Tag Archive | twitter

BUY MY BOOK!!! – Is Shameless Self-Promotion Good or Bad?

Sep27

I can hear the drumroll already.  My debut Indie published book will be coming out any day now.  I’ve got the cover, I’ve had it edited, I’m just putting on the finishing touches and formatting.  Soon, very soon, The Loyal Heart will be out there in the world!  Fly, baby, fly!

Okay, so what do I do about it now?  I’m not fool enough to think that people will flock to read a brand new book by a completely unknown author choosing to publish it themselves.  J.K. Rowling I am not.  But I would like more than just my friends and family to read it.  So what’s a girl to do?

Uh oh.  Looks like it’s time for shameless self-promotion.

Well, I’ve got my author platform well under way, right?  I’ve got this blog that I love, my Twitter account full of Tweeps who have become good friends and sources of inspiration and motivation, and I have my Facebook page with hundreds of likes from like-minded people (and that pun makes me very happy =D).  I’m not resting on my laurels with any of these elements of author platform-ness either.  I’m going to keep at it, yes I am.

But is that enough?

No one has ever mistaken me for a patient person.  This is especially true when it comes to watching the way some people choose to promote themselves and their writing online.  I cringe at anything that comes off as spammy.  I double-cringe when authors tweet and retweet and retweet “Buy my book! Only 99 cents on Amazon!  Here’s the link!” constantly.  I get uncomfortable when people post a lot of reviews of their book to their Facebook page.

But now that my baby is about to be out there I am coming around to a whole different way of thinking about these sorts of things.

How does an Indie Author promote their work?  How does a Trad Author promote their work for that matter?  If you’ve made it to the top 5% your name promotes it for you.  But if you’re like 95% of the rest of us how do you do it?  Team Trad has the advantage of a big promotion machine.  Team Indie doesn’t.  So what do you do?

I think, my friends, that you have to get down in the trenches, roll your sleeves up, get your hands dirty and spam.  Not excessively, mind you, but I think there comes a time in every Writer’s life when you have to put up the post that says “Buy my book!  I swear you’ll like it!  Here’s the link…”  I think you do have to get in people’s face to let them know you’re there.

Now I’m not saying that you should get in people’s faces and shout and wave your arms and attempt to stay in their face even when they try to look away.  That crosses the line to obnoxious.  But you do have to put yourself out there.

One of the best examples of an author who got very subtly in my face and whose book I ended up buying because of it is Tania Tirraoro.  I started following her on Twitter (@TaniaLT) because she was a fellow Writer in a similar genre.  Well, right there in her Twitter profile she has a link to her book on Amazon.  She also has some concise, friendly information about who she is.  Tania tweets book promos, yes, but she also tweets generally nice things.  And not too often.  She self-promotes without screaming or spamming.  High five for Tania!

There are some other people, whose names I won’t mention, who self-promote so long and so hard that I unfollowed them.  Yes, I KNOW you have nine books out in e-formats, but please don’t tell me about each one every day.  That deserves a yellow card for excessive spamming.  But, and this is the problem, I am now very much aware that those Indie Pubbed books are out there.  Granted, I’m not going to buy them, but I know they exist, unlike 99.9% of other Indie books.

So now it’s got me thinking….  How did I find my favorite authors in the first place and what can I do to emulate what they did that enabled me to find them?

Unfortunately for Team Indie, I think I first stumbled across Elizabeth Hoyt, Lisa Kleypas, and Elizabeth Boyle because the covers of their books were the most appealing ones in the book store.  But with eBooks there is no cheerfully lit book store with music playing and a Starbucks in house for me to enjoy while perusing shelves of brightly colored books.  And while yes, cover designs are super important and can pop out from the pages and pages of books of all publication type online, you can sort through thousands and thousands of web pages full of eBooks without skimming the surface of what’s out there.  To get bumped up to the first hundred or so pages of Amazon you need to have had people read and review your books to begin with.

This brings us back to shameless self-promotion.

