"It's Not Over Til You're Dead"

What are writers, even traditionally published ones, to do when sales don't materialize for a new book? I've read more than once that we should suck it up and move on, 'cause it is over.

Maybe that advice is outdated.

In 2012, author Lloyd Devereaux Richards published Stone Maidens with Thomas & Mercer, one of Amazon's imprints. (I have no idea how Amazon imprints work. Something to research in the future.) Evidently that was it. There was not much action as far as sales go.

Then his daughter created a TicTok account for the book eight days ago, with a video. Her call to action, and we're told all our promotional efforts should have a call to action, was, "I'd love for him to get some sales."

The book leaped to No. 1 on Amazon's Serial Killer Thriller list. The number of Amazon reviews has shot up, too. And there is talk of movie inquiries.

This may just be a random, wonderful fluke rather than some kind of hopeful model for other writers. But it does suggest that Jennifer Coolidge is right, and "It's not over til you're dead."

Kitchens, Bathrooms, And Websites Don't Age Well

Author photo for new homepage.

It seems as if it was just four years and ten months ago that I was all excited about a website rework. Well, now I've done another. The latest one involved extensive changes to the homepage, some deletions and minor reworking on other pages.

What We Did Last Time

In 2015 I was interested in using color on both my Facebook page and Twitter banner as a sort of brand. I'd read an article on personal branding that said colors have attributes and yellow's is supposed to be creativity, intellect, and energy. But I am not a pastel person, so we went with gold, which I thought of as yellow-ish. That meant a tremendous amount of work for my computer guy, because he had to carry the color to every single page of the website, not just the homepage.

We kept the same color this time. We also kept the same fonts. This meant far less work and time.

What We Did Do This Time

I write and submit adult work, as well as children's, so I wanted my homepage to reflect that more. Additionally, while I like a homepage that contains information immediately, so users don't have to wait for some fancy work-of-art to load before looking for links, my homepage had become very text heavy. I was concerned that the amount of reading was turning visitors off, and that they weren't continuing deeper into the website where there was even more content.

What we have now is what I think of as a preview page. Each link has an image from the page it leads, too, which I hope will encourage visitors to move into the site, itself. And, of course, there are still images for each of my books, so that visitors can go directly to information about each of them.

Author Websites Need To Keep Changing

As a reader of other authors' websites, I've seen many changes over the years. Because so many websites change, the ones that don't begin to look very dated.

Much like kitchens and bathrooms. I'm very sensitive about old kitchens and bathrooms. And websites.

By the way, I've also done a little updating to my Twitter banner. It now has a photo image of my books, instead of a spread of book covers, and the same new picture of me that we're using on the website.

#STPStwittered: The Results Post

I finished my July Saving the Planet & Stuff summer reading push a couple of days into August. But I did finish it.

You will recall, of course, that the July marketing month involved a series of quote images from the book. They cover the entire story without giving away the entire story. The Kindle edition, all that's available now, has been marked down from $2.99 to $1.99 since July 1. I did a post here at OC on Saving the Planet's Vermont setting, as well as one on the Norwegian textbook that includes a STPS excerpt and the recycling crafts described in the book.

What Did This Book Marketing Get You, Gail?

Well, here is what I hoped to gain from this effort:

• Sell a few books.
• Get a couple of decent Goodreads or Amazon reviews.
• Collect a few new Twitter followers
• Gain experience running a new marketing strategy. 

Here is what happened:

•  I sold 1 eBook. Hurray! Really. Hurray!
• No new Goodreads or Amazon reviews, decent or otherwise.  
• Whatever new Twitter followers I got last month were due to my own trolling. People were not beating a path to my door because they were so impressed with my quote images.
• Computer Guy and I did gain experience using Twitter quote images as part of a marketing campaign.

 

What Questions Does This Book Marketing Experience Raise?

Notice I didn't ask "What have I learned?" That's because I've learned nothing. Absolutely nothing. I just have questions I didn't have before.

