Permission to scream

This post was originally published on Lisa Jey Davis' Ms. Cheevious blog on May 10, 2013.

I’m on a bit of a rampage. Wait. Stop. Let me rewind a bit. I’ll set the scene for you:

A fabulous new freelancer (who is super cheap and comes highly recommended) is working to upload my Yoga routine book to other platforms besides iBooks and Amazon. No small task, mind you — dealing with and educating the freelancer, that is.

Simultaneously, I’ve got a couple of PR clients whom I pitch and arrange interviews for, as well as submit them for and take them to red carpet events. Why isn’t this listed first, since it pays the bills, you ask? Meh… I can do this one with my eyes closed. I love it, but it doesn’t cause a rampage unless someone does a client wrong. 

The reason I’m even talking about it is because I’m taking a big risk here by not pursuing more clients, even though one of my few has just gone on hiatus.  I made this decision because dammit all, I WILL finish my books, come HELL or high water… even if it means a) I give up my apartment and spend a chunk of my last remaining savings to b) put everything in storage, c) risk MC Nugget getting kicked out of his apartment for harboring a stow-away, and d) continuing to use my beloved VW Jetta as the great Costco storage vehicle.

I’m okay with being a starving artist, if it means I’ll finish my passion-projects. But shit. It does tend to send the stress barometer into hyperdrive.

But the icing on the cake came with a little tiny request I sent out weeks ago to some of my noteworthy friends (or if they aren’t noteworthy, they are beloved) for advanced reviews of my newest book (almost finished, but waiting on those reviews) Getting Over Your Ovaries – How to Make "The Change of Life" Your Bitch. 

While some of them did reviews (one of which is posted here) and amazed me with their sentiments (and for taking the time) – the others… well, you’d think I was asking them to slay their first born. The book is all of two chapters. Let’s just say, this is the thing that will drive me to drink this weekend.

I’d now like your permission to scream.

But before I do, and before I go, please know – this is not at all about you. It it most definitely about ME.

That is all.

Lisa Jey Davis is Editor in [Mis]Chief of the Ms. Cheevious blog and author of Ahhhhhh…Haaaaaa Moments with Ms. Cheevious, Getting Over Your Ovaries – How to Make “The Change of Life” Your Bitch and Ms. Cheevious In Hollywood. 

The tenth daughter — in a family of eleven children — she was born and raised in the rugged, small southwestern town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the base of the beautiful Sandia Mountains. Her mother was an Italian immigrant and her father, of Western European descent, was from Dallas, Texas. After graduation from high school, Lisa Jey (or L.J., as she became known by friends and colleagues) attended the University of New Mexico, majoring in (among other things) journalism and communications.

After her divorce, she made the daring choice, sans employment, to pack it up and move (with her then six-year-old son) from a quiet white-bread neighborhood in Orange County, California to Los Angeles. The goal? Pursue her dreams of working in television production. After months of relentless networking, constant prodding and begging, she finally landed a gig as a talent coordinator on the production crew of The Billboard Bash – a pre-show for the Billboard Music Awards in 2001. She now works as a PR agent in Hollywood.

Visit her Ms. Cheevious blog and website, and follow her on Twitter @MsCheevious.

Business Card Budget

A “must have” for every professional author is a business card with contact information. No one should ever wonder who you are or how to get in touch with you!

Minimal information on your business card includes:

• Your name
• Book title
• Email address
• Web page

Additionally, you may include the ISBN, a post office box, or FAX number for direct book sales. To avoid unexpected company, do not use your physical address on your business card.

The reverse side of your business card can be used for promotional ideas and other information. There is space for:
• Your photo
• Book cover
• Your 25 word pitch
• A tag line from your book
• List of your other books
• Social media links, ie, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,
• Code number for a discount if ordered directly from you

A low-budget idea is to rubber stamp a small picture that coincides with your story or your name on your card. Craft shops have hundreds of unique stamps with letters, numbers, symbols, plants, animals, smiley faces, etc.

Business cards will likely be the least expensive item in your marketing plan, but the most versatile. Keep them in your car, wallet, purse, briefcase, home, and office. Use several of them as bookmarks in each of your books.

