Cover Reveal – Cold as Ice
Bubba is trapped in the Winter Court of the Fae, and he’s going to have to battle his way through four rounds of mortal combat to get out! Cold as Ice is coming soon, check out the awesome cover from Natania Barron!
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!
Help Selling More Books – How to get a bunch of reviews
So, we all know that reviews are critical to a book’s success. The more reviews a book gets, the more action there is on the book’s Amazon Page, and the higher it appears in Amazon’s mysterious “search algorithms.” The rumor is that 20 reviews is a benchmark, and that after 20 reviews, the book gets a bump in discoverability in the Amazon search engine. The rumor continues that you get another bump at 50, and another bump at 100. I have no idea if this is true, because I don’t program search engines for Amazon’s site, and the people that do aren’t talking. So anything anyone says (unless they can specifically tell you “I worked for Amazon and know this to be true”) is pure speculation. And even if they worked there, if they left more than six months ago, it’s probably speculation.
But anyway, reviews are important to a book’s success, regardless of whether or not they affect the ranking in the Amazon’s searches. Reviews from consumers are more and more how people make decisions in purchasing items. With so many things out there, and so little time to fuck around with figuring out what the best fit for you will be, user reviews of everything from washing machines to books are critical. Word of mouth is still the best way to sell a book, period.
So how do you get reviews? Especially if you’re self-publishing or working with a small press, it can be tough. Your marketing budget may be small or non-existent, and you may not have enough name recognition to get people excited to read your book when it first comes out. So what are you going to do?
1) Build an engaged and excited fan base – This isn’t easy, and it isn’t quick. But it is the best way to get a bunch of reviews on your books. You need to find your fans, and you need to tell them how important reviews are. Eric Asher has released two awesome novellas for Falstaff Books this year. He’s writing a spinoff series to my Bubba the Monster Hunter books, featuring a Monster Hunter based in Missouri named Mason Dixon. The books are great, and you should totally buy them. The first book, Mason Dixon – Monster Hunter, has 45 reviews after an April 21 release. By comparison, my book that released in February, Calling All Angels, has 16 reviews. Eric kicks my ass in soliciting reviews. Eric also has about triple the number of people on his newsletter list that I do, and has worked very diligently in building his email list and his street team over the past few years.
The Past Few Years. I wasn’t joking – it takes that long to do it right. Eric does it right. He promotes other people, does newsletter swaps with people, and builds his list. Sometimes these newsletter swaps result in a bunch of people getting free ebooks and then instantly dropping off the list. That’s fine, because out of every ten people that sign up, you’re probably only going to get one superfan, and that’s if you’re lucky. And those superfans are who you convert to your street team, and your ARC team, and you engage with them. A lot.
How do you engage with your fan base? You talk to them. You don’t just send out a newsletter when you have a new book. You send out a minimum of one per month. I’m building up to twice a month, but I’m also terrible about staying organized, so I end up doing them whenever I or Falstaff has new releases. That’s been a lot lately. A LOT. But you have to stop thinking of a newsletter as spam. This is something they have signed up to receive. Something you have probably given them a free book to lure them into your lair. They may have signed up for your list because they bought your ebook. They WANT to hear from you. So talk to them.
In addition to newsletters, you can blog. You know, that thing that I’m doing here. This series of blog posts was originally created in my role as Publisher of Falstaff Books (yes, we are open for submissions. Yes, the guidelines are on the website), but it’s open to anyone. So this is another way that I’m talking to potential fans. I try to post a minimum of twice a week here. On Mondays, I put up a chapter of a book that I’m serializing, called Amazing Grace. I do these posts on Tuesday. On Friday, I have an underutilized marketing opportunity for other writers to write a blog post about where their idea came from and promote their book. Not many people take advantage of this opportunity. But you can start a blog. Yes, it feels like screaming into the void at first, but that’s okay. Your writing is screaming into the void, until someone reads it. So anything that points someone to your books is a good thing.
