Month: September 2013

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First impression of diverse books

I accidentally learned something really pivotal in the last couple of days. On a reviewing site on Facebook I said I download free books that catch my fancy, and always post a fair review if I do;  anyone wanting me to look specifically at one could send me a private message.

(To digress very briefly, when you send a private message on FB to someone you’re not following, it goes to their ‘other’ mailbox and FB doesn’t tell you about it.  You need to check regularly, as shown below.  Inbox (12), Other (2))

Facebook other

Back to what I was saying.  I got a LOT of private messages, most of which had completely ignored what I had gone on to say about my tastes.  It was an interesting crash course in instant reactions. If the cover had entwined bodies or gushing blood, I knew immediately not for me. So cover really is that important at identifying your book to your target readers.  Two seconds yes/no.

If the cover looked okay, I clicked on the link to read the blurb, i.e. what the author thought summed up their book.  One sentence led, or didn’t, to me reading another.  Ten seconds yes/no.

In one case, although the cover looked right, and the blurb seemed to cover my interests, it didn’t really grab me. Purely because I was slightly disappointed, I went on to look at the reviews, and they were very upbeat. Hmm. Then, and only then, did I start reading the sample, and it was great, and I downloaded the book, enjoyed it very much, and will be giving a good review.  I’ve also fed back to the author that her blurb isn’t working for her, because that’s the sort of thing I’d want to know.

But what a learning curve – faced with twenty seven messages about twenty seven books, I rejected fourteen immediately on their covers, and five on their blurb which made it clear that we weren’t, you should pardon the weak pun, going to be on the same page.  That’s a maximum of fifteen seconds of attention.

Eight of the submissions got me as far as reading the sample. I gave up at the second editing glitch on three of them, got bored on two, got puzzled on one, took the one I mentioned above, and took another which started really well but I’m halfway through and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.  It’s fun, it’s easy to read, but every other page is a new character and no central plot. Many of the characters have similar names and I’m getting confused. I’ll probably give up soon, it seems to be the book equivalent of Love Actually and you either like that sort of thing or you don’t.  The blurb suggested a tight dynastic theme and named two characters who have so far (halfway through, remember) appeared fleetingly twice, a paragraph each time. Eh?

I wish I’d known all of the above before I wasted my own promotional window, because my blurb is (rightly or wrongly) a snatch of conversation between characters and I WASTED the window by repeating it there.  The window should have been much tighter and brighter, that few seconds of attention that the cover won for me. Damn.  I love my books, but I’m not helping them.  Wearily pushing them into the light and effectively saying ‘there you go, darling, off and sell yourself’ is not productive.

I’m toying with the idea of starting a Facebook page just for those first impressions, for writers to try out different options on each other before taking them into the big wide world. If there’s a page for that already, please let me know, otherwise keep an eye out for the next blog.

As for those wondering how the promotion learning curve is going, here’s the latest learning. If you sign up on a promotion option, especially one which requires participants to share and retweet and that sort of stuff, first check what time they’ll be doing their thing. I’m annoyed with myself for not checking – Kboards do their promotion at 4pm Pacific time. That’s midnight here in the UK,  I did one weary share and retweet and crawled off to bed!  Their FB page has nearly 60K followers and the post got 88 likes (8 books were being pushed at the same time).  They’re quite small on Twitter, 1600 followers, and it looks like the tweet only got retweeted once (by me).  (and I’m even smaller). No way at this point of judging if I got a personal benefit.  Both of the Kboard links direct viewers to their blogspot.  http://kboards.blogspot.co.uk/

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Hitting the ebook promotion trail

For those of you avidly following this post to see if I’ve found any good promotion stuff, I’ll start with the nuggets gleaned so far and suggest you skip the rest.

Why give away a book?  It is probably only really worth it if you are writing a series.  If you can give away a thousand books, (and the well-known writers give away twenty five thousand or more), that’s potentially up to a thousand people who will read it, finish it, think ‘that wasn’t bad’ and maybe, let’s not get too carried away here,  post a review and / or buy another in the series.

All the activity – and the more you can give away, the more activity there is – gets your sluggish book moving from the murky depths, to the heights where readers looking in your category will see your book in that ‘people who bought this book also bought’ strip.  Your cover, bobbing around jauntily, demanding their attention. The rest, of course, is up to your blurb and sample but the more books you shifted, the longer it will take to fall back to the depths, and the more chance it has of actually selling (and therefore continuing to bob, and sell, and bob, etc)

Even giving books away takes work. You have to push push push on Twitter and Facebook and list it on lots of different websites (telling them in advance when your book is free) and Facebook pages (post it on the day) and hope like hell it’ll take.

Getting onto some of the websites almost guarantees attention, because they’re fussy about the books they take, but they’ll only accept books with an overall rating of 4.5 stars and at least ten proper (not puff) reviews.  Ah, reviews.  The chicken and the egg. No-one will look at the book if it doesn’t have reviews, and if no-one reads the book how will it ever get them?  One in perhaps a hundred readers bothers to post one at all. So how to get onto respected sites like Pixel of Ink?

Frankly, the book may have few or no reviews because it stinks. At best, because most of your readers are also writers and Amazon is very beady-eyed about writers reviewing writers.  (Personally I think Amazon should authorize those writers who do real reviews, because at least half the readers out there are writers themselves, but that’s an argument for another post and not why you’re patiently reading this and wondering when I’ll get to solving the problem.)

