Authors On The Net

Found the Porn for Moms book trailer on the Chronicle Books website and had to share. It’s a simple, low-cost video that’s effective because it shows how people are reacting to the book. If you remember a few posts ago I blogged about being able to tell people is 140 characters or less not necessarily what your book about, but what people should expect from it, i.e. it will shock you, it will scare you, etc. This video does that:

And don’t forget to join our Wake Up Celebrity Author book contest. The deadline is September 15th.

When asked this question, most authors (myself included) will launch into a lengthy explanation about our book. But in today’s age of 140 characters or less, the best way to set the hook is with a short, dramatic statement.

Here are 10 possible ways to create interest in your book in 140 characters or less . . .

1. It will scare the hell out of you
2. It’ll keep you laughing to the end
3. This book will change your life
4. After reading my book, you’ll never eat red meat again
5. This might be one of the most shocking books of all time
6. My book can make you a millionaire
7. After reading my book, you’ll never buy another stock again
8. It has so many plot twists it’ll make you dizzy
9. You’re not going to want to read another book for a year
10. You’ll learn ten secrets the government doesn’t want you to know

These are just examples to give you an idea of how to create a short headline for your own book. Now let me give you a real-life example. I have co-written a book with Dr. William Guillory titled, “How To Become a Total Failure: The Ten Rules of Highly Unsuccessful People.” When we started selling this book in local book fairs, people would pick it up and laugh and flip through it and if I was present they’d ask me what the book was about.

At first I said things like, “It’s a transformational book that teaches people how to learn from their mistakes . . .” and I’d go on for 5 minutes. I never sold a copy with this approach.

I then started saying, “It’s 122 pages of dumb or stupid behavior Bill and I have witnessed over the years and most of it our own.” This simple statement usually prompts a response, especially if they are thumbing through the pages. For example, one rule in the book states, “Promise things you have no intention of doing.” People will read this and say, “Yeah, I’ve done that.”

The point is that my first approach was boring and even threatening in a way while my second approach was light, fun and engaging. Which by the way mirrors the tone of the book itself. Needless to say, I started selling more books with this second approach.

People have short attention spans and it’s critical to set the hook in the first sentence when asked what our books are about.

Today we have the pleasure of being a stop on Austin Camacho’s blog book tour. I asked Austin a few questions about his book and how he is promoting it. Here are his answers:

Announcing the release of Russian Roulette (buy at Amazon by clicking here), the fifth novel in Austin S. Camacho’s mystery series about Hannibal Jones, an African American private detective working in Washington DC.

Phil: What is your book about?

Austin: Like every good crime novel, this book is about deception. A Russian assassin threatens Hannibal’s woman to force him to take a case. He must investigate Gana, the wealthy Algerian who has stolen Viktoriya, the woman the assassin loves. Evidence connects Gana to Russian mob money and the apparent suicide of Viktoriya’s father. More deaths follow, each one closer to Viktoriya. To save the Russian beauty, Hannibal must unravel a complex tangle of clues and survive a dramatic shootout side-by-side with his murderous client.

Phil: Tell us about you.

Austin: On the surface I’m a public affairs specialist for the Defense Department who has written five detective novels in the Hannibal Jones series - Blood and Bone, Collateral Damage, The Troubleshooter, Damaged Goods and now Russian Roulette. I’m active in several writers’ organizations and teach writing courses at Anne Arundel Community College.

Inside I’m a philosopher and a teller of morality tales thinly disguised as mysteries or adventure stories. I’m also a husband and father, a flirt and a loudmouth, with a big heart and an even bigger ego. And I’m a hard-working marketing fool who wants every adult alive to read my novels. My manual, Successfully Marketing Your Fiction in the 21st Century is the result of those efforts.

I was born and raised in New York, spent my Army career as a broadcast journalist and now live in Springfield, Virginia with my lovely wife Denise and Princess the Wonder Cat.

Phil: Who is your target audience?

