Marketing Trends Then, Now, and the Future: Guest Hijacker Renée Pawlish

          I don't know about you, but I never get too much info about marketing.   My guest hijacker Renée Pawlish knows a thing or two about the topic and is here to share.  

The Ever-Changing Face of Marketing

I’ve been an independent author for a little over a year now and I find that this new age of publishing is exciting, hectic and ever-changing.  When I first came on the scene, John Locke and Amanda Hocking were the indie authors everyone was talking about, wondering how those two had such phenomenal success.  I had just published Nephilim Genesis of Evil and was hoping to be discovered as well.  So what’s happened since the summer of 2011 and what might happen in the future?

First, don’t expect to have the same kind of success as Locke or Hocking.  Locke was a marketing person before he started writing and he had a lot of money to throw at his marketing efforts (he’s also admitted to buying over 300 mostly positive reviews for his first few books, and that helped him suddenly sell well).  Hocking created a zombie-based blog tour that helped her sales.  Both of these approaches won’t work well now.  There is too much negative press about independent authors, Amazon and reviews right now, so don’t think about buying reviews.  And in my personal opinion, most blog tours don’t work either because lots of indie authors are doing it.

Twitter is next.  Does it work for marketing?  Yes, at least it has for me, but not like it did for some of the first adopters.  There are tons of indie authors using Twitter so it’s lost some of its effectiveness.  Authors need to be active on social media, but it’s important that you know your audience so that you can target your audience with your marketing efforts.  And social media is, well, social, so you don’t want to just market your books.

What worked a month ago (or a week, or day) may not work now.  How many have tried KDP Select, using free days to try and bump book sales?  Those that were in the program in the first couple of months saw great success, but in March Amazon changed its algorithms and how it weighs free versus paid books, and it’s much harder to get any real sales jump.  Sure, it happens for some, but not like it was in the golden first few months.

So what does the future hold?  Who knows?  I hear rumblings that Amazon expects another year of great ebook sales, especially around the holidays, but then ebooks sales are expected to level off.  I don’t see print sales going away anytime soon, so I continue to offer all my books in paperback and ebook format.

KDP Select is dead, at least as a great marketing machine for indie authors.  I think the next big thing may be with Apple or other e-reading formats.  Barnes and Noble might at some point get its act together and be a force for indie authors.

One thing I do know, and this is echoed by many successful authors: keep writing and keep publishing.  The more books you have available, the more sales you generate.  I now have nine books available and I do find that people will like one of my books and they come back for more.  That’s flattering for me, but it also keeps me motivated to keep writing more (that, and that I love writing).

So keep writing, stay on top of marketing trends and keep pursuing your dreams.

Author Bio:

Renée Pawlish is the award-winning author of the bestselling Nephilim Genesis of Evil, the first in the Nephilim trilogy, the Reed Ferguson mystery series (This Doesn't Happen In The Movies, Reel Estate Rip-off, The Maltese Felon, and the short story Elvis And The Sports Card Cheat), The Noah Winters YA Adventure series (The Emerald Quest), Take Five, a short story collection, and The Sallie House: Exposing the Beast Within, a nonfiction account of a haunted house investigation.

Renée has been called “a promising new voice to the comic murder/mystery genre” and “a powerful storyteller”.  Nephilim Genesis of Evil has been compared to Stephen King and Frank Peretti.

Renée was born in California, but has lived most of her life in Colorado. When she's not hiking, cycling, or chasing ballplayers for autographs, she is writing mysteries, thrillers and horror. She loves to travel and has visited numerous countries around the world. She has also spent many summer days at her parents' cabin in the hills outside of Boulder, which was the inspiration for the setting of Taylor Crossing in her novel Nephilim: Genesis of Evil.

Visit Renée's website http://www.reneepawlish.com or her blog http://tobecomeawriter.com.

Amazon link for books:

http://www.amazon.com/Renee-Pawlish/e/B0058PXUPO/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1347331399&sr=8-1

       What has worked for you?   Where do you think the future of marketing will go?    Do you agree with Renée's assessments?

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Dee Ready : Self Publishing

           Recently I reviewed Dee Ready's   Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats & Their Humans , a book that rather surprised me for reasons that you can read about in that review post.  Today I've invited Dee as my guest to tell about her experiences with publication.

Self-Publishing Vs. the Traditional Route

           I’m sitting here at the computer grateful that Lee has asked me to guest post and yet unsure exactly where this posting is going to start or end up. That is the way with many writers. We simply have a wee idea and we sit down before the monitor and see where the mustard seed takes us.