Three-four-final

I have no idea whether I’ve solved it, but I have signed up to Kboard, who will promote the book for a day along with fifteen others, on their own page and their Twitter and Facebook links. All sixteen writers commit to retweeting and promoting the listing like crazy all day.  Kboard themselves have sixty thousand followers, plus whatever the writers can collectively drum up, so the potential of being spotted is there.  They feature new or overlooked books, so Three Four is being thrust forward to fly the flag.  One Two may have its first murder in the first chapter, but Three Four is a more cheerful starter (and needs reviews, especially Amazon.com ones). (Fingers crossed)

So there we are, I’ll post in a few days to let you know whether Kboard is something to pencil into your own plans.  You can move on now because the rest is quite gloomy.

I’m frankly a bit subdued on this promotion trail. I spent two days researching Facebook groups (there are lots) (LOTS and lots) for authors, promotions, reviewers, groups for everything you can imagine, and in all fairness all but two of the ones I thought looked the best have accepted my request to join. The other two haven’t said no, they’ve just not responded, but in theory I’ve now got an audience of over 100 000. However, I’ve come to realize two things.

Firstly, the readers have pretty much fled. The bulk of the posts are shouts of ‘read mine!’ ‘No, read mine!’  We’re all yelling at once and nobody is actually reading any of the posts – at most, a quick scan to see what the competition is up to, a sneer, and move on.

That’s not to say nothing posted is read. I put a post on a FB group which included reviews, saying I’d review any free books that I liked the look of enough to download, but that I did most of my reading on the train so nothing to make me blush, cry or puke in public.  Gold stars, I said, to anything that made me smile and cheered me up.

I’m guessing I’m the first reviewer to put my head above that parapet for a while. My post had two comments within minutes, and the group administrator said sternly that all further comments had to be private. It had about twenty comments on it within half an hour.  My Facebook ping has gone hoarse announcing more incoming private messages. Body parts, buckets of blood, entangled heaving bodies and dead babies for the most part – obviously my sensibilities are out of step, because if the authors don’t expect their readers to blush / cry / puke at that lot you have to wonder who they are writing for. Not one – not ONE – has so far met the general guidelines.

The second thing I realized is that I’m WAY off trend. My corpses should be hopping to their feet, elbowing aside the boring living people, ripping apart their killers and running amok.  My living characters will have to wear black and grow fangs if they want a look-in. The way they’re written now, William’s the only one who would even know what to do at an orgy. (William would love me to write in an orgy.)

I’d say (primly) that I don’t know enough about orgies to write about them, but knowing little or nothing about a subject, including sex, hasn’t held back some of the authors who have pressed books on me.  As a reviewer, I’m embarrassingly popular. As a writer, I’m one step off jumping into the fray and shouting READMINEREADMINEREADMINE ITS (sic) THE BEST.

I take that step next week since I’m signed up to that Kboard promotion and can’t cancel at this stage. And I’m still going to have a free book giveaway in late October, to welcome Five Six to the family, just because I’m now gripped by an unhealthy fascination to see if I can at least manage to give books away. But I’m not hopeful.

five six final

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Puzzling through how to promote a book (an ongoing learning curve).

I genuinely don’t remember learning to read, although I do remember the first word I couldn’t read – I was showing off at school because it was all sooooooooo easy and the teacher said in that case I should read out the story of Jack Sprat.

I was 4, and pretty full of myself, and whipped through it until I got to ‘between them both they licked the plate clean’.

“No”, said the teacher, “it doesn’t say plate. It says platter.”  Whatnow?’  There were words I didn’t know?

And now a few years (okay, decades) have slipped by and there are still, nearly every day, words I don’t know.  They still set off my inner four year old.  What does it do? What does it mean? Is it a better word than the one I knew? Is it a word I want to be friends with?

Reading was (and is) my passion, although I couldn’t quite understand why a book could say anything, and nobody minded (fairies at the bottom of the garden? Good story) but you couldn’t tell people there were fairies at the bottom of your own garden because they said you were telling stories. Duh, YAH. But they didn’t seem to think me telling stories was a good thing.

I puzzled it out eventually. Once you write it down, then it becomes a Story and people nod and smile and tell you what a funny little imagination you have.  The first Stories were in crayon. Then pencil. Then pen. Then typed.  I thank the powers that dictate our lives that I was born in an age that would eventually include the word processor and even, in fullness of time, the electronic book, although we had to wait a while for that.

Turns out there are quite a few of us looking to be patted on the head and praised for our funny little imaginations. In truth, I sometimes wonder if there are more writers than readers. It was obviously time to sit down and puzzle out how to get a few more pats.

I’ve put out two books without any proper promotion at all but the third is coming out end October so anyone with promotion tips, or who can point me in promotional directions, please let me know. In the meantime I’ll pass on the ones I come across as I work through my pages of notes, and try things out.

Here are a few goodies found so far. There is a great site for selling short stories, Alfiedog.com  (click here to link) (take your imagination for  walk)

I’ve been accepted but damn and blast hadn’t known to switch off my ‘Kindle Select auto-renew’ option so it will be November before The Passing of Mrs Parker Woodburn is available there. But hey, I’ve tried a few of the stories already and they’re ideal train-commute reading, highly recommended.  I’ll be keeping very good company.

Another lovely site is First Chapters,( click here to link) where you can post your first few chapters, cover, author bio, etc.  It’s a co-op site,  you promote the site as well your chapters and so does every other writer who has had chapters accepted. Together, at least in theory, we reach millions – in reality, a couple more pats on the head, eh?