Growing a Giant Set of Viking Balls

What’s the next big thing? As authors, we are always trying to figure that out. What do we need to do to get noticed? It’s a big ocean out there, and there are a lot of books swimming in the proverbial published sea. How do we stand out? What can we possibly do that hasn’t been done before, or at least, how do we create a new take on an old trick.

 

Viking Tricks

Marketing is a funky kettle of fish. We authors know how to write (hopefully, lol). Learning how to target and market our work is a whole other story. One that doesn’t always end in a happy ending. There’s a lot of trial, error, and blood, sweat, and tears in that tale. Where to even start? We can advertise traditionally—take out a newspaper ad for an event or a launch—or we can try our luck in the online world of advertising by embarking on campaigns through Twitter, Goodreads, or Facebook, for example.

Let’s look at one cornerstone of the author marketing experience: The Facebook Party.

 

The Facebook party allows fans from anywhere to comfortably pull up a computer and join the fun. We ask author friends to host time slots, or we go it alone. Each event involves tons of giveaways and prizes doled out at frequent intervals. We share funny memes, silly gifs, and great photos. We post teasers, excerpts, and trailers. But do we generate sales? Are our efforts tangible? Is there conversion? Do we break even—sales versus giveaways? How do we measure success—is it sales, or exposure? This is a tricky business. I’ve been to my fair share of launch parties, and I’ve hosted a couple of events myself. In truth, I haven’t seen any other entrepreneurial group giveaway so much, so often. It pays to be someone who follows authors. They giveaway the shirts off their backs in an effort to try and stand out from the crowd, and smart contest hunters know this. I read an interesting article about contest ‘groupies.’ Are they friend or foe? Contest groupies scroll the internet looking for new authors to follow and like. When events happen, they are the first ones there, interacting, playing along with the games, and kudos to them, winning prizes. The thing to keep in mind, is that these people love books too and they talk books up to others on the internet. I don’t question the people who follow the contests, I question whether this is a viable, efficient use of an author’s resources and time. Look around the internet. Try and find another industry where so much is given away for so little measurable feedback.

 

Now, I appreciate, not everything is about profit. Sometimes, we do things for the sheer entertainment value, in and of itself. Recently, I embarked on a marketing campaign that blew everything else I’d done before out of the water. It was ballsy, it was risky, and it was downright fun as hell. I have an event coming up at Blue Heron Books on Saturday, March 5^th from 2:00 – 4:00pm. I wanted to draw attention to it. I wanted it to stand out. I’ve done a lot of book signings in big corporate stores, but Blue Heron is a small, intimate Indy bookstore. I wanted this signing to be special. I needed a plan—an outside the box kind of vibe. 

The Big Event

Many moons ago, I read a book about a writer who showed up to her book launch, carried on a pallet, supported by several hulking sentries. At the time, I thought to myself, how cool would that be? A seed was planted. Recently, I found a way to incorporate that wild and crazy vision. My debut historical romance, Avelynn, is set in 869 Anglo-Saxon England. My heroine is the daughter of a Saxon earl, but the hero of the tale is a Viking. 

Ergo, I needed Vikings! I sent a call out on a few local Facebook groups, seeking stalwart young men, willing to pose shirtless as Vikings for a day. Their job was to hang out with fans and hand out chocolates to anyone who bought a copy of the book.  In a matter of hours, I’d found my three Vikings (body building photos confirmed these were just the type of men I was searching for). As part of the deal, I needed one evening for promotional photo ops prior to the book signing. I wanted a photo shoot where my handsome, tough Vikings posed with swords and cloaks, while, I, the respectable author, stood aloof and professional in my blazer, jeans, and boots.

The Respectable Author and Friends

Flash forward a few glasses of wine into the Durham Photo led photo shoot, and while I held onto my jeans and boots, I had donned a sword and shield of my own, and wore last year’s Halloween costume of a warrior princess. The results were magical. Those promotional photos could be used to hype up the event itself, but also to promote the book in general. 

