Help Selling More Books – To Con or Not To Con? Part 1 – Industry Conventions

Help Selling More Books – To Con or Not To Con? Part 1 – Industry Conventions

So y’all might have heard that I was in St. Louis last weekend, hitting up both Penned Con 2017 and Archon 41. My conversations with several people at both cons raised the question – Is it worth it?

It’s a valid question, and one I ask myself often when I go to conventions. Last week I drove over 1500 miles round trip. I was away from home for six days. I spent five nights in a hotel, and ate out every meal for six days. That’s not an insignificant investment in time, effort, and money, and that’s before we go into the inventory involved with me taking over 120 paperbacks and hardbacks across five states!

So when I evaluate a convention’s worth, I look first at what kind of convention it is. There are several major types of convention that I attend, some more frequently than others, and I expect different things from all of them. Today, we’ll take a look at what cons fit into what type, and what I’m looking for at each one.

Let’s start with the ones that are frequently the most expensive, and have the lowest opportunity for immediate return on investment, but may have the greatest long term ROI – industry cons. In the writing business there are several different types of industry con, and they are usually the ones that have the highest cost to attend. When I talk about industry cons, I mean World Fantasy Con, World Horror Con, RWA Nationals, and ThrillerFest. Regional writer festivals like the NC Writers’ Network Fall Gathering also fall into this category.

Industry cons often cost everyone but the volunteers and Guests of Honor to attend. Unlike comic cons or fandom cons, even the vendors at some professional cons still have to buy their badge on top of their table fee. And if you don’t have a table, even if you’ve been a pro in the field for decades, you may still have to spring for a badge. That’s not a knock on the convention, it’s just the way they are structured. The target audience of the con is the pros, so they aren’t using your work on panels to draw in the Muggles, they are putting you on maybe one or two panels to speak to your peers.So at these cons you pay for your badge. And they ain’t cheap. Some of these cons will cost several hundred dollars to attend, and it’s less likely that you’ll have an opportunity to make that cost back by selling books, as the number of fans in attendance is far lower than the number of pros. You may find yourself laying out $300 for a badge, then $150-250 per night for a hotel, plus travel. These cons can easily set you back a grand or more, with little to no opportunity to recoup that money quickly.

So why go? Because it’s a long game, remember? I had a great meeting at Dragon Con with an editor that I’m working on a proposal for. If it goes through, it’ll take most of 2018 before I see a dime off that meeting, and I’ve been building a relationship with that editor since 2014 at Dragon. It’s the long game. He’s not going to leave the business. I’m not going to leave the business. If it takes us four to six years to make any money off being friends, so be it. If we never make any money off being friends, so be it. But the connections you make at industry cons have so many more ancillary benefits over dollars and cents and immediate sales. Maybe a drink in the Westin bar turns into a cover blurb given or received. Maybe a panel on the Urban Fantasy track results in contracts for eight novellas (See: Mason Dixon, Monster Hunter). Maybe you meet somebody that you can give advice to, or somebody that you can learn from. Industry cons are great for that kind of networking, that kind of relationship building. I didn’t sell a single book at World Horror Con, but spending the weekend hanging out with Alethea Kontis, Jake Bible, Chris Golden, Charles Rutledge, James Tuck, and other friends was well worth the expense of the con.

That’s not to say that you should jump in on every industry con that’s within driving distance. I’ve never done the RWA national conference. I write very little romance, and most of what I publish can only be called romance in the very loosest of terms. So I don’t go to those cons. I don’t go to the NC Writers’ Network Gathering except when it’s in Charlotte. It’s mainly a literary fiction, historical fiction, and poetry conference, without a ton of genre fiction writers or readers. So while I really like the organization and support their programming, I can’t justify it as an every-year con. I’ll be there in 2018 when they’re in Charlotte, though. That’s for damn sure. So you do have to balance potential return on investment with your attendance, but you don’t have to look at it as a black and white set of numbers on a balance sheet. I plan to attend World Fantasy Con next year in Baltimore because it’s drivable, and I can sell some books, raise the overall profile of Falstaff Books, and maybe sign up some more writers to our stable. It’ll take years to see if that investment will pay off.

Long. Game.

Next week we’ll talk about fandom cons, and maybe move into pop culture cons or comic cons/vendor hall cons. Later on we’ll look at what I call Starfucker cons, then we’ll talk about what you’re trying to get out of a con, how many you should do in a year, and when is it too much of a good thing?

