July 2011 – Mystery, fantasy and romance at the dangerous ends of the earth

Book Blog Tours and Review Sites with Adrian Phoenix

By Karen Abrahamson | July 24, 2011

The few last weeks I’ve written about building a social network and its use in marketing. It was interesting that Joshua Graham couldn’t directly relate his Facebook and twitter followers to his writing, but that John Locke, could. Hard on the heels of writing those posts I attended a Publisher’s Workshop on the Oregon Coast where we discussed marketing strategies for e-books. One of the items clearly not at the top of the facilitators list of marketing tools was social marketing a la Facebook and twitter.

Following on that workshop I was referred to a an article on the Science Fiction Writers of America website regarding the author’s 100 day Social Media Blackout and the results of that experiment regarding social media and marketing. The author basically removed herself from social media for 100 days and talks about what she learned from this experience. Basically, her view of the value of social media shifted from a belief that social media connected her with readers and industry professionals as well as connecting her with family and friends, to one of social media’s value being its ability to connect her with community.

Not marketing. Community building. She goes so far as to point out that having a person as a follower (something that takes only the click of a mouse), does not necessarily mean they are going to take the time to buy and read your books.

So how do you build a fan base? Urban Fantasy Author and friend, Adrian Phoenix, has done extremely well at building a fan base over three years of publishing her Maker’s Song and Hoodoo novels. She kindly agreed to an interview about how book blog tours have contributed to her following.

1. For those of us just starting down this road, can you please explain what a guest blog is?

Adrian: You bet! A guest blog is a post you write for another person’s blog, usually by invitation, on any number of topics. I’ve written on topics ranging from vampire dating tips, my first crush, writing from the male POV, on the nature of ghosts, my love of paranormal, the top ten shows on my DVR, etc. Anything that readers might find interesting. I try to gear it toward the blog that I’ll be guesting on—paranormal, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, etc. But I’ve found that most blogs are happy with any interesting, reader-hooking subject. And humor seems to be really appreciated.

Here’s the links to a few examples.

On Paranormal Haven, I did a guest post on the nature of ghosts.

On the Strange Candy blogsite, I did I guest post on vampire dating tips.

On All Things Urban Fantasy, my post was about the top ten shows on my DVR. (Including pictures for each show, plus who I thought was the hottest character.)

On the Vampire Book Club, my post was on writing from the male POV.

2. How do you get invited to provide a guest blog?

Adrian: I usually get invited by bloggers who’ve either read my books or have received copies from my publisher. So it never hurts to check the blogs reviewing books in your genre and offering to do a giveaway or offer to send them a copy to review. Sometimes they are overloaded with books to review, so my advice at this point would be to contact them about doing a guest blog or interview along with a giveaway.

Once you’ve been a guest on a blog site, keep in touch about your next release. You should get an invitation to come back. If you don’t (and they do have a ton of authors to deal with), politely let them know—in advance— that you have a new release coming out and schedule a giveaway and guest blog or interview. Always be polite and friendly. Most bloggers will be happy to work with you and promote your books if you treat them with warm professionalism and courtesy.

3. You have conducted guest blogs as both yourself and your characters. Why have you done this and how is blogging as a character different from regular blogging? Why do it?

Adrian: I really enjoy letting the characters do guest blogs and/or giving interviews. I can play and have fun and don’t need to worry about how I’m perceived. Readers in general and fans of a series absolutely love interacting with the characters they read about, the characters that feel so real to them. Some even get to flirt. Sometimes I’ll offer to do a character gig just for a change of pace, but more often, the bloggers will ask for one—especially if they are fans of the books themselves.

Every time I’ve done a character interview or post, I always see a comment along the lines of “I haven’t read these books yet, but I loved this interview and the way the characters chatted that I’m going to get the first book right now.”

That alone makes it worthwhile. It gives new readers a taste of the books through getting to know the characters, and it gives fans a chance to play with them. And my turnouts for character posts and interviews are often better attended than my own interviews. I’m okay with that. After so many interviews, there isn’t much new to say that your readers don’t already know from previous interviews. Another reason for guest blogs—myriad subject possibilities beyond yourself and your writing techniques. LOL.

Here’s a couple of examples of character post and interviews.

On Paranormal Haven, the Maker’s Song gang posted likes and dislikes dossiers, including their thoughts on Twilight.

On Paranormal Romance Addict, Dante and Heather did an interview together.

And on WereVampsRomance, Dante discusses sex, lies, and the mofos who tell them.

4. Personally, the thought of being interviewed in a blog makes me nervous. How do you make sure you haven’t made a fool of yourself in the blog or that your characters don’t make a comment that could impact readership in the future?