1. Is this quote image thing just a poor marketing tool? It is free and pretty easy, after all, and "You get what you pay for" is a much more accurate cliche than "The best things in life are free."
2.  Are older books like Saving the Planet & Stuff impossible to market?
3.  Is Saving the Planet & Stuff impossible to market? 
4. I've been experimenting with different types of marketing over a long period of time for what is now a self-published book. Is this pointless? Are self-published books just like traditionally published books? The only opportunity for sales is during the big opening, like movies?

It's All Good

 

This afternoon, a family member and I were discussing how we'd used part of our summers on activities that weren't very productive when we could have been doing other things that might have been more so. (He did better than I did last month.) But all experience has value. What we did will be good for us somehow, sometime. 

"Saving the Planet & Stuff": Twitter Edition

A Twitter marketing push for the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook wasn't one of my objectives for this year, but it seems like something that ought to be connected to my annual goal of Community Building/General Marketing/Branding. So it's okay that I've spent some time on a Twitter edition of the book. Really. It is.

Now, I published the eBook edition of STP&S a few years back. In traditional publishing, no one would be making a new marketing effort for a book that old. (The hardcover edition published by G.P. Putnam's Sons is even older.) But this isn't a traditionally published book, it's a self-published book. And, to me, a big reason for self-publishing is that you can do things you wouldn't do with a traditionally published title. You don't have to follow any marketing rules, beyond not being any combination of tasteless, needy, and dishonest. I'm going to try to pull that off.

So What Are You Doing, Gail?

I'm using quote images on Twitter for this particular plan. I got the idea for quote images from the article 5 Fresh Ideas For Promoting An Indie Book at the Writer's Edit website. I probably stumbled upon this Fresh Ideas thing through Twitter, to be honest. You know. A tweet?  (And, yes, I do try to avoid reading listicles and any article with a number in the title. I am ashamed, but just a little.) When it came time to decide what quotes from Saving the Planet I should use, I decided to use enough to do a Twitter version of the book, tweeted over an entire month.

A test of our quote image format. Font may be enlarged at some point.

My computer guy created these images for me. He didn't use a "graphic design tool" as described in the Writer's Edit article. Because real computer guys don't need no stinkin' graphic design tool. I have no idea how he does these things. He is a mystery.

Why July?

In the past, I've promoted Saving the Planet as an environmental book because it has an environmental setting and the plot involves an environmental issue. But the book also involves a summer vacation and a summer job. And it's funny. It could just as easily be described as a summer book. Thinking of the STP&S in this new way opens up a new marketing opportunity. Especially since it is summer. You know...a summer book...it's summer now...

July is the first full summer month, a month when some people find themselves with extra reading time.  July leads into August, which might end early as far as summer vacations are concerned, but people still can be doing some summer, light reading then.

What Do You Actually Hope To Achieve, Gail?

 

Maybe in Sept.?

• Well, it would be great sell a few books. 
• If I got a couple of decent Goodreads or Amazon reviews out of this, I wouldn't complain.
• It would be terrific if I collected a few new Twitter followers who enjoy the Twitter version of STP&S
• Computer Guy and I will have gained the experience of running this new, to us, marketing strategy. In fact, depending on what kind of response I get to this effort, I might tweet some quote images related to one of my eBooks published by Putnam. 

 Doing Anything Else For This Promotion, Gail?

I hope to get a few blog posts up about STP&S next month and finally create a Pinterest board related to this book, one that I've had in mind for well over a year. Improving my use of Pinterest is one of my objectives for the Community Building/General Marketing/Branding goal, so, good work, me.

 A Tasteless Mention of Money

I've instructed Amazon to drop the price of STP&S to $1.99, and I'll keep it there for the month of July. (I'm not sure when that will actually happen. I hope by Sunday, July 1.) After the beginning of August, it will go back up to $2.99.

So those of you interested in book marketing and/or Twitter might want to follow me at gail_gauthier and look for #STP&Stwittered. You can also keep checking back here to see how this diabolical plan of mine works out.

Terrific Interview With Michelle Cusolito

Michelle Cusolito's first book, Flying Deep: Climb Inside Deep-sea Submersible Alvin, will be published next week. Today Kathy Halsey interviews Michelle at the GROG blog.

This is a terrific post that includes great material describing how Flying Deep can be used as a mentor text. The interview itself stays focused on book launches. Both interviewer and interviewee did good work with this.
 