Until then, I had a new book come out yesterday, so I’d love it if you’d go buy Amazing Grace. If you scroll back through the archives, you can hear me read the prologue. If you’ve already bought it, and enjoyed it, leave a review! They really matter.

Help Selling More Books – To Con or Not To Con? Part 1 – Industry Conventions

Help Selling More Books – Write More, Publish More, Sell More

That’s the trick, isn’t it? If we write more, we can publish more, and then we can sell more. I publish roughly 2-3 novels per year, plus a couple of short stories, plus anywhere from 9-14 novellas. This year, I will finish up with eight novellas, a couple of short stories, and two novels. Somewhere between 375,000 and 400,000 words of published fiction, plus around 100,000 words of blogging. I don’t count FB posts, but I do count the stuff I write here, because it’s written with intent and forethought, and usually some level of narrative thread. So close to half a million words, or a little more if we take into account the 60K of Black Knight #7 that I trashed, and the 25K of TECH Ops that I’m still working on.

That’s a lot of words. That’s what it takes for me to make a living. I don’t make any kind of extravagant living, but I am the wage-earner for my wife and I. That word count allows me to do that. It also allows me the time to work on Falstaff Books projects, and we will probably end the year producing 20 titles, every one of which I had some level of direct hand in producing.

So the question I get from a lot of writers is “How do you write that much?” Well, here’s how, and I have to give credit where due to Dean Wesley Smith, who wrote some very good blog posts in 2010-11 on a workmanlike approach to writing, and how much you could produce in a year if you just write 1,000 words per day. I shoot for a little more than that, but I also don’t write every single day.

But here’s my basic approach.

  1. Divide and Conquer – I typically work on two projects at once, one main project and one side project. This lets me have a palette cleanser project that I can fiddle with when I need to let my lizard brain work out a plot problem.
  2. Break Down the Project – My chapters are almost always 2,000 words long, so I shoot for one chapter per day on my main project. When I’m working a novella, that means that working Monday-Friday for three weeks gets me to 30,000 words. That’s the average length of my novellas, with a couple thousand words for an epilogue. Since I usually get to the last chapter and binge right through to “THE END,” I write a novella in three weeks. That’s a pretty relaxed pace. Then I use the 1K/day on my side projects to do things outside the Bubba or Harker universes, my novels, or work-for-hire stuff. I’m currently working on some work-for-hire serialized stuff for a client, and they want 5K per part. So that’s one week per serialized chunk.
  3. Don’t Kill Myself – I mentioned that I write 3K per day, and I consider that a pretty relaxed pace. I can do 5K/day, but it’s tiring. I could train myself to write more, and faster, but I’m in this for the long haul, and I have yet to meet more than a couple of people who can do 5K/day for more than a year or two and make it consistently good. That’s pretty important to me – being able to do this for the long term. I’m seven years into my fiction writing career, and 11 years into my professional writing career, so I know what I can do consistently to make the words come out tight and requiring as little polish as possible. I want to turn in clean copy, and about 3-4K/day is my maximum sustainable pace for that. Much faster, and I spend so much time scrapping shit and rewriting that I am better off just writing slower in the first place.
  4. Let Life Happen – I mentioned above that my output this year wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be. I had some months where I didn’t write much, and it was a struggle to get 2K per day. That happens, especially for those of us with depression, anxiety, bipolar (that’s me!) or other mental health issues. Or physical health issues, if you have those. Or family issues. Shit happens, and sometimes you have to deal with that. Hopefully if it shits all over your writing productivity, you either still have a day job, or you have enough of a backlist selling through to carry you. But you can’t freak out about that shit, or you’ll just create a whirlwind of doom and never write anything.
  5. Hop Around a Little – I write four series currently, or more like 3.5, since the Harker books and the Shadow Council books are so intertwined. But that keeps my ADD appeased, with the occasional bone thrown to my distractions by doing something like Amazing Grace (which is out for preorder now). I would likely make more money if I just hammered out Harker novels as fast as I could. But I’m not in this just for the cash. Yes, this is how I make my living. Yes, I need this income to pay my bills. But as I keep saying, I am in this for the long haul. Amazing Grace could turn into a Hallmark movie series, for all I know. What I know about that book is that while writing it may mean that it takes me two years to finish the Harker plot Quest for Glory, I wrote a book I absolutely love and think is the best thing I’ve ever produced. That will pay me more dividends in the long run than jamming out another Harker novella or novel.