Sometimes you gotta do it.  But you have to do it with finesse and you can’t make it your sole purpose for being online.  You have to kiss hands and shake babies … wait, strike that, reverse it.  But most of all, I think you have to be patient.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  Neither was J.K. Rowling.  I don’t expect to sell thousands of novels a day or a week or a year.  Honestly, I don’t expect to break even.  But I’m going to try.

So what are your favorite strategies for shameless self-promotion for your book?  What things do you see people doing that drive you nuts?

Follow the Leader – How Should We Use Social Media?

Aug30

By now I’m sure every Writer out there and everyone who gets sucked into a conversation with a Writer knows about the massive changes in the publishing industry, the brewing battle, as it were, between Trad and Indie publishing, and the importance of creating an online platform to market yourself as a Writer.  Everyone knows that the onus is on Writers to promote themselves, whether they have a major publishing company and a contract behind them or whether they go it on their own.  These things are all givens.

But what do we actually do with this glut of information?  I mean, I had a fantastic time last Friday swirling down the rabbit hole of Novel Publicity’s    Author Karma Friday Facebook like-a-thon.  It was awesome.  My Like-man-ship doubled in one afternoon and I gained several Twitter followers as well.  But dear Lord was it overwhelming!  It was like hosting a party and having ten times the people I expected show up.  I was terrified I would run out of food, people would get drunk and puke on the carpet, and cars would get parked on the lawn.  I’ll recover though.  It was a damn good party!

So here I am on the proverbial morning after with an online social media platform hangover.  What to do with all this information….

So far I’ve noticed that author social media platforms tend to be a bit incestuous.  We cater to each other.  Writers follow writers.  We get out numbers up and feel happy.  We blog about our writing and our experiences.  And this is all awesome.  I love reading about people who jumped into this same boat with me.  But there’s something, a niggling little thing way back in the corner of my brain, that questions the reasons for the party.

In surfing all the Facebook pages of my new friends I found a wide variety of intent in creating a social media presence.  There were the folks who’s single-minded aim seems to be to promote their book.  Awesome.  I’ve got a book coming out at the end of September myself and I appreciate the need to market it.  But some of these sites left me feeling a bit hollow.

Then there were the sites of authors who appear to be hard at work creating an image for themselves.  Is this branding?  Perhaps.  A lot of these pages were quite gothic.  They had a strong visual impact and a clear message.  Granted, a lot of the ones I came across were dark and, dare I say it, indulgent.  Of course my opinion about that could be shaded by the fact that I’m not really into the whole paranormal or urban fantasy thing.  But does branding really mean playing make-believe with your image or is that role best played by the characters in your books?

The pages I really loved were clean-cut, had pictures of the author in question as the profile pic (as opposed to pics of the books which, strangely, didn’t appeal to me at all) and included personal status updates and touches.  I felt like these were people pages, not marketing tools.  And of course as a devotee of Kristen Lamb’s book We Are Not Alone: A Writer’s Guide To Social Media, this makes perfect sense to me.  These are the authors who are seeking to connect as themselves, make me see them as people.  I like it!  Of course that’s part of the point.  I like it.  Not everyone will.  It’s subjective to the core.

Okay, so where does that leave me and the people I follow online and everyone else eager to establish a platform for themselves in hopes of hitting pay-dirt as a Writer?  Should we throw parties for each other or should we go out looking to crash other people’s parties?

I think the answer is to do both.

Following and being followed by other Writers is like going to a family reunion.  We all have common bonds.  We come from the same background.  We’re dealing with the same crazy Uncle Trad who is a little schizophrenic and doesn’t quite understand what all those wild young people are doing with their crazy Indie books and weird way of dressing.  (But since Uncle Trad is the moneybags in the family and we all want to be in that will we humor him)  It’s a grand old time, even if Grandma tells the same three stories every time we all get together.

But you’re not going to get a date at a family reunion.  At least I hope not!  To get a date you need to go to other parties.  You need to venture outside your circle and look for folks who share common interests with you.  That’s why I routinely search for keywords like “medieval”, “romance”, and even “renaissance faire” and “SCA” on Twitter and WordPress.  The book I’ve got coming out in September is a medieval historical romance told in a modernish voice, a la A Knight’s Tale, so those are the people I think would like it.  Those are the parties I need to go to right now.

