Blog Tours and How To Screw Them Up Pt. 2

A quick moment of self promotion: I've got another book out! Love in Darkness, the sequel to Castles on the Sand is out and $.99 this week.

Alex had everything when he was with Madison. But the darkness within him wouldn't go away. After two years apart, he returns to Pelican Bluffs and to the girl he never wanted to leave. 

Madison wants to give their love another chance, but Alex can't fight fate. He is what he is. Ruined. Crazy like his mother. And Madison deserves so much more. When his secrets spill out into their small town, Alex has a choice to make. Hide away in the darkness forever, or let love in.

Head on over to any major book retailer for your copy!

And now on to the second installment in my series about how not to treat book bloggers or conduct a blog tour. Part One is here. Again, I'll use the same outline as my friend, noted book blogger, Ritesh Kala, used in his I'm a Blogger... series. Today I'll go over the points he made in I'm a Blogger... pt. 2.

In this post, Ritesh gets a little more general about what to do when publicizing a book anywhere, so it's got a broader focus than just blog tours, but nevertheless, the advice applies to blog tours as well.

6. Put Out A Good Book: Everyone, not just book bloggers, is tired of slogging through badly written, badly edited books. For this, let me take a business person's perspective. As far as the arts goes, novels and publishing are one of THE CHEAPEST types of venture. Think about it. Would you try to produce a film without getting the right camera, the right editing equipment, and putting your best foot forward to film festivals? Even with all the advances in digital filmmaking, it's pricey. Consider painting, or music, or quilting, or... well, you name it. In comparison publishing is pretty darn affordable. Do not try to break in for free. Invest in yourself, and I'd suggest setting aside a budget of $1,500 to spend on 1) editing 2) copyediting 3) cover design 4) formatting 5) publicity and marketing. If that dollar figure makes you choke, then indie publishing isn't for you. If you don't think you can sell enough books to make that money back, then your book isn't ready for prime time.

A publisher would spend upwards of $15,000 or more on a novel, and that's a novel they aren't investing much in, to be honest. There the author got almost no advance. So if you're into indie publishing to be more cost effective, that can work. If you're into it because you refuse to part with any money, you're not in indie publishing. You're in vanity publishing. All you will gain is the right to say you have a book out. Period.

I'll add one caveat, you can do this for cheaper if you train yourself, but that means a serious training investment. I've got the full Adobe Creative Suite on my computer and have studied Photoshop and InDesign pretty extensively. Thus, I'm as qualified a cover designer and interior formatter as most people who hang a shingle out, and starting next month, I will have a shingle out as a book designer. People have started coming to me to ask how I make my interiors as pretty as they are because I don't just do it competently, I do it better than most, and that was my aim when I decided to do it in-house. Two of the three novel covers I've designed have made it to the top #300 books on Amazon. Another good example is Colleen Hoover who had very little money, couldn't afford a cover designer, but spent twelve hour days blogging and interacting online to do her own publicity. She compensated for what she couldn't afford in cash by investing vast amounts of time. That can work too.

7. Help the Blogs in Return: Bloggers and authors should have a mutually beneficial relationship because they're after compatible goals. The author wants to sell more books. The blogger wants more traffic to their site. Hence, you want to drive people to the blogger's site, and the blogger will in turn drive them towards the sales listings of your books. There are some very simple things you can do to show proper gratitude:

1) Tweet, FB link, and link the review from your blog. I link the reviews a couple of times because this creates backlinks, which helps the blogger's blog rise in search engine results. With twitter, I tweet the review regularly; right now given how many reviews and content about my books is out on the web, you'll see the same tweet about a review every 10 days or so, and I intend to keep doing that regularly for a very long time. Thus, bloggers who reviewed you two years ago still get a little residual traffic trickling in and will be more likely to feature you in the future.

2) When on a blog tour, make a Twitter list of all the blogs participating and RT their tweets for the duration of the tour. Make them like hosting you because you drive people to their site.

3) And most importantly, when a blogger features a guest post by you or an interview of you, keep that page open in your browser for a week and refresh it a couple of times a day. Answer any comments that come through, again creating interaction and thus more hits on the page. The blogger has given you a forum to interact with new potential fans. The appropriate thing to do is to make use of the opportunity, and I let me tell you, this can earn you big brownie points with a blogger.

8. Don't Demand Reviews: Bloggers are, like anyone else, people with lives. They have dayjobs and families and lots of books they want to read. It's not unusual for a new book blogger to bite off more than they can chew and end up unable to read and review all the books they take on. Always show some class in this situation. Understand that this isn't them bailing out on you, this is them trying to help everyone and getting overwhelmed. There are only good motives here. Also, here's a chance to learn something important: Was your book one of the ones they got to no matter what? The top selling books are the ones that were, and that has more to do with your writing and your book than you may want to admit. If your book wasn't that book this time around, note the ones that did make the cut and get glowing reviews and learn a little more about the market for your next project.

There are enough rude writers out there, that being a polite one will yield results. Not everyone I've followed up with has reviewed my book immediately, but some sure have. When they realize that I'm not seething or about to snap at them, they want to work with me. They know I won't do something diva-ish and offensive. Unfortunately, that does make me stand out from the crowd, and it'll work for you too.

