This And That And The Other

So, today is my day to promote, again, which makes me feel rather on the spot. Since we last talked, I’ve sold a short story (An Answer From The North which will come out in Courts of The Fey, edited by Russell Davis.) Wrote another which I’m in the process of cleaning up (hopefully) for acceptance. I delivered a book – A Fatal Stain – to Prime Crime. I’m hoping to get the sample chapters for that up this weekend. The samples for the other two are here. And I had a few things come out with Naked reader.

First, I want to call your attention to Death Of A Musketeer. Excerpts are here. The trailer video is here.

There is also A Touch of Night, written by Sofie Skapski and myself. The reason we wrote this – Pride, Prejudice and dragons, oh my – is that my Magical British Empire Series wasn’t selling, so we did this to use the world. For fun. An unedited and shorter version is out at austen.com. Of course, the minute we’d written it, the MBE sold to Bantam Spectra.

I have also attended a steam punk con. Yeah, that’s what the picture is all about. It was surprisingly fun. First, possibly because I hadn’t dressed up in years. Second because though it took place on a college campus – though, you say? Though, I reply – the attendees were all bright, engaging and interested young people who actually seemed to read for fun. Why is it “though”? Because with notable exceptions, a lot of young sf fandom seems to be more media and games based. My excuse to be there, of course, was having written the Magical British Empire Trilogy. Samples for which are here. It is a chase for the eye of the goddess in a magical land in which the industrial revolution is underfoot in a way you’ve never seen before, and all shape shifters are illegal and subjected to being killed on sight.

And right now I’m working on finishing Darkship Renegades, which is the sequel to Darkship Thieves. Excerpts for Darkship Thieves live here. Darkship Renegades starts this way:

Out Of The Frying Pan

I was a princess from Earth and he was a rogue spaceman from a mythical world. He saved my life three times. I rescued him from a fate worse than death.
We married and lived happily ever after.
Ever after comes with an expiration date these days. We’d been married less than year when Kit got shot in the head.

And if you're totally at loose ends, let me remind you I give away some short stories and even a collection. If you haven't tried the short stories, read them or download them here. As for the collection, please visit the Baen Free Library and look for my name. Happy reading.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, and the occasional dragon (thought I wouldn't see you, lurking there at the back, uh?) have a good weekend. I shall go imbibe massive quantities of caffeine and work.

(The Picture is courtesy http://Fantascenes.net )

*Due to serious lack of caffeine as well as fact I am finishing a book, this post being echoed over at According To Hoyt*

Promotion, Not Demotion

Last weekend I promised to talk about how to promote your book. I'll admit here and now, I considered backing out. After all, all you need to do is google "how to promote a book" and you get hundreds upon hundreds of hits. Then I started looking at some of the very first pages linked and, after picking myself up off the ground and wiping away the tears from laughing so hard -- yes, some of them were that bad -- I figured maybe I had better start a dialog about promotion.

Mind you, this isn't the end-all, be-all list. What works for one author may not work for another. There are a lot of factors to take into consideration, time and personality being two of the biggest. Ask any author out there and none of them spend as much time as they think they should promoting their work. Why? Because if they did, they'd never have time to write.

Promotion is the evil that exists so you can continue writing books. Promotion drives sales, whether we want to admit it or not. This is especially true for those of us who are just breaking into the business. We don't have the name recognition of mid-list authors, much less best sellers.

So, what are some of the things you can do to promote your book? As Rowena said in her last post, you need a website. Now, this is where I'll diverge some from the general consensus. If you are a new author and this is your first book, you don't need a complete website. A very nice blog, preferably one that will allow you to have different sections or tabs or pages, will fill the bill nicely. This lets you talk about your road to publication, give snippets of the book AND post your cover. You can also link to your publisher, agent -- if you have one, other authors, Amazon, etc. NOTE: If you have a blog, you MUST update it regularly. Readers will come with the expectation of reading new material. If they keep visiting the site and there's nothing new, they will stop coming.

Probably the simplest way to promote your work is to have a signature line using the title of your book. You can make the title a link to where it can be purchased when posting to mailing lists and online fora. But don't make it a live link in emails as that very well might get your email marked as spam.

Be active in on-line groups that share an interest in books like the one you just wrote. If your book is available electronically, take part in the discussion boards that are dedicated to e-books and e-readers. And by being active, I mean doing more than just pushing your book. In fact, at the beginning, you shouldn't mention your book. It's enough that it is there in your signature line. Take part in other discussions. Let the other members of the fora get to know you. Then you can start promoting -- within the guidelines of the board.

Facebook and Twitter -- yes, that was me groaning just now. Social media are, in my opinion, a necessary evil. However, there are ways to keep it from becoming a major drain on your time. That is to set up your blog so it feeds directly into your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Wordpress has this capability. I'm sure others do as well. If your blog doesn't have the capability, then use a program similar to TweetDeck. It lets you "tweet" and posts it to Facebook and, if I remember correctly, other sites you set up as well.

