Spreading the word about your novel

[tgmiko]

Hi Folks,

Before I go on my question/rant/plea for help/latest round of self-pity, I want to thank all of you out there, starting with Ted, for having this forum, and for helping. You guys have gotten me where I am, now. Seriously, I really appreciate it.

Okay, here's my question: what are you doing to get the word out there about your book(s)?

I have done many disparate if not desparate things, and am not getting traction, but first a little background: Amateur Hour is a fun romp. It's about nuclear terrorists, good guys in white hats vs bad guys in black hats, etc within the context of The War on Terror. Okay, so I am competing with a lot of other guys who write manly-man adventure novels of this sort, and have not been able to get any Tom Clancy types, their agents, or publishers to give me the time of day. [actually, at least Jim DeBiase wrote me a nice email]

So then, a real-life plot was uncovered that PERFECTLY mirrored the book, as if I had predicted the future. The parallels were astonishing. There isn't enough hyperbole in the dictionary to cover how well my action adventure novel was carried out in real life by 3 knuckleheads who live(d) [in the past tense, now they live in jail] 3 miles from my house. So when I saw the newspaper articles when these 3 guys got arrested, I emailed and called the various reporters at all of the newspapers and radio stations who covered this story, because I was CONVINCED that one or more of them would want to interview me, and this, of course, would send sales through the roof. I would be famous. I was the guy who predicted this, and whose warnings went unheeded!
Nothing.
Nada.
Zip.
Seriously?
Are you freakin kidding me???
One possible complication: the morons were arrested on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when the entire United States is either on the freeway, or at the airport, on the way to Grandma's house for 4 days of eating, drinking, arguing, crying, more arguing, and yelling at the football referee on TV who made a bad call.

I did get one reporter from one local paper sorta kinda interested, and he asked me to give him a hard copy of Amateur Hour, because "I work on computers all day" so I paid a print shop to print a hard copy and bind it, using the same cover that is on the ebook. I hand-delivered it to him, but he never followed up.

Now, on to Roadside Rest

SPOILER: Click to show

: it's half as many pages as Amateur Hour, and very different. It's about a female army sergeant who loses her leg in Iraq. Two thirds of the book takes place in a small town in Arizona, and over the last few months I have been hoping that the editor of that town's newspaper would get one of his employees to read it, and write a review. Today he wrote me an email that none of them is willing to do it, so it ain't gonna happen. We wrote back and forth over the course of the day, and it was what I feared: his female employees can't get past the first part of the book, where she wakes up severely wounded, then her rescue is botched, and an Iraqi tries to rape her while she's still strapped to her stretcher. He does not succeed, and she is rescued a second time.
Here's the thing: I have a female friend who was raped when she was 16, and she told me that she would rather read Amateur Hour, and because of what happened in her teens she doesn't want to read Roadside Rest. Hey, I totally understand, but right now it feels like no women at all want to read Roadside Rest because they can't stomach it--and I want to emphasize this: that part isn't nearly as graphic, descriptive, and horrible as you're thinking, while reading this. That, and the fact that she successfully fights off her attacker, despite her grave wounds. To rub salt in my wounds, a lot of men, especialy male veterans don't want to read it because "It's about a girl." Wow, that is such an insult to the tens of thousands of female soldiers, sailor, and marines on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. My frustration is that women should WANT to read this book because it is about a strong, independent woman who fights, survives, and succeeds, despite the fact that she has become handicapped.
I am asbolutely sure that many of you reading this post have the same feeling in your gut that I do that "If only a small number of people would read my book, the word would spread like wildfire."

I have tried using FaceBook to get the word out about my books. Nothing. I did do something, though:I just paid several hundred dollars to have a color ad put into the American Birding Association's January edition i.e. for one month my flashing, colorful ad for Roadside Rest will be at the top of each page of www.aba.org/ , hopefully starting January 1st.

Also, there are 2 veterans that I know who have a lot of FaceBook friends and Twitter followers who have stated that they want to help. All things considered, maybe the whole social media thing is a big waste of my marketing time. Maybe BJ Mendelson was right. Even when it comes to that small town newspaper that doesn't want to write the review, maybe I shouldn't be so frustrated because it's "only" a small town paper with a small circulation. Mendelson says that the only way to get your product (your book, your rock album, your flower shop) out there is through plain, old-fashioned advertizing in the mainstream media, and that all of this hype about how you can use the internet for free (I am referring to FaceBook etc, NOT this forum, or smashwords.com!) is a bunch of baloney that is making Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin rich, while the rest of us are gnashing our teeth...

[anita]

Having read through your post, I'd have to say that you aren't doing enough with social media to get the word out about your book. Social media doesn't begin and end with Facebook.

Who is your target audience? Men? Women? Birders? Do birders tend to be females? (I don't know the answer, but I suspect that you do!)