That’s what I do. That’s how I work, and how I make a living in this business. Am I killing it like some of the newer self-published Urban Fantasy authors? No. Am I still going to be here in five years? Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of people flame out in the past seven years, and I’ve found the method that lets me continue to produce at a reasonable pace and not burn myself out. You’ve got to find what works for you, but for me, writing for 3-4 hours each day gets the bills paid, as long as I’m doing all the other stuff that goes into being a full-time writer, more than half of which has nothing to do with actually writing.

Remember, if you find these posts helpful, feel free to buy one of my books as a “Thank You,” or you can join my Patreon and pledge your undying support!

Help Selling More Books – To Con or Not To Con? Part 1 – Industry Conventions

Help Selling More Books – Mailing Lists Revisited

I wrote a couple of posts early in this series about how to build a mailing list with Incentivized and Organic Subscribers, and all that stuff remains true. If you missed them, the first part is here, and the second one is here. This won’t be about the philosophical elements of making a newsletter, this will be about the nuts and bolts, the mechanics, and what I personally do with my mailing lists to monetize them. Some of this is stuff I’ve gleaned from the internet, some of it I’ve come up with on my own, and fair chunk of it is from notes I took in a long conversation with my friend Stuart Jaffe. If you want to read some kickass adventure or supernatural mystery stuff, check him out. And if you sign up for his email list, you’ll get some free shit! Eric Asher is another person I use for a resource on promos and mailing lists, and he’s also got a deal or two running right now.

But how do I deal with my mailing list(s)? Well, that’s been the subject of a lot of thought over the past few days, as I’ve recently relocated my mailing list from Mailchimp to Mailerlite, because for the number of subscribers that I have (currently about 3,600 across four lists) Mailerlite is $20/month, where Mailchimp was $50, and going to $75 when I reach 5K. So that’s not an insignificant savings, especially given what I have in the marketing budget most months, which is frequently dryer lint. By the way, if you click on those links and sign up for Mailerlite, you get a discount and I get a kickback, so if this is helpful, that’s one way to show the love.

As I mentioned, I have four mailing lists, three of which are active, and one I’m just getting moving (slowly) on. The lists are – my newsletter, the Falstaff Books newsletter, and the ARC team for me & Falstaff. Yes, those links are the signup forms for the linked newsletters. Yes, you can get a metric ton of free ebooks just for signing up to all of those email lists and then auto-dropping. I mean, by my rough reckoning, if you signed up for all the lists that I’ve shown you here, you would get six complete novels, two short stories, one sampler anthology, and one anthology. All for free!

But how does it work? How do I get people onto the lists, and how do I deal with the lists once I’ve got them there. Okay, here’s what I do. It’s more than most people, and scale it back to fit your productivity, but remember that I release at least one new product every month, and sometimes more, plus I have a publishing company releasing at least two new books each month, usually more. So I have a lot of shit to notify people about. But here’s the plan.

1) Consistency – I’m a flake, and anyone that has worked with me knows it. I know it, and I also know that I can’t do the things I need to do if I’m flaking out all over the place. So I have an event set up in my calendar to write a newsletter every Wednesday. It’s also when I write these posts, so it kinda just gives me a couple hours in publisher headspace to do this kind of stuff. I do a John Hartness newsletter one week, then a Falstaff newsletter the following week. If for some reason I don’t have anything new coming out that week, the week before, or the week after, I skip a week. That doesn’t happen very often, between appearances, book releases, and audiobook releases, I have something hitting the virtual streets almost every week, so there’s something to talk about. But consistency is critical. If you go too long without sending out a newsletter, people forget about you. And obscurity is our enemy. So I send out a newsletter about every two weeks for each of my major newsletters. The ARC team is a whole different story, and one that I’m still working on. I’ll keep you posted.

2) The Funnel – This is what I learned from Stuart, setting up my automation. I know he didn’t invent the idea. He’s smart, but not that smart. But he was kind enough to take the time to sit down and explain the whole thing to me. So here’s what happens when someone signs up for my email newsletter, and this is another place in which Mailerlite has Mailchimp beat, hands down. This shit was so much easier to set up on Mailerlite that it wasn’t even funny.

