How I choose books - and what that might mean for my own marketing

 

Or if you want to sell your books to me.

I buy lots of books. I have 117 pages of unread books on my Kindle. These include classics, literary texts, holiday reads, books by people I know, non-fiction mainly to do with areas I’m researching, books on creativity, books like the ones I’m trying to write, and books on the craft of writing. I’ve probably missed out come categories. Some texts are in French, German or Spanish.

Here I analysed how I’ve come to buy these books and I put these influencers in order.  Then I look at what that might imply for the way I should market my own books.

Reading what I know

If I come across a book by an author I’ve read before, and if I’ve enjoyed their work, I’ll generally buy – or borrow from the library – their new book once I’m aware of it. Here’s an interesting example:

I bought a really tatty copy of Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy from a second-hand bookshop. I enjoyed it so much that I went to read all of her books, sometimes buying them as hardbacks as soon as they came out.

I’ll also often buy books written by people I know, sometimes even if they’re not quite the sort of thing I’d normally enjoy reading.  It’s called friendship.

 

Book events

I really enjoy these events though I do only tend to go to the ones where the sort of book I’m likely to like is being presented. Listening to the author read, finding out the story behind the book and seeing it there is its 3D reality normally persuades me to buy it.

 

Lists in my mailbox

I’m on a couple of email lists and bookshops like Amazon and The Hive and publishers such as Simon Shuster or Penguin Random often email me as well. I sometimes find something I like the look of there. The Hive is particularly good at knowing what I would like.

 

Social media

I’m actually glad that people post about their book releases on Twitter and Facebook. I’m not obliged to buy the ones that don’t interest me. I’m glad to be alerted to the ones that might interest me.

 

 

Book reviews in magazines

I often pick up reading ideas in magazine I read. These include, Mslexia, Writing Magazine, The Tome Higher Education Supplement and the Sunday Times.

 

Bookshops

I can’t resist them.  Many a time I’ve gone shopping for clothes and come back with a book.  

So, now you know what to do if you want me to buy your book.  And if I want to find people like me as readers of my work I must:

·         Tell all my friends and acquaintances about my work. This is actually the hardest to do but it is the most effective marketing tool:  WORD OF MOUTH.

·         Arrange a snazzy book event. Okay, it might be a loss leader but I may pick up some of those readers who will buy my work again and again.

·         Build up my email list and use it effectively.

·         Put my work on social media.

·         Get reviews in quality publications. This is tricky. However, both Mslexia and  Writing Magazine offer feature type ads that you pay for.  The prices are reasonable  

·         Approach local bookshops about stocking my book

In that order.

There you have it! Happy reading and marketing!    

Image by InstagramFOTOGRAFIN from Pixabay 

Kaffee und Kuchen for Writers

Kaffee und Kuchen – that very delightful late afternoon German habit. Sumptuous cakes or something a little more modest like apple cake or cheese cake and good coffee.  Plus some engaging conversation and a feeling of celebration.  

Cake, anyway, seems to be a leitmotif with me:

·         I love making them

·         When I was a language teacher one of my line managers always used to provide chocolate cake for our department meetings.

·         I often provide cake for my team meetings.  

·         My creative writing colleagues at the university like a good piece of cake and one of our favourite activities is repairing to a nearby cake shop to try out the wares.

·         A choir to which I belong offers good cake as well as good singing to its audiences and serves it up with tea at every rehearsal.     

·         Afternoon tea, including cake, is my favourite form of celebration.

·         Not to forget the Creative Café Project

Pace- getting it right

I don’t mean here the pace in a story though that is of course important. I’m talking here more about pace in the writer’s life.

The difference between selling and not selling and between being published and not being published

We all probably recognise that that has little to do with the quality of the work. Given that the writing is good, it won’t be published unless it gets to the right publisher at the right time and once published it won’t sell unless both writer and publisher make the right sort of marketing moves. We have to be proactive both in sending out to publishers, in marketing our work and creating helpful publicity around it.

Writers need a strategy

If your writing is good and you have a strategy there is no reason why you shouldn’t be published. You need to be driven enough to stay with your strategy and intelligent enough to realise when it isn’t working and to think of another. Usually it’s actually a matter of adjusting rather than creating new.

My strategy

I do not have a UK agent and I would really like one, though I do actually manage very well without one.  I usually focus on the latest work and will send it to three agents. I am currently in the process of doing that and actually have interest from two.  

