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I can promise you it wasn’t the casting couch.

Well.

I’ve done TV before. TV is fun. TV is nothing to be afraid. TV is overblown.

Yeah. All that applies until the TV interview is about YOU and one or your LITTLE DARLINGS. Whew! Check out this article and the TV interview that ran on the 6:00 p.m. news in Amarillo on September 10th, after I was in town to do a book signing. The angle was stepparenting and blended families, and the book we’re talking about is my How To Screw Up Your Kids. The news anchor, Lisa Schmidt, did a fabulous job. I don’t even think you can tell that my thighs were dripping with sweat :-)

Thanks Lisa, and ProNews 7. And thanks TJ Walker for in depth on-camera training, all those years ago!

CLICK HERE to READ and WATCH.

With respect to the video clip, the important issues, for an indie writer, are 1) how did I end up on TV, and 2) what did I do to give a halfway decent interview.

As far as appearing in media, this aint no “if we write it, they will come.” You are an INDIE WRITER. You have accomplished something huge and wonderful, but you are invisible to the world unless you get out there and introduce yourself. That means that you submit story pitches to newspaper, magazine, radio, and TV people. And then you do it again. You make it so easy that they’d be crazy not to use the copy you put together for them.

Is that how I’ve gotten my media appearances? Yes, and no. Definitely, the stories that have run in various papers came from pitches. I recently gave a speech that I was invited to do because of a story that ran because of a pitch. Same thing with the radio interview — I pitched.

But the TV was different. I can promise you it wasn’t the casting couch, though. Here’s the scoop: We paid for an ad to run in the city newspaper the day before the signing at Hastings in Amarillo. As in forking over the dough. Ads aren’t cheap. They do not pay for themselves directly. I won’t tell you what this ad cost, but let’s just say that it caused marital discord and leave it at that. However, for the Amarillo signing, we had a plan and a goal. Our goal was to show Hastings Entertainment that we would expend money and effort to drive buyers to their store. I did evites and a Facebook event to secure attendance. We ran the ad. We did a ton of social media promotion. And on the day before the event, Channel 7 called. Lisa wanted to interview me for her segment, and to do it at Hastings, with footage of the signing.

Which was totally freaking awesome. Luckily, I had media training in my old life. She told us what she wanted to talk to me about, and I wrote down three message points that I wanted to get across. I planned answers to the probable questions that would include reference to my points. She would run only two minutes of footage, so I needed any single answer to “stand alone” for what I wanted people to take away, about me, and about my books. I did not want to sell my books. I wanted to provide a taste of what they — and I — were about.

Hastings was thrilled for the exposure. We were thrilled with it, too, for the long term implications. I now have a media clip to show I can give good TV, which is key to getting more TV time. The clip remains online for future traffic, and the potential of influencing future buyers. We are going to talk to Hastings about distribution of my books soon, and this, plus the excellent numbers at my signing (another 50+ sales day at the signing), certainly help!

Plus…it was fun. Nerve-wracking, yes, but really, really fun.

Ciao!

Pamelot

Ebook sales outlets: where to upload, how, and why.

I was a late joiner, but I must admit I love my Kindle Fire. So here’s a little free advertising, Amazon. You’re welcome.

For most of you embarking on indie publishing, the biggest return on investment for you in ebook sales will be to upload your book onto Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. While their market share is shrinking, they still hold over 60% of it. And be sure you do the uploading yourself, not through a “service.” It’s super easy, and you’ll earn the highest possible royalty that way. KDP requires .mobi files, but you can upload different file types for conversion. You may recall that I use PressBooks to create my ebooks (they are also styling themselves into a sales outlet, and their services are a’changing, as are their prices — currently, you can create five books there for free for conversion and publication elsewhere), and their epub uploads and converts through KDP beautifully.

Kindle is not the end-all, be-all, however. There are other important sales outlets for ebooks and the ranks swell daily. Here’s a few more to add to your list, in priority-ranked order:

1. Pubit: Barnes & Noble’s service is equally as easy to use as KDP. Indie authors simply access Pubit to upload their books. Again, royalties are highest if you do this yourself instead of through a service. Pubit requires epub files.