Excerpted from: Publish, Write, Sell! Quick, Easy, Inexpensive Ideas for the Marketing Challenged 2^nd Edition by Valerie Allen

~ Valerie Allen ~

VAllenWriter@cs.com                                          ValerieAllenWriter.com

Facebook.com/Valerie.Allen.520

Amazon.com/Author/ValerieAllen

 Beyond the Inkblots: Confusion to Harmony

Write Publish Sell!

Summer School for Smarties

Bad Hair, Good Hat, New Friends

Sins of the Father

Suffer the Little Children

A series of experiments in publishing

For July, I am conducting a number of small experiments in publishing. The first experiment involves Twitter. Over the course of the last few months I was tweeting about two or three product links per day in addition to links about writing, publishing, the industry, and other related materials. For the month of July I have not been tweeting product links to my books. Most tweets were for Amazon Kindle books. Amazon is the biggie, and we all want to do well there. But it might be wise to stop chasing that best-seller dream and focus on building a core readership. If one thousand loyal fans bought one $2.99 book per year, that would be $20,000 in revenue. It really is just that simple.

Audience.

I still crack the odd joke and tweet items of interest to my followers, and cross-post on a number of other platforms. With multiple accounts and some duplication, I probably only have three or four thousand unique followers, with friends and followers on all platforms adding up to less than 10,000 overall; e.g. on Facebook I have 1,492 friends.

The rationale is simple. Various sources have suggested that over-promotion is self-defeating and an audience becomes saturated over time. Often the solution is to continually build an audience. But the reach isn’t the only measure. Often there is no measurement of ‘quality’ in terms of an individual audience member. It’s also disproportionate, in that it might take a hundred new followers to generate ten real, qualified page views, and a hundred ‘good’ page views to sell one book. At this rate, it’s not a good idea to start buying followers. We might only make two bucks a book. Name recognition doesn’t take very long, not in any size of audience. That’s taken care of with a few repetitions.

Measuring results.

The way to measure the results of the experiment is very simple: compare July sales to months when we did tweet.

My second experiment involves Smashwords’ July month-long sale. All of my full-length novels are marked down 25 %, but I’m not tweeting or doing any other promotion except blog posts such as this one in particular. Page views are not high on SW for my titles, although I have given away about thirty copies of ‘Core Values,’ which is free on all my sales platforms right now, and it will be for some time to come.

So we’ll see just how we do without promoting a sale on Smashwords.

A third experiment involves the notion that we simply have to write more and publish more and this alone sort of promotes us effectively. I’m not denying it, and I’m not confirming it. What I am doing is trying to see if it works in my own case. That’s because each and every author has a different personality, and a different audience or readership, and a different set of goals both financial and artistic for the work.

Publishing shorts on an experimental basis.

For this experiment, we take stories out of our folder, polish them up, get a free, copyright-free, royalty-free marketing image, an ISBN number, which are free here in Canada, and take some time to make an eye-catching ‘cover’ for it. Then we publish on Lulu, Amazon, Smashwords, and through Smashwords it will ultimately go into all the other distribution channels such as iTunes, B & N, Kobo, Diesel, etc. I’ll worry about Google books another time.

The rationale for this experiment is simple. I see other people, virtually all of whom are using pen-names of one sort or another, and they’re publishing all sorts of shorts on different sales platforms. Yes, Lawrence Block does it too, and everyone knows him. But I cannot and should not compare myself to Lawrence Block for just that reason.

Here is my new short story, 'The Jesus Christ Show,' available from Amazon, Lulu and Smashwords.

Why are we making the experiment?

I would like to know what sort of results unknown (or unidentified) authors are getting. I will publish two or three short stories in the next few weeks. This leads to another experiment: publish on Amazon or any platform at an appropriate time of day.

Method.

Basically, I plan on getting up on Friday morning and publishing a story. On Amazon, it takes about twelve hours to go live. Obviously you need to have everything all ready to go, including pic and blurb and relevant metadata. By anticipating this delay, I might get a story to pop up in horror, or science-fiction, (or whatever category,) during prime time Friday night. It will be interesting to see if this has any effect on the short story in question. Also, will this have any effect on overall sales, surely the only ones that matter to someone with a number of titles?

Shalako Publishing was conceived in February, 2010. It has involved a learning curve from day one, and that learning curve is continuous. You can’t learn anything if there is nothing there to be learned. So what do we do in an absence of facts?