Although I have picked out the most suitable to approach first I will replace them as they reject with other likely ones.  I will also reedit the work between rejections.

As soon as three agents have rejected, I also look at small press.

Once the next work is finished I abandon proactive submissions for this one and go on to reactive ones. This is where I look at opportunities as they arise – calls for submission, competitions, new small presses etc. I have to admit this is the area I’ve most been published in. Nevertheless, I’ve built up a good CV this way.

All of this is underpinned by effective networking habits: Twitter, Facebook, blogging, attending events – e.g. SCBWI, Society of Authors, book launches.

Work out your strategy

Answer these questions to work out your strategy:    

What is your vision?

What do you need to do in order to do that?

How often can you do this?

How will you notice your strategy is not working?

Writers don’t just write

In fact, if you become a full time writer, you probably won’t spend any more time writing that you do now. You may spend more time on effective submitting and marketing.

A strategy for marketing?

Oh yes, that is another whole story and deserves a whole blog post to itself. Then there is also a strategy for maintaining balance between writing, submitting and marketing.

Happy writing!         

Which services should self-publishing authors pay for?

More and more people are self-publishing. Print on demand facilities and Amazon’s Kindle have made it extremely easy and you can now do this without the fear of ending up with a garage full of books.

The message seems to be, particularly from writers who have gone the conventional route but who are now resurrecting their out-of-print backlist, that people who self-publish will have to market like mad, but then those published by the Big Six have to do than anyway, and that you should never pay huge sums of money to have your book published.

Some services you need

I agree with the former argument, I’m not so sure I agree with the latter.

Editing

Your book needs editing. Even the best writers need editing and copy-editing and the writers themselves are not the best placed persons to do that. Editing takes time. I’m a publisher as well as being a writer and even a beautifully and competently written 1000 word short story will take me at least 30 minutes to edit. Now think of a patchier 100,000 novel. I can edit, copy-edit and critique, but find it best not to do all three for the same text – especially if I actually wrote the text. Even at minimum wage, you’d soon be racking up the £s. It’s absolutely accepted that freelancers charge more per hour than staff earn per hour – because so much of their time is spent in tendering for more work – and for publishing houses / indie authors they’re still better value for money than employing someone full time.  

£240? Low estimate?  

Designing

Your book needs designing. You may be able to learn how to do this correctly but this will take time. This isn’t just a matter of getting it to look nice. It’s also about making sure that the software that’s going to print the book understands what you want. Different formats require different formatting. The Unicode you use in a Word programme is not supported on Amazon Kindle, for example. Just look what it does to foreign accents. You save a lot of time and effort if you let someone in the know deal with this. Also, if you use a proper designer, they’ll know about all of the conventions.

£120.00  / 12 hours? (after you’ve learnt the ropes?)

Cover design

You can use a stock picture for a few pounds or pence but you’re still need your designer to make sure the title, spine, bar-code and blurb all look right and end up in the right place.  Of course, again, you can learn this yourself but remember this will take time and actually designing each cover will also take time.

£60- £300? 6 hours if using stock photo /art work

Marketing / publicity

Word of mouth always works well but you have to be established. Do you want to get someone to do the nitty gritty – getting out press releases, contacting indie bookshops, nagging W.H Smiths and Waterstones  etc? Or is that just more time you’re willing to steal from your writing day? Buy £150 worth of someone else’s time? Or expertise – they might be better at press releases than you are.   

I’m not counting all the social networking here – we all do that anyway. You’ll have to do that as well.

Book trailer

If you have the expertise, the insight and the time to do this yourself, great, if not I’ve seen people charging €30 - €150 – and much more, I’m sure. They do seem necessary these days.   

When you should pay and when you shouldn’t

To sum up, I’d say most of the above you can learn and if the budget’s tight you could even swap editing procedures with a group of colleagues. Whatever happens,  however, you should own your own ISBNs or you could form a cooperative with writing colleagues.  

If you add the above up, and then throw in the costs for setting-up printing costs you’re around about the £1000 mark. This is remarkably similar to what some self-publishing companies and some vanity publishers charge.

The crucial difference comes in what happens once the book has been set up. If you’ve paid these charges for someone to do all of these activities for your book, that company should have no more profit from it. If they handle the orders for you, fair enough, an admin charge should come in every time. And probably it’s best not to use the same company for each procedure. Employ people according to their strengths.