What Are We Really Promoting?

This week I'm starting a new schedule that involves doing promotion/marketing on Mondays. So it's appropriate, I think, to talk today about this terrific promotional article, What It Costs to DIY A First Book Tour. In it, author Katey Schultz discusses her year-long promotional tour for her book, Flashes of War, which was published by a small university press.

Interesting points:

• Schultz spent $12,000 on her tour, split pretty evenly between hiring a publicist and tour manager and travel expenses. It was money she'd inherited or saved, not borrowed. She wouldn't go into debt for the book. This caught my attention because several years ago I attended a NESCBWI event at which a colleague said she didn't want her family to lose money on her writing. Something writers need to consider--writing can cost you money.
• Selling 5,000 books is too large a goal for a year. Schulz had to lower her expectations and spread that goal over three years. She's been told that the 1,500 books she believes she's sold over one year is a good number. Good numbers are still small numbers.
• Some booksellers were not very supportive. I don't know if her experience is common. I can't help thinking, though, that within writers' circles there's so much commitment to booksellers. So...
• Schultz hasn't made back her financial investment, but feels the work she's done has been good for her career overall, preparing the way for the promotion of a second book. And that's often how things work with writing. You have to think in terms of the career, not any one particular book.

We're always promoting ourselves.

NESCBWI: Marketing Your Brand

Oh, Look! Suddenly I Can Add Captions!

Yesterday I attended a New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators' program, Marketing Your Brand. Jen Malone was the program leader.

Now Jen's first book, At Your Service,  was published just last year, though she has several others under contract and coming out soon. What she brings to the table when it comes to marketing is that she is the former New England Head of Publicity and Promotions for 20th Century Fox and Miramax Films and has sixteen years of experience teaching film marketing at Boston University. 

This was a very good program. I try not to go into too much detail regarding events like this, because the content is the presenter's. But I feel comfortable discussing workload and blogging.

Workload

 

You cannot exaggerate how hard many children's and YA authors are working at promoting, the time they are spending going to events, planning presentations, traveling, contacting people, all on their own dime. They may hold jobs of one kind or another and have families. It is just huge. And then they need to be writing their next books.

 

Sigh. I happened to be reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki today. Suzuki says, "The driver knows how much load the ox can carry, and he keeps the ox from being overloaded. You know your way and your state of mind. Do not carry too much!" It seemed appropriate.

Blogging

 

The feeling among the people in attendance yesterday was that blogging is a bit yesterday as far as "Authors must blog!" is concerned.  Some authors in that room were vocal about disliking blogging. What does that mean for long-time writer/bloggers like myself?

I'm thinkin' good news.

The Internet began to buckle under the weight of all the blogs that were created by writers from, say, 2006/7 to date. The pool of blog readers couldn't absorb them all, so many of us saw our readership drop and drop. If writers no longer feel compelled to blog, that could mean more readers for the rest of us.

That's what I'm hoping, anyway.

The caption under the picture of Jen Malone? The capacity to caption appeared out of the blue. Computer Guy is mystified.

A Writer Gets All Techie About Her Website

This weekend we relaunched my website after some work that I originally thought would "just" be cosmetic. Cosmetic. That's tweaking, right? How long can that take? Well, it took about two-and-a-half weeks, though we're not talking two-and-a-half weeks of eight-hour days. My computer guy ended up using a lot of his snowdays on this project.

Many of the issues we ended up dealing with in this revamp are the same kinds of things we'd be considering if we were starting a website from scratch. So if you're thinking of getting started with a site or you've been wondering if it's time to do some touch-up work, yourself, you may be interested in what we've been doing these last few weeks.

What Got Me Started

My website is quite old, going back to 1998. We've made many changes since then, of course. Recently, though, I'd been feeling that my site was very white. That's not ethnic commentary. My website was very white meaning that its pages seemed to spread across computer screens, which are now often quite wide, in an unattractive manner. But what to do about it?