Step 1 – Janet signs up for the newsletter. Janet gets a confirmation email with a link in it directing her to confirm that she’s a human and really wanted to sign up for this crap. Once she does that, she is sent to an Instafreebie page. Instafreebie is a website that automates ebook giveaways and integrates them with mailing lists. It lets me do all this without actually having to sit down and send people ebooks. I use it for all my mailing list giveaways. Yes, there is a referral link buried in that link, too, so if you sign up for Instafreebie and upload a book, I get a discount. Just assume that I have put referral links in every link in here, because I probably have. It doesn’t add anything to your cost, and if I am recommending that you sign up for a service, might as well get them to pay me for it, right?

Step 2 – But anyway, Janet goes to Instafreebie and gets her free ebook. Then the automation starts rolling. In a few days, Janet will get a second email, with another Instafreebie link, this one to a different free short story. She doesn’t have to sign up for anything extra, she doesn’t have to get the story. But it’s free, and it’s a story I like, so why not give it away?

Step 3 – Seven days later, Mailerlite runs an if/then sequence. If Janet opened the email, then she gets an email inviting her to join the Falstaff Books email list. This will get her two more free ebooks, plus another set of notifications. If she didn’t open the email, it will resend, to give her a little reminder to become an active fan and read all my shit (and get more free shit!).

Step 4 – Seven days after that, another step runs. If Janet didn’t open the email a second time, she’s removed from the list. I pay per subscriber, and if people aren’t reading the things I’m sending, then I would rather not pay to keep them around. If they are actively interested and just got busy, they can sign up again and get more free shit all over again. If Janet opened the email the second time it sent, she then gets invited to the Falstaff Books email list. To get more free shit. If she opened the Falstaff Books invite, then she gets another email inviting her to join Stuart’s email list and get his shit for free. Because we all like to work together, and a rising tide lifts all boats. So the more books Stuart sells, the more books I will eventually sell, because we’re all about training people to buy indie and small press books, and love us all. So I like pimping my friends.

If Janet didn’t open the Falstaff Books email, then nothing else happens. I don’t refer only moderately active subscribers to other folks, but I don’t boot them, either. If they’ve opened 2/3 of the emails I send, then I definitely want them around.

That’s the way my funnel is currently set up, and it’s constantly evolving. But I want to draw people in as much as I can, and engage them as much as I can. Those are the initial steps to building a list, signup forms, and creating a funnel to suck them into your loving arms forever.

We’re way over the thousand word limit I try to keep these at, but just a quick note – there’s a new Quincy Harker short story coming out soon, and I’m giving away 100 copies on Instafreebie. You don’t have to sign up for shit, just click this link and you can get a free Harker story. Now, you CAN sign up for the email list while you’re there, but it’s not required. There are 80 or so available as of this writing, so go get some free shit!

Help Selling More Books – To Con or Not To Con? Part 1 – Industry Conventions

Help Selling More Books – To Get Political or Not To Get Political?

Well, I guess we were going to have this conversation eventually, and now seems like as good a time as any. Last weekend, a bunch of Nazi dickbags staged a march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of the aforementioned dickbags murdered a woman with his car. Said dickbag was arrested, but the rest of the Nazi dickbags were not, and many online Nazi dickbags started trying to spin the whole mess to make it look like the dickbag driver was actually a liberal protestor. He wasn’t. There are photos of him in the line of Nazi dickbags earlier in the day.

This may come as a surprise to you, but I am not a fan of Nazi dickbags, or dickbags in general, but I particularly dislike Nazi ones.

As a writer of fiction, and someone with a (very limited) public profile, I am sometimes asked about taking public political stances and whether I think that’s something that writers and celebrities should do. Sometimes this is accompanied by the person asking the question continuing on by saying that they don’t care about Chuck Wendig’s or Orson Scott Card’s or Larry Correia’s or John Scalzi’s politics, they just want them to shut up and make with the entertaining. These folks also often rage about Colin Kaepernick not standing for the national anthem or Susan Sarandon speaking out against the death penalty.

If these people are folks I actually know, and we’re speaking face to face, I call them idiots to their face and tell them that since my art is part of me, and my beliefs are part of me, that I can no more divorce my beliefs from my work than I can painlessly amputate my own nutsack, and am about as likely to do so. If this encounter happens on the internet, I may not call them an idiot, because believe it or not, I’m more polite when people don’t have the opportunity to punch me in the face, not less.

I’m also six feet tall, weigh over three hundred pounds, and look like a day player on Sons of Anarchy. I’m not any flavor of badass, but I kinda look like one. So I don’t often fear people just randomly punching me.

