May 4 2014

Bad Book Marketing Ideas Continued: Marketing Ploys to Avoid

Our series on bad marketing ploys continues with a look at additional marketing “ideas” that you may have witnessed in your FB feed or seen rearing its disturbing head on blogs and websites. If you are guilty of indulging in any of these promotional gimmicks, be warned. Your readers are on to you, and so are other independently published authors who are tired of getting a bad rap as an unprofessional because of the actions of a few. Read on for an in-depth look into marketing ideas that you are better off not using if you want to be looked upon by readers and other writers as a professional author.

Marketing Ploy #2: Pity Party!
“I’m being bullied by mean people leaving negative reviews on my books instead of all those 5 stars that I KNOW I deserve.”
“I’m disabled and my book sales are my only source of income!”
“My child is disabled and my book sales help offset her doctor bills.”
“I have a health condition and my book sales help offset my hospital costs.”
“Poor me! No one is reading my books!”

With Facebook being all the rage these days, virtually anyone can not only slap up a book onto Amazon for an instant publication, but they can also create a FB account, a community, group, and author page with just a few clicks of a mouse. The next thing you know, you have amassed yourself a few thousand friends who are picking apart everything you say or post. And herein is where authors apparently have a hard time separating their personal lives from their “professional” lives.

As an author, you will want to always present yourself as a professional just like any other. Even if being a writer isn’t your full time job, and it rarely is, you should conduct yourself as if it WERE your full-time, professional career and conduct yourself accordingly. You want to present yourself as a caring, intelligent, and honest person. Your personal life and events are just that, personal. They should not be broadcasted in minute detail over FB, blogs, and pages in an effort to make people feel sorry for you. You want people to buy your books because they are a good read, not because they are being guilted into buying it. Yet, more and more readers are complaining of seeing this growing trend amongst self-published authors and writers in their FB feeds. People are using their sob stories and personal tragedies to sell more books. Readers are getting wee-wee’d off about it, and rightly so.

While it is perfectly fine to post a quick comment about being MIA for a few days due to personal issues, it is NOT okay to use those personal issues to make your readers feel sorry for you or to try to guilt them into buying your book. No one should even have to tell you that it is dishonest and extremely unprofessional, yet I myself have seen authors on my own FB feeds play up their recent job losses, their or their child’s disabilities, their high risk pregnancies, their divorce, and most recently, their declarations of being “bullied” by readers who would dare to leave a low-star review on their books, among other things. Again, such behavior is very unbecoming of an author. If you are going to claim to be a professional writer, then you better start acting like one. Otherwise, you are going to lose readers and authors who do not want to be associated with anyone who uses such trickery into trying to squeeze a few more sales out of their customers.

Marketing Ploy #3: I’m a best seller!
Nothing will make a reader roll their eyes quicker than seeing an unknown indie author proclaiming to be an Amazon “best seller.” Unless your book has hit one of the other roughly six national best sellers list, the use of this title means nothing to a reader other than you are trying to boost sales by bragging about being on a list that doesn’t actually exist.

For those who have not looked into how the Amazon Best Sellers Ranking is calculated, then you might be surprised to learn that Amazon refuses to tell anyone HOW it calculates that list. Experts have speculated that it is a complicated mathematical equation dealing with total number of copies sold by any one author in relation to total number of copies sold on Amazon by all authors across all Amazon stores. Regardless of how it is calculated, the list itself is updated hourly. So even if you actually did manage to hit it once for that one hour, that doesn’t constitute a best seller. It only means that the specific book in question is selling a lot of copies for that specific moment in time. The reality is that unless you hit that list and can stay on it every single hour of the day for 30 days straight, you are not a best seller, you are merely a best seller for an hour.