Last month I happened to read some articles in More on personal branding. The two issues I was particularly interested in:

• Using color to help brand. Color has attributes it communicates when it comes to branding. Yellow is supposed to communicate creativity and intellect, as well as energy. I most definitely am not a pastel person. Any pastel. But I thought I might like some kind of gold in my website, maybe an autumn-type color. Yellowish.
• Finding ways to unify your brand message across your social media platforms so readers/viewers begin to recognize you, wherever you are. Color can be a unifying element. 

 

What We Did And Why It Took So Long

Originally, all I wanted to do was create a colored border around the pages of my website. Because I was interested in gold, which is similar to the theme of this Blogger blog, we would immediately be providing some unity between these two platforms. But once we placed the gold color around each page, the color we'd been using for the hyperlinks clashed. All the color on all the links had to be changed. (By  the way, we changed the theme on my Twitter page to conform with the color of my website's hyperlinks, thus creating some uniformity with that platform ,too.) Then Computer Guy started really getting into this and gave the space behind the text a little hue-like color, so we really were rid of the white. This was also more in keeping with the blog's appearance.

All this had to be done to every single page in the site. In case you weren't aware, I have a very big website. It's deep, meaning it's multi-leveled. A link from the homepage leads to another page and there are links there that lead to still more.

While we were touching everything, anyway, we were careful to bring any outdated material up to 2015.

And, Then, Fonts

Things were looking better, but now I wasn't happy with the font. Fonts, it turns out, have attributes, just as colors do.

Serif fonts, for instance, are associated with artistic, intellectual, and warm attributes. Sans serif fonts  are considered technical looking. Computer Guy loves sans serif fonts, which are very straight and have little embellishment. I, however, have always been a Times New Roman woman because it looks like the text in a book. TNR is a serif font. Serifs have little extra bits at the end of letters and, like TNR, look like what we'd expect to see in books and other publications.We decided to go with a serif font for the text, which would require more reading, and a crisp sans serif font for headings.

Sounds as if we're done with fonts, right? No! Why not? Because a certain number of fonts are preloaded onto every computer making that computer capable of rendering text accessed from the Internet onto its screen. There are fonts that are commonly used. If I were to choose an uncommon serif font for my website, one that many computers couldn't render, they would have to use a fallback font that may or may not look the way I planned it to. Thus, I needed to choose common fonts.

Some Things We Didn't Change

 

Believe it or not, I have some very specific views on websites. These views are related to communicating messages and making communication easier for people receiving my messages.

1. My homepage, my users' first stop when they come to my website, includes real content. I want my users to get something immediately for having made the effort to come to www.gailgauthier.com. I don't want them to have to click again to "enter website." I don't want them to be faced with just a menu.
2. I'm not into bells and whistles. Things that move and pop are slow to load. I value my users' time. As a user, myself, I sometimes leave sites while I'm waiting for gimmicks to load.
3. I avoid distracting clutter. I want to make the reading experience on my pages comfortable.
4. I try to keep content short. I believe the reading experience on the Internet is supposed to be different from other kinds of reading experiences. Is is supposed to be fast. That is not a bad thing. We can read long in other places. That's true of blog posts, too, by the way. If I can't keep a blog post short, I use sub-headings, the way I am today, so users can pick and choose what they want to focus upon.

In Conclusion

This was a fun thing I hope we don't have to do again for a while. "A while" meaning "years."

Some Serious Book Product Placement

Anyone watch Scorpion on CBS Monday night? The Christmas episode where everyone starts feelin' the season when a child is trapped in a cave with the water rising? In the course of the show, Katharine McPhee's character (I don't remember her name, we always call her Katharine McPhee) says that her son only wants one thing for Christmas, something called I Want an Alien for Christmas. Later in the episode, he gets it! And it's a book!

Well, I was on-line by the time the closing credits were running. I Want an Alien for Christmas appears to be a self-published book available on Kindle and Smashwords. Except for those two sales pages and its placement in Monday's episode of Scorpion, there doesn't appear to be any marketing for it.

What's particularly interesting about this situation, assuming this book turning up in an episode of a nationally broadcast television show isn't interesting enough for you, is that the author, Nick Santora, is also the creator of Scorpion. He's written for other TV shows and has written another book.