Austin: I started out thinking that hardboiled detective fiction was for young men. However, the great majority of my readers are women between 30 and 60 years old, so I now write for them.

Phil: What are the 5 top marketing tactics you would recommend to other authors?

Austin: My overall plan this year is to focus on creating buzz by working the internet. So my top marketing tactics are:

1. Blog Tour: This month I will appear on 16 of the best crime fiction and literary web sites (like this one) and the content varies – interviews, synopses, reviews by the blog owners, a real variety. The object is to make Russian Roulette part of the general conversation.

2. Reviews: the more the better. I sent books to the usual reviewers, but I also sent books to top Amazon.com reviewers. These people have a lot of credibility. The new twist was to offer a free advance copy to ANYONE who would commit to reviewing my book and posting their review in at least 4 places on line. Again, I want to raise awareness and generate conversation. Most of the amateur reviewers post on their own blogs but also on Amazon, BN.com, Dorothy L, Shelfari and other places readers look.

3. Video: I got a book trailer because it’s an easily passed calling card. But I also taped a promotional video for Russian Roulette in which I personally explain my book to the viewer. This personalizes me and helps readers connect with me. It hasn’t exactly become viral but it has gotten me a little better recognized. And I have posted these things EVERYWHERE!

4. Social Media: I’ve gathered an audience and post daily on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Gather, Friendster,Crimespace, Book place and Bebo. I also maintain a presence on Red room, Black Authors Showcase, Maverick Marketers, LinkedIn, Shelfari, and Goodreads. Aside from my own blog (Another Writer’s Life) I post on three group blogs – Criminal Minds at Work, Acme Authors and Make Mine Mystery. And did I mention the Hannibal Jones Yahoo Group? The idea is to stay connected with people and share your writing news.

5. Direct mail: I’ve never done the post card bit before, but to make it most likely to pay off I targeted the zip codes of the bookstores I’ll do signings in. And the mailing lists are of known mystery readers. Note that this is the most money I’ve spent on promotion and I have the least faith in its value but we’ll see how it goes.

I must tell you that I also went old school for visibility and got a couple print ads. After assessing my target audience I placed ads in Mystery Scene and Crimespree Magazine. Even if they don’t generate a lot of sales, they will be good for my ego when I’m at Bouchercon.

I also sent personal letters to each of the 47 bookstores in this country that specialize in mystery fiction informing them of the imminent release of Russian Roulette and respectfully asking (alright, begging them) to order a few copies. I even promised them a pizza party for their staff if they sell 50 or more copies. Yeah, I’m shameless.

As you can see, the top marketing efforts for me involve more time than money. When your book is ready to hit the shelves you need to think it through and do what will work for you. Keep good records so you’ll know what did pay off, and be careful of buying services that don’t come with guarantees.

GET the latest news about my novels at http://www.ascamacho.com
READ my blog at http://ascamacho.blogspot.com
JOIN the Hannibal Jones Yahoo Group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hannibaljones

If you want to learn more about running a complete social media book campaign visit The Author Platform.

I’m sharing an email I received from a good author and mentor friend of mine, Christopher Harding. I’m sharing for two reasons: 1) to let the community know about his new book and 2) to share how Chris approached his fan base. I liked the use of questions in the second paragraph and his overall “soft” approach while making a direct call to action.

From Christopher Harding:

Hope all is well with each of you.

I’m taking the opportunity to let friends and family know that I’ve just (or as some might say, “finally,”) published my latest book, “The Saint of Malibu Shores.” Given the age we’re in, it’s published in e-book format (download as a PDF or as a Kindle book to your Kindle, iPhone or iPod).

The book came to me as I contemplated the idea of what would happen if a person appeared in our world today who was a Messianic or Christ-like figure? How would people react? What kind of political and social interactions might take place? To make it more personal, I drew from the experiences of a friend of mine who allowed me to use her story as a foundation of the storyline.

