I don’t often autograph copies of my books, which is odd in as far as I’m also a collector of modern signed first editions. I’m the proud owner of signed copies of The Graveyard Book, Name of the Wind, Painted Man/Warded Man, Eragon, Skulduggery Pleasant, Underground Railroad, The Bone Season, Kim Harrison, Child 44, a number of signed anthologies, and many, many more.
As for my own books, only two signed copies of Bound exist, two of Divide and Conquer, and around ten autographed copies of Guarded.
Now a shipment of bookplates has arrived, and I’m sending some out to the first ten readers who will send proof of purchase (invoice or picture) of any paperback or hardback you own.
In case you didn’t know, Guarded and Bound also contain a handful of drawings, which are not available in the ebooks.
So send in your proof of purchase plus your address to authorcarmenfox at gmail dot com, but do so soon. This offer expires January 31.
And phew. I’m so relieved. You know that feeling where you’re too close to something to be objective? I always get that way about books. My writing partner won’t actually engage in any ‘there, there’ activity anymore, because she knows my tendency to panic and my bouts of self-doubt too well.
I sent my novella out to a few early readers, and the response has been great. I’m so freaking relieved. Just because something will be free doesn’t mean I want to skimp on quality.
All that’s left to do is to format it, upload it, and then send out my newsletter so that my lovely subscribers can get started.
What else is new? Well, I’m seriously excited about the novella I’m writing right now. This one’s going to be a little longer. The length of a novella is sometimes planned, which means it pays to be concise and frugal with the details. But on this occasion, it is the plot that determines the number of words. What’s exciting is that the plot is a little different from things I’ve tried before.
And I gotta tell you, I love these characters. My lead character is one tough lady. I mean seriously tough. I’m about a third of the way through now.
Of course I can’t wait to start my next full-length book. It’s going to be so much fun!
Hmm. Whoever decided that putting 24 hours in a day was enough? People without ambition, that’s who. Or maybe people who have a…what’s it called again?…oh yes, people who have a LIFE!
It’s been a while, so I just wanted to quickly touch base with everyone.
As expected, my deliberate ceasing of promotional activities has led to a sudden decline in sales. Yet I continue in the knowledge that writing is more rewarding than selling. The thing that hit hard is the lack of reviews for BOUND. The reviews from magazines and blogs have been overwhelmingly positive, yet ordinary readers don’t bother. I think they don’t realize that even a single sentence can make a difference in how an author’s book is doing, especially on Amazon, because Amazon focuses its booster opportunities on books with a large number of reviews.
But I’ve come to realize it’s not a reader’s job to help me. Once I’ve written a book and the reader has paid for it, our contract is over. I value all my readers, though, so for those who are interested, I want to offer something special. As regular visitors to my blog know, I’m currently working on TRICKED, a novella that is part of the Silverton Chronicles. In many ways, it’s the first part, since its heroes are Josie and Graeme, Ivy Bell’s parents. Writing TRICKED is a wonderful experience, and I have grown very fond of Josie and Graeme. Actually, I’m sad it’s nearly over. Please understand, this is not a book I’ve quickly cobbled together. It will be edited and proofread as if it were a full-length novel.
I’m aiming to write at least one new novella a year, which I will make available exclusively to my newsletter subscribers. I’m also working on a special treat for Halloween. If there’s anything else you’d love to see, please let me know.
In other news, the GUARDED audiobook is in limbo, i.e. I have approved it and it’s waiting for distribution to Amazon, iTunes etc. Any day now it will be ready, so keep an eye (or an ear) out for it.
On a personal note, I’ve received happy news from home. First, my stepdad got his first Dan in Judo. Now, I’m from a judo family. My mom has a brown belt, my dad the fifth Dan (Dan = black belt), my godmother has a black belt, and I started when I was five. Yes, I’m lethal. In theory. Sadly, an injury spelled the end of my judo fun when I was only sixteen. Anyway, my stepdad has been coaching kids at our Judo Club forever (even when I was little), and he’d had a brown belt all my life — until now. He totally deserves the black belt. My mom, my dad and my stepdad have been at the heart of the Judo Club for as long as I remember. So any recognition of their service warms my heart.
My brother has also made me proud. For the past three years, he has sacrificed his evenings and weekends to attend school to further his education. He has passed all his exams and is now a professionally certified logistics manager, which means he’s entitled to train apprentices and run warehouses. Anyone who goes back to school as a grown-up to build a better future for himself is amazing, and I’m so, so proud of him.
That’s it for today.
I’ll let you know when the GUARDED audiobook is ready. Until then, enjoy your summer.