Found another Viking

I then hired, Inkpen Studios, pros at social media promotional posters, and when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any better, they did! The designs to match the photos were out of this world. 

Me and my Viking

I invited friends to the photo shoot, who blasted their own camera phone selfies and live photos of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans on their own Facebook and Twitter status. I then shared those raw photos as well! 

Behind the Scenes Shenanigans

Will any of this result in more sales? Only time will tell. My event at Blue Heron Books on Saturday happens in two more sleeps. I’ll know if my innovative efforts were received if we have a rollicking good day of book sales and Viking hi-jinks. If the sales don’t come, at least I tried something new. I found a new angle. I played with a never-before-attempted idea. I had to grow a giant set of Viking balls to pull that off, but I’m already trying to figure out an excuse to do it all over again!

Ready for Battle

Happy marketing. Reach for the absolute limits of your imagination and don’t let fear slow you down. Grab hold and put yourself out there. Go boldly where you haven’t gone before.

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

Authors Open for Business

 

 

So, you want to be an author. Are you prepared to also become a public relations wiz, marketing guru, entrepreneur, and international sales rep?

I was at a workshop recently, and the take away message from a panel discussion seemed to be that as authors we must treat our passion as a business.

It all starts when we sit down and write that first word. Think of it as owning our own manufacturing company. Our novel is a time-consuming, rewarding labour of love, and with any manufacturing process, our job is to create a compelling, dazzling product to shake up the market place. But our investment isn’t finished when that manuscript rolls off the production line. Whether we traditional publish, or self-publish, we have to generate sales. What business can survive without healthy revenue and income streams?

With shiny new book in hand, we must understand our market niche and promote to that target audience. We have to knock on doors, cold call, hand out postcards, business cards, and bookmarks. We must find creative ways to engage potential readers on social media, hosting launch parties and giveaways, joining groups and forums, and commenting on blogs. Gone are the days of just writing a book and waiting for readers to find you.

I listened to fantastic ideas outlining opportunities to promote yourself, all of which involved understanding your core market first—after all if you don’t know who wants to buy a book like yours, how are you going to go about promoting it to them?  I took notes and admired the creative ways proposed to engage with readers, for example, if your book is about dogs, meet your local pet store owner and see if they would be willing to carry your book. The presenters spoke about business plans, clear objectives, and a narrow focus—know your audience and focus your efforts there. There were lots of suggestions on how to get your book or cover in front of readers e.g. ads of Facebook, Google, Goodreads, Twitter.

But a business? To me, that label took the creativity, spontaneity, and fun out of the process and turned it into something sterile and cold.

Here’s a couple articles on highly successful people: 

http://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/the-10-most-important-attributes-of-highly-successful-people.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/8-traits-the-worlds-most-successful-people-share-2015-7

The traits that struck me most were passion, integrity, persistence, communication, and drive. We can embody all of that without looking at our chosen path as a stuffy, starched collar, stiff tie entrepreneurial business. We need to show up and do the work, I appreciate that. We need to write like the wind, devote a certain amount of time to understanding the needs, desires, and values of our readers, and we should all be looking to engage, delight, and inform. We can promote and sell as needed, but do we have to do it from the confining space of a business mentality?

I realized a few things in this workshop, but specifically to this train of thought: just as there are plotters and pantsers when it comes to one’s approach to writing, there are plotters and pantsers when it comes time to deal with the other myriad aspects of being an author.

I know a lot of people who approach their writing career as a job. They wake up, section their day into the ‘business’ side of their affairs and the ‘writing’ side of their job. They plot, plan, make spreadsheets, and graphs. I also know other people who take their passion just as seriously, but their approach is more organic. They might try something new every day—a new way to engage with readers, a new promotional idea, a new outlet or avenue never explored before—but they are not trapped by expectations or measuring conversions.

