marketing

by 1 comment on "Coming soon: online direct art sales"

Over the next week or so, I’ll be finalizing the details on my shiny new sales portal at SaatchiArt.com online. Even though I’m already registered there, I’ve got a lot of background work left: choosing art, deciding whether to offer prints, verifying shipping weight and dimensions for each piece, researching market prices, etc. Why Saatchi?…

Read More Coming soon: online direct art sales
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Attention, Big-Name authors who feel compelled to tout a writing-related product or service: Stop. Think. Research. At least check to make sure you are not endorsing something well-meaning but clueless, if not utterly predatory. Lesser authors look up to you. They may even believe you. Do you want to disappoint them? Now, if you know…

Read More psst! research before endorsing!
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If you are a writer or a reader – or both! – you need to go here RIGHT NOW and look at this petition. Then please sign it. https://www.change.org/p/amazon-com-amazon-change-the-you-know-this-author-policy Lucky authors might have self-published bestsellers that seem to gain word-of-mouth acclaim instantly, or have commercial publishers bankrolling major marketing campaigns. The rest of us struggle…

Read More Amazon’s review policy (rant warning, adult language)
Aside 2 comments on "Content writing for blogs"

A handy tip on writing for your blog: do most of it yourself or don’t do it at all.

Sure, cultivate guest blog trades for relevant and relatable posts. It’s fun and lets you network with peers. But your blog should be about your voice and vision, not someone else’s. Especially not someone you’ve hired to scrape and repackage web topics. Otherwise you’re not blogging, you’re just a spamming spammer who spams. 

If you can’t write well enough for publication, take some classes or use free online English-as-a-second-language resources until you can. 

Especially if your blog is your business contact and showcase.

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Especially in America, there is immense corporate pressure to have a college degree – as a meal-ticket to a better job and future, not necessarily as a proof of one’s intellectual skills. When the fact of having the degree is more important than the process of earning the degree, the stage is set for fraud…

Read More Thesis mills
by 2 comments on "Selfie or not?"

There’s a writers group on LinkedIn I was considering joining. I’m not, now, because they require a headshot photo of all prospective members. (I did end up joining, after all; see update in Comments below.) I don’t have many pictures of myself not costumed or otherwise masked. They’re around. I’m just not happy about adding…

Read More Selfie or not?
Aside 1 comment on "one of these platforms is not like the other"

(Borrowing from Stephen Colbert): A Tip Of The Hat to commercially published authors who are self-publishing their backlists. That’s good for them and their readers. We don’t want a return to the days of the midlist mass-market paperback that had a print run of 2000 copies, and about two weeks on the bookstore shelf to prove itself.

A Wag Of The Finger to those same authors who imply or state their current self-publishing experience and results are 100% applicable to the masses of unpublished, unagented, likely unpolished, and possibly under-informed writers who follow them.

A reasonably successful commercial author can springboard their self-publishing efforts off already existing readerships, and whatever work their old publisher’s marketing department did on their behalf.

Unknown self-published authors have a far rougher road. 

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For anyone who has been in a cave for the last nine years, Etsy.com is a sales site meant to showcase original handmade objects. It is poised to offer a major IPO. It is also coming under increasing pressure by detractors who: 1) Claim Etsy is often a haven for cheaply-produced overseas goods marketed online…

Read More Is Etsy bad for honest artisans?
by 1 comment on "Anne R. Allen’s ‘How Not To Sell Books’"

The sun rises. The living move in the waking world. Sadness remains, as well as selfish fury at a universe that would take Terry Pratchett before he could give us another Tiffany Aching book…* Sigh. I’m short-tempered this week, partly because of that. I’ve put several people on ‘ignore’ in various social media forums, because…

Read More Anne R. Allen’s ‘How Not To Sell Books’
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Throughout the month, the authors over at Marketing For Romance Writers (MFRW) will be having Tweet Days, blog hops, interviews, and contests showcasing some of the best romance writers around. I like this group because it connects commercial and self-publishers, writers across all subgenres of romance, and some amazing promotional opportunities. Today is one of the…

Read More our version of March Madness
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 A reluctant vampire hunter, stalking New York City as only a scorned bride can. From Bathory Gate Press principal Margo Bond Collins comes another fast-paced, grimly funny paranormal romance/mystery/horror/comedy. And this week only, it’s $.99! (Buy links after excerpt) _______________________________________________________ Elle Dupree has her life all figured out: first a wedding, then her Ph.D., then…

Read More Margo Bond Collins, Legally Undead
by 1 comment on "Yet another literary writer epicfails at genre…"

…then revels condescendingly at her own faceplant, and then manages to sell a smug little literary essay about it while touting her ‘purer’ work. To round out the trifecta of writing-related articles this week, here is the National Post’s unintentionally funny ‘confession of a failed romance writer’. Jowita Bydlowska’s essay touches on every single stereotype…

Read More Yet another literary writer epicfails at genre…
by 4 comments on "An agent talks about publishing"

Another article of note, this time a Guernica Magazine interview of superstar agent Chris Parris-Lamb. He’s mostly into literary fiction, not genre, but he has some very interesting and incendiary things to say about writing, publishing, Amazon, big books, and big advances. Selected quotes: On Amazon’s huge efforts to police its relatively tiny returns from publishing:…

Read More An agent talks about publishing
Aside

I honestly don’t know what to tell people who only post updates, photos, links, etc on Facebook – and then get huffy when I don’t respond. Chances are, I didn’t even see it. If you’re only interacting on FB, then I’m going to miss a lot of it. Until long after the fact, and possibly never.

I check my FB account when I remember to. Maybe once a week, sometimes once a month. I keep it as a placeholder. I’m not thrilled with the directions FB seems to be going. I’ve already abandoned a personal account. The only social media I find more annoying is Zorpia, and that’s because they don’t stop spamming once they have an email addy.

If you are *a business* and you’re only updating on Facebook – good heavens, what is wrong with you? Cross-post and link to Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and LinkedIn. Have an actual blog: WordPress, Blogger, Squarespace, and others make it easy. I’m not that social media-savvy yet, and I manage to do it.

Consumers and collaborators like me would probably like to work with you more, if we don’t have to deal with Facebook on the way.

 

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Here’s one detail that seems to divide professional genre publishers and many self-pub authors/inexperienced small presses/vanity publishers: Cover font. Specifically, a hard-to-read script font. Font matters as much as imagery and composition. For e-books, the cover may be one of the most important investments an author or publisher will make. The ‘thumbnail’ sized or small-format cover…

Read More The script test
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For authors unfamiliar with show business, few words will evoke the sheer magic of ‘They’ve optioned my book!’ That means someone has paid an author a certain amount of money to allow least the possibility (the ‘option’) of making that story into a movie, television drama, series, webcast, etc. Hold on there, pilgrim. You’re not…

Read More Option daydreams and nightmares
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I’m an unrepentant chocoholic. When everything goes downhill and we’re living in a post-apocalyptic, climate-ravaged wasteland, I might actually miss chocolate more than hot water. Just sayin’. So I’m very disappointed in the Hershey Company, for deciding to use legal threats to keep the British version of Cadbury’s chocolate out of the US. They cite…

Read More Boo Hiss, Hershey