On Being a Writer

Although it has been a rocky road, I have enjoyed some success as a writer. I have five books to my name—only one of which was a self-pub. I have been a columnist for a short time with the local newspaper—The Florida Times-Union, and I have published many poems and articles in numerous literary magazines and several glossy mags.

However, if I were to total up all the prize money, the royalties, and the contributor copies I have earned, I’d be surprised if I have made even as much a $7,000 in a career that has spanned just over 40 years. By my count that would mean I would have made approximately $175 per year, and that wouldn’t have even kept a hamster in seeds and grain. Thank goodness I had a teaching career on which to fall back.

So, why do I keep at it when there is so little money to be made? It is for the same reason as the rest of the world’s writers—the compulsion to write. I have, as I think all writers have, a drive to put on paper (or on computer) the words that help me process the world. And I sense that there is a bit of immortality in the process, as well.

Think of all the writers from days past whose words have moved and excited you. I suppose, I like to think that in the distant future, someone might come across a poem I have written or a book over which I have labored, and they might find an answer or an insight into the human condition. Pretty lofty goal, isn’t it?

I also enjoy great satisfaction when I get an idea on paper that is exactly what I needed to say. Whether I am paid for my efforts or not is immaterial (although I will never turn away a writer’s fee). The glow that comes from preserving in words an emotion is intoxicating and has kept me writing whether there is anyone else in the forest to read it.

Just about a month ago, I signed a contract to write my 6^th book, another Jacksonville, Florida,  history, and even though I have an accelerated deadline and a mountain through which I must sift, I am excited that once again, I will be able to capture thoughts and memories of people before these thoughts and memories are lost to oblivion.

I love recalling and preserving earlier customs that we no long practice. Remember wearing hats and gloves, even in Florida, when it was time to go shopping downtown? Remember sock-hops and cruising through the curb-service restaurants? Remember hanging out at the beach, and celebrating that fact as you listened to the Beach Boys on an AM transistor radio? Remember being painfully smitten with a person who didn’t even know you existed? Remember falling in love for the first time and being certain that THIS IS IT!?!

It is a privilege to be privy to the memories of others, and it is very satisfying when I can capture those moments so that they will live forever somewhere in the Cloud or on a network or in pages. I will continue to write until I lose all my words.

I do want to be clear about one thing, however. I don’t give my writing away. Once I was “stiffed” by a tabloid after I had written four articles for them, so I have been careful ever since to be sure that some portion of payment is made before I begin, or that I get it in writing what I will be paid. I also recall being asked to write for an up-start website for a pittance, and I turned them down flat. It may seem somewhat contradictory that I would do that, but I felt my time was worth more. And this website was totally uninteresting to me.

Perhaps if the site had been for a charity that I support, I would have written for it for free. If the site had even been about something about which I wanted to learn, then I could see myself writing for little to nothing.  Still, there has to be a pay-off for any writer—be it expanding ones knowledge base, which might come in handy at another time, or helping a cause in which one believes. Then, and only then, would I write for free. 

Writing is a sacred calling. It is something we writers are compelled to do with our days on this earth. And because it is sacred, writers must value their worth and consider carefully the payoffs in the offing—be it tangible or more esoteric. Then, our hope of enlightening readers will come true, and we need not give ourselves away to those who would take advantage.
Dorothy K. Fletcher
Pen Woman , Jacksonville Branch