You'd think that a couple of mentions in a network primetime show would create some buzz. But two days later, I'm still seeing next to nothing about I Want an Alien for Christmas on-line. The book is mentioned in a Forbes piece, but that's from back in September.

Marketing is a mystery.

Promo Friday: To Blog Or Not To Blog

I've been blogging for twelve years. As far as I'm concerned, there is no question as to whether or not I'm going to blog. I do have doubts as to whether new writers should start blogging now, though.

When I started, I found six children's literature blogs on-line. Now, between review sites and children's/YA authors, I'm guessing there are thousands. Just look at the litbloggers who have registered with Kidlitosphere Central. And the writer bloggers who have registered with it. Oh, and here are some more bloggers with Kidlitosphere Central. And how many children's lit blogs of all kinds are out there who haven't heard of Kidlitosphere Central? Yet we're all competing with one another for readers.

The number of blogs has escalated. The number of readers, not so much. Many blogs that have been around a while have seen a decrease in activity. Blogging is like publishing. You hear about bloggers with readership that skyrocketed in just a few months. But then there are all the others.

Kirsten Cappy of Curious City, which does "theme-based marketing for children’s authors, illustrators, and publishers,"  is well-known in New England, if not the country. She is definitely a fan of blogging for writers. In her blog post, SCBWI Whisper Pines, she answers questions from participants in last winter's Whispering Pines Retreat. Over and over again, she says things like, "Gosh, my answer is always to blog" and "I hate to sound like a broken record, but I guess if you have very limited time and have to focus on one thing, it would be blogging deeper."

Actually, she's kind of encouraging, making points that a blog post has the potential of reaching more people than a public appearance and is out there waiting for people to find it while an appearance is done and over. I don't know how often that happens, but right this minute I'm kind of pumped up.
 

Everyone Agrees That Book Promotion Is Necessary, But...

The two writers taking on the question of the necessity of book promotion in The Demands of Book Promotion: Frivolous or Necessary? are pretty much in agreement that it definitely isn't frivolous. They just don't/can't get into the subject much beyond that. The comments are a little more nitty gritty.

But, you know, it's rare to find a promotional essay that offers a whole lot of help and hope to writers.

Promo Friday: The Problem With Promotion

Well, there are a few problems with promotion that I can think of off the top of my head, but the one I'm going to mention right this minute is that it's time consuming. Seriously, I've probably mentioned it/whined about it before. But I'm thinking of it now because I'm trying to prep for this May Days thing I want to start next week, so I haven't had time to do any more promo research. And next month while I'm making the big May Days effort, I don't plan to do much promotion because I can only concentrate on a few things at a time. I'll have May Days, getting myself up to speed on Ethan Allen for an appearance in June, the June Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar, Time Management Tuesdays, and whatever family surprises come up. Oh, and that essay I've been trying to finish. And maybe submit.

So I'll do myself a favor and drop promotion for May. No research. No approaching bloggers regarding the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook. (I have someone lined up to do a post about it in October, by the way.) Nothing. Unless something drops in my lap, of course. Then I will go nuts and see what I can do.

I suspect some people will think that's a mistake. Their theory would be that promotion has to be a continuous process. I can see that. I just can't keep too many balls in the air.

Speaking of promotion, as I have been, and Saving the Planet & Stuff, the eBook, as I was, it will continue at the sale price through Sunday.

Promo Friday: Working On Twitter

Okay, I've done a little more snooping about Twitter.

Basics

I'm not going to do any "First, choose a name" things because you can find that all over the place. Agent Molly Jaffa does that in The Writer's Guide to Rocking It on Twitter, reprinted at Backspace. She does a little something extra by suggesting appropriate tweet material for writers--your writing and, additionally, your reading.

Then What About Followers?

Pragmaticmom (who I sort of know through Google+, not Twitter) has an interesting post, Twitter Tips and How I Got 55,000 Followers. Mia has a great deal of information here, but the point that really popped for me was the one about following and unfollowing people to increase your followers. Scroll down to the comments, and at the end you'll see I asked why to unfollow. Well, Twitter only allows you to follow so many people at a time. So you unfollow those who don't follow you back so you can follow others.

