|
While no one can predict the future of publishing with absolute accuracy, here's a simple truth that I don't see changing any time soon: People love to read good stories. People also seek solid, factual information that improves their lives. Those people are our audience and our job is to provide those readers what they seek. Sure, our industry is difficult. With tenacity we'll find success. ~Gregory |
|
January 31, 2008 |
|
Gregory A. Kompes, Editor |
|
ISSUE #163 |
|
February 6 — Tell Our Life Stories Free Teleconference — 5pm Take part in the Tell Our Life Stories FREE teleconference to learn how to start telling your own life story. Hosted by Margaret Randall and Jay Speyerer, this FREE Teleconference will help you write your stories! Wednesday, February 6, (5 p.m. Pacific) To receive the phone number and passcode send an email request to margaret@tellourlifestories.com
February 23 — Book Fair — 2pm-4pm
|
|
Be optimistic, but financially smart. Set a budget for promotion and stick to it. Those royalty checks your dreaming about are well in the future so you'll be footing this bill out of your own pocket with no sure return. Keep track of all the advice you receive. Create a simple word document with a two or three column table. Put the advice in one column, notes in another, and a timeline date in the third. This is simple and you can easily sort the date column. Don't rush to the publicity gate. Wait until your book is out to begin any serious publicity. It does no good to develop buyers if you don’t have anything for them to buy. Use the time, energy, and excitement to plan your campaign. Don't buy advertising. It just doesn't offer a realistic return. Better, go after all the free publicity that you can (reviews, article placement, interviews, Q&As, etc.) Get several articles listed in proper/related topic areas on the free article sites (see The Fabulist Flash, Issue 60) and include a simple About the Author paragraph/resource box with your website URL. Check out PRWeb. I've had great success with this service at the free, $40, and $80 levels. But, save your spending on this until AFTER your publisher is done with their campaigns. Most book signings are an absolute waste of time. This is a sad, but true fact. A better plan: develop a 30-45 minute speech, presentation, workshop or 1/2 day seminar on your topic and offer it for free to groups that fit your niche. This is a great way to generate sales and increase your expert status. Just make sure you can sell your book in the back of the room following your talk. Will your publisher be hiring a publicist for your release? Will they be covering radio? If not, I highly recommend working with a publicist. Be warned, the good ones are expensive. Basically, when you hire a publicist you're "renting" their rolodex so you need a firm or person with great contacts. The better the contacts, the more expensive the fees. But, if you're going to spend money on PR, hire the best. I highly recommend Newman Communications. They specialize in book promotion so they're incredibly well connected. Ken Howell (www.newmancommunications.com) was my publicist and he did a terrific job getting me radio slots. The fees will vary greatly based on what you want to accomplish. But, you're probably looking at $3-5K for a decent radio campaign (10-20 interviews). While promoting your book is essential, you've got to keep working on other writing projects. Don't devote all your time leading up to and after the release of your book to the book. It's difficult to find balance, but essential. You need to use the book experience to enhance your writing and financial life, but it can't become all consuming or your other income sources are going to dry up. You'll really notice this six to eight months after your book comes out. |
|
The Frugal Book Promoter: How to Do What Your Publisher Won't assures your book the best possible start in life. Full of nitty-gritty how-to's for getting nearly free publicity, Carolyn Howard-Johnson shares her professional experience as well as practical tips gleaned from the successes of her own book campaigns. The Frugal Book Promoter tells authors how to do what their publishers can't or won't and why authors can do their own promotion better than a PR professional. |
|
1. Did you choose the writing profession or did it choose you? It chose me mostly at night. My husband finally told me that I either start writing for publication or I couldn’t wake him any longer in the middle of the night to read to him what I had just written.
2. What is your background? (education, work, etc.) I only had a year and a half of college before I married, and the very first job I ever held was as a bookkeeper for the Bank of America, I worked at the Anaheim Main branch in California, and tracked the deposits for Disneyland and service charged the business accounts. The job I hold now, here in Las Vegas, is Chief Operations Officer for Mystic Publishers, a coaching endeavor for people who want to self-publish without falling into the trap of the vanity presses. I think I have done everything in office work that there is to do, from file clerk to Executive Secretary to head of a data entry department, except rely on the speed of my typing. I was even the computer operator and the entire data entry department for a local hospital’s home health department.
3. When did you ‘know’ you were a writer? I knew I was a writer when I stopped telling myself that I couldn’t be. All the way from high school until I had raised 4 of my 6 children everyone had urged me to write. It wasn’t until I went back to college here in Henderson, NV, that I took the advice of my English teacher, Ann Simon, and I started my first book. But I have to admit that I chickened out in the fourth chapter. That’s when my husband introduced me to Richard Draude, and we began co-authoring what turned out to be the Tyranny Series. We kind of taught each other the writing process.