You've done well to target the ABA website, but there are a lot of people that seem to be interested in birding when I look at what folks pin/post on Pinterest. Lots of people seem to share photos of pretty bird varieties. Pinterest has been called 'Facebook without the drama.' It is a growing social media, rather than a fading one like Myspace. Most of the participants are women. If you are targeting women with your book, that is the place to have a presence.

That does not mean that you should just post information about your book, but that you should post info relating to birding to draw the birders in. You can post a link to your book on Smashwords, Amazon or wherever else it can be found. You can post links to info about the best birdseed mixtures to attract certain songbirds, and other helpful information.

You can also use Twitter to attract birders to your book. Tweet out helpful birding information, your website addy with a clever message to hook them in and you can even tweet out the pins that you have on Pinterest. I used to think that tweeting was a waste of time and thought it was only for the Hollyweird types. Instead, I have learned that there are all sorts of people on Twitter that are interested in all types of things and not just which Khardashian was featured in a sextape. There are also services like Hootsuite and TweetAdder that can automate this process so that you can tweet out on a schedule, regardless of what else you might be involved in. I send about 20 tweets per day and only physically compose one on my iPhone a few times per week!

I have found that this combination helps to sell books. (BTW- I don't tweet about the Erotica that I write...just the straight novels!)

Assuming that you are also a fan of birding, you could also seek out forums where that is the topic. You could lure people to your books through a link in your signature (if allowed) or mention from time to time that you are an author that writes novels where birding figures prominently.

Back to Facebook... It has historically been my least productive means of advertising, but I have also underutilized it. I am now using it to support my presence. I don't think that it is helping to sell any books, but it is necessary to post something a couple of times per week in order to keep it relevant. If you blog, include the RSS feed to automatically post to your Facebook page. Automation is your friend and it frees you up to do other tasks!

My website is another underutilized resource. I recently revamped it and made sure that there was up-to-date content on it. If I do a Podcast Radio interview, I include the link. There is a link to all of my blogposts, a shortcut to my Facebook page and a Follow me on Twitter sign. I also have the share icon that encourages people to share content on my pages to Tumblr, Blogger, etc...This causes all of your social media to work together. Include links to a few relevant things that visitors to your site might want to purchase, not just your books. This could be as easy as becoming an affiliate marketer for birding scopes, and birdcalls. In this way, you diversify your income streams.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on the topic of Klout. If you don't know what it is, you should visit their site and learn as much as you can. I signed up with Klout about 9 months ago. I didn't understand it and I just left it alone. I recently received a better description of what it does and am actively seeking to improve my Klout score. Klout measures your social media influence. It works like a credit score and can help you to determine what raises your profile in the eyes of others. A good score is above 50. A lower score means that you have some work to do. These articles might help to explain it better than I can:

mashable.com/2011/12/20/how-to-increase-klout-score/

www.pcworld.com/article/254778/how_to_increase_your_klout_score.html

Since I write my straight novels under my real name, I don't want them to be negatively tainted by my erotica. If that weren't the case, I would share my website, Facebook, Klout and Twitter accounts with you so you could see the way that I integrate them. I just started paying attention to my Klout score in late November (It was 50)and found that it is now a 52! It isn't where I want it to be yet, but it is pretty high considering that it wasn't a goal that I knew to strive for. Incidentally, Justin Bieber has a perfect score of 100, while President Obama has a score of 93!

[Ted]

Marketing is a long, slow slog which often doesn't return results for weeks or months. If an author is lucky enough to find a reader who becomes an evangelist of his/her work then word of mouth will propel sales.

If the first part of a book is turning off readers, then consider moving the offending bits lower into the story so that the reader is captured by the initial section and perhaps won't be as turned off by the offending section(s) appearing later on in the story.

Review pricing structure with your competitors. If the popular price point for 100,000+ word ebooks is $3.99 - $5.99 then price your work within that range. Usually the higher priced works are by well-known authors who left a traditional publisher and decided to self-publish.

If you haven't already done so, join a local writers group and meet other authors - new or established - and listen to what they've tried in the way of marketing.

According to Mark's slide-share presentation - www.slideshare.net/Smashwords/mark-cokers-ebook-self-publishing-workshop - indies earn more at lower prices than if they were with a traditional publisher. He gives the example of an indie ebook at $2.99 earning an author $1.80 whereas to earn the same amount from a traditional publisher the work would have to sell for $10.25.

Mark goes on to say that lower prices leads to more readers which leads to more income. Duh.

When marketing your work don't spam it all the time. Authors are a brand, so protect it. I never read or click on a link that is mainly a promotional spam, except perhaps on Twitter as that is designed as a spam delivery system.

Both my Facebook and Twitter accounts are purely for promotional purposes and I use them only for that purpose. I place links to The Economist magazine or some other news story, I place links to an article on my blog, and I place links to my ebooks now and then.