We go to our family for support.  We look elsewhere for consummation.  Both are important.  So if we’re going to ace this whole author online platform thing we need to make sure we’re going beyond Author Karma Friday and looking for People Who Like Medieval Things Wednesday or SCA Saturday, if you’re me that is.  You get the point.  Again, we all know this.  Consider this my friendly reminder to get out there and crash some parties.

Ten Random Things About Me

Aug24

There is a fun little game of tag going around the blogging community right now, and I’ve been poked by the awesome Samantha Warren (@_SamanthaWarren). To play, you simply need to be poked by someone. Then you list 10 random facts about yourself and tag four more people. Here are my random facts. Hope you enjoy!

1.  I have the world’s worst luck with men.  Seriously.  Bad timing, a few bad choices, and stupid extenuating circumstances.  Plus I always seem to fall for guys who are taken.  It would be sit-com worthy if it wasn’t so un-funny.  =P

2.  I suffered from severe agoraphobia starting when I was in elementary school.  It got worse up until 9th grade when I finally started cognitive therapy.  I’m perfectly fine now.  My 16 year old self would never have believed I’d be completely un-agoraphobic at age 37!  But…

3.  I am still terrified of throwing up.  Haven’t puked since 1995 in spite of a couple bouts of flu and food poisoning.  I WILL NOT PUKE!!!

Speaking of illnesses…

4.  In November of 2009 I had Swine Flu and a kidney stone … at the same time.

5.  While laying on my couch barely conscious and in excruciating pain for 4 days with said Swine Flu and kidney stone I watched three seasons of The Office back-to-back.

6.  I hate the way my teeth look in photos.  They’re HUGE!  They may be straight, but they take over my entire face when I smile.  Meh!

Speaking of teeth…

7.  I went to the dentist in April.  I hadn’t been to the dentist in 10 years.  I had ZERO cavities!  Ha ha!  I also still have my wisdom teeth.

8.  I love, love, love super large families.  Probably because I have a grand total of ONE immediate family member (my brother whom I love and whose teeth, as you can see, do not take over his face in photos).  Our dad left when I was 6 and my brother was 3.  Our mom died of breast cancer in 2001.

9.  I am fascinated by different religions and have read the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, part of the Book of Mormon, and various other holy books.  Guess what?  They all essentially say the same thing with different wrapping paper.  I completely don’t understand the idea of religious intolerance.

10.  I’m psychic.  I used to do readings for people but I stopped when I correctly foresaw someone’s death.  It was really upsetting.  Along those psychic lines, I feel sick for days before a natural disaster happens.  That earthquake in Virginia?  I felt terrible Monday and yesterday until it hit.  Then I felt fine.  I did the same thing with the earthquakes in Haiti & Chile and the one in Indonesia that caused the tsunami.  True story.

And now I tag:

Lady Antimony http://ladyantimony.blogspot.com
Linda Burke http://lindaburkewriter.wordpress.com/
Dana Britt  http://mywindowswideopen.wordpress.com/
Jamila Sinlao http://jamilajamison.wordpress.com

Twitter: Are You Doing It Right?

Aug23

I love you guys.  I really do.  You know I do.  I love my #mywana #wewrite #amwriting and more hashtags friends on Twitter.  You guys keep me motivated and cheer me up when I get down.  But I gotta tell you, some of you … Dude, you’re doing it all wrong.

And I admit this is all my opinion, BUT….

You know how sometimes you say something to someone off-the-cuff and when you stop to think about it later you realize that it was more profound than you intended it to be?  I like to think of these statements as coming from a higher power that just happened to find your mouth as you opened it.  Well, I said something to a Twitter friend last week like this when she complained about someone who had DMed her with a rude message telling her off for not retweeting his posts and promoting his book more.  I said to her that the point of Twitter is to make friends, not billboards.

I stand by that statement.  Twitter is for making friends, not billboards.