Marketing Tips

We thought we would share some great tips with you on how a writer can market their work for little or no cost. All of the following tips are from “Guerrilla Marketing for Writers”
1) Content: Publishers waste millions of dollars a year buying and promoting books that fail.
No amount of money or marketing can overcome a book that doesn’t deliver. So your first challenge is to write a book that is the best it can be. The content of your books will determine how you sell them to publishers and promote them to book buyers. Content precedes commerce.
2) Commitment: You must make a commitment to your marketing program.
Talent isn’t enough. You need motivation—and persistence, too. —LEON URIS
Once you decide on the best promotion plan for your books, make the commitment to stick with it.
The only time you can safely stop promoting your books is when you’re ready to stop writing them. Before then, commit yourself to the Rule of Five: do five things every day to market your books. Think of it this way: A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.
3) Investment: You must think of marketing as an investment in your future.
Most best-selling authors don’t strike gold with their first book. Their sales grow with a succession of books until they write the breakout book that catapults them onto the best-seller list, where they stay for the rest of their careers.
Until your promotional efforts pay off and you become a successful author, consider the money you spend on promotion as an investment that will pay for itself many times over.
4) Consistent: Your marketing must be consistent.
You must make your promotion consistent so that, over time, the media and your readers become more receptive to you and your books. One of the weapons in chapter 18 is the marketing calendar that you will create and tweak as needed every year. But once you’re convinced about the most effective way to promote your books, don’t change your approach. Make your promotion, like your books, consistently first rate. Also be consistent about the frequency with which you write your books and when they are published. One book a year is the usual pace.
5) Confident: You must make potential readers confident in you.
Consistency creates familiarity, familiarity builds confidence, and confidence is the most important factor in determining what makes consumers buy. It’s more important than quality, selection, price, and service.
6) Patient: You must be patient with your marketing.
If you’re doing all you can for your books, take two more steps: • Follow up on your efforts. • Have patience with your promotion plan, the sales of your books, and the development of your career.
7) Assortment: You must use an assortment of weapons to ensure the success of your marketing.
Small businesses shouldn’t try to use all the weapons in their arsenals at once, but should unleash them over time with a well-thought-out plan. Unfortunately, this is a luxury writers don’t have. Unless publishers make a commitment to a book, they test-market it with the first printing. To sustain your publisher’s belief in your book’s future, you have to create maximum promotional firepower for it during the crucial four- to six-week launch window when it’s published.
Firing as many weapons as you can integrate effectively into your plan is the best way to accomplish this. If your book doesn’t gain momentum fast enough, your publisher will give up on it and go on to other books. Make it your goal to use at least sixty weapons. The wider the assortment of weapons you use, the wider the grin on your face will be when your royalty check arrives. However, if you can’t use a weapon effectively, don’t use it at all.
A Web site alone will not make your books successful, nor will a media kit. Regard every weapon as 1 percent of your promotion plan. The best way to guarantee the success of your books is to use as many weapons as you can. The more weapons you unleash on publication and the more completely you integrate them, the more powerful each of them becomes. Unity and variety are two of the keys to victory in the publishing wars. The bigger your arsenal, the greater your victories.
A bookseller who was chosen to receive the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year Award was using seventy-four guerrilla marketing weapons (and he was still trying to figure out how to use the other twenty-six!).
Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 No-Cost, Low-Cost Weapons for Selling Your Work – http://www.bookdaily.com/book/1034711
~~We hope this helps you as an author to get your work out there to the waiting reader! K.R. and I are working diligently, daily, to put into practice all the things we read about and learn. The above are some great encouragements that have helped to keep us motivated to move forward. Another great resource, is MasterKoda on Facebook. This author/editor/illustrator/marketing group is full of people who know the real meaning of putting others first. Join us, you won’t be sorry you did.

Tamy Burns

A Sea Story - Learning to Love Living Out of Control

 It has been nearly three decades since I last lived on a sailboat, but much of my writing is inspired by what I learned over many years on the water.  Every sailor knows that the path to your destination is not well marked, the route you take depends on the weather, and sometimes you end up in a place very different from where you thought you were heading when you set out.

In other words, sailing is a metaphor for life. 

That metaphor took on much richer meaning when my husband and I abandoned successful careers at age 40 for a five-year circumnavigation of the globe. In fact, we only made it halfway (New York to New Zealand), but it was nearly ten years before I returned home.  Having “dropped off” off the professional track at an age where the path to success begins to narrow, I returned to a career that was much more satisfying than I ever could have imagined if I’d remained in New York instead of going sailing.

So herewith, one perspective on sailing as a metaphor for life.

Every sailor knows that the basic elements of the boating life— the wind, the weather and the current—are out of your control.  But Tom and I were experienced sailors and it never really occurred to me that I could die at sea. 

That is, until one sunny day 18 months into our voyage, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, miles from the shipping lanes.  That day, a group of experienced yachting friends failed to check in on the scheduled ham net.  We laughed, at first, about too much partying the night before or a dead battery due to engine trouble.  But when the yacht did not re-appear after several days, I could not avoid the possibility that something catastrophic had happened on a beautiful day in the middle of nowhere. And that the probability of being rescued was close to zero.

If it could happen to them, of course, it could happen to us.  For the first time in my sailing career, I understood, in the pit of my stomach, that my life could end at any moment, without warning.  

I fought panic for nearly a week, berating myself for giving up a comfortable life in New York City for an existence that was so fragile.

And then one gorgeous night with the full moon marking out our southwesterly course on the sea’s surface, it dawned on me that my comfortable life in New York had been an illusion.  I’d been so busy trying to control the small details of daily living—racing to get onto the subway before the door closed … getting to the movie early enough to get good seats … planning a cruising itinerary with arrival and departure dates five years out—that I’d never stopped to think about all the big things that could snuff my life out in an instant.