2. Smashwords: My sales are not high through Smashwords, but I still believe in them, and here’s why. First, I can give “100% off” coupons on Smashwords to selected readers. This allows me to give away ebooks without having to make them free to the general public. I can do this for reviewers, for instance. Secondly, I can utilize their ever-growing expanded or “premium” distribution network, and I can select one-by-one the outlets for Smashwords to distribute my work to (Apple/iTunes, Baker-Taylor and their Blio, Paige Foundry, Kobo, Diesel, and Library Direct). This is critical, because I get higher royalties by distributing/uploading to Pubit and KDP myself, so I don’t want Smashwords to do that for me. However, I do want Smashwords to send it to every other place it possibly can. Don’t forget, though, that royalties lag about six months for expanded distribution through Smashwords. I know I am selling through some of these outlets, because my sales rankings are good. But I have no idea how much or of what or when. Also, I can’t ignore these outlets completely. I go to them and make sure that comments are feeding through through properly from Goodreads if applicable, or that I direct readers to also post their comments on those outlets, when possible. The downside to Smashwords, and it is significant, is that I have to format a Word Doc in Smashwords-specific style to upload there. They publish instructions, but it’s not easy. You can hire help for cheap.

3. There are a slew of others to consider: Lulu.com, ebooks.com, biblio.com, omnilit.com, and many more.Of these, I’ve found omnilit to be worth the extra effort, but none of the others yet. I’ll keep you posted. Here’s someone else’s opinion on this issue. A quick google search will yield more opinions, if you need them.

4. Both KDP and Pubit allow you to direct buyers from your webpages to their sites to purchase, and pay you small fees for the referrals. It’s worth it, if you are tech-savvy enough. KDP uses Amazon’s Associates Program and Pubit uses a slightly more complex system with Barnes and Noble called Rakuten Link Share.

5. Don’t overlook analyzing whether to sell ebooks from your own site. If you can establish buyer confidence, and if you can direct sufficient traffic to your site, you can sell ebooks directly. Your buyers have to be tech-savvy enough to load them to their devices, thogh, and I have found that uploading a non-KDP .mobi doc to a Kindle can be daunting for some folks. It’s super easy to replicate once you figure it out, but you could end up provding a lot of hand holding and TLC if you take this route.  You can find the instuctions if you go to your Amazon account, then go to Manage Your Kindle, and look at your Personal Document Settings under Your Kindle Account. I don’t sellf ebooks from my site at this time. I see some folks do it quite successfully, however.

There you have it. My choices, and why.

I hope it helps you with yours.

Pamela

 

To print or not to print, that is an indie’s question.

Back in the “olden” days, the choices for authors were limited, and you weren’t the one who got to make them. Now, the world is an indie’s oyster, and the number of choices are daunting. I want to focus on just one choice today: print books, or not?

To me, print books were a no brainer. With CreateSpace and LightningSource, the only real cost to print is a modified version of your ebook cover and the time or nominal cost to reformat the book for paperback. Cost of the edited cover? $100-200 dollars. Cost of reformatting? $50-$100. Peanuts.

With CreateSpace, for no additional fees, your print books are available at a very competitive price print-on-demand for you, and for Amazon customers. For $25, they’ll make your book available for expanded distribution to other book sellers and libraries. Note that they don’t market it for you. They simply make it available. You’ll have to make it attractive in order to move it.

(CreateSpace offers whole suites of manuscript consult, editing, cover at, formatting, and marketing services at additional cost, if you so desire — all of these are ESSENTIAL elements of indie publishing. It is just a matter of who you want to perform them for you, and at what cost. Check it out.)