We experiment, and find out for ourselves. And that way, we don’t have take anyone’s word for anything, besides, what might be a good answer for them, might not be such a good answer for us.

We are all different, and so are our needs, our gifts and our aspirations for our work. If you were wondering about the photo above, it relates to active blogging, and it shows our results. Clearly, on this one issue, we are doing something right. Can it be done better? When I come up with a idea, I will try to do just that.

Louis Bertrand Shalako

Comments are always welcome.

For more informative articles on writing and publishing, please visit my blog here: http://shalakopublishing.blogspot.com

Louis is on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/louis-bertrand-shalako/id412091968?mt=11

Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/louisbertrandshalako
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Louis-Bertrand-Shalako/e/B005GHIF86

This Writer's Journey

Once upon a time, not all that long ago really, this writer (me) knew nothing of writing and never even considered the possibility of publishing anything. I was doing good to come across a new book to read, which meant that I read what I had over and over. Oh sure, once in a great while I'd drag out some paper and write down a story, but that's all it was, and in truth it only happened a couple times and one of those got lost when we moved from one place on this river to another.

One day, sometime during the winter of 2000 I think, my son comes home with this rather new innovation, at least it certainly was for me. He brought me a little laptop computer. We had a computer upstairs (still do in fact), but it had been maxed out to 1G of memory and couldn't be upgraded any more. We got it to help the boys some with their school but mostly it was their toy. I never did much with it because it was upstairs and upstairs isn't just a stroll up a set of steps, it's a climb up a ladder and I really wasn't interested in playing with it all that much anyway. It is such a dinosaur compared to what I have today, or even compared to what my son brought home that day.

Well, now I had this 'toy' down here on the table. All it needed was plugged in and push a button and it turned on. The one upstairs needed at least one boot-up disk before it worked. Okay, so now that I had this thing, what does one do with a computer? Well, it had a keyboard. Did I remember any of my typing lessons from high school?

By coincidence, I had been writing a story on some notebook paper left over from when the kids went to school up river, so what better thing to experiment with. My son showed me how to open a document and I began to type. I discovered real quick that my new little toy knew more about grammar and spelling than I did. What a nifty trick that was. And adding or correcting something within a paragraph was pure joy. I think it took me flat minutes to fall in love with my new toy.

Over the next two years, I learned how to work my toy as I wrote my story, eventually giving up on the notebook step. I found the paint program and drew several pictures for my story, spending hours and sometimes even days modifying some of them to satisfy my picky nature.

To help me picture how long my story would be if it were a book, I picked up the last book I'd read and found a page full of text. I counted the lines and, following the rules for counting words from my typing class, I counted 'words' across one of the full lines. I took that information back to my story and adjusted the margins and font size until I got as close as possible. That also gave me a book size goal. The book I'd chosen was around 300 pages so that was my goal. I would consider my story a 'book' if it reached 300 or more pages. Imagine my pleasure when my story reached a little over 400 pages by the time I had reached an ending. I remind you that actual publishing was one of those alien concepts still.

The entire journey was such a delight, I simply had to start another, and then another, and then another. And oh my, look at me now. That first story is now a real book. The publisher chose a larger format which decreased my page count by nearly a hundred pages, but what did I know, and it was a minor matter, all things considered. They were, after all, supposedly the experts. Ah but that gets into a different journey and a different learning curve.

Many writers I've talked to since getting internet have been aimed at writing ever since they were little. How about you? How did you come to be a writer? Did it take you by surprise like it did me? Tell me all about it. I'd love to hear your story.

You can find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AuthorAnnaWalls and you are most welcome to my corner of the world on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AuthorAnnaLWalls. Hope to see you here or there sometime soon.

Anna L. Walls
PRINCE IN HIDING, book #1 of The Making of a Mage King series - http://www.buckscountypublishing.com/portal/
KING BY RIGHT OF BLOOD AND MIGHT - http://bit.ly/ld8mz It's worth checking out.
My blog novel - THE FORTUNES OF MAGIC - http://thefortunesofmagic.blogspot.com/p/blurb.html
My blog - Anna's Obsession - http://annalwalls.blogspot.com
My website - Anna's Passion - http://AnnaLWalls.weebly.com
A window into my life - Anna of Alaska - http://AnnaOfAlaska.blogspot.com - every day is an adventure.

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