But the fact of the matter is that I am a political person. I’m about as liberal as the day is long, and I’m pretty damn sure that shines through in a lot of my work. There are certain things I’ve written because there were issues of social and societal weight that I want to explore, and my own exploration of race, sexual identity, gender equality, and other issues comes through in my work. Yeah, I use my writing to work through some shit. I hope I take readers along for an enjoyable ride, but sometimes your punching in the face may be accompanied by a side of social justice. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it. It’s cool. There are way more people in the world who don’t read my books than there are people who do.

There are probably more people in the world who have never even heard of my books than there are who have.

Wow, now I feel fucking insignificant. Excuse me while I go look at my Goodreads reviews to re-inflate my ego.

Time passes.

Well, that was a stupid goddamn idea. Note to self – if you want someone to blow sunshine up your ass about your writing, call your sister. No, she doesn’t read your books, but she loves you, and will tell you they’re great anyway.

But back to politics, or when to be political at least. I don’t advocate that everyone drop a bunch of heavy-handed preachy-preachy bits in every book they write. I actually had a conversation with a writer friend not long ago where I told them that too much of their religious views were seeping into the work and undermining the narrative, and they needed to cut that shit out. I’ve done the same thing with my work, telling editors “look at this section and tell me if I need to pull it back.” But to all the people who say “entertainers should entertain and not have political opinions,” I say, “go fuck yourself.”

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

I’m not going to wear a “Fuck Trump and the horse he rode in on” shirt to Dragon Con. I don’t own one, and wouldn’t wear it in public if I did. That gains me nothing. It’s attacking, and by extension it’s attacking everyone who voted for our sitting President. That gets me nothing. I have in the past, and if I ever lose more weight, will happily again wear t-shirts promoting equality and LGBTQ rights. That promotes something positive, rather than attacking someone. I’ve heard many times that people in authority should never punch down, meaning that I shouldn’t slag on new writers or writers with less success than me, and Jim Butcher shouldn’t pick on me so much (Jim has never been anything but nice to me, he’s a very kind dude in every encounter we’ve had). I actually amend this to tell people not to punch up either. Taking potshots from the bottom of the ladder at someone higher up than you only makes you look small, bitter, jealous, and petty. None of these are traits that will attract readers.

So it’s better not to punch at all. Except Nazis. What’s good for Captain America is good for everyone.

So I try not to attack individuals for political stances. I try not to let the politics or the issues overwhelm the narrative, because that is our job – to tell a good story, and any teachable moments that come along with that are a bonus. And I try not to let my political beliefs color the way I interact with fans, which I hope is always polite (or at least funny) and approachable.

And if people want to avoid my politics entirely, they can follow my Facebook Author Page, join the Facebook Group, or follow the Falstaff Books website, which have appearance and publication updates, but nothing about my personal life. This blog is my personal blog and predates my professional writing career. My Facebook page is my personal page, and it’s wide-ass open. I approve most friend requests that aren’t obvious fake profiles, but you better understand that you’re getting unexpurgated Hartness on there. The Facebook group is a 100% no-politics zone, and anything political there gets pulled immediately. So there are places that I don’t mention politics, but I don’t try to keep it out of my work, and I sure as shit don’t keep it out of this blog or my personal FB page. that’s my personal balancing act, which I think gives people that liken my words but don’t agree with me politically (some of them are my real-life friends, even!) an opportunity to keep track of my work without getting constantly reminded that we are polar opposites on many things.

So that’s what I do. Does it work? I don’t know. But I have to write the stories I want to tell, and I’m not going to hide my beliefs. So that’s the compromise I can figure out.

Help Selling More Books – To Con or Not To Con? Part 1 – Industry Conventions

Help Selling More Books – How to Promote Your Books Without Being an Asshole

A lot of people have asked me how I can find the courage to promote my work without feeling like an asshole. Well, I can’t tell you how to do that, because I can’t help how you feel. I can’t even tell you how to promote your books without other people thinking you’re an asshole, because I can’t help how they feel, either. No matter how often I ask my cat to build one for me, I don’t yet have a functioning Public Opinion Control Ray Gun.

And I should never, ever be trusted with such technology. With great power, comes great potential for hilarity, and I think I would do lots of funny shit with that, but not very much good.

But I digress.

So there are two kinds of writers – the kind who promote their shit, and the kind that don’t make any money. You decide which one you want to be, and behave accordingly.