If you haven’t read Kristen Lamb’s book We Are Not Alone: A Writer’s Guide to Social Media then you need to drop whatever you’re doing and go out there to get it.  Kristen does a very good job of walking you through all the necessary steps to maximize your social media presence and persona.  It’s invaluable information.  I’ve run across people on Twitter who I wish I could hand a copy and say “Don’t come back until you’ve read this eCover to eCover.”  Because there are some common mistakes out there that are so easily avoidable.

Mistake Number One:  You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.  I have the uncomfortable feeling that some people out there think that signing up for Twitter and following a bunch of people entitles them to follow-backs and retweets.  I worry that these folks go on the hunt for followers, not friend.  They get really tetchy when they feel like they’re not getting what they deserve.  But the thing is, none of us deserves anything.  Following people on Twitter is not some magical key entitling you to be promoted.  We have to promote ourselves.

Which leads me to…

Mistake Number Two:  Spam.  I think it’s wonderful that there are Writers out there in the Twitterverse who have written and published novel in various formats.  I’m super happy for you all.  However, reminding me on an hourly basis that your book is on sale now doesn’t make me want to buy it.  Sort of the opposite.  Also, it’s a wonderful thing that there are folks out there who enjoy promoting other authors.  But ten RTs back-to-back obliterates the effectiveness of all of them.  I’ll be honest, when I see someone fill up my feed with a dozen posts like this I ignore all of them.  That’s not the point.

I think there must be a magic equation out there, the fine line between broadcasting and spam.  I love it when people retweet interesting blog posts or links to buy books, but one at a time, with a little discrimination (the good kind I mean).  I’m far more likely to click on a retweeted link if it stands on its own as a genuine recommendation, not just a link in a chain that hurts my eyes.

Mistake Number Three:  Standoffish Profiles.  Here’s another pet peeve.  I hear about someone on Twitter I’d like to follow.  I go to their Twitter Profile.  It includes the words “I don’t auto-follow back”.  Congratulations, you’ve just told me that if I follow you I will get nothing out of the relationship and that you will view me as just another number.  You’ve insulted me before we’ve even met.  I don’t care if you don’t auto-follow back or not, but advertising that fact is like saying “Here is a fantastic Rolex watch that you will never be able to afford so don’t bother looking through my shop window”.  You don’t have to auto-follow back anyone.  But you also don’t have to be a jerk about it.  And besides, your ratio of followers to following tells me clearly that you don’t follow many people, so why rub salt in the wound?  I also tend to shy away from following people who have hugely disproportionate numbers of followers to following, unless they’re a name I recognize.  Why?  Funny you should ask because….

What are we all doing here on Twitter?

We’re networking.  Social networking.  I prefer to focus on the SOCIAL in social networking.  Because as Kristen explains in her book, people want to buy books from folks that they know and with whom they have a personal connection.  Well, that’s the technical explanation.  Me personally?  I like people.  I mean, I really like people.  I’ve been online participating in social-type forums since my first computer in 1997.  I have met some super-fabulous-awesome people online.  In 2000 I flew cross-country to meet up with a group of folks from a social website I was part of and had one of the most fun, memorable vacations of my entire life.  I have sent and received care packages across oceans and continents to “imaginary friends” in exotic places that I’ll be lucky if I can visit someday.  And you know what?  Nothing makes me happier than sending words of encouragement to my fellow Twitterati when they’ve reached a milestone, are having a bad day, or just type “hi” in their Twitter feed.  It’s all about people.

So ask yourself: “Why am I on Twitter?”  There’s no harm in answering, “Because I want to sell my book”.  But if that’s your only answer, if you aren’t approaching this wonderful medium with a grander sense of community and caring, are you really using it to its fullest potential?  I would argue that if you’re using Twitter as a tool for promotion rather than a conduit to reach people then you’re doing it wrong.

And right now I have the deep urge to buy the world a Coke and teach it how to sing….