Let’s look at the math to better understand this. Let’s say that you do hit the list once and you sell 500 copies that day for that one hour but only sell 25,000 copies for the entire year. Now let’s say another author sells only 100 copies a day. They will never hit the Amazon Top 100 Best Selling list with those kinds of numbers, but if they consistently sell 100 copies per day, they will have sold 36,500 copies for the entire year. So as you can see, from a numbers stand point, the author who sold the most copies in a year would clearly have more right to the title of Best Seller. However, since Amazon produces this list based on hourly sales, the title itself is of little marketing value and readers are not using it as a means to determine whether or not they will purchase a book. In all actuality, a lot of readers will purposely NOT buy a book from any author who is claiming to be an Amazon best seller. Why? Because so many self published authors have been using it as a “catch phrase” to entice readers into buying books that ultimately did not live up to either the authors’ claims or the readers’ expectations. To put it bluntly, the book wasn’t nearly as good as all the “hype” drummed up by the author and their street team proclaimed. Because of this, readers are learning the hard way to steer clear of authors who use the phrase “best seller” as a marketing line.

It has often been said that a book should sink or swim on its own merit. That isn’t to say that authors should not promote and advertise their book. However, more and more self published authors are using the insta-publishing now available like it was the wild west, thinking that anything and everything goes when it comes to self-promotion. This is just not the case. To put it plainly, as an author, you should be conducting yourself as if you were representing Random House. Think about that for a moment. If you had just been picked up by Random House, would you be on your FB trying to guilt people into buying your books because of a disability, or because you were getting negative reviews, or because you were recently divorced? The answer would be no, and the reason why you wouldn’t do that is because you would be too worried that the publisher would drop you because you were not acting like a professional writer worthy of being carried by Random House. So before you start laying on the pity party, astroturfing your reviews, and begging people to buy your books, ask yourself if you would want anyone from any of the big publishing houses to see and judge your professionalism according to that post. Chances are, you wouldn’t want them to see you in that light, so why would you want your readers to see you acting so unprofessional as well?

May 4 2014

Bad Marketing Ideas: Reviews, Not Endorsements

Continuing on with our theme of bad marketing ideas, guest blogger Brian Wilkerson weighs in on the topic with his article “Reviews, Not Endorsements.”

This article originally appeared here: http://trickstereric.blogspot.com/2014/01/reviews-not-endorsements.html and is being reposted with the written consent of the blog’s owner, Brian Wilkerson.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t have anything against quick or short reviews. My style requires a lot of time and I understand that few people want to spend their leisure writing an essay about their reaction to a book. What I dislike are reviews that sound more like advertisements than reviews.

When strolling through Amazon, I find reviews that disturb me. They’re all composed of the same basic phrases: “couldn’t put it down”, “when’s the next one”, “recommend to all age groups/everyone/anyone that likes reading.” In three paragraphs, it’s easy to overlook them but when a review is one paragraph and made entirely of these phrases it raises a red flag. I think “Is this a paid review?” or “Did this person read the book?”. When I gush about things, I go into detail. I avoid spoilers or warn of them, of course, but I want them to know exactly what I liked about a book so they will understand how great the story is and read it themselves. Generic reviews are a waste because they contain nothing specific about the story and so they could be copied and pasted any number of times.

A reviewer isn’t doing an author any favors by turning their review into a endorsement. It sounds fake. Often times, it sounds cheesy. Posing questions that the novel ‘answers’ or saying that it bucks trends or some such; you don’t sound like a reviewer you sound like a promoter. Nobody trusts a promoter because the promoter is biased. They’re looking for an honest and informed opinion.

When I write a review it is long and it is thorough. If I dislike something about the book then I am sure to include it. I give A+s sparingly and even then I don’t sound like “OMG! This book is awesome!!!!” It’s a point of professionalism. Even for books that are not review requests, I follow the same format. Three sentences of generic praise may bolster the rank but it doesn’t help the reader (at least, it doesn’t help a reader like me) decide on whether or not to read the book.