A brick falling off the façade of a building on Madison Avenue as I walked by.  A drunk in the wrong lane of the Saw Mill River Parkway.  A fire in my high-rise apartment building.  A stroke. 

But even worse, all that busy-ness had been in service of yet another illusion. I had no more control over the subway door than I had over the drunk on the highway.  I had no more control over whether a guest broke a wine glass than I had over the arrival of a hurricane. 

As I watched the moonbeam dancing on the water ahead of our bow, I realized how much time and energy I had wasted trying to manage things, big and little, that were ultimately uncontrollable.  The cruising life had already taught me to be content with the uncontrollable nature of wind and weather.  Now, it was teaching me to be content with uncontrollable nature of life itself. 

Cruising was teaching me to love living out of control.

Mary Gottschalk is retired and living in Iowa, much too far from the world of serious sailing.  In 2008, she published Sailing Down the Moonbeam, a memoir about her journey from New York to New Zealand.  She is currently working on a novel she expects to publish in early 2013.  She also works as a freelance writer and speaker.  A version of this article first appeared in www.WriteontheWater.com

www.sailingdownthemoonbeam.com; http://marycgottschalk.com

http://www.facebook.com/MaryGottschalkWriter

https://twitter.com/Marycgottschalk

"With a little help from your friends"

When Siggy asked me if I'd like to write something for Writers Get Together, my immediate response was “I'd love to!”

Upon further thought, I realized this meant I'd have to come up with something to write. Between writing novels and thinking up mildly clever or vaguely informative things for my own blog, I volunteered to write for someone else's? Crap. Yes, she said I could re-post something from mine, but that didn't seem like the answer – if people want to read that, they can go to my blog, right? I could also post an excerpt from my book, but that didn't sit right, either, because I already spend so much time at shameless self-promotion.

Hmm: promotion. Now there's a thought.

You can read author blogs ad nauseum that will tell you the elements needed to find success in the world of independent (and particularly electronic) publishing: a well-written book, eye-catching cover, intriguing blurb, precise formatting, luck. And a platform.

A platform is like a following – people who will buy your book, read it and share it with their friends, relatives, neighbours, co-workers, the kid down the street and the meter maid. And hopefully everyone else they meet.

“That sounds easy,” I sez reading that.

So out I go into the world of Facebook and Twitter, friending everyone I can find, following everyone with a pulse. More than 1300 people agree to be my friend (see, Ma? I'm popular!), but only people related to me follow on Twitter. That's okay, though, because now I have a platform.

I start sharing news and links to my book, telling people about my blog. I tweet clever quotations, share funny pictures. And what happens? Do my book sales skyrocket? Do people start knocking at my door asking to be my friend? Do tweeps start following me in droves?

Nope.

Select members of my family share my FB posts with their 97 friends (most of whom are my friends, too). A few people I know take the time to click the little 'like' icon at the bottom of my posts, declaring to the world their affinity for whatever I had to say. My ten-year-old daughter tells all her school friends what a great writer her Daddy is (God bless her). My Mom tells me she'd retweet anything I have to say...if she was on Twitter.

Okay, indie publishing gurus, how is this going to help me become successful enough to quit my job and write full-time?

It won't.

The secret to successful promo in the social media world rests in the power of the group. My platform + your platform + his platform + her platform = success.

Does anyone remember the old Pert shampoo commercial with the amazing multiplying woman? “She tells two friends, then she tells two friends, and so on, and so on.” All those tiny woman heads in that commercial added together made for many sales for Pert shampoo, but only because they each told two friends. If I tell my friends, and you tell your friends, and they tell their friends...and then we do it again. For you, for me, for her, for him.

I like to do the Twitter math. When I share a link to my blog, 153 people potentially see it (yeah, I still don't have that many followers, but it's growing). For my last post, I saw my link retweeted at least 7 times, increasing the number of eyes potentially seeing it to over 2500 sets. Far more impact.

But be warned, fellow indies, this can't be done selfishly. Truly care about helping your peers, put their success ahead of yours, and you may be happily surprised at the results. For everybody.

To that end, my platform is your platform. Drop me a line if you'd like to guest on my blog, tag me when you have an important link to share, DM me when you have something to retweet.

It's a big, scary world out there, indie authors and readers who read us, but together we can survive and thrive.

Indie authors of the world unite! And together we'll take over the world!

Mwah, ha ha ha.

Find Bruce Blake at:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=640723713

https://twitter.com/#!/bruceablake

http://bruceblake.wordpress.com/

http://www.on-unfaithful-wings.com/