9. Price Competitively: This is just marketing advice. Know your market and know the price points. Know where you are in the grand scheme of it all. I'm more established as a writer now than I was a year ago, but I still need to keep a book or two at $.99, because that's the kind of clout I have. It's limited. I may be "Amazon bestselling" thanks to the day one of my novels spent on the Kindle Top 100, but that alone doesn't make people flock to my books. Most people have never heard of me and hence are taking a chance. I need to make that easy for them, and that's just the way it goes. People who set their prices high will attract fewer readers curious to try something new.

A book blogger doesn't want to advertise books that their readers won't buy. It's a wasted post for them if they write up a review and get a bunch of comments that say things like, "$7.99?!? No way!!!" And a book blogger can't afford negative reviews any more than a writer can. If they're not blogging about books their readers will go out and buy, they aren't successful. You need to help them be successful.

10. Don't Go To War: There have been a few flame wars that got so big the parties to them are famous, so I don't know why people take so long to learn this. Do not fight back against reviewers or readers. There's one simple truth here: they don't work for you. They work for other readers. You try to push them around? They don't care, or they just get annoyed. They are entitled to their opinion and have a right to broadcast it. Fight with them and you appear petty and small and worth avoiding at all costs. Even if it's a positive interaction, be VERY careful about responding to a review. I'll respond to someone who asks about when a sequel's coming out, sometimes. Once someone posted a very apologetic negative review and I replied to say they had nothing to apologize for and I appreciated them being honest. Even that is walking veeeeery close to the line. Readers and reader reactions are not something you should try to influence in any way other than shoring up your writing skills and doing a better job on the next book.

Needless to say, book bloggers will not work with authors who start a flame war. It makes the site look bad and gives the blogger more headache than anyone deserves. This includes calls to fans to downvote bad reviews and upvote good ones on Amazon and appeals for "white knighting," which is when someone else goes to bat for the writer and takes on negative reviewers. As sweet as this may seem, if you catch it happening, try to put a stop to it. Express gratitude, but invite the person to take the high road. It's too easy for people to assume that's a fake account you made, or a friend or family member behaving unprofessionally.

The link to Ritesh's post, again, is here. I'll be back when it's my turn to post next with more on this series.

And again, Love in Darkness, the sequel to Castles on the Sand, is now out and is $.99 this week. Go check it out!

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:

What's the big idea?

People always ask writers where they get their ideas, and I think there's a simple and a not so simple answer to this one. The simple one is: practice. Anyone who makes themselves write every day is going to get good at coming up with and cultivating ideas. Most of us always have an eye out for a funny story, or an odd image, or a theme suggested by an anthology. Over the years, we all train ourselves to strip an idea down to its most essential components, and then fit it into the structure of a story. We learn tricks like taking two seemingly unrelated ideas and playing them off each other. We learn to spot what kinds of ideas would make a great A plot versus a B plot, and then switch them around for the challenge.

But there's a difficult answer too, and it's probably what most people who ask the question are digging for. How do you find the ideas that you're excited about? That you must write? Before I share my answer, I have a funny story. My friend and writer's group-mate Walter Jon Williams used to wake up in the middle of the night having dreamt the most amazing dream ever, but he'd invariably drift off to sleep again and by morning he couldn't remember it. The feeling that he'd had this incredible idea that just set his creativity on fire was all that was left. So, he put a pen and paper on his nightstand and one night, woke up with one of his world shattering ideas and managed to remember the pen and paper. He jotted down his dream, fell back to sleep, and in the morning woke up excited. He grabbed the piece of paper and looked at what he'd written and it was, (not making this up, you can ask Walter):

UFOs are actually made out of bread.

The point of that story, aside from making you laugh, is that even a writer as experienced and accomplished as Walter, with his many awards and decades long career, will go out of his way to get the idea. He's surely got enough story ideas to fill several careers, given he's practiced coming up with them for most of his life. Yet there are ideas and ideas. The former can make perfectly good, even great stories. The latter won't leave you alone until you pour out your soul onto the page - which sometimes results in a great story, but without enough training in how to write will result in a mediocre, incomprehensible mess. Hence one purpose of practicing your writing skills is to be primed and ready to make those rare ideas shine.

Mine sneak in through the back door. I lay bait for them by thinking of something that I want. A certain feeling that a book gave me, for example, and then I ruminate about it and get frustrated and write a bunch of random scenes and make up characters that don't really click for me, and then, after several days to a few weeks, one of those ideas usually comes together, and it often has nothing to do with what I was originally looking for. Most of my sales, though, come from these ideas, and this in part explains why I didn't start selling stories until relatively recently, even though I graduated from Clarion West a decade ago. I used to work hard on ideas, honing my craft and execution and I got a lot of positive feedback and rejection letters that told me I was close. It was when I started laying bait for ideas that the sales started. I used to provide my most polished, overworked piece to my writer's group in New Mexico. More recently, I dashed off a rough draft of a story with an idea for my writers group, heard them chew it over and worry it to shreds, and came away with an idea, which might or might not have anything to do with what they'd said.

So the question I ask is, how to you find your ideas, as opposed to the regular run of the mill ideas that you've got a million of?

Ninja Wordle Skillz

If you want to be a Ninja as well as a Pirate, come check out my post on Ninja Wordle Skills for Improving Your Writing over at Ink Spells!

Pirate Love,
Sue