I use bland language for this reason. Poetic lines are not professional because you sound like you’re trying too hard to impress. By using such language you’re trying to turn your review into something that is more than your personal opinion about a work; you’re trying to make your review into a work itself. I find that silly and arrogant. Reviews are not supposed to be read like a book or a poem. They’re supposed to inform a potential reader (and customer) about the book from the perspective of another reader and customer. Nobody cares how witty or enjoyable your reviews are because they’re interested in whether or not you liked the book. (I recognize there are exceptions: newspaper columnists and bloggers etc can have fan followings of their own, but in that case, what they’re reviewing is less important than the review itself.)

Genuine reviews are more effective promotions than promotions pretending to be reviews because the former has substance. It is unique. A promotion will not be unique and so has no substance. It’s little more than literary junkfood.

http://trickstereric.blogspot.com/2014/01/reviews-not-endorsements.html

Apr 24 2014

Open Call to All Publishers – Have I been Wrong All This Time?

I began writing when I was only eight years old. By the time I was thirteen, I had already written my first full length novel. Less than a year after its completion, after everyone and their brother at my middle school had read the book, I took their words of encouragement to heart and began researching on how to get my book into publication through traditional publishing houses. The next ten plus years saw three more novels written and several hundred query letters, novel summaries, chapter submissions, and more rejection letters than I can count at this point. I’ve been turned down by everyone from Random House to Aardvark Press. I never took it as a sign that I should stop writing, because, after all, there are some really, really crappy books in publication. I just took it that I was young and needed to keep writing. Practice makes perfect, or so the old saying goes.

I took a reprieve from trying to get published for a while, allowing ideas to begin to form inside of my head before I once again took up the call of the pen in 2002. I wrote for fun off and on for about a year, posting short stories to social media sites. I wrote under the Avatar name of “PoisonRunner” and soon had tens of thousands of readers crashing my Yahoo! 360 page on a daily basis. I was bombarded with messages and posts of encouragement, everyone wanting to know why I wasn’t trying to get published. I decided, “Why not?” After all, I had spent more than ten years learning the business inside and out. I was older, wiser, my writing style had greatly improved over the years, and despite all the rejection letters (some of them incredibly harsh, by the way) I had received over the years, my passion for cultivating a well-told story could not be dashed by mere words from some of the top publishers.

Soon I was scouring the internet trying to get the scoop on some of the well established but lesser known publishers. What I discovered was much more of the same that I had encountered all those years ago when I was just starting out. More rejection letters, but now the rules had changed a bit. Most publishers were no longer accepting unsolicited manuscripts, forcing me to add yet another person to the mix in the form of a literary agent who would ultimately take a chunk out of the royalty pie.

The contracts that I got shown were atrocious to say the least. Most of them either had me signing away my copyrights altogether or had me giving the publisher an exclusive prints right to my work that never expired, meaning that if the book flopped with one publisher I could never take it to another publisher down the road in hopes of getting it spruced up and re-released with a new publisher. Most of them were doing little more than allowing me to use their name as the publishing house on the inside cover.

There were no advancements offered and none of them were going to put forth a single penny towards marketing and promoting the book, two things that determine if a book lives or dies in the literary market. The publishers kept 100% complete control over all aspects of the final product, including cover art and the final draft that went to print. For those who do not understand the full weight of this statement, it meant that the publisher withheld the right to rewrite the story and change it any way they saw fit, without my approval and oftentimes without my knowledge. Ultimately the publisher was turning me, the creator and writer of the work, into little more than a ghost writer, being just the person who came up with the initial idea, leaving the publisher to hammer out the details and rewrite it into whatever they thought they could make a quick buck off of.

I hoped that this was not the norm, so I continued to look into larger houses, smaller houses, indie houses, anyone and everyone that I could think of, find on the internet, and even some odd-ball houses that other authors suggested or that I found on blogs and other websites. The end product? The exact same thing: contracts that took away any future printing rights for anyone other than said house, no advancements, the publisher kept 100% control over final product, 0% upfront money being spent on marketing and promotion until I had cleared several hundred thousand copies or money earned off the book, whichever came first, and absolutely no marketing plan for me to follow in the meantime to help get the ball rolling. Ultimately, the publishers were telling me that they would lend me their house name for the inside cover, but all marketing and promoting would not only have to be handled by me, but the cost of those endeavors would have to come out of my own pocket.