That is, of course, a vast oversimplification. But let’s take a look at some ways that you can promote your book without being an asshole.

1) Promote to your mailing list – I might have mentioned before on this blog that mailing lists are pretty damned important. These are people who already want to read your shit, and are inclined to give you money for the privilege. Let them. Take their money. They want you to have it. Do not be ashamed of taking their money. Instead, think of what a favor you are doing these poor people who have too much cash, and need some way to spend it. Be a giver. Give them the warm fuzzy feeling of spending money with you.

Some people post to their mailing list every week. I think that’s a little too often. Some people post to their mailing list only when they have a new release. That’s probably not often enough, unless you release a book every single month. I think you should probably communicate with your mailing list at least once a month.

“But what do I say?” “I don’t have anything to say!” “I’m booooooring!”

Well, you’re probably right. But if you are, then what are you saying on Facebook all the damn time? Are you going to a convention next month? Newsletter. Are you releasing the audiobook of the book you released two months ago? Newsletter. Did you just sign a contract for four books? Newsletter.

The point is that you can come up with something relevant to your writing career once a month, unless you just aren’t writing anything, aren’t releasing anything, and aren’t doing anything to promote yourself. If that’s the case, then you’re not a writer, you’re someone who talks about wanting to be a writer, and that’s not who I’m talking to here. I’m writing these posts for people who actually want to sell books. If you want to talk about being a writer, or want to writer for the love of it, that’s fine. But you’re not the audience for these posts. You should read my serialized fiction every Monday and buy all my other shit.

So yeah, you need to send out a newsletter at least once a month. Some folks like to send out serialized fiction once a month in their newsletter. This is a great idea and it gives you potential readers a reason to sign up and stick around. I personally don’t do it, but I’m serializing two novels right now, so I think I give away enough writing. The first one is on this site every Monday, and the other is on my Patreon.

So by sending out newsletters, you are communicating with people who have already said they want to hear from you, thus – you are not an asshole.

2) Post to your Author FB Page – You do have one, right? If you have at least one book out, you need to have a presence on Facebook. If you use Facebook at all. Don’t do it if you hate Facebook, but if you have any use for FB, you need to have an author page.

Then you need to write shit on there. Frequently. Like, all the fucking time.

This is just like a newsletter. The people who like your FB author page want to hear about your work. If they don’t, they won’t follow the page. I feel like you should promote each thing you have out in the world once per day on your author page. Got an ebook? 1 Post. Got a newsletter? Another post. Blog? Another post. Audiobook? Another post. Before you know it, you can have a dozen things that you’re promoting on your Author page.

Don’t get all shy and awkward about posting there, because 1) the people who like this page are still predisposed to give you money, and it’s rude to turn them down, and 2) FB throttles your feed so much that only 10-20% of your friends and followers see the things you post. So it’s entirely possible that if you have eight posts on your FB wall, any given person who likes your work may only see two of them. So while you think you’re blasting the universe with a million bits of spam, they think you’re super-restrained and only post a couple times a day,

It’s okay, I won’t tell them.

3) Post things with cute pictures – When Natania Barron got print copies of her new novella, she posted an adorable picture of herself holding them. People love that shit. They love seeing you get excited about shit. So post pictures. Take your new book on a tour of the country, and post with it at landmarks. Or ask your FB tribe to send in pics of them holding your book in various places, and share those pics. Images are awesome on the internet, and funny pictures are even awesomer. That’s why I use the pic of the grinning chimp for all these posts. That, and it’s not a terrible likeness. 🙂

4) Post in threads where people ask for people to post what they’re working on – A bunch of folks will make posts like “Tell me about your new release.” DO IT. FFS, they’re asking you. They’re begging you to provide content and engagement with their page, and they’re offering promotion in exchange. Take them up on their kind offer.

Same for blog posts. Remember, I offer a guest blog spot every Friday for people to send me stuff about their new books. Just write up a post around 500-1,000 words on where the idea for your book came from, and send it along with buy links and a cover image. You’re reading this, so obviously somebody sees this site, right? Take advantage of the opportunities that people offer you. Because if you provide them content, they will link you, and give you a shout out, and make sure generally your guest post is at least somewhat promoted, because they want you to see value in it for you as well as for them.

There’s a few ways to promote without looking like an asshole. Some of these are easy, some are less so. They all take a certain amount of getting out of your own head to do. But they all pay dividends. So get your ass to writing, and send me a post for Evolution!