Now, if you really want to get traction with booksellers other than Amazon, you should also consider simltaneously utilizing Lightning Source for paperbacks. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE OWNED BY INGRAM. Don’t know who Ingram is? Well, let’s just say that Ingram is the 800-pound gorilla in the room for print book distribution. All (or most) roads lead through Ingram before they result in a brick-and-mortar store placing an order for your books to sell in their store, unless you go the consignment route yourself. *We are having a lot of success with consignment but it is a labor intensive process and not for the timid.*

While CreateSpace makes your books available via expanded distribution to Ingram, might it happen faster if they were affiliated with the company, say, like they are with Amazon? Hmmmm, like Lightning Source is with Ingram. And something else: with Lightning Source, you can, if you want, assume the risk of refunding books shipped back by sellers, if they fail to sell. While this means you have to be smart and not spend all your royalty money on a wild trip to Vegas with Prince Harry, it does provide much more incentive for booksellers to order your books.  At this point in time, I am recommending you consider simultaneously working with Lightning Source and CreateSpace. I’m sure considering it for my next book.

And, really, why not? You’ve already paid for the cover and the formatting, so re-use it. Lightning Source’s fees are really nominal ($75/book set up fee and $12 per year to be in the system), and about the same scale as CreateSpace for print costs per book. However, if you use Lighning Source, you would probably not want to do expanded distribution with CreateSpace, as that would mostly be a duplication of cost for the same thing in two places. And — listen up, this important — Barnes & Noble purchases from Ingram. So if you want to get in their stores fast and easy, indie authors, Lightning Source is calling your name.

My personal experience to date (three months) is that I have sold twice as many print books as ebooks. Possibly this is because I have had such successful book signings. Possibly it is because my partner/husband does such a fantastic job of getting my books into stores on consignment. But additionally, humans are buying the paperback versions of my books online through multiple sources. For some folks, ebooks aren’t a substitute for something they can hold, sniff, flip through, and read safely in the bathtub. And more power to those folks. I make more money on print books than ebooks, per book sold.

Paperbacks have a life beyond their initial “read,” too. People can pass them along and spread your name and reputation. You can’t exactly leave an ebook in the seatpocket on an airplane for the next passenger like you can a paperback. (And, really, how awesome is that when you discover a literary gift from the gods when you’re languishing in the electronicless hell between doors closing and 10,000 feet?)

Yes, it is lowest cost to publish to ebook only. But the conversion to print is the smallest part of our expenses, and to miss print is to miss a huge opportunity. Maybe someday ebooks will completely replace print books, but it hasn’t happend yet. The market is so huge that even a dwindling market is still immense. Make sure you claim your piece of it. It’s your oyster, after all.

Pamelot

Fickle is the muse.

 

Sometimes my fingers fly and still can’t keep up with the words pouring out of my head across the screen. Literally, the characters dance ahead of me across the lines, turning, stopping, taunting, tongue out and thumbs in ears with fingers waggling, the little scoundrels.

Other times, my fingers hover uneasily, waiting for divine inspiration, guilty with inactivity, searching for something to deliver if not to the screen then to my stomach in compensation. Maybe if we feed the muse, she will deliver unto us again?

She doesn’t, but my butt grows bigger in my cushy black office chair, the one I bought at a yard sale for $25, and the most comfortable chair I’ve ever owned. But I digress. A  bigger butt? Not the desired outcome.

In May, I wrote 70,000 words. In mid-July, I submitted a completed novel based on those words to my editor. It is now finished, it is beautiful, it is the best thing I’ve ever written.

“Holy crap,” I thought. “I’ve figured this writing thing out. I can DO this.”

I sat down again in mid-July. I flexed my fingers. I wiggled them, waggled them. I placed them on the keys.

Nothing.

I adjusted my position in my seat. A few pages of wooden, colorless gibberish spurt out like literary baby poo.

I ate some slutty brownies. I repositioned my tush in its throne, the seat a bit tighter now, but for a good cause. I ground through 20,000 words of garbage over three weeks. I cried. I cried some more. I bought new running shoes. I went out to run and came back inside. I was too fat to run in 100 degrees.

What.The.Hell??

It’s August 15th as I type this post. My rough manuscript is due September 1st. At least, it was. I begged for an extension. Now I have until September 10th. Meanwhile, real life caught up with me, ate up my window of writing opportunity. A visit from the MIL for a few weeks. Kids home for the summer. The day job rearing its ugly head after a blessed break.

All of this overtook me and left me high and dry, until I thought I left my laptop cord at my parents’ house. Now, it turns out I didn’t actually leave it there. Hold that thought. But the belief that it was missing was critical. Because I bought a new laptop six weeks ago.