To be sure, the story is controversial and somewhat provocative, but ultimately the message is one that invites all of us to take a deeper look at our lives. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

If you’re so inclined and would be game to help me get the word about the book started, please visit either:

http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-saint-of-malibu-shores/7245214

or Amazon (download the Kindle format for Kindle, iPhone or iPod Touch) at:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_kinc?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=The+Saint+of+Malibu+Shores&x=11&y=22

Both formats of the e-book are selling for just $7.99.

If you’re not in the position or of the inclination to buy the book, that’s perfectly fine.

If you are, I’d love your feedback (http:/www.saintofmalibushores.com) and be truly grateful if you felt inclined to pass on this info and your recommendation to your friends and colleagues.

This is just one of the ways that Lila and I are working to generate a positive ripple effect while stimulating our own micro-economy. We would also love to know what you’re doing as well so, please let us know of the visions you are pursuing so that we can continue to find ways to support one another’s dreams and well-being.

All the best,
Chris

I just discovered www.freado.com, a place to make a widget to make it easier to share your book on social media sites. The widget allows readers to flip pages and get a very good feel for a book before they decide to buy. Here’s what my widget looks like:

For two weeks in May I partnered with a local representative of a national company in Salt Lake City, Utah to have them display our new book, How To Become a Total Failure: The Ten Rules of Highly Unsuccessful People, in 14 book fairs. These fairs were held in corporate office buildings, corporate board rooms, hospitals, colleges, factories and a number of other venues. Here’s a video of the book fair held at the Utah One Center, a large office building in downtown Salt Lake City.

Bill and I were very pleased with the results and especially the feedback. For example, we sold 10 books at an Ikon factory and 0 books at a hospital. This is excellent market information. We will ramp up our efforts in the fall with better merchandising and some special offers and have a goal of selling 200 books.

If you want to participate, we are accepting up to 50 authors. We can only accommodate 50 authors per 20 book fairs as the company needs to keep its primary focus on the mainstream books it sells. It is also important that we place independent author books next to mainstream books as cross-promotion helps sell independent books.

If you are interested in this program, please email me at info@authorsonthenet.com We are accepting applications now for the fall book fairs that start the last week of August. The cost per 20 book fairs is $250.

Here’s another video of the book fair at the One Utah Center. In this video you will see that our book was first placed near the register. While at first this seemed like a great idea, in later shows we placed the book on tables with other self-improvement books and produced much better sales results.

Today I’m sharing with you an email (with permission) I received from one of our authors at Authors On The Net, John Haines. A few months ago I had the pleasure of podcasting John who lives on the northern tip of New Zealand. I wanted to share John’s email make two points:

1. The first point is the tactic he is using to encourage people to leave reviews for his book. When you read his message you’ll see the approach he took. Basically, he made it so easy for me to leave a review I couldn’t say no.

2. The second point is that John sent this “form” letter out to people he considers to be on his informal marketing team. He may not have labeled me as a member of his informal team, but by simply sending me his email, I have left my review for his book and am now sharing his message to the thousands of people who follow my blog.

So these are the two take-aways: make it easy for people to take action and find people to be on your informal team. Informal teams can be powerful. Here’s John’s message:

Phil,
I’m wondering if you can help me by writing a brief review on Amazon? Here’s a form letter I put together this morning:

Hi all and greetings from Aotearoa.

I have a dream. I have a dream of our world made whole again through the collective intentions and actions of us all. I have a dream of peace. Will you help me fulfil this dream?