I can also tell you, neither group appears to be more ‘successful’ (such an interesting term and very subjective when it comes to defining what it means personally to be successful) than the other.

I’m curious. What do you think? What’s your approach to writing and letting the world know you’re out there?

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

Be A Tease!

Everyone loves a tease. That tiny morsel of goodness to whet your appetite and leave you begging for more. The build up of anticipation for something, whether it's food, books, movies, a hot date...it's what keeps your attention and focus, leaving you aching for more.

Teasers are an important part of book marketing. Done right, you can grab a brand new reader's attention in less than a minute. Done wrong, you can turn a potential reader away for life.

Here's a teaser for my new book out today, ELUDING ILLUSIONS

Sometimes teasers can be done using a tagline or a "hook" for your book. Here's another using a tagline for my book, VEXED.

Sometimes teasers can be lines or quotes from your book.

You'll notice in the teaser above I put my copyright info and gave credit for the picture to the owner of it. NEVER use pics of celebrities or steal pics from the interwebs to use in teasers. You can get in serious legal trouble without express written permission from the rights holder of the image. There are many stock photo sites you can buy images from to use in your teasers. 

And if you don't want to buy images, some photographers will allow you to use an image if you credit them in the photo, as I did above. But you must have their permission to do so. Or you can use plain backgrounds and make your own using images from your book cover art files as I did in the first two teasers. Ask your cover artist for help if you want banners made up or blank teasers you can manipulate using your cover art files.

A teaser can even be as simple as just an image and your release date to start getting your cover in front of your potential reader audience, like the one I did above.

Also, please remember when making teasers to keep the fonts legible.

While those are cool fonts and it makes it eye catching, it's somewhat hard to read. Teasers should entice a future reader, not make them work for it or get frustrated because they can read only every other word because of font, or colors blending in over background images. 

Try can keep them as crisp and eye catching as possible.

Remember to change up the teasers. 

• Have a sexy one if it's a romance novel. 
• Have a more serious and dramatic one that shows the depth of the book as well. 
• Have a tagline hook as we mentioned earlier. 
• A PG level one for general audiences is also a good idea. 
• Have one as well that gives perspective and insight into the personalities of your characters. 

Like the one below for my novel, VEXED, it gives you a sense of the banter between the main characters.

Teasers can also can turn a potential reader into a lost sale. Remember that a variety of people will be seeing your teaser. So, unless you're posting in a specific group of people, please make your teasers for a general audience. If you write BDSM or Erotica, make sure you have a teaser specific to those audiences, but don't post those in a general FB group using graphic sexual references. Have a cleaner version for the masses and put a warning that the book itself will contain language, violence, or graphic sex. 

Also, please, for the love of all humanity, make sure your teasers don't have misspellings or typos. It's a reflection on you as the author. Put your best work forward.

Go forth and tease the world!!

How to Rock your Cover Reveal

Are you looking for a tried-and-true, fail-safe, how to guide for planning a cover reveal? Read on for my awesome, enlightened eight step approach to Rocking your Cover Reveal ...

Recently, I had the opportunity to reveal the cover of my debut historical fiction, Avelynn. As a good little author, I wanted to shout my cover to the mountaintops; I wanted the whole world to share in my joy and pride. But one cannot simply post the picture and say here it is. We must do it up to the nines—and rightly so. This is a big deal in the life of an author. A momentous occasion, a milestone of sorts.

However, to others, it’s merely another cover reveal in the onslaught of cover reveals on the internet. It’s just another image, another self-promo tactic in a sea of authors yelling, ‘Hey, over here, look at me, see what I’ve written, isn’t it awesome!’ But here’s the kicker—my book is awesome! ;) I want you to see what I’ve written! I want you to love the cover and the words painstakingly rendered on each of the three hundred odd pages as much as I do. I just need to help you filter the cacophony out there until you notice me.