If you’ve paid those upfront charges you should receive all of the profits.  You have become the publisher. Vanity publishers and less scrupulous self-publishing companies want to charge you an upfront fee and merely give you a royalty. Steer clear of them.

The way forward

The traditional publisher risks those services on you and pays you a royalty on every book sold. These days royalties on electronic books are quite generous. There are still many advantages for going this route to the writer.

Personally I’m enjoying having books published in a variety of different ways – some are by traditional publishers, some are merely on Kindle, some are self-published but in print and some are published by small presses. Diversity is probably healthy anyway these days.                     

 

 

Gentle Marketing for Gentle Footprints

“I think I’ll get my car washed at the gym today,” I say to my husband.
The door bell rings. There are two little girls standing on the step.
“Would you like to have your car washed?” one of them asks.
“Well….” Well, why not? And how did they know? “How much do you charge?” I ask.
“We’ll do it for free if you like,” the other one replies.
No, I can’t do that. That would be child exploitation. “Will a fiver do?” I ask.
They nod eagerly. I remember my daughter used to do exactly this for pocket money about fifteen years ago. She did a much better job than the local car wash.
They do too. I’ve already had the idea of giving them a “tip” in the form of signed copies of two of my books. We also give them all the Tesco’s school vouchers and because one of the girls keeps dropping everything we even supply them with a linen bag that advertises my web site.
“My mum likes books,” says the older of the two girls.
“Well, she’ll like the one that’s come out this week,” I say. I explain all about Gentle Footprints and that my story is about the swans on the Outwood Park pond just opposite the house.
“Oh, yes, they’ve got babies again,” says one of the girls.
Good. I hadn’t seen them for a while. The nest must have been well hidden.
Unfortunately, I have none of the Gentle Footprints postcards left. However, I find a couple from my other books.
“Tell your mum to look out for this book,” I say, writing down the title and ISBN of Gentle Footprints and the address of the Bridge House Publishing web site. “And tell your teachers I’ll come and do a free author talk if they’ll let me sell some of my books.”
Fortunately the girls go to two separate schools. One is still at primary school, the other is already at secondary school.
So, a good marketing opportunity and a clean car to boot.
Late, when I drive to the newspaper shop, I see the girls again. They spot me and immediately take out the books and start reading.

The Three Aspects of Being a Writer

Being a writer isn’t just about being a writer. Writing is important and writing as well as you can is crucial. Yet there are two other activities that you really have to take part in: networking and marketing.
I’ve been doing some of the latter today. I’ve actually done two types. I’ve sent a revamped copy of the first three chapters of a Young Adult book and a synopsis out to an agent. It’s odd how you never send exactly the same out each time. Each time it comes back, you’ve moved on a little and you write differently. I would just so love to get an agent. So, I have to market myself to potential agents.
I’ve also spent some time approaching festivals to attend as a writer. I send pretty much the same basic email out to each one. But I do custom it to what I’ve found out about their festival. It’s only polite to find out as much as you can before you approach the organisers.
It’s always important with these to address people by name if you can. It really helps.
It’s actually quite fun doing it once you have persuaded yourself you can.

More News from a New Publisher

Well, I’ve just formally taken on a publicist, on a profit-share basis. We never make a loss on our books. The authors get 50-60% the profit pro rata between them. We’re giving the publicist 20% of the profit.

One of the big problems for small independent publishers is marketing. We don’t have the connection that the big guys have. We perhaps don’t have the power. But we do have a quality product and we need other people to see that. We need to tap into the six handshake idea. We all know 250 people who all know 250 people which means we’re just six steps away form anyone else. Question is: can we persuade the 250 people we know to buy our book and recommend to the 250 people they know. Of course, the system does fall down a little anyway because some of the 250 people I know are the same as some of the 250 people you know.

I’ve given the new free-lance publicist a to-do list. There’s a clear month for research as there won’t be a lot to do until the end of this month. Then we’re ready to roll again, hopefully, on the two summer publications.

We’re also planning a Writer’s retreat. A weekend, concentrating on the Short Story – especially for writing for the Bridge House Publishing Anthologies.

And there is one definite advantage about being a small publisher – we don’t have the overheads.

It seems like a good start to 2009 to me.

