ballot box. Said friends will also downgrade bad reviews to try to get them to disappear, and quite a few of these "friends" are the writer themselves, working from a newly created account on Amazon or Goodreads.

Now I stand with a foot in each camp. I've kept Emily Mah traditional, but I took my chick lit moniker, E.M. Tippetts indie. This means I've had to tackle the publicity issue head on and come up with what I am and am not willing to do. In fact, I went indie specifically to learn about publicity, to figure out if there's any way I can influence sales while still keeping my writing goals and my respectability.

When I began this, anything that seemed at all like talking myself up was anathema. I tried to make E.M. Tippetts a website and put good review quotes on it and all that, and despised it. I tore out most of the marketing stuff and started over, and spent more time on things like a cool header that was fun to make and a really nifty background I found. I played with Amazon widgets, again trying to make the site pretty. I didn't feel desperate for sales, so I didn't want to act desperate. Eventually, months later, when book bloggers whom I love and respect gave me nice reviews, I excerpted them on the site, as much to thank them as to have those on display for potential readers.

And I hit the Twitterverse, where I made myself try every technique I could find - short of the fraudulent and spamming ones - to see if any worked. What I found? Being obnoxiously forward does actually increase site hits and move sales. But I really don't like it. Nowadays I do what's comfortable for me, which is just make a lot of silly comments and send an individual tweet to every new follower I get. I rarely ever talk about writing unless someone asks, and not about my own if I can avoid it. I have made a lot of new friends in the Twitterverse, and get a lot of complements on my site. I'm happy in my niche, comfortable, and move a lot more books than I could ever have hoped to if I refused to get my hands dirty.

Through this process I've learned exactly what I set out to learn, which is how to sell more books and still be me. Now, I don't think E.M. Tippetts is set for world domination (she writes Mormon chick lit), but I think she's taught Emily Mah quite a lot about putting yourself out there and taking control of your own sales destiny.

So what are everyone else's stories about publicity? What have you tried or what do you want to try? What scares you the most? What scared me the most was turning into one of *those* authors, the kind who have car full of their self pubbed novel that they try desperately to sell anywhere they can, firmly believing that's the path to the NYT Bestseller list (I know multiple people who've been on that list. Believe me, it doesn't work that way.) The truth is, once you are who you are, being a little more forward with your art will help more than harm you. Unless you really are desperate and unscrupulous...

Estate Your Business, My Post on Black Gate

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to write a post for Black Gate's website. I've got a fantasy story in the current issue of Black Gate. The topic of the post doesn't have anything to do with the story, though, it's all about how to organize a literary estate. Yes, planning for death, everyone's favorite topic. I was an attorney, though, who did estate planning, so it's a topic I know something about.

And while it may not brighten everyone's day to have me come here to the Cove with this topic, it's something every member of the Cove should be thinking about. All of us own copyrights, whether or not our work is published, and if we want our work to live on after us, we need to make sure it's handled in an organized manner. For that matter, all of us should have wills, no matter how youthful and healthy we are. Especially those of us who have children.

My post on Black Gate went live this Tuesday, and I recommend everyone hop on over and at least skim it, not because I'm just the best writer of posts ever and expect you to love it. In fact, I'll think you're a little weird if you love my post, but it's a topic that gets very little attention and on which people receive very little guidance. As a writer, choose to be in the know!