The book :D

Lisa Abellera wrote a great blog post about the importance of a book’s cover. And continuing on a theme first introduced by Charlotte Gruber in her latest post on characters, judging a book by its cover is akin to going on a first date.

 

We might claim that we’re not superficial, but deep down, under the surface of our altruism and genuine desire to be nonjudgmental, we’re all deeply influenced by what we see. A perfectly  symmetrical face is considered the most attractive to our wandering eyes, and like our first impressions of another person, our first impressions of a book are often determined by the design elements on its cover. It has to be captivating, intriguing, and aesthetically pleasing. In those first moments, within that suspended breath, we should be able to catch a glimpse of what we will find inside.

 

Off course, yet veering into a slightly relevant tangent:

 

I love my husband. We’ve been together twenty-four years. I fell in love with his personality, his sense of humour, and his genuine and selfless character, but I have to admit, when I saw him walk through the doors of that submarine shop all those years ago, I first noticed his handsome face—taking in his gentle blue eyes, the outside edges crinkling slightly when he smiled, his high cheekbones, his perfectly coiffed blond hair, strong jaw line—and his tight little soccer-playing ass. In fact, many years later at one of those soccer games, he jumped to head the ball just as the goalie lunged to fist it away. Both missed the ball but made contact with each other—husband’s face/goalie’s knuckles. When I saw him the next day, all puffy and rocking a technicolour eye, which I might add was swollen shut, I told him point blank: “I never realized how superficial I was until just this moment.” ;)

 

The husband :D

Isn’t he cute! But I digress. So, back to the cover reveal. I wanted to make a good first impression, but I wanted it to be meaningful. So what to do? Google it, of course. I scoured the internet looking for information on how to reveal a book cover. The pickings were abysmal at best. I hunted, scrolling through over ten pages of google search results for anything I could find. I stumbled onto a lot of individual author websites and blogs that highlighted their cover—one image, a few words of buildup, maybe an excerpt or two, but that was it. Nowhere could I find a tried-and-true, fail-safe, how to guide. So, after pouring though several sites, I improvised. I combined a few ideas, came up with a couple of my own, and here’s what I garnered:

 

How to Rock your Cover Reveal

1. Plan it
 

Pick the date

• I chose the handy six month pre-publication date to reveal the cover.
• I.e., the book is coming out September 8^th, 2015, so I held the party on March 8^th.

Set the time

• I wanted this to be a big event with the option for people to pop in throughout the day.
• My party ran from 12:00pm EST to 8:00pm EST.
• Plan on being glued to your computer from at least an hour before to an hour after.

2. Facebook it



Set up a Facebook event

• Setting up a Facebook event is effortless, and it’s easy to invite everyone on your friend list to the party!
• Since it all takes place on Facebook, you can host the event in your pyjamas.
• Your friends can also attend in the PJs.

Caution: Not everyone knows what a Facebook event is! As the awesome organizer of this spectacular soiree, it’s very important to make it clear to your invitees that the event takes place ON Facebook, not AT your house. Take it from me … this little distinction is key.  

3. Guest Authors
 

A party is always better with friends

• If you’re a writer, you probably have lots of author friends who might like to find and meet potential new readers.
• Dog-earing an hour at the start of the event to set the atmosphere (e.g., describe contests, giveaway rules, reveal guest author line-up) and an hour to close the festivities (e.g., finally … Avelynn’s big cover reveal), I offered each of my guest authors a full hour to interact and have fun with our guests.

Tell your friends what you are doing to build up the event

• One week prior to the event, I revealed a tiny piece of the cover with a word hidden within the image.
• Every day thereafter, leading up to the event, I would post another puzzle piece.
• Readers were told to jot down the hidden words and bring the list to the party. If they got them all correct, they were entered in a draw for a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift card.
• Pimp out the event on all your social media pages and outlets. Talk it up, blast it out there! Create some noise.