4. How would you describe your style of writing? I would describe my writing style as down to earth and made for everyone to read and enjoy. And that’s something for a science fiction writer to say. But my brand of science fiction is the type of adventure that just happens to take place in the future. Oh, I get to make up gadgets and the like, but my stories are more about the people in the future and how they cope with the problems of space, other worlds, and everyday events.
5. What is your writing process? Right now I am three books into our Tyranny Series with a co-author. But it is much the same as my solo pieces. I start with a summary of what I want to see the story cover and then I chart my way through the chapters to get the reader through the twists and turns that bring them to the end.
6. What was your path to publication? I started with poetry. I entered a community cultural contest sponsored by Orange Coast College and won third place with my entry. Since then I have accumulated a lot of rejection notices. But along the way I have had two essays published on KNPR, local to Southern Nevada, and have been printed in two independent short story collections. We self-published the first two of the Tyranny Series, and then we were picked up by a national audio book company, Books in Motion, and we receive the commission from both our books that they sell and rent on tape, CD, and MP3’s. I also have a book that Avalon Books is waiting for me to finish. They saw the first two chapters and have asked me to finish it and submit the complete manuscript.
7. What is your favorite self-marketing idea? I love taking the cover of my current work, or something from the story, and wrapping small copies around a bite sized candy bar (with the ISBN and purchasing info on the wrap-around flaps), and handing them out to everyone I meet. Who can resist a piece of chocolate?
8. What are the biggest surprises you’ve encountered as a writer? I think it was that I could actually do it and people liked to read the words I spun into a story. |
|
9. How do you inspire yourself? What are your sources of creativity? Please don’t laugh! A lot of times my ideas come from my dreams. I know, you ask yourself how many people dream about flying in space, but I find myself up in the wee hours of the morning writing feverishly before I forget what is left in my head. I also use personal experiences whenever I can. As in Tyranny’s Outpost, I wrote a two page section of the second chapter about one of the main characters that is afraid to fly. When I read that piece at a writer’s group meeting where we were asked to speak about the problems of co-authoring, I received applause. Then they laughed when I told them that it was easy to write because my feet never leave the ground. I can’t even stand on a second story balcony.
10. What is your proudest writer moment? My proudest moment was when I received the phone call from the president of Books in Motion and he told me that they were sending us a contract to put Tyranny’s Outpost and Tyranny’s Prisoner in audio format, and that they wanted us to hurry and finish the third one of our five book series.
11. What’s the best advice you were given about writing? The best advice I ever received was not to hold back. Say everything you want to say in your first draft. It may sound badly written, but that’s what the first draft is for. You can always cut from there, but at least you got to hear what the idea sounds like
12. What is your most embarrassing writer moment? For a person as shy as me, that is a very difficult question. Let’s just say that I have permanent foot in mouth disease. If I don’t have enough time to write it down, send it through my editor and then review it before the public hears it, my words never come out right.
13. What business challenges have you faced as a writer? Marketing. I find it difficult to push myself to do it.
14. What is your writer life philosophy? Write! Write! Write! And then, join a writers’ group.
15. When you’re not writing what do you do for fun? I conduct meetings at the Henderson Writers’ Group. I’ve been their president since 2001.
16. Who do you like to read? In the eighth grade our English teacher took us to the library and told us to pick something we had never read before. I, of course, ended up in the mystery section. He grabbed me by the arm and we stopped in front of the science fiction section. After I made an initial face and said something like “This is for boys to read,” he shoved the book When Worlds Collide into my hand, and I’ve read mostly nothing but science fiction since then.
17. What’s your advice for new writers? Find a good writer’s group to join. Learn from the others who have already been through what you are starting. It will save you a great many heartaches.
18. What are you currently working on? I am in the middle of the third book of our Tyranny Series, Tyranny’s Alliance, and am also putting the finishing touches on a murder mystery of sorts for Avalon Books, loosely based on the story of my mother’s gambling habit. Before she died of stomach cancer in 1997 she asked me to tell others how her addiction ruined her life. I tried to tell it as a factual account of her hardships from her daughter’s point of view, but it bored even me. Then I hit on the idea of turning the story into a murder mystery, where the impact of her gambling obsession is revealed, through the memories of her family, during the process of solving who killed a nice old lady. |
|
ISSN 1554-0804 |
|
Are you a published author? Take the 18Q today! |
|
Follow through on that New Year resolution to build a stronger online presence... Internet ACE: Building Your Online Self-Promotion Platform with Gregory A. Kompes — learn how build, brand, and expand your writing career using Internet Technology during this 10 week, interactive, online course. Begins May 5, 2008. $147. Register Today! |