Also, on Facebook -- and on any other social media site -- for it to work as a promotional tool, you have to go outside your sphere of friends and acquaintances. It used to be that a couple of hundred "friends" were enough. Now, if you ask an author or editor or agent, you may be told at least 750 friends or 1,000 or even more. As with your blog, post regularly. But don't be obnoxious about it. Post quotes once or twice a day. Link to a sales site daily. Give a snippet. But don't flood other people's fb page with entries and please, PLEASE, don't post quotes or snippets of your work on another person's wall without their permission.

Giveaways always work. Give copies to reviewers. Hold contests on your blog or fb. Offer free copies on boards such as the kindle boards in return for reviews on Amazon, etc.

Other methods you can use are contacting your local media, sending press releases and even "interviews". Make the acquaintance of your local librarians AND the friends of the library. Offer to do a reading/signing or other activities as a fundraiser for the library. Have freebies such as bookmarks, magnets, etc., to hand out whenever your are out and about. This is especially important if you are electronically published. When folks ask about your book, you want to be able to give them something with the title, your name, cover image and where they can purchase and download it.

Now, things you really don't want to do. And yes, I saw each of these listed in articles or lists online about how to promote your book. But come on, common sense needs to enter into it somewhere.

• Put a chapter into an auto-responder. Think about this. Someone, possibly even your boss, or your doctor or who-knows-who, emails you. Instead of getting the response they are expecting, they get an unsolicited chapter from you. Not only does it come awfully close to spam, but it very well could get them in trouble with their employer.Do NOT do this. Please.
• Volunteer to do book reviews. This is one of those that can work, but can also be a massive waste of time. Now, if the review is for a well-trafficked review site, that's one thing. But if it isn't, don't do it.
• With regard to Facebook, I saw several suggestions to make a facebook app that has something to do with your book. Don't. Just don't. Most folks do NOT like apps. They see them as a security issue. So don't waste your time and effort.
• Since I started with a "what were they thinking?", I'll end with one. Magnetic car signs. I'm not talking bumper sticker size. I'm talking those big ones you see attached to the car door. Not only does it scream, "I published this myself and printed it on my laser printer in my back room," but I have visions of someone ramming into your car as they try to read it.

Here's what our own Sarah has to say, sort of, about promotion.

Okay, that's a quick overview of some ways to -- and not to -- promote your book. Can you think of any others? What are the most unique ways you've seen books promoted? What have been the strangest (as in, OMG, what were they thinking?)?

Steam Punk, and my thoughts on marketing

I thought I'd celebrate Sarah's drive to make me work harder with a first snippet of the Steam Punk thing I've been intermittantly working at - which is aimed at 11-14 year olds. Any submarine experts willing to offer me advice... I'd be very grateful.

The Coal-fired Submarine
Book One of the Drowning Empire
Dave Freer

Chapter 1

It was after midnight, and London's lights shimmered on the waters that had been her streets. Something dark moved down there in the depths of them. Bubbles of smoke belched up in its wake. No one was likely to notice. The still, warm air already reeked of coal smoke, and the rotting ooze overlying the drowned Landsdown Way bubbled anyway.

The dark shadow slipped onwards into Wandsworth canal, and down into Nine Elms and then through the rotting concrete teeth into the deep channel.

Like the rest of the crew, Tim Barnabas let out a sigh of relief. He knew all about the dangers of the Stockwell tube run -- dead trees, fallen masonry, and, of course, the chance of detection in relatively shallow waters that had once been London's streets.

"Up snuiver, Submariner," said Captain Malkis. "Let's breathe before we head down-channel."

Tim worked the brass-crank with a will, sending the breathing pipe to the surface of the Thames Estuary.

He swallowed hard to sort out the effect of the pressure change on his ears.

And then an explosion rocked the Cuttlefish. Rang the sub like a bell. Tim could hear nothing. But he could see Captain Malkis push the dive levers to full.

A blast of water sprayed out of the snuiver outlet, soaking them all, before the cut-off valve took. The Cuttlefish settled onto the bottom of the dredged channel. No one moved or spoke. Tim's ears still rang, but he could hear sounds again, and saw the Captain signal to the Marconi-man The radio-operator worked his spooler, sent an aerial wire up to the surface. Tim watched the man's face in the dim glow of the battery-lights. His expression grew increasingly bleak. He flicked the dial expertly to another frequency. Then Sparky pulled the headphones off. "I got the Clapham Common sender first. Transmission cut out after an SOS. I picked up Parson's Green. They weren't even sending coded messages. Just reports that Stockwell's been blown, and Clapham had reported that they were under attack by men of the Royal Iniskilling Fusiliers, Captain, before they went off air. And I picked up a signal on the Royal Navy calling channel. The HMS Mornington and the HMS Torquay are ordered to start laying dropping mines in the Thames channel from Blackfriars point to Rotherhithe bay. The Captain of the Mornington was getting mighty shirty about the operation not running to according to orders and him still being below Plumstead shoal and not on station."

