Launched!

I am exhausted right now, but it's been a fun week. I launched my latest book, A Safe Space, which is a coming of age/reverse Cinderella story. My main character is a child star who's just aged out of her role on her hit show and is now unsure whether she can keep acting into adulthood. Unfortunately, she doesn't have any of the millions she earned as a child; those were all mismanaged away, so she faces adulthood like we all do, empty handed and in desperate need of a plan.

Meanwhile she's got an all consuming, inexplicable crush on a personal trainer at her gym. He's arrogant, abrasive, and often taunts my main character, which is the last thing she needs. However, his behavior isn't consistent towards her, and she has the nagging feeling there's something more going on.

There is, but I'm not going to tell you what. I had a blast writing this book. It's my eighth novel and while I'm still not making a living, I feel like I'm gaining new skills all the time. But most importantly, I'm very happy with my career. If it takes me decades to build up a shelf I can live off the royalties of, those will be some fun decades.

Here are buy links:

Amazon

B&N

Kobo

iTunes

And then here's a fun giveaway. One of the prizes is a pen of your choice from my Etsy store!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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!

Adventures in Cover Design

As most of you know, I have two writing careers. One is as traditionally published Emily Mah, who sells her science fiction and fantasy stories to magazines. The other is as indie published E.M. Tippetts, who is an experiment on my part to try my hand at all the different aspects of the publishing industry. Up until this point, I've always had my novel covers designed by professionals, but this week I've taken the plunge and put one of my own covers out there.

My bestselling book so far is Someone Else's Fairytale, and so I've been writing a sequel. I wanted to design a cover that would work as a template for all the books to come after it. So, here it is, the first cover I designed and put out there:

I debuted this cover on Wattpad, where Fairytale is a featured novel (as of Wednesday). I've since uploaded it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. The images are all stock art off Shutterstock. The leather texture is from Scrapgirls, as is the gold tone effect (I purchased a commercial licenses). The swirly patterns are royalty free brushes that my professional cover designer used, and my knowledge of how to put it all together comes from digital scrapbooking. Yes, really. That's how I learned to use Photoshop, from JessicaSprague.com and her online classes :-)

This first cover's gotten a positive response, so I put together a mockup for the second cover:

This is the book I'm working on right now. I debuted this cover on my site, (www.emtippetts.com) and people have been very positive. I need to make a few changes. I'm going to play with what word I put in the magnifying glass. Maybe "crime" or "police" might look better than just "ot cr". I also need to fix the title block. It's crooked, but nobody noticed that, right?

Now, I suppose I should tie this up with some intelligent, meaningful comment, but to be honest, I am so exhausted I can barely see straight! I launched the German edition of Fairytale, also on Wednesday, and have been writing over 2,000 words a day on Damsel, so as soon as I finish this post, I'm stumbling off to bed ;-)

Launch day for Castles on the Sand

Many of you will remember me advertising my Kickstarter campaign to get a Kirkus Review for my novel, Castles on the Sand. That campaign was ultimately successful, and Kirkus dubbed the novel: "A fast-paced blend of high-stakes drama and average teenage concerns (sex, appearance, friends), capped with a welcome message of hope."

You may also remember my post on how to make a book trailer, in which I showed the trailer for the book: 

Today, the book was released on Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Smashwords, and I shall update my little section of the righthand sidebar accordingly!

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:

Memories of Clarion West

Eleven years ago I had the privilege of attending the Clarion West Writers Workshop for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Seattle, Washington. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, the Clarion Workshops are intense, to put it mildly. For six weeks, seventeen students are taught by professional writers - ours were Octavia Butler, Bradley Denton, Nalo Hopkinson, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack. Every morning we'd get up, scrounge some breakfast, and then head to a critique session. Three students would have their heads on the block. We'd have read their stories and go around the circle, analyzing, criticizing, and trying to suggest cures for whatever ailed the piece. The last person to go would be the instructor. After being roasted by seventeen other people, the author was permitted to do two things: 1) ask for clarification and 2) thank everyone.

This has been such a valuable lesson for me because when you write professionally, you can't argue with your readers. You can't complain that they "didn't get it". It was your job to make them get it. Your only remedy is to learn from mistakes, sit back down at the keyboard, and do better next time.

In the science fiction and fantasy genre, a lot of professional writers groups use the Clarion style of critiques, and it was my time at Clarion West that qualified me to join Critical Mass, a writer's group in New Mexico that helped keep me working hard for the next ten years. Meanwhile many of my former workshop mates were finding their own way in critique groups, earning degrees and research grants, and winning awards and accolades such as Hugo and Nebula nominations and novel publishing deals.

It's been a privilege to be associated with my former classmates, and it's been a blessing that social media like email and Facebook have allowed us to keep a connection and be a part of each others lives and careers. This year, we decided to celebrate with a reunion anthology. Since the workshop was in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, we titled it, Under the Needle's Eye. Eleven of us have contributed stories and novel excerpts, and it was my privilege to oversee the copy editing and to convert the book to Kindle format. I have to say, my classmates' work leaves me both humbled and bursting with pride.

And I made us this book trailer:



I hope it conveys some of the sincere admiration I have for my classmates and the incredible fun it was putting this project together. The anthology is FREE today and tomorrow on Amazon, so come find us Under the Needle's Eye!

Giveaway!

Hi Scribblers!

Just wanted to post a quick note about a giveaway of a signed hardcover copy of Renegade Magic by Stephanie Burgis. Details of how to enter are in the top post on the book's Facebook fan page. Head on over there now to sign up!

Someone Else's Fairytale is FREE in Kindle format today!

Hello fellow pirates! (Actually, that may not be the best way to begin a post about a free ebook...) Someone Else's Fairytale is free today, March 1, 2012, on Amazon. This is all legal and legit. It's a promotion I'm running to celebrate the book making it into the top 1,000 Kindle books on Amazon, a very exciting moment for me this Monday.

So head on over and get yourself a copy. Send your friends on over. Don't hold back! As I type this, the book has just disappeared from its subcategory rankings - it was in the top 100 childrens books on Amazon, that includes both ebooks and paper books, and it was in the top 30 YA romances on Kindle. These listings apply only to paid books, though, so mine won't be eligible for them again until tomorrow. So it's a lonely little book without a ranking at the moment. Go help boost it up!

Paint Me True out for Nook

Hey everyone,

I finally got Paint Me True out in Nook format! It's up for the promotional price of $.99 until Thursday, when my next novel, Someone Else's Fairytale, comes out. Thanks, everyone, who's shown support and bought my book so far.

Once I finish all this formatting craziness, I can get back to reading. I've got Open Minds and Darkspell cued up on my Kindle.

Launching Darkspell with a SMASH!

I am throwing an online party over at my blog, October 31st! Join in the festivities to win a signed poster Illustrated by moi, a $10 Amazon gift certificate or a copy of Darkspell!

After signing up, all  you have to do is post on October 31st--Darkspell's release date--saying what you'd do if you had all the magic in the world. I will provide a cut-and-paste blurb of Darkspell with its cover. Viola!

Are you with me?

PS--please don't miss my stunning Illustration countdown--happening now!