Battling Your Writing Demons

Aug5

I’m not gonna lie to you.  Yesterday on Twitter Angela James, Executive Editor for Carina Press tweeted several comments that her editors had made on rejected manuscripts using the hashtag #editreport stating why they were rejected . . . and I felt totally inadequate.  I had to stop and consciously remind myself that I was not the one who wrote those rejected manuscripts.  Those comments were not directed at me.  It was a Herculean effort of will.

Because they could be directed at me.

One of the major terrors of being a writer is the sheer volume of rejection we all get.  On the one hand, the very essence of what we do is subjective.  I write and enjoy reading Historical Romance and Sci-Fi with romantic elements.  I do not write nor do I enjoy reading Paranormal or Urban Romance nor do I enjoy Erotica (I learned the hard way, no pun intended, that there is a world of difference between a juicy sex scene, which I love, and erotica, which I do not).  I like some authors much more than others.  It’s all about styles, about personality, and about squishy things like feelings.  I’m well aware that my writing style is not to everyone’s liking.  But that in itself is the stuff of my nightmares.

I absolutely understand the things that Angela was tweeting about craft faults.  Bad grammar, poor story structure, and irregular pacing are one thing.  I can accept that kind of criticism.  In fact, my current WiP is a minefield of fuzzy motivations, underdeveloped characters, and a plot that is so off track at the moment that I want to cry when I think about it.  But it’s a first draft.  I will fix it.  We can fix those things.  Several of the other comments from editors were about flat characters, unsatisfying endings, and lack of credibility in overall plot or specific scenes.  Without having actually seen the works in question I began to worry where the line of objective faults and subjective matters of taste lay and where it was crossed.

Herein lies the nightmare.

The rational part of me knows that editors are professionals.  They know what they’re doing.  They have read oodles of manuscripts, bad and good, and they are on top of their game.  Which comforts me … until I buy a book and find myself torn between plucking my eyes out with a fork and continuing to read the drivel that somehow made it into print.  And I begin to wonder … How could this crap get published instead of my work of art?  Ah, hubris!

The partial answer to that raging question is FEAR.  Just as you can’t win the lottery unless you buy a ticket, you can’t score a book deal unless you submit your manuscript for torture … I mean consideration.  I will confess that I have hardly, barely, scarcely tried to submit anything.  There are a lot of reasons for that.  Submitting takes time and I have 1001 hobbies clamoring for my attention.  Yes, I’m really using that as my excuse.  But also, I, Merry Farmer, am afraid of rejection.  (This probably also explains why I’m single, but that’s a whole other blot post)  The crazy thing is that this fear isn’t born out of being rejected because my writing isn’t any good.  The fear is that in spite of writing well I’m terrified that I don’t fit and that the subjective aspect of the submission process will condemn me to a lifetime of being picked last for the dodge ball team (*childhood trauma alert*  I was always picked dead last).

I suspect I am not cowering under this bed alone.

So to all of us out there who struggle not with craft but with self-confidence, we can do this!  If we didn’t believe in ourselves we would never have picked up a pen or turned on a computer in the first place.  We would never have dreamed and shared our dreams with others.  We would never have entertained our friends by weaving wild stories beside the campfire of childhood.  We are writers!  This is in our blood, our soul, our sinew!  It’s not a matter of good or bad writing, acceptance or rejection.  This is a lifelong journey.

Criticism is not there to kill us, even though it might hurt us, it is there to teach us.  The comments made by the editors quoted by Angela were not designed to ridicule or destroy the authors, they were designed to help them improve their art.  It hurts to be told that what you think is your best isn’t good enough, but if it’s not good enough it’s not your best.  You can do better.  The key is to keep going, to challenge yourself, to learn and grow and hone your natural-born talent into everything that it was destined to be.

In musical theater, when an emotion becomes so strong that words can no longer contain it the characters burst into song.  And so I leave you with words to remind you of who you are and why you do this:

To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go,
To right the unrightable wrong,
To love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star.

This is my quest, to follow that star,
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far;
To fight for the right, without question or pause,
To be willing to march into Hell for a Heavenly cause.
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this;
That one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star!

We are writers!  Let’s get out there and write!