To read the rest of “Fickle is the Muse,” CLICK HERE, which will take you to the original post on Pamela Fagan Hutchins’ blog, Road to Joy.

“Don’t just stand there playing with yourself.”

I am often asked how I am so “prolific.”

Is it just me, or does prolific sound like a communicable disease, like the kind you might catch from a public toilet? Well, whatever it is, I don’t have it. I do, however, have a fairly strong work ethic, thanks to my father. Any time we goofed around when we should have been working, he would admonish us, “Don’t just stand there playing with yourself.” Yes, my mom loved this just as much as my brother and I did. Especially when he hollered it out to us on the basketball court or baseball field, with all the other (normal) parents around.

With his words of wisdom resounding in my head, I published five books in May of 2012. I will publish another in November of this year. There are no super hero powers involved. It’s a very simple secret: when I finish one book, I don’t stand there playing with myself (!), I start another. Maybe I take a short break to rejuvenate my brain, but I keep it short and stick to a schedule. And then I write.

Sure, you’re thinking, so do I. Many of you do.  I learned from some of you.

Some of you don’t. (Although I am not suggesting that you instead stand there, and, well, you know.)

When I say I start another book, I mean that I do not wait to see what happens with the current book. I mean I write the end, and I start the next one. Now, I only devote three to four hours a day to writing books, because it is all my brain can handle. That leaves a lot of other hours for blog posts, marketing, mothering, wifing, working out, and a day job. It leaves time to decide what to do with the last book, to hand it off to the critiquers, or the editor, or for formatting (commensurate with whatever stage it is in).

If your goal is only to indie publish your one book, then please ignore this advice. We all set our own goals, the goals that are meaningful to us. They should drive every decision and action we take. I am only talking in this post to the people whose goals require volume.

It’s soooo easy to stop writing. Writing is hard. Writing hurts. Writing is time-consuming. Writing doesn’t love you back 🙂 But if you want to indie publish successfully, you need volume, you need a back list. You need to keep writing. So, set up an editorial calendar for your planned books (and, oh yeah, plan ahead for the books you want to write — you can always change the plan, but without a plan, it is hard to have an editorial calendar), then a daily schedule that includes time to write. If you fall behind, schedule a makeup weekend, and write your hands off until you catch up. Or don’t. It’s up to you. But if you’re one of the many people that say, “I want to be a multi-title author, I want to have a back list, I want to be prolific, I want to be like you when I grow up,” you’ll have to work hard and with a lot of self discipline to get there. No fairy dust or magic beans will do the trick.

I don’t even need to write a long blog post on this topic. The advice is simple, take it or leave: don’t just stand there playing with yourself; keep writing. The end.

<3

Pamela

Achieving Indie Book Visibility

Let’s start with the assumption that your goal is to sell books to the general public, if not you can skip this entry.

It’s important to understand that there is no one thing that guarantees an avalanche of sales.  It is our belief that it takes simultaneous effort in multiple arenas to get traction and ultimately sell your book. This blog covers only one of those areas: visibility.

The first requirement of visibility — DON’T BE SHY. We run into a lot of authors that feel “awkward” about promoting their work. STOP THAT. Be proud of it! If you believe it is good enough to publish, then it sure ought to be good enough for you to hold your head high and proudly support it.

Do you remember the phenomena that was Paris Hilton? She was famous simple BECAUSE SHE WAS FAMOUS. She and her handlers had an incredible ability to get her face in every magazine, TV show, and newspaper. The general public began to assume she was important because of how often they saw her, not because of anything she had actually done.

Try to make your book a higher quality version of Paris Hilton. The more people see your cover, the more they hear your title, the better you will do. Books sell because people THINK they are selling. Does that make sense? Think about it.