Needless to say, my first reaction to all of this over the years has been, “If you are not going to help market and promote the book, then why would I bother signing a contract with you?” My next questions were subsequently, “If I have to do all the work that you should be doing, why am I having to share my royalties with you?” and finally “If you are not helping to get the word out on my book, then exactly what is in this deal for me?”

It is these questions that go unanswered that has driven so many authors to just self-publish their work. With traditional publishers, it is all about compromise. You write the initial draft and the editors and publishers turn it into whatever they think will make them money. It isn’t the author’s story, it is the publisher’s version of their story. You don’t have that in self-publication. It is the author’s story told how the author intended. About the only compromise you have is how much money and time you can invest to get the best cover art work and editors and which platform you want to publish to. You keep complete control, you keep your copyrights, you keep the print rights, and best of all, you keep all the royalties. Of course there is always the cost of editors, graphic artists, swag, etc. if you decide to purchase all that, but those costs are factored into royalties received from a traditional publisher, so you have to pay for all this regardless of whether you go traditional or self-published. The only difference is that if you are one of the lucky authors who is savvy enough to create your own cover art work and do all the PR work yourself, then you cut out a huge chunk of costs that you can’t cut out if you go the traditional route.

I know, this has little to do with the title of the article. But I’m getting there. As I have outlined above, I have more than 3 DECADES of experience with traditional publishers and nearly ten years experience as an independently published author who owns her own publishing house. I shouldn’t have to constantly repeat to everyone that I KNOW what I’m doing and I KNOW how the traditional publishing model works. Yet, I find myself constantly having to repeat this to fledgling authors on FB all the time. They keep asking for advice, and when I give them the straight-up dirty truth on how it all works, they immediately turn on me, screaming that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I didn’t give them the rose-colored happy ‘now-I’m-famous-and-rich’ ending that they keep dreaming about. Those authors who don’t know any better are bad enough, but when I’m also constantly being told that I am not a ‘true’ writer because I no longer seek out traditional publishers and also told that I would suddenly become a well known author if I would just try to get a mainstream publishing deal by authors who claim to actually BE in the mainstream publishing business, then that just pisses me off. I may not can account for what someone else knows, but when I have already been through the process more times than I can count and I know FIRST HAND how it all works and they still want to sit there and tell me I’m wrong, then sorry, no, I will no longer put up with your delusions of grandeur.

Which brings me back to the whole point behind this article. After all, I did say it was an open call to all publishers, and it is. I am sending out a major SOS call to ANY publisher, be it small, indie, large, whatever, who is willing to prove me wrong. You read that right. I want to sign a publishing deal with any house that is willing to put up with me. I want a publisher to prove to me that I’ve been wrong about them. I want a publisher to prove to me that everything I just posted above is wrong, that I am delusional, that what I wrote is not the way the publishing world works. I want a publisher who is not going to just take my work, slap it up on Amazon, and walk away with half my royalties. In other words, I want a publisher who is actually going to help me get my work out to the masses, support me, and not just have me do all the work.

So here is the deal. I’m willing to come off my most popular erotic romance, Vindictus, The Dark Lord to whichever publishing company can do the following:

1. Advancements are up for negotiation. Whether you offer them or not is up to the rest of the contract and are not a deal breaker.

2. Marketing and promotion plans are a must. Even if you do not plan to put any financial backings into the endeavor, you must at least provide a detailed marketing plan that you plan to use to market and promote the book. There also must be a separate or joint marketing plan that I can follow as well as I do not expect the publisher to do all the work. HOWEVER, if you are not putting up any financial backing into either the marketing of the work or advancements, I expect you to take on the majority of the marketing. This must be provided prior to any contracts are signed so I know how much work is expected from me and how much work the publisher is goingto put into the marketing. Again, if you are not actively marketing the product then what are you doing for me as a publisher?