Adrian: Interview questions aren’t all that difficult, really. The readers want to know more about you—do you have pets, children? What do you like to read? Who do you like to read? What is your writing routine? If you avoid religion and politics, you’ll be fine. Readers want to know the person behind the book. That’s all.

As for the characters, I let them say whatever they would normally say and don’t censor them. Fans want them to be themselves and, trust me, Dante doesn’t hold back. They love him all the more for it. And he’s gained me new readers as well. I don’t think you need to worry and your characters chasing away readers. If anything, they will win them over.

5. What kind of time commitment is involved in guest blogging?

Adrian: Unfortunately, it can be a lot. It depends on how long your guest blog is (and shorter is generally better) and how much you interact with the readers after it is posted. It’s a good idea to read the comments, leave comments of your own thanking them for joining you, for their support, and answering any follow-up questions.

On my previous release, I did a huge blog tour. I had so many requests and I wanted to do them all and I did. I’ll be more careful with this next release, spread them out more. Not only do you use up too much writing time, but you run the risk of people seeing too much of you. Spread it out. Instead of a guest blog or interview every time, offer to do a straight giveaway instead. I’ve never had a blogger say no to that.

7. On a topic other than blogging, do you have a promotions/marketing plan beyond whatever your publisher identifies? I also note that you have a posse of fans who do a lot of promotion of your books. How did that come about and what do they do for you? How did you go about promoting your book as an author once you had your book deal?

Adrian: I don’t have a specific promotions/marketing plan other than getting the word out via blogsites, giveaways, sample chapters, etc. Having an active website is part of that. That’s a necessity so readers, new and continuing, can find you, learn more about your books (where to find them, for one thing) and contact you.

Through my website, people can also join the street team, request free book plates, or go to the forum (or my official Yahoo fan club) to chat with other fans about my books. I also have chats with characters on the forum.

I have a street team of 160 people worldwide right now (that number keeps going up) and two street team managers (both who are fans that I got to know and who volunteered for the job) who handle the details. The street team receive bookmarks to hand out to book stores, libraries, and to other readers. They post about my releases and events on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, MySpace and spread the word about my books in a ton of different ways (including my titles and website link in their email signatures). Quite a few make sure their local bookstore keeps my books on the shelves and chat the books up in book clubs and reading groups.

I give signed copies of each release to the top 25-30 people on the team and every few months, award prizes to members with the highest points. (Points are earned in a number of different ways.) I also make sure they know I want it to be fun and that they are not obligated to do anything.

As for promoting my books after landing each of my contracts, I don’t do much—aside from putting info and news up on my website. Not until it gets closer to the book’s release date. A couple of months prior, I start contacting blogs about doing appearances and giveaways. And I always have something happening on my website.

Thanks so much to Adrian for her time and her insight. (Her most recent book, Black Heart Loa is receiving stellar reviews.) Blog tours sound like work, but they also sound like a lot of fun —but then so does most of social marketing when you focus on the social aspect. The one caution I would add to Adrian’s information after a follow-up discussion with her, is remember that social marketing and guest blogging should not take over your writing time. If it does, then you have a problem.

Building a Social Network and Following

By Karen Abrahamson | July 16, 2011

Last blog Joshua Graham discussed how he built his novel’s readership from first self-published manuscript to best selling Thriller. Joshua talked about building his social network and that this was the key to having his book sell.

So how does someone build their network from their few friends to the broader network needed to sell your book widely?

Best selling novelist, John Locke, talked about conducting searches on Twitter and Facebook for people who might be interested in your types of books. These types of searches might be as simple as searching #mystery, or #romance, or #thriller, or they might be as complex as conducting a search of a topic area, such as #postapocalypticfiction, or #Bahamas (the location of your novel).

It may also involve areas you are passionate about. For me travel and culture were two areas I searched and followed people who seemed to have similar interests to me, or to post information that was interesting to me, e.g. National Geographic Traveler.

A next step is to look at these individual’s twitter pages and identify those people who follow that site who might also be interested in following you. This might be based on their profile, but it might also be based on what they post. Are the people avid readers, or reviewers, or are they passionate about the topic you are writing about such as #afghanistan or #animalrights? When you find people who are interesting to you, then follow them. Chances are they will also follow you, if you also look interesting to them. So how do you do this?

First of all, have an interesting profile on your twitter account. This doesn’t mean make things up, it means telling people what you are passionate about that show who you are. This might include your book, or your hobby, or your family, your pet, or your humor, but show them. This makes you human and they can see things that you might have in common.

Second of all, have a website linked to your facebook and twitter page. Make sure your website is interesting. Have a blog that is also interesting. Make sure your website and your blog are constantly changing (new material) to bring people back again and again.