SOOOO, how do you make it visible? Try these ideas:

  • DO print books. Even if all your profit ends up coming from ebooks, print books are one of THE best forms of advertising. Imagine someone carrying your book around and enjoying it. How many people see your cover and title?
  • Get your print books in stores (there will be an entire blog topic on this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned).
  • Gift books to people that you think will be advocates. While gifting might seem counter to making money, it represents one of your best  marketing tools. What you want is to create a buzz. You want to get people talking. If you gift a book to a person, they read it and love it, and then they go to lunch with a group of friends, and they say, “I just read this great book, you HAVE to check it out”, you have effective grassroots marketing throu.gh visibility.
  • Create bookmarks – Get them, spend the effort to MAKE THEM NICE, make sure you put all of your contact and purchase information on them. Then leave them EVERYWHERE. (we have found http://printrunner.com to be the good quality and price but I am sure there are others just as good).
  • Business Cards – See comments regarding Bookmarks. (http://VistaPrint.com is great. Fast, and they will do them for free if you allow them to have the back for their advertising, free is good)
  • Create promotional flyers – Include an image of your book cover, a picture of you, a blurb about the book, and a short author bio. If you or your spouse works in an office see if they will allow you to make color copies on the weekend or find other creative ways to minimize your costs
  • Get a quality print (image) of your full book jacket, front/spine/back (we use http://adoramix.com for this; excellent quality and cheap).  Sign it, frame it, and put it up wherever you can. Maybe you have a friend that owns a restaurant that hangs pictures on the wall. Ask if you can put it up there, and also in in your place of work.

Now, these things you have made don’t do any good stacked up in your bedroom. Make yourself a marketing “box” and keep it in your car. Approach every interaction as an opportunity to market, every errand you have to run as an opportunity to place something about you or your book. Examples: waiting rooms at doctors offices, hairdressers, or spas.  Anywhere there are chairs and tables with magazines, leave bookmarks on the table, ask them if it would be OK to leave a copy of your print book with the words Lobby Copy written across the front on the table for people to thumb through while they are waiting. That big public bulletin board at the grocery store? Put up your flyer. That store that allows people to leave a sotack of business cards? Leave yours.

Will these things on their own sell books? Probably not. But get back to the original point of this blog: Visibility. It is our belief that people rarely purchase a book from a new author simply the first time they see the cover. However, if they see it while waiting for the doctor, and then see it again on a poster while walking into the grocery store, and then see it again somewhere else, there is a subliminal impact of “wow, I have seen that book/author EVERYWHERE, that book must be popular, that book must be selling, I should get one.”

For those of you that are saying “I am one little person in one little town, how can these things make a difference,” I have three responses:

  1. If you do nothing, I can do the math on your sales figures for you…
  2. You have to start somewhere and book sales begat more books sales. If your book is good, and if you are able to sell it to ten people that actually read it, they will each tell ten more people who become potential customers, who will each tell 10 more and so on. Do that math.
  3. Build a network of friends, family, and other indie authors who are willing to do this same thing for you in their cities. And return that favor by doing what you can for them in yours for their causes/enterprises.

Is this easy? No. Is it possible? Yes. Is it hard? Yes, AND even though it is hard, it is pretty dang fun.

There are so many visibility ideas to try. We will leave some more in the comments section. We hope that you will add yours to the comments also.

Power in Indie teamwork.

Eric

Video killed the radio star.

Radio-appropriate attire.

I’m a lucky, lucky girl, if a 45-year old woman can still claim girl status, that is. Anway, I’m extremely lucky. I’m married to the world’s coolest guy, we have super kids, we have an astounding place in Nowhersville, and a great house in Houston. We are healthy. We like our day jobs. We get to collaborate on SkipJack Publishing.

And I get to do radio interviews.

I lo-o-o-o-o-v-e doing radio. Especially when I’m the “call-in” special guest. Call-in guest = Pamela doesn’t have to change out of her PJ’s to talk to thousands of people over the air waves. Sweet!

I got to do exactly that on the Health & Wellness Solutions radio show with my hero, Dr. Stephen F. Hotze. Now, if you’ve read Hot Flashes And Half Ironmans (and, if you haven’t, what are you waiting for, for goodness sakes?), you’ll know about Dr. Hotze already. His natural health and wellness practice saved my life. I’m not exaggerating. All my life I suffered from PMDD, and every year it got worse as my progesterone deficiency increased. Conventional medicine failed me (big time). I thought at the age of 39 that I was over, kaput, finished.