Are you ready for the mother of all blog tours? Before we kick it off, I want to extend a huge and heartfelt thank you to all the reviewers and bloggers, and to the readers who pop in and take part. This is my biggest giveaway so far, and the winners are going to be thrilled with their prizes.
So much generosity of time is humbling. Hopefully you enjoyed or will enjoy reading BOUND as much as I did writing it.
For the 12 days from December 25 – January 5, at least one of my books will be discounted.
GUARDED (The Silverton Chronicles, Book 1) Will be available at $3.99/£2.39 on Amazon (20% off), with a 20% discount voucher if bought on Smashwords (coupon code: EB59L)
Book 2 of The Silverton Chronicles is scheduled for release in April. Get your copy of Book 1 now so you don’t miss the train.
SHOW DON’T TELL (Immersive Writing From The Roots Up) can be snapped up for $1.99 (33% off)
If you’re an author, you know nothing will have a greater impact on your writing than the right kind of showing and telling. Let this guide show you how to get started with great examples and exercises you can do right there on your ebook reader.
Being Stephen King or Nora Roberts must be nice. Birds wake you with happy chirps, your butler serves you breakfast in bed, small, well-behaved children scatter rose petals wherever you put your feet… Okay, maybe not.
The odds are against us, yet many dream that one day we’ll be able to support ourselves with our writing. Some get there, most don’t.
Twist and turn it every which way, being an author is hard.
Not only do we have to learn how to write well, we must also put our butts in chairs to write the book, then edit it, ask others to criticize it, then edit again, and again, and again. We also prepare query letters and synopses to submit our work to agents and editors for almost guaranteed rejection, or we navigate the publishing landscape ourselves, with all its red tape. All the while we must establish connections with potential readers and supportive fellow authors.
Then the hard work starts. In no particular order, we build a website, write our author’s bio, think up intriguing book blurbs, make our own video trailers or hire someone to make them for us. We ask blog sites and individuals for reviews and endorsements, put up author pages on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, maintain a blog, keep our Twitter followers amused, update Facebook friends on our progress, find exciting pictures or quotes to share on Pinterest, and design banners for our website and social media accounts. With luck, we find beta readers and send out copies.
To remain friendly with other authors, and to kick back, we read their books and provide reviews. We advise fledgling writers. We have pens, bookmarks and sticky notes printed, and flyers for which we designed the layout. We pick our favorite excerpts and answer interview questions for blogs that are willing to feature us. We proofread our work and write press releases. We create events for readers and other authors on Facebook, and join yahoo loops and make new Google+ friends. And when we have a minute, we compile interesting extras to post on our websites, such as deleted scenes, origin stories or recipes.
We design and pay for ads. We keep up-to-date on all our memberships, maintain a newsletter, and we run giveaways for our existing and new readers. We enter and judge competitions, absorb constructive criticism and survive malicious reviews left by people who clearly have no friends. We bow before the writing greats and beg for endorsements that might never come. We send out bulletins, arrange and attend book signings and travel to conventions. In the meantime, we’re writing our next book, because we live for the day that someone tells us our book touched them or helped them escape from reality.
We do this while working a full-time job and/or looking after our children. To put the above into context, remember how long your last official email took to write? Five minutes? Ten? Now consider writing a blog that’s three times as long or ten emails a day just to chase an editor or arrange an interview.
With luck, we’ll sell between 30 to 100 books in the first month before interest wanes. So our only choice is to keep up our marketing efforts. Yup, the sleepy author doesn’t eat. But neither does the busy one.
In competition with authors who give their books away, we make do with between $0.10 and $1 per ebook sold. Of course at the higher end of this scale, you’re most likely to be a self-publishing author, which means you can add cover design, finding and paying for a good editor, purchasing a batch of ISBN numbers, and formatting for print, epub and mobi publication to the list. Oddly, we then have to justify to readers why we’re not handing out copies for free, or why we charge the normal retail rate for signed books, plus shipping.
And then, one day, you come home and find a pirated copy of your work offered for free on a website.
Just a real quick post today. Fancy making your own Facebook banner? Tired of using landscapes as banner backgrounds, and ready to add some spice to your profile?
This is a template I made myself that’s worked well in the past. You can use it too. It’s easy.
I’ve separated the Facebook banner template into different boxes, but make sure you don’t get too close to the edges so nothing gets cut off. The square at the bottom left is where your photo will appear, so make sure you don’t cover it. The boxes are meant to guide you. No need to adhere to them rigidly.
Here’s an example of what you can do (fill in your name etc.). Feel free to use it for yourself or to try it out. Making it took me less than 10 minutes.
Here are a couple for readers:
If you’ve read my article about creating your own book trailer on a budget (i.e. for free), you’ll know I use an iPad app called TouchDraw for most of my ‘creations.’