I think you have to consider what your goal is for Twitter. I originally joined for content, so whether or not people were following me back wasn't that great an issue. I was more concerned with cluttering my stream with content I wasn't interested in, keeping me from getting to the stuff I was. But rereading Mia's information about finding an audience niche and following hashtags has made me reconsider what I'm doing there.

Speaking of Hashtags

My understanding of hashtags is that they can increase your reach beyond your followers because anyone who is interested in the topic/hashtag you've added could end up finding your tweet in their stream. Feel free to correct me on that, readers.

You can find lists of hashtags related to various fields. Twitter Hashtags for Authors and Book Marketing Pros is one of them.

How Much Am I Liking Tweeting?

 

Ehh. I don't dislike it. I can even get into quickly sharing an article I've enjoyed reading. But I'm finding learning how to best use Twitter a little time consuming.

Promo Friday: What's With Twitter?

I'm not entirely sure. I'm going to be working on Twitter for a while.

How To Deal With All The Tweets

I read quite some time ago that Twitter users only read what is on the screen in front of them at any particular time. Otherwise, all the material the people they're following tweet all day is pretty much lost to them. That's my experience. I'm probably not seeing a fraction of what's in my stream.

In Twitter Tips for Beginnings: Everything I Wish I Knew About Twitter When I Started Kevan Lee advises putting your followers into lists. Then at any one particular time you can call up just one list and read tweets in an organized way. How often are you going to do that and how far back are you going to read? I don't know. But it's a way to do some reading, anyway.

Do You Really Want To Follow Everyone?

Lee also suggests following anyone who follows you in order to build as big a following as you can. Some of his commenters disagreed, suggesting focusing on quality rather than quantity. I've read that it's considered good manners to follow anyone who follows you, but you shouldn't expect it of those you follow. I'll follow friends and interesting writers and bloggers who follow me, but I avoid people who are marketing products for writers or hardselling their books. I really am interested in content. Remember, it's hard to keep up with all the tweets, anyway, so you don't want to make your job harder by filling your stream with sales pitches.

What About Hashtags##??

Quite honestly, I was going to cover hashtags, but I read something today that suggests that I may not have a real good grasp on how to use them. My Twitter life is evolving. I'll cover this again another Friday.

Promo Friday: Making Google+ Work For You

First off, why get involved with Google+?

Nobody's over there, right? Well, your friends from high school probably aren't. Or your neighbors or members of your church. If you're interested in professional-type content rather than pictures of cats, Google+ might be the place to find it. It's definitely an easy place to organize it. Google+ allows you to organize your contacts into "circles," categorized the way you want to categorize them. I, for instance, have self-publishing circles, marketing/promotional circles, and blogger circles. I can easily bring up each circle so that content is all I see on the page in front of me. I can take in a lot of information, easily.

How about getting my information out on Google+? Last week, I said I was going to check out Julia DeNeen's tutorial on crafting content for Google+. What you want to do on Google+, as with any other social platform, is get a message out to as many people as possible so you can develop some name recognition. DeNeen's tutorial can definitely help you do it.

This past week I've been doing only a few of the things DeNeen suggests, and I've definitely seen an improvement in my plus 1's (people sharing my posts) and an uptick in people adding me to their own circles. People, particularly people I don't know, sharing my content gets my name out in front of more people I don't know. People I don't know adding me to their circles so that my posts will be coming up on their walls regularly means that they'll see my name over and over. Name recognition.

What have I been doing?

• I've been reposting all my blog posts at Google+ for a while. After watching DeNeen's tutorial, I've been much more serious about introducing them with a summary. That way, readers don't have to click through to my post to find out what it's about. This makes a great deal of sense in terms of the little I know about communication theory. The receiver of a message shouldn't have to work too hard. Without a good summary to give receivers an idea of what's on the other side of that link, they're forced to do the work of discovering it themselves. A lot of readers won't. (Myself included.)
• I link to Google+ users whose work I'm discussing in my post in the summary. I had no idea how to do that. Never even occurred to me to try.
• I now know how to use bold text.

I'll have to watch the tutorial again to figure out how to use images. But given the results I've had with what I have been doing, I think it would be worth it.