Enter Dr. Hotze.

Five months after my first visit, I did my first half ironman. Within 18 months, I’d added five marathons and several half marathons. I did another half ironman 18 months after that. I’ve written ten books since then.

Guess how many half ironmans, marathons, half marathons, and books I’d done before I saw Dr. Hotze?

That would be ZERO.

I got my life back, and then some. I had no idea my general health had declined so drastically over the years. It was nothing short of a miracle, except that it wasn’t a miracle. It was simply bio-identical hormones.

So, anyhoo, anyhow, Dr. Hotze invited me on his show. I put on my very best sleepy sheep PJ’s for it. I had my headset on and was sitting by the phone at the appointed time. I picked up.

“Standby to join Dr. Hotze after the commercial break,” a woman said.

“I’m ready,” I replied.

The music came in signalling the start of the show. Dr. Hotze and his co-host Brooke talked for awhile, then came my queue to speak.

As I opened my mouth, the lawn crew that takes take of the yard at the house next door fired up their industrial mower.

VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOOOOOOOOOOM

I was in a panic. I did my best to answer their questions during the first segment, then we broke to commercial. Shit shit shit. What was I going to do about the background noise? But then the mower moved off to do the other side of the yard. It was better. Good enough.

The cue music started. Dr. Hotze asked me a question.

VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOOOOOOOOOOM

T.J. Walker didn’t teach us how to handle the noise of industrial mowers in our media training. And I was on a hard-wired land line with a short cord. Eric had replaced our cordless phones with this old-timey model when he could never get the kids to put the phones back on their chargers. It had seemed like such a brilliant move at the time. Not so much now. I stalked to the furthest point I could stretch the cord into reaching. The lawnmower still VROOM’ed in the background.

The segment ended. We went to commercial. By now, sweat dripped down my sides and pooled in my bra. This was not how I had pictured this interview going down. I didn’t have time to stress over whether I had hit my message points or not, or if I sounded like an idiot.

The mower headed toward the backyard. Thank God. I could do the last segment in peace.

The music cued the start of the last segment. I cleared my throat, ready to begin.

VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOOOOOOOOOOM

This time the lawn guy was mowing the strip of grass adjacent to my office window. Basically, he had all but lodged himself into the phone’s mouthpiece. I had to do something, but what?

I threw myself underneath my desk, the wood providing an extra barrier between me and the awful noice. A little better.

“And so why did you write Hot Flashes and Half Ironmans, Pamela?” Dr. Hotze asked me. Or at least I think he did. I couldn’t quite hear him.

I cupped my hand around the mouthpiece to hold out the noise and in the sound of my voice. I prayed it didn’t sound like a prank caller heavy breathing into the microphone. I began to think about the fun I would have blogging about the experience. I imagined myself away to my happy place, the Annaly tidal pools back on St. Croix.

And then we were saying our thank you’s and good byes. The line went dead. I slumped against the inside of the legs to my desk.

The sound of the mower stopped. I looked outside. They’d done a mighty fine job on the yard. And they were done. Time it took them to mow my neighbor’s yard? The exact forty-five minutes of my appearance on the radio show.

I’m a damn fine Girl Scout, but this time I was not prepared. For a Petey the one-eyed Boston Terrier barking emergency? Yes. I had stashed him in the game room with special treats. For call waiting? Uh huh, I’d turned that off. I’d warned the kids, turned off my cell phone, and put a note on the door so no one could call or ring the bell to interrupt us. But I hadn’t planned for industrial mowers.

And Dr. Hotze still sent me these flowers as a thank you gift for appearing on his show.

Eric listened to the show, and he swears he couldn’t tell. I don’t think he’d tell me if he could, though. Do you?

Pamela Fagan Hutchins

Socializing for Success in Indie Publishing

Love it or hate it, collectively all of the various forms of social media are a critical part of marketing. They are a way of connecting, not only with potential readers, but also with people who can be resources to help you meet your goals, as long as you remember that it is a two way street. You need to be prepared to put as much or more energy (or money) into other peoples’ goals as you would like them to put towards yours. Why is this important? Go back to my mantra: You sell your book by getting people to tell OTHER people to buy it, and read it.