Offer something to people who come to your website. This might mean value-added material about the characters or the world in which your book is set, or it might include offering contests or something free, like a story, to readers.

Be consistent in your postings to your website and on twitter and/or Facebook become a presence with something interesting to say and people will follow you.

Don’t think you have something interesting to say today? Then find the people with the tweets that are interesting to you and retweet them, because if you found them interesting, chances are others will too. If we’re talking about Facebook, make coments about posts that interest you. Facebook also allows pages for your book, so here is another place to show what you are writing about. With regards to blogs, if you have posted your blogs regularly, people will come to expect that you will keep that regularity up. That consistency allows people to follow you.

A note here. Many social media pundits say you should post a new blog at least once a week. Others have postulated that a quality post could be written less frequently to allow people to be guided to it again and again.

It’s my belief that this will depend on the nature of the post and its intended readers. So think about whether your blog’s readers are people with time to check posts regularly, or are they people who may need a month just to find the time to check your blog? Finally, a challenge for a lot of writers is that they target their blog to other writers instead of their readers. So think about what you are doing with your blog and your social media posts, and make sure it is targeted to who you are really writing for—your readers.

Beyond your own blog and website, you can also build your social media connections a couple of other ways:

1. Identify writers or books that you believe attract a similar audience to that your book should attract. Find fan pages and groups for these writers and books and engage with them.

2. Find other blog sites, like review sites, forums or well-trafficked sites and participate regularly. Share what you know. Share yourself and DON”T USE THOSE CONNECTIONS TO ONLY PUSH YOUR WARES.

3. Join Goodreads and become involved with reader groups. Participate in book discussions. When you introduce yourself to a new group, feel free to introduce yourself as a writer, but don’t push your book. There are other ways established on Goodreads to do this.

Most of all, relax and enjoy the people you meet. The open conversations that occur, make you human and are more likely to cause a person to think that given they like you, they might like your book.

Next week we’re going to talk about book reviews and blog tours.

Social Media and Marketing your e-Published Book

By Karen Abrahamson | July 9, 2011

Which social media do you prefer and what success have you experienced with it? Last Post I said that we’d start to explore social media and how to make it work for you. When I consider social media and on-line marketing there are four basic areas to discuss:

Twitter
Facebook/Google+
Websites and blogs
Author opportunities on Amazon.com, Pubit and Goodreads amidst others.

In addition there are other opportunities such as interviews/blog tours and UTube, however I recently saw an amazing graphic that shows the immense possibilities available for social marketing (click here). All of these are built on a key concept we discussed last week, namely the importance of social networking.

Marketing on social networks requires you to first of all to focus on also being social. To help with introducing this subject, successful self-publisher, Joshua Graham, provided these insights about his experience building from a newly published book to a best seller. He provides a good introduction to what social marketing requires.

1. You’ve talked about using social media for promoting yourself and your books. Can you tell me what social media you’ve used and what have you used them for? E.g. do you only use social media for your writing, or are you involved with the various forms for other social purposes?

I have Facebook accounts, fan pages for my pen names and books, as well as twitter accounts. I mostly use them for marketing my work.

Do you have those for each of your pseudonyms and each book?

That is correct. For now, with only 2 novels and 2 pen names, it’s manageable.

2. How have you used each type of social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon book groups, etc.) to promote your writing? E.g. announcing new publications, pushing your books (if so, how?)

Twitter is still a bit of a mystery to me, but I’m learning. I’ve used Facebook to find readers and let them know about my books, reviews, interviews, awards, and honors. All of these help build my internet presence and create a platform. As this platform grows, there will be more of an audience for future releases.

To find readers, I basically went to various special interest pages on Facebook such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., engaged in discussions and “friended” anyone who seemed like they might be interested in my books. Also, based on the reactions (comments, “likes”) to my book posts, I “friended” those people as well.

3. Did you have a social media presence before you began promoting your books?

Not really. I had a personal Facebook page, but I really began marketing under my pen name when my ebooks first became available.

4. How often are you on the various social media sites? What time commitment does social media involve a week? (What did you devote to it?)

Probably a bit more than I should be. I spend several hours each week on Facebook, and often when I’m feeling a bit unfocused in my writing, I hang out there more doing marketing and communicating with my fans.

5. Have you tracked which social media sites have had the greatest impact on your sales? If so, which ones have you found most effective?

It’s hard to draw a direct correlation (esp. with Twitter) but I have definitely found Facebook the most effective way for now. Even that is reaching a limit, so I’ll need to explore other venues for marketing too.

6. Are there actions you would recommend for writers venturing into marketing on social media and, conversely, are there actions that you would recommend writers avoid?