3. Limited exclusive printing rights. Unless you are willing to offer me a half-million dollar advancement or are Random House, I will not sign any exclusive printing rights contracts. I know this is not the norm for most contracts, but if you are a small indie house then I am not about to sign away my printing rights in hopes the book doesn’t bomb and then never be able to take it to another publisher. I am, however, willing to sign a limited printing rights contract. Basically, depending on any advancements and your overall marketing plans, I will sign a limited time exclusive printing rights contract. I will give the publisher up to 3 years of exclusive print rights on the book dependent upon how well the book is doing. In other words, if the book is doing well then I am willing to extend the print rights to the publisher indefinitely, but if the book is not doing well we are both going to cut our losses and allow me the chance to take the book to another publisher if I so wish.

And that’s it. I don’t ask for much. Advancements are not needed and honestly not expected, but I expect a marketing plan to be in place prior to any contracts being signed, and if the book is not doing well I reserve my right to terminate the print rights agreement and take the book to another publisher.

So traditional publishers, prove to me that I have been wrong about you all this time. Prove to me that you are not out there just taking authors’ works, slapping it up on Amazon, taking royalties, and not providing any type of marketing and promotions. Prove to me that you are an actual asset to authors, that you are needed, and that you can do for authors what they can’t do for themselves self-publishing. Or have I been preaching the gospel this whole time?

I’m interested in finding out……

Apr 18 2014

Bad Literary Marketing Ideas – “Astroturfing” And Why You Should Never Use It

As a writer, I spend a ton of time researching marketing ideas. Before I decide to embark on any given marketing idea, I first research to see if the idea is working for others, the pros and cons of pursuing the idea, and most importantly, what my audience thinks about the use of such ideas. I must say that the best teachers I have come across have not necessarily been other writers, but my readers. I hang out where my customers are, and I take to heart all the things that other writers are doing that readers either can’t stand, or that cause them to avoid authors who use such marketing ideas.

A few days ago I posed this question to my FB page of over 3K authors: “Who else is familiar with the term ‘astroturfing’?” To my surprise, not ONE single author claimed to know what the term meant. It is for this reason, and learning from my customers what they hate to see authors doing, that has caused me to completely revamp my entire marketing plan from the ground up. One of the most important things I have learned from my readers so far is that they absolutely despise authors who engage in the practice of ‘astroturfing.’ But before we get into the article, we must first have an urban vocabulary lesson.

Solicited/”paid” review – ANY review that is the result of an author requesting that the reviewer write and submit a review on any given book/story to any publication including, but not limited to, blogs, magazines, Amazon, Good Reads, websites, etc., regardless of whether or not the reviewer received a free copy in exchange for the review or purchased the book/story on their own

Astroturfing – the practice/act of using solicited reviews in any media publication to make a book/author seem more popular than it is, or to create a false “buzz” about the work on the internet using social media. The act of “astroturfing” also includes using “puffery” or false claims about a work or author, such as claiming it to be a “best seller” or winning literary awards that it has either never won or that do not exist.

These days being a self-published author, an indie author, or pretty much an author in general means you are spending more time promoting your works than you do actually creating them. With POD companies, vanity presses, small indie houses, and insta-publisher sites like Amazon allowing everyone and anyone to be an instantly published author in under five minutes, It’s a sad reality that has authors doing anything and everything they can think of to try to have their voices heard over the drone of the masses. How you are being heard, however, can mean the difference between having positive feedback from readers and the literary world in general, and getting a bad reputation as an author who is willing to stoop to unparamouned levels to bring readers to their books and make a sale.

With so many authors following each other’s marketing plans, it would stand to reason that if everybody else is doing it, then it has to be a good business model to follow, right? Wrong. You remember what your parents used to ask you when you told them that EVERYbody was doing it? The same goes for business. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean it is a good idea or that is works, it just means that it is a trending practice at the moment, and next week it could very well be something entirely different and even less useful. And while writing a genre that is trending could be a good idea, following everyone else’s business model is not something you want to do. It’s why one of the first things that any respectable literary agent is going to ask you is, “What is your long-term goals and marketing plan?”