____________________

The subject of ebooks, self-publishing, new ebook publishers has come up rather a lot lately. So I thought I'd put my thoughts on this down in a coherent fashion. What do you mean, I'm never coherent? My therapist told me that and that I was obsessed with revenge. I told him we'd see about that in good time. Heh, only kidding, I might need a therapist but I believe they want stuff called money (of which I have heard) in exchange for their services. So as I am writer, you'll just have to hope that I confine my vengeance to merely drowning London and New York in text as above.

Let's assume that you, Joe, have written a novel, and like many tens of thousands of people have tried the trad. pubs, where, let's be honest, they knock out 90% of the total unreadables... at the cost of dumping many great books. And of course, they also take some total drekk, and, oddly enough some books which you may wonder however got through first pass, do well.
You've decided that your book is one of the good ones that get missed. After all, they turned down DUNE. Quality will truimph!
So: you go to Kindle Direct. You get 70% of the money. And 5 people read it and 3 of them are related to you.
Or you go to a new startup. They offer you 50% of cover price, which is a lot better than the 12.5% you might see from Trad. Pub
And, with the benefit of a better cover, and maybe a little editing and proof input... you sell 25 copies.
At which point it may dawn on you that trad pub (at the bottom end) is rather like vanity publishing is supposed to be (and isn't). You get to sell (if you're lucky) 5000 copies, earn 5000 dollars - and the process earns 40 000 dollars (of which they give you 5K) for other people. Now you can't take $40 000, print your book, and earn 5K 'profit'- because you don't have that access to physical retail space. If you want to do that, it's possible (and been done), but you'll need $400 000 or more.

However, if you were to take the same attitude to an ebook (where you can have the retail space) and spend the 40K wisely on a copy-editor, proof-reader, cover art, and the remaining $36 000 on a publicist and various marketing devices (the equivalent of your retail space for physical books), that you could sell 5000 copies - which might be enough to get word of mouth working for you (I think the real figure is probably higher - looking at trad pub - only really starting at 25K - if you can shift 100K, even if it is rubbish it'll find a market)
If you don't have (as I don't) 4K let alone 40K...
Should you just give up? Well, I've never been much good at giving up. So let's look at what I think I can do. YMMV. I've decided that a small Ebook publisher at least gives me a finished product and some less hassle, BTW.
1) I could just be lucky. That happens, you're in the right place at the right time. Some people have the breaks. The bottom line however remains that the more often you try the more chance you have of being that 1:1 000 000.
2)I could get a lift from someone who is well-connected. Not likely, I don't know Oprah and I don't get out a lot in Hollyweird. But at the same time, the more you network and link, the more possible this is.
3)You could build yourself a web-presence, a la John Scalzi or Charlie Stross. Now, this is possible and you should try. But 3 caveats. a)they were in the right place at the right time b)You have to have the personality for it, consistantly. c)Barring right place at right time... this is HARD WORK that goes on for many years. And even then, if you don't have (B) you won't get there. It means posting every day (or damn near, or at least on a regular schedule (I post every day on Flinders Family Freer and once a week here.) I have a good friend who read FFF and said 'I'm funnier than you, and our lives are weirder.' She's right. She also posts ad lib and months can go past. She has about 3 views a week. I'm less entertaining but I have 100 or so a day. And I accept I need to go on for years, that it builds slowly and saltationally and if I stop I'll lose my readers.
4)You can network on facebook. You can also make a pain-in-the-nether end of yourself by advertising yourself relentlessly. 2 minor authors I know have made damned sure I never buy their books. People may like to hear and be curious - if you are entertaining and work hard (like Sarah).
5)You can consider tangible bait. I'm seriously looking at free giveaways - tangible, solid ones - books, corkscrews... with the purchase. Yes, it'll cost me pretty much what I will earn.
6)You can look at intangible bait. Sample chapters, free stories. Not sure either work, but they're low cost.
7)You can try to hitch yourself to star. That's why I co-authored books. Because of name recognition.
8)You can come up with a crazy You-tube clip... working on this. "I said if they got me my author copies of dragon's Ring before it actually came out, I'd walk naked up Strzlecki with nothing else or take a swim with a giant ray with it..."

Ok - more ideas? And how did you like the steampunk?

Doing the Happy Dance!

This is one of those happy days. You invite the whole family to watch you unpack the books. Then the cat turns up and investigates to see if this box is a good place to sleep.






You slave over a book for X years, do the structural edits, line edits, copy edits and finally ... drum roll ... your publisher sends you copies of your printed book!

You pick up your book, (smell it - don't you love that new book smell?) and then you suffer every writer's dilemma. What if no one buys it?

So, here I am, asking your advice.

I'd like to do a blog tour. (I have time to plan this, as the books isn't released until July 15th). Can you recommend any blogs I could approach? I'll offer to do a give-away of the book. I'll research the Australian blogs, but I'm at a bit of a loss for the US blogs and the UK blogs.

The other thing is this. My friend Richard Harland is on a US and UK tour. Sounds like he is having a wonderful time. Marianne de Pierres and I were thinking what if we could get a grant to travel to the US?

Which would be the best Conventions or events to attend? We've looked at the Romantic Times Convention. Now there is a lot of people who love reading. And then there's Dragon Con. What is the best way to connect with readers?

All advice welcome!