            The first idea that comes to me today is that we all write differently. Let’s take Elizabeth George. She’s a world famous mystery writer whose books have sold millions of copies. In Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life she explained her method. Her way is so foreign to me that I could never begin to use it.

  

            Why?

            Because before she begins to write she has everything planned out. She knows exactly where she’ll begin and where she’ll end. And she knows every detour along the way. She knows exactly who her characters are. They hold no surprises for her because she’s written pages detailing them. She knows her setting, her plot, and her denouement as well. She is a meticulous planner.

            That has worked brilliantly for her. It’s just not the way I work. Most of the time I don’t know what I think until after I start to write. Slowly my characters reveal themselves, as does the setting. That’s what happened with A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story. I sat down at the computer and felt as if Dulcy channeled the story through me.

            That happened also for Dulcy’s companion book: Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans. It has also happened for the three novels for which I’ve completed rough drafts. With those novels, I’ve simply sat and let the words and the worlds come. They have revealed themselves to me.

            For me, that’s one of the great joys of writing—discovering the characters in my mind and their thoughts. Letting myself go with the flow. For me, writing is like prayer. It centers and focuses me. I am never more present to the moment, I never live more in the moment, than when I’m writing. So I take joy in the act whether or not I’m published.

 Let’s talk about getting published in today’s world.

            We all know that we can write—with a plan like Elizabeth George or by following the flow as I did with Dulcy’s book—and never get published. Today’s publishing world seems, to me, to be in disarray. Many editors and agents seem to want the next Elizabeth George mystery or the next Frank McCourt memoir or the next Amanda Hocking paranormal romance.

            Who’s Amanda Hocking? She’s the woman who discovered the profits that can be found in self-publishing. Within two years, she made over $2 million with several young adult urban fantasy and paranormal romances. Amazon tells us “she is widely considered the exemplar of self-publishing success in the digital age.” 

            How was she able to sell so many books independently? That’s the question all self-published writers ask.

            She didn’t start out a phenomenon. In many ways, she was like all of us committed to writing. That is, she loved to write; she wrote several books; and she met a brick wall, unable to find an editor or agent who’d publish her work. So she began a blog. On it, she wrote about writing from her Minnesota home. She also promoted her self-published e-books and trade paperbacks.

            Her books sold. And sold. And sold some more. After she made that $2 million, several New York publishers engaged in a bidding war for her next four books. This year, St. Martin’s Press is publishing her most recent book.  

            How do we do the same? How do we find an editor/agent or self-publish and have broad sales?

            First perhaps, we need to read the type of book we want to write. We need to note how writers we admire write that genre. We need to study writing styles. I mean STUDY. Note sentence construction. Dialogue. Transition. The arc of suspense. Plotting.

            Second, we need to be writing a genre that many people want to read. Since 1996, when Angela’s Ashes was published, memoirs have been extremely popular. But in the fifteen years since 1996, countless memoirs have been published. No longer are editors/agents interested in the memories of rape, incest, alcoholism, abuse, poverty. They no longer want horror stories of growing up. And many readers on longer want to read them.

            What the public and the editors/agents of traditional publishing want is something new. Fresh. Original. A fresh take on an old story. Or a new setting. Or world event. Without those qualities and without an exceptional writing style, I think that getting a memoir published traditionally is going to be very hard in the future. And if it’s self-published, the readership will also probably remain small.

            Third, if we self-publish, we need a blog that many, many, many—I say MANY—readers follow because how else can we market and publicize our books? How do we reach the large reading audience out there? How do we let people know there is a book?

            Fourth, we must be willing to move away from the blog and the computer and do some marketing in the wider world for our self-published book. We must try to get readings and signings in bookstores. If our book is for young readers we might arrange to visit classrooms and talk about writing.  

          

            One fellow blogger—Melissa Ann Goodwin—has self-published the young adult novel The Christmas Village. On her blog she often recounts the most recent school she’s visited. (Click here for her blog and look at the left side for the upcoming classes she’s visiting.)

            As I see the world of publishing today, if we are to have stupendous sales, we need to write books that are popular at the time. And right now books about vampires and werewolves (paranormals) are. So Hocking was in the right place at the right now with the right story.