Think of social media as a way to fill a bucket that has the potential to contain good will. You will need that good will to sell your book. But you have to fill it first, and you do that by helping others. BUT DON’T START HELPING OTHERS ON THE SAME DAY YOU WANT TO DRAW SOME GOOD WILL OUT FOR YOURSELF, or the bucket will remain empty.

The good news is that it is really not very hard to fill your bucket. People are grateful to accept help. If you get out and establish a presence and help people promote whatever it is they are trying to sell/distribute/raise for charity (whatever is driving them), they will be 100 times more likely to do the same for you when the time comes.

The bad news is the bucket has a leak. If you fill it up, and then get busy doing other things for a few months, you will come back and find that the bucket drained itself while you were away.  This is why everyone says that social media is hard. It’s not hard to get the bucket full, it is hard to keep it that way while you are trying to do all the other things you have to do.

The other critical reason to be active in social media is so that there is a way for people to learn about you, like you, and care about what you have to say. Think about that every time you use it. The people that you meet in your social media world know you only by the snippets you give them, and they will likely only see a fraction of what you do put out. Make sure what you put out there is the you that you want people to see. Be interesting, be funny, be smart, be scientific, be creepy, be yourself but with lots of colors. And be careful, don’t be reckless. For example if you write Christian-themed children’s stories, you probably don’t want to go off on a rant about how you want to kill everyone at your local grocery store when you have had a bad experience.

A few words of caution: do not fool yourself into thinking that what you put out on the internet is only accessible to your circle of friends. You better be sure you want to put it out there, all the way out there, before you hit enter. YOU DO NOT HAVE THE CONTROL YOU THINK YOU DO.  If you are taking cracks at your spouse on Facebook, if you want to post those great pictures of you doing tequila body shots during your Mexico vacation, just know that you will NEVER be able to pull them back. Be mindful of this even when you are leaving comments on blogs. Choose your name wisely and your words carefully. If someone Googles you, your comments under your real name may all come up.

Also, if you are using social media to actively push a social, political or religious agenda, this may work for you and fit your goal, just remember it is narrowing your list of potential readers. And that may be FINE with you, just be realistic. For example: you write general mystery fiction which should have a broad audience, however, your social media presence is rabidly over-the-top Republican (I am not taking a position here folks, I’m just making up an example; relax). You have cut your market in HALF. Do you really NOT want to sell your book to those crazy Democrats, even when they use the same currency you do?

Social media is a necessary part of promotion in indie publishing, with Twitter, Facebook, and blogging still in the lead as far as usefulness goes, but with Pinterest, Google Plus, and many others on their heels. Use whichever work for you, but use them thoughtfully and consistently if you want to see them impact your book sales and success.

Eric

Selling books: what doesn’t work.

Writing a great book with wonderful cover art and getting it on the “shelf,” virtual or pine, is not enough to make it sell. This reminds me of the boom in home-based internet businesses when the thought was that all you needed to do was create a website with a “buy” button and have some cool product to sell, and those “internet people” would flock to your site and you would be rich. Well, four or five of those companies made it, and the other three million are still having garage sales to try to get rid of all the doggie diapers and stained glass window decorations.

Shouting “buy my book” is not enough to make it sell either. The only person who will buy it because you tell them to is your mother. Maybe. The rest of us? We’ll just put our hands over our ears. Or unfollow you. It’s self-serving. It’s annoying. Your instruction to us has no credibility. You give us no motivation to buy it just by telling us to. In fact, it motivates us to do exactly the opposite. People are peculiar that way :-).

So how does an indie published author sell a book? We’re still learning, but what we have learned on this adventure so far is that you sell your books by:

  • Getting people to tell other people that they should buy it.
  • Being interesting.
  • Making people care about what you have to say.
  • Finding ways to get your book linked to other books by other authors that are selling.
  • Creating the appearance that it is selling (people buy books that other people are buying).
  • Having more than one book, so that if you do create a “fan” that person will have another one (or five) to buy.
  • Making the process of buying your book easy
    • Make it easy to find – get it in front of your target market.
    • Minimize the steps in the buying process.