Try to keep your colors neutral and in line with those you use on your website. Also, make sure to use the same photo on all your social media accounts. Most of all, make it unique. Whether you’re an author or a reader or something else entirely, show us who you are.
As always, if you need help, let me know. Good luck.
After another reviewer has thrown in the towel due to inappropriate behavior from guest authors, I figured this quick guide might be useful. Print it, pin it, share it. And if you’re lucky enough to find a reviewer who’s still offering their time to help promote you, follow the rules. If you’re not sure, ask in plenty of time.
It’s really simple.
As sad as rude guests are, luckily they’re in a minority. However, some people are naturally shy or have never appeared on a blog before. Again, follow these guidelines, and you should be fine.
The one golden rule is always to make your host’s job easy.
You’re just starting out as a writer and don’t have a lot of cash. The little you have, you want to expend on necessities like swag and perhaps one or two ads or blog tours, right? What about book trailers? Probably not in the budget.
Think again.
You may not afford a fancy book trailer, but you can afford a video collage. Which is really just another term for…book trailer. Let me tell you how.
How it started
Okay, so I’m a bit of a gamer. A few years ago I got into creating my own tabletop games. I have now invented five games. My friends love them, and I’ve even sold a few to friends of friends. In addition to a cool concept, I needed artwork to represent my game’s theme. I love learning new things, so I downloaded a few apps onto my iPad.
Touch Draw – A general image program that lets me add text to pictures, manipulate photos and so on. Cut-out – A program that lets me cut out individual elements from other pictures and stick them onto the background of my choice. Instablend – One that allows me to blend two image into a superposed image. Snapseed – And a program that allows me to age, distort, reverse or add effects to pictures.
You don’t have to get these programs. They just happened to be the ones I tried out on my iPad and I got quite good at using them. There are hundreds more out there, not to mention entire suites for your PC.
What about the book trailer?
Patience.
My book Divide and Conquer is due to be released in February 2015, so I haven’t received an official book cover yet. However, I wanted a picture I could show around, a picture that represented what the book was about. Which is why I produced my first photo collage.
Unofficial book collage
I found photos either from my own collection or off the Internet. You can buy stock photos or use any of the thousands of free stock photos available with a few key strokes. Since Divide and Conquer is set in Seattle, I needed a photo of the Space Needle, the most iconic symbol of this great city. For my two heroines, Lea and Nieve, I needed women in the right poses (one crouching, one in the midst of a kick), and two faces I liked. Nieve fights with a hanbo, i.e. a mid-length fighting stick, and Lea has a dagger. Finally, to add a threatening feel, I needed fog, which their enemies use to hide themselves and their prey.
Next, I cut out the elements I need. Using the same app, I assembled the pictures one by one. I stuck Nieve’s face onto Nieve’s fighting pose and gave her a hanbo. I stuck Lea’s face on Lea’s crouching body and gave her a dagger to hold. Next, I cut out my finished Lea and my finished Nieve and stuck them, together with the Space Needle and a plume of black fog onto a white background.
The result was a bit crude, I admit. Not to worry, because I used an app that transforms photos into a sort of pastel watercolor, which really appealed to me.
Finally, I added text in the font I’d already used for my website name banner, and I was done. I nowhad something to show around and guest-blog with. As long as I make sure people understand this is just a collage, it won’t interfere with my book cover once I receive it.
What about this book trailer/video collage I promised?
Actually, we’re closer than you think.
I downloaded a movie app (iMovie). You can make your video from scratch or use one of the templates they have, which is what I did.
If you use a template, all you do is add photos and text to it, then click save. It already comes with its own music. For the pictures, I made up similar ones to the ones I used for the photo collage and details from the photo collage itself. I also made up a title page. A dark alley. A dark alley with text. A dark alley with more text. The Space Needle. The Space Needle with text. And so on. In the end, I simply added these photos in the right order to the template.
Yup. That was it. I’m very pleased with the result. You can see for yourself if you check my margin on the right, or on You Tube. The template didn’t give me enough space to tell my story through text, so I added text to some pictures. The key is to keep the text short, because some pictures are in view only a short time (the template will even tell you for how long). You can add or delete photos and play the video until you achieve the perfect result.
When you’re done, add it to your web page, show it off on your Facebook page, upload it to Youtube, or just watch it by yourself at night, reminding yourself that your book is a reality.
By the way, you can just as well do this on the computer or on an iPod or on you phone. You just need to find the right applications. And by the way, it only takes a few hours of tinkering with your new apps to learn how to use them proficiently. Once you do, you’ll be able to use your new skills until your writing affords you a full team of publicists to do the job for you.