            All of us who want to get published—and who would like to make a little money doing so—and who would like to reach a large audience with our writing—must decide how we can do this realistically. The truth, as I see it, is that unless we are writing something that fits the trends and the temper of the time, our self-published book probably won’t sell a lot of copies or make a lot of money.  More importantly to writers who want to be read, the self-published book won’t reach many readers. So our thoughts and characters won’t touch the lives of a large audience.

 So what to do? What to do?

            The truth is that I wish I knew. Finding an editor or an agent is more or less impossible today. The one really good thing is that most of them will accept e-mail queries and so we no longer have to wait so long to hear from them.

            Believe me, back in 1990 when I was trying to get someone interested in A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story, I had to wait months to hear back from editors by “snail mail.” And yet finally, in April 1991, I did hear from a senior editor at Crown Publishing in New York and got a contract.

            So today, with an eye to being published, I think we must look for agents and editors to publish us and at the same time consider self-publishing and what it entails.  For myself, I’ve decided to devote seven months—from July through December—to finding an editor or agent for my third cat book, which is a young adult fantasy. I’m going to send out only e-queries so as to save money and to cut down on time.

            If by January 2013, I’ve experienced no success, I will self publish and hope for the best. That is, I will try to find ways to not only self-publish but also self-publicize my three cat books and any novels I ultimately publish. I will try for signings and readings at places where readers of these books might congregate. I will look for “a hook” to see if I can get newspapers, magazines, and radio talk shows interested in these books. But I know that unless I do something the books will languish on Amazon, selling one or two copies now and then.

            So it’s up to me—to do the writing, the publishing, and the promoting. But as Edna St. Vincent Millay said, “but, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends” I so hope that in the next six months I can find an agent or editor because at seventy-six I don’t look forward to expanding the energy that self-publishing calls for!

Now some questions for you: 

           What success have you had with self-publishing?   With traditional publishing?   With finding and agent or an editor?    How have you marketed your self-published books?   Has that worked well for you?    Do you enjoy the writing so much that the getting published matters little?

Related articles

• A Surprising Book: My Review of Dee Ready's New Release

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• The Most Successful Self-Published Sci-Fi and Fantasy Authors [Books]

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• Self-publishing Pros and Cons - Introductory Post

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X-Factor

The X Factor (U.S.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

           Attorney Darcie Chan self-publishes her novel The Mill River Recluse as an e-book after being  rejected by several publishers and agents and the book lands on best-seller lists.    

          Amanda Hocking begins self-publishing her novels as e-books in 2010 and within a year sells over a million copies.

            

             What's the secret?  What did these authors do to gain success where so many others fail?  If there were a fool proof formula that always worked we'd all be hugely successful authors.  There is no precise formula.  There is something missing in most cases and that missing something is the X Factor that we each need to find for ourselves.  

           Talent shows have been a mainstay of radio and television for many years.  In the past decade shows like Pop Idol and American Idol have swept television ratings.  Simon Cowell went on to create a show in the same vain called The X Factor.  The premise behind the show name is that star quality is an unknown factor in the success equation.  It is a variable.  What works for one person does not guarantee success for the next.

              You may have the most wonderful product in the world, but until you discover that unknown variable that will create marketing magic you may not be successful in getting your product in the hands of the consumer.  And you can't just sit there and wait for someone to come along and make success for you.  

              Study the success stories and gain market awareness.   Draw up marketing plans and analyze them thoroughly.   What was successful for someone else may not work for you.  In fact, things that worked two years ago may never work again.  These are the kinds of things you must learn about.   Don't be afraid to try old ideas if they seem viable.  Don't be afraid to try new ideas if they seem practical and possible.  Somewhere there is the missing magic factor that will complete your equation and it's up to you to find it.

             You don't have to be a mathematician to find the X Factor of success.  It will help to be astute, assured, and unafraid.   Monumental success may never happen even when you seem to be doing all the right things.   Not becoming successful will be a pretty sure bet if you don't do anything.

              Are you ready to find the X Factor that will fit your equation?  Do you have the stamina to pull out all the marketing stops in order to find your X Factor?

Here are a few x-ceptional blogs:

Suze from Analog Breakfast writes some deep stuff although when I last looked it appeared she'd fallen into a deep sleep.  Can somebody shake her and wake her?

Jarm del Boccio at Making the Write Connections reflects her eclectic background of travel and history in her writing.

At Geoff's Blogs Geoff Maritz has been teaching us about his home continent of Africa.  Some cool stuff from a very cool guy.