If I went into detail on what each of those mean this blog would be forty pages long and those that haven’t already fallen asleep would pretty soon anyway. Stay tuned and I’ll break some of these down over the next few months.

Meanwhile, at the risk of losing a few followers I want to share an observation that will be in a series of tweets with this hash tag: #Skippyadvice.

I have a personal Twitter account with 2000+ random people, and it is a cool stream of consciousness: ideas, smiles, and funny stuff. #Skippyadvice

I have a publishing Twitter account with 500+ writer followers, and its feed feels like I am in a room full of people shouting BUY MY BOOK. #Skippyadvice

People will not buy your book because you tell them to. You need them to want to get to know you. You need to be interesting enough that other people will sell them for you. #Skippyadvice

That’s all for now, folks.

Eric

p.s. see some advice on what DOES work in the comments below — don’t worry — we’ll expound upon all of that soon.

Echoes of a Past Life, in Indie Publishing Promotions

Once upon a time in another life, I had a real job. Not that I don’t work now, but it’s pretty hard to convince people I have a real job when most days I sport PJ’s until I hear the dogs barking at the side door, alerting me to my husband Eric’s arrival home from his real job and leaving me mere seconds to transform from my happy-but-haggish self to almost-put-together office-at-homer. In that old life, I was the Vice President of Human Resources and Legal for a refining company in the Caribbean. I wore Ellen Tracy suits, Puerto Rico-high heels, and (sometimes) makeup. I dispensed justice from my large office. People said, “Yes, ma’am,” to me, and gave me stock options.

Unfortunately, I hated it. I liked some of the people I worked with a lot, though. In fact, one of them I liked so much that I quit my job and married him (yes, Eric). But, even though I am so much happier in my new life, I experienced some amazing things in that old job.

One of those amazing things? Media training. That’s right. Media, as in TV, radio, and print. We brought in from New York to our little island the awesome T.J. Walker of Media Training Worldwide to work with those of us who had communications responsibilities. I was a member of what we called the Incident Command Staff, and I filled its Communications Officer role. That meant that in the event of a crisis, my ass might end up in front of a camera taping me talking to a slick reporter. Yikes. Luckily I never had the misfortune to need the skill in an emergency, but I put it to good use in day to day public relations on behalf of the company.

It certainly comes in handy now when I’m appearing publicly or giving interviews for the books I’ve written. I did a radio show (blog coming soon) and gave four print interviews recently, for instance. By the way, as you can imagine, print is way easier than live radio or TV.

T.J. put us through a grueling full day workshop where we crafted our message points for pretend disasters and delivered them in video’ed statements. He taped us as he grilled us with questions, and he critiqued our responses. How cool is it that I was paid to receive that kind of instruction? It really was invaluable to me. T.J. also worked with us on delivering presentations, and to this day my husband invokes T.J.’s name when he prepares to give a speech.

T.J. and I became friends. I took him on my infamous Annaly-to-tidal-pools hike. He toured the fabulous Estate Annalise, who is about to star in three of of my novels due for publication in late 2012 and thereafter. See, T.J.? You’ve had your brush with greatness (Annaly’s, not mine).

When I published The Clark Kent Chronicles, T.J. asked to read it. I was honored, as T.J. has written and published many books of his own, several of them bestsellers. You can check them out by Clicking Here. He also gives away an amazing amount of valuable information on public speaking and media, on his website. You can access them by Clicking Here. *highly recommended by me * I hung on every scrap of advice he dispensed on publication and marketing, too.

So after T.J. read Clark Kent, what do you think he did?

Just went and taped the world’s most awesome video review, that’s all. Seriously, it rocks. And I wanted to share it with all of you. Because I’m generous like that. And because you can ask people to review your books through their webcam and post it to Amazon. Yeah, it won’t like quite as incredible as T.J.’s, because he is a professional with a professional studio. But it will still be pretty darn cool. Great stuff for an indie author, and easy to do.

With no further ado, here’s T.J., and I’m outta here.

 

Pamela Fagan Hutchins