I try to find an hour or two a week to visit my Facebook or Twitter accounts and post something, usually visiting the sites only for a few minutes at a time.

I don't do any paid advertising because at my ebook price range - $0.99 to $1.99 - I'd have to sell tens of thousands of ebooks just to get back the money I would spend on advertising.

When I studied marketing many years back as part of my business courses there was a rule of thumb then which still applies; nobody sees an ad before it's been shown to them 6 times. That is why you see the same ad over and over and over. It's not because the ad is expensive to create (which they usually are) but that an advertiser has to bang the viewer over the head a gazillion times before the viewers brain retains the info and 'may' decide to act and purchase the product or service.

[tgmiko]

Thank you Anita and Ted! I am already doing some of this. If I lower the price at Smashwords will the old price also still be visible, making me look like a loser who couldn't sell his books? Also, will the price drop automatically carry over to the places where smashwords sells us as premium e.g. iStore and barnesandnoble.com ?

[Ted]

Jan 3, 2013 22:31:36 GMT -8 tgmiko said:

Thank you Anita and Ted! I am already doing some of this. If I lower the price at Smashwords will the old price also still be visible, making me look like a loser who couldn't sell his books? Also, will the price drop automatically carry over to the places where smashwords sells us as premium e.g. iStore and barnesandnoble.com ?

Price changes are automatic on Smashwords and are sent to Premium retailers. No, your former price won't show beside the new price.

[tgmiko]

Jan 3, 2013 23:26:59 GMT -8 Ted said:

Jan 3, 2013 22:31:36 GMT -8 tgmiko said:

Price changes are automatic on Smashwords and are sent to Premium retailers. No, your former price won't show beside the new price.

Thanks! I will seriously consider dropping the price down to the $3 or $4 range. Before I set the price, I did my own hands-on research: I walked up to a bunch of strangers who were reading e-Books, and asked them what price range they were willing to pay for a novel. They said things like $12, and the big-name authors' ebooks sell for $12 to $16 so I figured that $9 i.e. $8.99 was a great compromise: less than the known authors, but not so inexpensive that readers would assume that I was desparate to sell a 2nd-rate book. In other words, if it costs that much, it must be good.

[Ted]

Jan 6, 2013 12:27:03 GMT -8 tgmiko said:

Jan 3, 2013 23:26:59 GMT -8 Ted said:

.... but not so inexpensive that readers would assume that I was desparate to sell a 2nd-rate book. In other words, if it costs that much, it must be good.

Buying exclusivity by setting a high price works with high quality diamonds and 10K prostitutes, but not for ebooks by indie-authors.

Low price doesn't equal desperation. Look at Walmart. Do they seem desperate? Or smart?

Most of my works are $1.99 or $0.99 because they are short or in the ballpark price of similar ebooks.

I could have set my prices initially at $2.99 or above just so I could earn 70% royalty at Amazon, but I didn't want to ripoff Kindle owners by charging a very high price for a very short ebook.

So I end up with steady sales and earning less royalty on each book from Amazon, which is in 4th place in overall sales for me last year and very close to 5th place, and more than make up lost royalties through sales at other retailers.

With the thousands of free Kindle ebooks roaming the world, because of KDP Select program, it is becoming harder every day for authors to entice readers to buy an ebook for a Kindle, let alone a high priced ebook.

Setting a reasonable price at the start is the hardest part of the initial process. Set it too high and you get no sales. Set it too low and you end of with lots of sales and wondering if you shouldn't have set it just a tad higher.

I was sold/developed real estate for many years and was taught the importance of setting the right price to begin with. Yes, you can always come down - a bit - and not look like you're selling a lemon. But setting a higher price works only when emotion of the prospective purchaser(s) overrides common sense.

[alanjames]

Here's an idea that seems to work for me. I have made up hundreds of business cards with my book info and smashwords.com in large font. I have found that almost all large grocery stores and strip malls have community bulletin boards that allow you to post them. Also, when I buy a pizza or go to almost any restaurant, I look for plastic business card holders at the counter. I usually slip a few into these places. Hand them out everywhere and anywhere the conversation turns to reading. If you include a discount code, you can track the usefulness of this technique.

[Ted]

Jan 13, 2013 18:24:54 GMT -8 alanjames said:

Here's an idea that seems to work for me. I have made up hundreds of business cards with my book info and smashwords.com in large font. I have found that almost all large grocery stores and strip malls have community bulletin boards that allow you to post them. Also, when I buy a pizza or go to almost any restaurant, I look for plastic business card holders at the counter. I usually slip a few into these places. Hand them out everywhere and anywhere the conversation turns to reading. If you include a discount code, you can track the usefulness of this technique.

I do the same, and my cards have a QR code for Smartphones etc.