If you have any question regarding the apps I used and how to work them, leave a comment. Or just let me know how you like the result.
Published a book? Well done. You started months ago building a twitter base of followers, collecting facebook likes, feverishly writing blog posts. Now is the time to unleash your creation upon the world. You send facebook updates, participate in blog tours, plaster your book details onto Twitter, and organize giveaways on Goodreads.
But why is this so hard? You should be laughing all the way to the bank, but the sales aren’t as copious as you’d hoped. What are you doing wrong?
Clearly, there could be any number of reasons. Perhaps your book doesn’t strike a nerve. Maybe that’s the way things go for new authors.
Or maybe you’re sabotaging yourself.
What is this thing we call promotion?
Promotion isn’t about selling. Selling is what Amazon and Barnes & Noble do. Promotion is about communication. Dialogue. A two-way exchange of communication.
So stop shouting already! You’re annoying people. Hasn’t your momma taught you manners?
If you shout, no one is going to hear you. Try talking to people. Starting with why a reader should buy your book. Because you’re loud? Because you’ve written it? Uh-uh. Not gonna happen.
The crucial issue in promotion is that it takes the participation of two parties. This applies not just to writers, by the way.
I helped a couple of authors increase their fan base, and ultimately sales, with what I learned in my one-year marketing course combined with a dash of good old common sense. There’s no telling what you can achieve by following the same simple rules.
So, what do you do?
First of all, have you picked the correct partner to engage? Buying 20,000 followers on Twitter means nothing if they aren’t readers. Does your blog address readers or fellow authors? If you mainly feature writing advice, don’t panic. Writers are avid readers, so all is not lost. But don’t forget which side of their personality you’re appealing to.
Of course you need a platform. A stable base where people can find out about you, about your book, about what makes you tick. Which social media outlet is best? Your Twitter profile is not that place. Facebook? Better. Amazon and Goodreads author pages? Great. But the best platform is your website. Let me try it this way. Your website is the link, or the interface, between your readers’ individual space shuttles and the mothership (i.e. the seller of your book). Occasionally you might redirect the link to a cargo ship, like a review site or your Facebook page, but only as a means to ultimately guide the shuttles safely to the mothership’s hangar bays.
So, how have you set up your interface? Is it easy to learn more about you? Are your posts attractive to the right sort of reader? Are your Amazon/B&N links, Facebook like button, newsletter sign-up and follow fields at the top of the page, or does the reader have to wade through lines and lines of old blog posts and affiliated websites?
Next come the channels of communication. Twitter is a rubbish way to sell anything. But it’s fantastically suited for informing. Inform your followers of the release of your book. Let them know about this fantastic post you’ve written or your guest appearance on someone’s website. Facebook, in turn, is a great place for genuinely engaging with readers. Have fun with them. Find out about them. Listen to them. You must know your readers to understand how to communicate with them. Too many writers regard this as a waste of time. It’s not. The key is to invite readers to join you, not to damage their eardrums by yelling them into compliance.
A word of warning. You might gain Facebook likes, but the rate of engagement will be low until you’ve “made it.” Yes, until you’ve joined the big-ish leagues, people won’t give two cents about you. Engaging takes time, and people’s engagement is focused on the big names. Of course it is. Wouldn’t you rather be sitting with the Heathers than with the weirdo new guy? But your effort will not be in vain. Because at some point, your likes will reach a number where you become interesting. The book(s) will take off. This is not the time to act like a spoiled brat and reject those that used to ignore you. No, this is when all your earlier efforts pay off. This is when your early followers start their word-of-mouth campaign. After all, they’ve been with you from the start.
How about the frequency of your promotion activities? Well, at what point do phone calls stop being fun and begin being the acts of a stalker? You’ve written a book? Great. Pick the correct time, ideally after work and toward the weekend, and send your followers a tweet. Perhaps another one a week later. But let’s be honest, everyone’s Twitter feed is filled to the brim with book reviews and self-promos. Be different. Shake things up. Share some cool lines from your book, and someone might be intrigued enough to investigate. Tweet about a cool blog post, and someone might follow the link, like your views and your writing, and check out your book.
It’s not rocket science. Promotion is tough, and you’re probably doing many things right. Just…don’t sabotage your efforts. Okay?
I mean, if you’re an author, you’re also a reader. What tweets do you react to? What makes you buy books? Share with us. We can all do with a little help.
I don’t often autograph copies of my books, which is odd in as far as I’m also a collector of modern signed first editions. I’m the proud owner of signed copies of The Graveyard Book, Name of the Wind, Painted Man/Warded Man, Eragon, Skulduggery Pleasant, Underground Railroad, The Bone Season, Kim Harrison, Child 44, a number of signed anthologies, and many, many more.