Be clear up front about expectations

• Yes, it’s your cover reveal, but this party is actually more about your guest authors. After all, you don’t even have a book out yet.
• Ask them to invite friends from their personal Facebook pages.
• This is very important. Only a small percentage of those invited will actually attend, so the more invites the better it is for everyone involved!
• Ask that they post their ‘special guest appearance’ on their blog at least twice leading up to the event and tweet with abandon.

 4. Giveaways

Make it worth the reader’s while to give you their valuable time

• For each correct answer to the hidden word puzzle challenge, a reader received an entry into the draw for the $50 Amazon gift card.

Scavenger Hunt

• Building an author newsletter list is essential.
• Building a presence on Goodreads is essential.
• Having readers ‘like’ your author page is awesome too!
• So, I sent my readers on a scavenger hunt, so to speak. For each ‘action’ completed from the list above (i.e., going to my website and signing up for my newsletter, hopping over to Goodreads and voting for Avelynn in Listopia and adding the book to their ‘to read list,’ liking my author page) they received an additional entry into the $50 Amazon gift card draw.
• Win/Win. :D

5. Author Giveaways

 

Each of my guest authors offered a giveaway of their own

• Whether it was an ebook, a print book, a pdf, or a gift card, each guest author brought a giveaway to the party … so that meant FREE stuff every hour!
• At the beginning of every hour, I would introduce a new guest author in a new post. In the comments, under that specific thread, for that specific author, readers would post questions and generally interact with my guests.
• For each comment, a reader received an entry into the draw for that hour’s prize giveaway.
• Every comment garnered an entry, ergo, the more you commented and had fun, the more chances you had to win!

 
6. Facilitate



Keep the conversation going

• Have a list of author interview questions handy.
• There are lots of great examples of author interview questions on the internet. I strove for a balance of serious and silly and launched at whim.
• Your job is to introduce your guest authors and start the dialogue rolling, periodically offering up new questions if a current thread tapers off.

Once I started the conversation, readers took over, asking their own questions. Once that happened, I could sit back and drink my coffee (or finally run to the bathroom … damn coffee). I had only to keep an eye on the time and make a few witty comments of my own.


 7. Organize

Prior to the event:

• Collect all the bios, images, and links your wonderful guest authors will provide.
• Copy the text into a specific file folder, e.g., Cover Reveal Party Author Deets.
• Copy the images into a specific photo folder. Bunch each author’s images together within that folder, e.g., author picture, book covers, teaser photos etc.
• This allows for fast and seamless copying and pasting into the posts. A Facebook event is like a live reality television show. There’s no stopping for retakes and editing!

Important: Organisation is the key to success! An hour is not a lot of time to run amuck on your computer, trying to find and organize everything for your next guest at the last minute, in real time, while you’re trying to facilitate the conversation for the current guest … not that I would know, of course.

8. Acquire Minions

Having multiple giveaways every hour requires an insane amount of effort, and Rafflecopter just isn’t going to cut it. This is a back-to-basics, pen-and-paper kind of affair. If possible, enlist the services of adorable minions, or unpaid labour … i.e., your family.

Since I had every comment = an entry, there was a lot of name dropping going on. I had a pad of lined paper beside my laptop and once the sheet was filled, I had my wonderful children cut them into nice, neat little rectangles, and place the entries into the ceramic bowl. My youngest was the official winner-picker. In hindsight, I’d have the paper cut and ready to go beforehand.

Here’s the link to my Facebook Party event page. Feel free to have a look around; see how the conversations for each author was organized and how it unfolded. Check out the puzzle images … heck see if you can find the hidden words. The draws and giveaways may be done, but the fun never ends. Looking forward to hosting Avelynn’s Launch Party in September! See you there!  :D

For more information and to keep up to date on Avelynn and the awesome prizes coming in September, join my author newsletter! Did I mention free stuff? There’s a sexy short story delivered straight to your inbox just for signing up.

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

 P.S. I just made this awesome teaser video of Avelynn, in case you're, you know, curious. :D

xo