There’s no one way that works for everyone. Definitely, write the best book you can. Get some good reviews and use them to talk about your book. I find that if you start giving away a lot of free ebooks (short stories, or even novels) on a regular basis, you’ll develop an appreciative and loyal following.

Then when you release a new book, they as your fans will be very enthusiastic and hopefully talk about it on their social networks as well. I would avoid over-saturating certain fan pages with ads. Be aware of the culture and rules of each fan page or message board. If you fall out of favor, it will harm rather than help your marketing efforts.

7. What would you recommend to the writer who has little to no previous experience with social media?

Get started! Learn your way around and find your own social media voice. Have a personality online that people can identify with. And most of all, be a giver. Give your readers and fan something of value. If they perceive you as a taker–someone who just wants them to buy your book, they will be turned off and you will become noise to them.

A big thanks to Joshua for sharing his insights. And just to reinforce what he has said, as an author he has focused on his marketing, but he has done so through becoming involved with communities within the social media.

A similar story can be found if you look at the process John Locke used to become a best seller, however his preferred social media was Twitter. So it seems that both social media can be successful; you just need to decide which you prefer and determine how to make it work for you. That’s what we’ll talk about next time out.

So I’ll repeat my question here: which social media do you prefer and what success have you experienced with it?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Social Media, Pulling Teeth and Getting Started

By Karen Abrahamson | July 3, 2011

I remember it well—the day my writing mentor said I had to be on Twitter. First came the panic.

‘No’, I said. ‘No way. E-mail eats enough time as it is.”

Another kindly pair of friends took me aside and explained that really, Twitter wasn’t so bad, and you needed it to market you books (no mention of how). So they helped me get an account and TweetDeck, and set me loose in the Twitter world.

And I never used it.

The few times I logged on, it was like going to the dentist and I HATED the fact that my darn computer dinged and disturbed my train of thought every time a new tweet came through. Now I know I could turn my speakers down, but I needed the volume to tell me when business e-mails came through. The trouble was twitter kept dinging and dinging. So this post is about Twitter and Facebook and social media in general and how to make it manageable for you. Next post will be on how to make it WORK for you.

The thing with Twitter and Facebook is that you have to understand that they have tremendous potential, but you also have to understand that there are downsides:

Social media can be frustrating as heck until you understand them and how they work.
Social media can feel like floundering in deep water until you decide the parameters of how you are going to participate.
Twitter and Facebook can become veritable time sinks.
Social media can begin to take over your social life.

DSC_0038 - revised la saucet river — Winter river near La Saucet, France (2005) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Like anything new, understanding Twitter and Facebook requires purposeful learning. Yes, it is possible to simply open an account and begin tweeting or sending messages, but why, and what do you send messages about? One reason may be to simply keep in touch with existing friends. Once you’ve connected with your friends, it’s easy to fulfill this purpose. You can use Facebook and Twitter to send out urls for blogs, which is also useful, and if that is all you want, then the social media is working for you.

So to make social media work for you, this is a first decision point: what do you want from Twitter or Facebook?

If you want to leverage social media to help with marketing your books, this requires you to become more involved in the social media family. It requires you to become more comfortable with working with social media. A good place to pick up pointers is through Lynda.com, which contains video tutorials on the basics, but also sessions on marketing.

Marketing your book requires building your connections to others in the Twitterverse, or Facebook Universe. This involves building connections to friends, which means that you need to do more than marketing. You need to give people something of yourself and your interests, something that both you and other people find of value. This involves reaching out to others to become their friends, either by identifying common interests, or through their connections to people you friend or follow. This is easy enough to do, by simply clicking on a person’s profile and friending or following them. Hopefully they will reciprocate and follow you, too. But the trouble is this can become an obsession. You can spend hours identifying friends and follows, and you have to ask yourself what is most important—this social media work, or time spent writing (and time having a life).

This is a second decision point: Are you a writer first and a social media savant second, or is it the other way around? If you are a writer, then you may need to set parameters around your time spent on social media. For an example, I try to put in thirty minutes to an hour in the morning and the same in the evening.

Street scene, Montmartre, Paris (2005) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

But at the same time you need to understand that social media is social. This means that even if your original intention in joining the Twitterverse and Facebook was to market your book, you need to do more than that. You need to have something to add to the Twitterverse. This was initially where I stalled. I didn’t know what I could add to all the comments out there. Well we all have things to add, whether it be book recommendations, reporting on your latest accomplishments, or links to blogs that you found important, these are the things that will build your followers and your social connections, and when you get your first message from a follower it starts to feel fun that you are building connections to people—people who might eventually become your friends.

And not your dentist.