Next week I hope to cover everything I've been doing wrong at Twitter.

Promo Friday: Are Writers Blogging All Wrong?

I've suspected that many writers make a number of mistakes related to blogging. Julie DeNeen at Fabulous Blogging discusses just one in Most Bloggers Think About Social Media the Wrong Way.

What she's talking about here is using blog posts "everywhere, multiple times, until people are so annoyed they start unfollowing you." A lot of people have a lot of the same friends on Facebook and Goodreads and some of those same people are following them on Twitter, too. So using the same blog post everywhere can lead to a lot of repetition. Writers, in particular, have to be careful about this sort of thing when we're doing one of those "my book got a wonderful new review" posts. People receiving these messages multiple times can feel they're getting a hard sell. You don't want to come across like a telemarketer trying to get homeowners to switch electric plans.

DeNeen describes ways to treat the same material in different ways for use in different places. Her plan reminded me of advice I used to read for freelance writers. It sounds like work, but I suspect that it's the kind of thing that you get used to doing and then it goes fast.

Please excuse me now. I have to go look at that Google plus tutorial Deneen linked to.

Promo Friday: Would You Buy A Book A Blogger Recommended?

According to Do Blogs Influence Purchasing Decisions? at Christian Marketing, blogs do, indeed, influence buyers. "A recent Technorati study (Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influence Report) found that blogs hold a lot of influential power on purchasing decisions of consumers." "...when bloggers like your book, this influences people to buy it."

I found this incredibly interesting because among bloggers I know there have been questions about whether or not we're just writing for each other. How many books can we read/buy? I've also heard some reservations from writers who've done blog tours as to whether or not they were worth doing.

Perhaps Christian bloggers influence purchasing decisions and others not so much?

Promo Friday: "Marketing Done Right Is Just Finding More Readers"

Not much promotion or promotion research done at Chez Gauthier today. However, I can refer you to an IndieReCon video podcast, Write, Publish, Repeat: How to Turn Your Art from a Hobby Into a Real Business with Johnny Truant, Sean Platt & David Wright.

Now, I was listening to this while I was working in the kitchen, so I'm not clear on which guy said what. But some interesting bits (quotes or paraphrases):

• Work is art at first. At that point, treat it as such. Then it is a product to be sold. At that point, treat it as such.
• Think of marketing as a funnel. The widest part of the funnel is where people can be exposed to you, all the aspects of your social platform. The narrow part of the funnel is the subgroup from the large part who will really be directed to your book.
• Many people treat marketing as something inherently evil instead of something that can be evil.
• "Marketing done right is just finding more readers." That is in quotation marks on one of my little slips of paper that were left on my kitchen counter.
• Entrepreneurial writers should track how long it takes them to write something. When they're done, they should then think about how much time it took and whether it was worth it in terms of return. If they're not satisfied, they may want to try writing something else. Maybe any writer should consider doing this.

All good thoughts.

I had a thought totally unrelated to the book business after I'd finished listening to this thing, though it was a video podcast, and I could have watched it: How many people have time to sit in front of a computer and watch a video? I am talking about the masses of work-related videos out there, not...ah...I can't think of another word for porn. If I didn't have periodic episodes when I was alone working in the kitchen for an hour or more, I'd never be able to find the time to listen to any kind of podcast. And watch one? How? How?
 

Promo Friday: How Do We Sell EBooks Without All That Time-Sucking Stuff?

This past week was IndieReCon. Yeah, I know. I should have mentioned it earlier. I think I did on Facebook. Or maybe Twitter. I'm not sure which. And that's sort of what this post on promotion is about.

On Day One Michael Alvear contributed a piece for the conference called How to Sell E-Books without Falling into The No-Value, Time-Sucking Vortex Of Blogging, Tweeting, And FaceBooking.

Alvear's extremely readable premise is that blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking are valueless time sucks for eBook writers. If he's correct, I'd argue that they're also valueless time sucks for any kind of writer. 

Alvear is talking specifically about Kindle eBooks here. He also suggests strategies that writers should concentrate on instead of social media to sell eBooks on Amazon. I wish he'd given more information on how, though.