So what are some of the marketing trends that you are better off avoiding? Number one on the list is astroturfing. In this instance, we are talking about any solicited review that the author requested, whether the reviewer was paid a monetary value or traded a free copy of the work in question or purchased the product on their own in exchange for a favorable review. The reason why authors should never really do this are many. Below, we outline a few of the more prominent reasons why authors should not solicit reviews from family members, friends, street team members, random bloggers, or pretty much anyone who is willing to write whatever the author wants them to, etc.

Paid/traded reviews are fake, they sound fake, and it makes an author look fake. Readers are not dumb. They have learned to spot such reviews and have been known to boycott authors who consistently use astroturfing to try to bolster their sales or make readers think the book is selling better than it actually is. It’s distasteful, dishonest, unprofessional, and in all honesty it makes an author look bad to not just readers, but to potential literary agents and publishers alike.

Readers want unbiased reviews by other readers. It’s how they make their decisions on whether or not to purchase a book. Paid reviews, however, are not unbiased reader reviews, they are just another paid endorsement. Dozens of endorsement reviews by street team members, family members, coworkers, etc. are ultimately going to be counterproductive for the author in the long run. Readers have learned to spot such popular catch phrases, and quickly move on to another book that does not have such reviews. Endorsements, also known as testimonials, are better off being posted on your author website or your personal blog, not as reviews on your books on Amazon and Good Reads. As one reader put it, “When I see a relatively unknown author with a book that has fifty or sixty reviews and all of them are 4 and 5 star reviews by people who have not actually purchased the book, then I know I’m not going to get an unbiased review of the book. I’m just getting another self-published train wreck that got handed out to anyone willing to slap up a ‘copy and paste’ ready review.”

In addition, having book review bloggers do paid reviews are not going to help you in the eyes of readers either. Again, they want unbiased reviews, and bloggers are traded copies of books with the expressed request that they ONLY post a 4 or 5 star review. So unless your work is being reviewed by a blogger whose blog is seeing tens of thousands of unique hits and followers each day, allowing dozens of book review bloggers that are only being frequented by the same few hundred readers and writers is actually hurting your sales, not helping. Readers don’t trust promoters, and if your book is sporting dozens of cookie cutter reviews that sound more like endorsements than an unbiased, unsolicited review, then sooner or later readers are going to take notice and start bypassing your work, not snatching it up to read it.

You are better off spending your time and energy trying to get one or two high-profile bloggers or well-established critics to give your book an honest critique than wasting that time by sending out dozens of advanced copies and begging for reviews from anyone who can copy and paste. Getting your work reviewed and in front of the right people can skyrocket your sales and your promotability, as well as solidify your position as a well respected, professional author in the eyes of readers as well as other writing professionals. Likewise, getting a reputation for astroturfing your reviews on Amazon can turn readers against you, and you can hardly blame them. If you are going to spend money on something, do you want to know what all the family and friends of the creator thinks about it, or what other money-paying customers think about it? So you have to ask yourself, would you rather be viewed as just another self-published author hocking their bad novels on Amazon, or as a respected author who not only took the time and energy to put forth their very best work, but who went the extra step and got it in front of the right people who could help their career instead of doing what everyone else is doing? It all comes down to how you are viewed, your reputation as an author. If you really want to stand out from the crowd, then prove to readers that your book really is as good as your family and friends tell you it is. It’s not easy, and it’s oftentimes not pretty, but in the long run, your work, and your reputation, will be better for it.

Feb 17 2014
Video

The Red Fang Book Trailer

I keep seeing book trailers all over FB by up-and-coming self-pubbed authors. I’ve seen authors drop several hundred dollars to get these things created. I wanted to see how hard it would be to create one, so I give to you my own book trailer created with nothing but stock anime images, free software, and about 7 hours of time. I figure anyone can make anyting look good if they have a pricey piece of software, so I wanted to see if I could come up with anything remotely good using free stuff. If you like it, please share.