Every time I present a talk in this area I sell a bunch of books. Sales of In Search of Simplicity in stores in New Zealand are strong and feedback, comments and reviews are excellent. But sales on Amazon.com have been slow to build. In some ways this is not surprising. With 400,000 new titles released each year why would someone risk buying a book from a relatively unknown author like me? Read the rest of this entry »

If you own a website, you’ve probably heard the term of “monetizing” your site. As the publishing industry transforms, this same concept will be applied to our books. In other words, how do we monetize our books? The following article sheds some light on how authors will profit in the new paradigm:

Publishers will set prices: Unlike Amazon’s revenue share model, which typically takes as much as a 70 percent split of the revenue from some content providers, the new Scribd Store will let content owners keep an 80 percent share of the revenue from purchases of their works, said Tammy Nam, Scribd’s VP-content and marketing, in an interview with paidContent. Authors and publishers in the Scribd Store will also be able to set their own prices and DRM options. Prices currently range from $1 for a graphic novel panel to $5,000 for an in-depth China market research report.

I just sat through a three-hour meeting with a publisher and a group of advisors and the whole discussion focused on how authors can sell more books. You may know this, but 97% of all books sell less than 100 copies. Authors in general are not getting rich from their books.

Here are three ways to monetize your book:

1. Using your book as your business card to get speaking deals.
2. Putting the content of your book on a website and driving traffic to the website to increase affiliate revenues
3. Sending out tens of thousands of free ebooks to market your other products and services

The point I want to make today isn’t so much as what to do or how to do it, but to convey the thought of using your book in innovative ways to make money. In the new publishing world, money from your book may come in ways other than the direct sales of your book.

Any other ideas out there on how to monetize a book?

Click here to read the entire article.

This is what one of our authors told me while sipping tea at the Oasis cafe in downtown Salt Lake. He just placed another order for 500 books and we helped him set up his blog about a year ago. He told me he stopped going to his blog several months ago.

Ten minutes after making this statement this author told me about an exciting speaking engagement he had coming up. Here is his direct quote, “This hospital in Idaho came to my blog and I guess they liked what they read there because they invited me to come speak.” This is a paying gig by the way, a gig where he can take his books and sell to his audience up there.

What amazed me was the author did not see the connection. I would think that if my blog were helping me get speaking engagements I would get serious about keeping it up to date.

While many authors do sell books directly from the blogs (Bill and I sell a $4.95 ebook version of our book from our blog, www.tenwaystofail.com), I understand many authors do not see direct book sales from their website. Here are a few tips to improve your conversion rate and keep you motivated:

1. Be sure a link to Amazon or to your own shopping cart displaying your book is in the upper left-hand corner of your blog. This is the area that catches the most eye-balls.

2. Put a link to your shopping cart where people can buy a cheaper PDF version of your book.

3. Have chapter samples on your blog. I don’t mean whole chapters, but rather small samples of every chapter. See www.howspiritworks.com to see a great example.

4. Don’t forget to schedule time to leave conversation-building comments on other, high-traffic blogs.

5. Run a Twitter campaign for your book to drive more traffic to your blog.

These are just a few things you can do to increase the conversion rate for your book. And remember that no matter what you sell, selling is a numbers game. If you have a 2% conversion rate, then expect to sell 20 books for every 1,000 new visitors. To see what your conversion rate is, you need to first get a lot of new visitors to your site and then track the results.

If you have some ideas of your own, feel free to let us know and if you want to learn more about driving traffic to your blog and how to convert more people to book buyers, take the 15 day free trial at www.TheAuthorPlatform.com

Are you using Twitter to promote your book? Here’s a direct message I received from an author who recently started following me on Twitter (I doubt she’ll mind the free publicity here):

Hey, thanks for the follow! Please take my 10-question survey for my new book @ http://tinyurl.com/devotionaldiva!

Renee Johnson / faithbookjesus

The main pull with Renee’s approach is the 10-question survey. People like lists. Of course, you can do almost anything to attract attention: Watch my new book trailer, enter a contest to win an ipod, follow my blog book tour and so on. Once you have a large following on Twitter, you can drive a lot of traffic to whatever event you are holding.

If you’re not sure what the “tinyurl” thing is, it is a simple way of converting a long link - URL - into a much shorter link so you do not use up much of the 140 characters allowed by Twitter. Just go to www.tinyurl.com to use the service.