Getting “Making Changes” out there

This is getting quite exciting and quite scary at the same time. Money is rolling in for the London party / launch and for author copies. I now have to start the heavy marketing. I love writing and editing the books. I cringe at the marketing because it’s really facing rejection all over again. Yet it has to be done.
Just think of this, though.
Everyone knows 250 people. Would it be possible to see all 250 of them a copy of our wonderful little book? And isn’t it so good that those 250 would recommend it to the 250 they know? This is the theory that we are just six handshakes away from everyone in the world. Can we start the ball rolling on this one?
We are beginning to roll. There is a book launch arranged in Bangor and in London. I’m about to set one up in Salford. Some people are contacting their local press and radio stations. I want to find a radio station who will broadcast readings of the stories. I’m sending out review copies.
What more can I do? Will it work?

Writing isn't Just Writing

I say this because yesterday was my first day as a full-time lecturer at the University of Salford. Somehow, though, that is part of me being a writer. I’m employed as a writer, and the fact that I have an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing helps.

I spent much of yesterday in front of a computer screen, tapping away at this and that. I was doing all sorts of tasks which belonged to my job as a lecturer, which I have because I am a writer.

I even did some direct writing: I worked for about one hour on a proposal for a book about the Young Adult novel. I didn’t do any direct writing on my own creative projects, though I did check out some blogs of people I met at the weekend. And in my search for conferences to do with creative writing, writing for children and young adult literature, I stumbled across some web sites which gave me some more information about my craft and about other publications in the field.

During the rest of the day, I watched a little children’s television, and did some reading. I think these are both essential for someone who writes for children. I also took up a marketing opportunity. Our local SCBWI organiser is creating a web site showcasing us. She is producing a flyer about the web site for the forthcoming Manchester Literary Festival. I sent her two book covers and some blurb about them, along with links to my site in general, the pages where people can see more about my books and order them, and to my blog.

I did still fit in two hours writing, producing just under 2,000 words. But that is so automatic, it’s like cleaning your teeth. You feel terrible if you don’t do it.

Writing for Triond

This is an interesting concept. You write an article or a piece of fiction and you post it to the Triond web site. They then place it on the most appropriate web site which is monetarised. They take half the income. You can see how many times your article has been visited. People can leave comments and also say that they liked it. It’s another connection with your public.

Half the income might seem a bit steep. However, I’ve often noticed that I spend more time on marketing material than I do on writing it. So, it seems okay to let these guys do that work and I’ll concentrate on the marketing.

I’m not earning a lot this way. In fact, I’m earning considerable less than I was from my own blogs until Google Adsense pulled the plug for reasons I still fail to understand. I think possibly some rival to some firm that was advertising on my site had become trigger happy and made unfair clicks. This could also happen on the sites where Triond post. I expect, though, they have a more sophisticated relationship with their advertisers.

I would have to write a thousand more articles to get anything like a decent wage with this scheme. Still, as with other forms of royalties, they do still keep coming and lots of peanuts make a feast, lots of trickles make a torrent.

You still have to make a marketing effort. Most of the people who read your postings will be people who have a connection with you. Some others will stumble across you. If the content’s good, both sorts of people are likely to come back. The trick is to make that as automatic as possible – put a link in your email signature. Have a link from your blog and from your web site.

I’m forcing myself to write at least one article a week. And I’m putting up anything else I also think of. At least that’s good for my discipline. And it’s not really costing me anything.

Project with Local Primary School

I am working with another school on an anthology of children’s writing. We have a title, “Friends Forever”. I’ve worked on two past occasions on writing and editing with the same school. But the really exciting session is where we have groups of children editing, designing, illustrating and marketing the book.
I think we’re going to end up with a book in the region of 200 pages. I’m now in the process of putting it together. I have to make the final editing decisions and do some copy-editing at the same time. I am astounded at how well crafted some of the work is and how moral and emotionally generous some of these children are. I was amused and touched to read on one piece “Note from editor: these two sections need connecting.” I was also pleased that the editors didn’t pick just the well-presented ones. They went for the ones which had really edgy or deep content. Sadly, I have had to edit a few pieces out as I can’t read them or they are incomplete. Yet the ones which remain are stunning.
The illustrations are fantastic, too. Children really can draw. They lack some techniques, but the content is so uninhibited.
Most of the design group worked on sorting out the order of the sections. I worked with the less focussed, less able students on the book cover design. They were insightful and became very enthusiastic.
The marketing group came up with some incredible ideas – ones that neither I nor Lisa, the teaching assistant who stayed with me, had thought of. And Lisa has a business studies degree!
A fantastic experience all in all.