Have a Facebook author page. Have a Facebook Group for your fans. ENGAGE with people. Emily Dickinson died without selling anything, because she was a recluse. If you’re a recluse, you might, too.
2) Blog tours – There are a bunch of services that will send your book out on blog tours, where you can write on a shitload of book blogs for a month and hopefully get some traction. This worked great in 2011-2012. I don’t think it’s worth a flying shit now. Save your money.
3) Solicit Book Bloggers – This is still very good. But you have to pick the real book bloggers, and preferably book bloggers that will cross-post their reviews on Amazon, BN, Goodreads, Apple, somewhere. But you really want Amazon.
4) Solicit reviewers – Look at the reviews that other books in your genre have gotten. See if any of the reviewers have “Vine Voice” by their name. These are the top reviewers on Amazon, and they review a shitload of stuff. You can click on their name and hit them up, ask them if they’d like a copy of your book to review. Frequently, they’ll say yes. After all, they already are in the habit of reviewing a shitload of stuff.
These last three are good, but the first one is the best. You have to get out there and chase down fans. Get them on a newsletter list, then make a separate list for your ARC (Advance Reader/Review Copy) team. Send them the book for free before it comes out, so they can review it. Once the book is out, send out another newsletter a couple weeks later reminding folks if they’ve bought the books and enjoyed it, to leave a review. You have to ask. You have to remind people. You have to get out there and solicit reviews. People will only review a book if they either love it or hate it, the 4-star reviews are the ones you have to go get.
I hope this helps. Leave questions in comments, and I’ll try to answer them. And if you want a shot at joining my ARC team, first you gotta subscribe to my newsletter. If you want to know about awesome books by a ton of other great authors, sign up for the Falstaff Books email newsletter, too! You’ll get free shit just for signing up.
Help Selling More Books – Part 5 – What’s a Good Tweet?
Hey there!
If you follow me on social media, you might have seen a few pre-written tweet and Facebook messages that come out from my account. You might actually have seen enough to make you dread the thought of ever hearing from me again. But obviously not, because now you’re here to read even more of my crap, so either something I’m doing is working, or there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
Or both.
Be that as it may, I do post a LOT of tweets and pre-scheduled social media messages. There are a few reasons for this –
- If commercials and junk mail (what I often refer to as the “shotgun approach” to marketing) didn’t still work to some degree, companies with a lot more money to buy marketing and analyze its effectiveness wouldn’t still do it.
- It takes multiple mentions of a product for it to stick in someone’s mind. That product may be a specific book, but more often than not, that product is YOU. So you need a fair amount of visibility. That means being active all through the day, particularly when the bulk of people are in a place to see it. My completely non-scientific belief is that most people fuck off in front of their computers the most from 9AM-5PM Eastern time. And even more between 11AM-2PM, because that’s lunch. That’s when I post most heavily.
- Facebook and Twitter throttle your posts so that only a small percentage of things you put out in the world are seen unless you’re willing to pay for the privilege. To combat this, I send out the same message once per day, six days a week. My hope is that different people will see it each time, or at least that a few new people will see it each time.
So that’s the “why” I post a bunch. But what about the “how?” What makes a good social media post? Well, here are a few things that I try to include in most of my posts, and this is something that is constantly being refined as I learn more and look at what posts get the most interaction.
By the way, I will refer to all of these as tweets, even though I have HootSuite set up to cross-post to Facebook and Twitter. Each message I create goes to five different feeds – my Twitter, the Falstaff Books Twitter, my Facebook page, my Author page, and the Falstaff page. But it’s identical, because I only have so much time in my life.
I try to be funny, witty, or at least entertaining. I frequently use over-the-top examples to push the humor if it’s a funny book or story, or I try to tie it to something that will make the person who sees it go “Wait, what?” In a tweet for the book Changeling’s Fall, I make mention of the fact that unless you read the book, you won’t know what part of a goblin glows in the dark. This is something that people aren’t expecting, and makes them want to look further.
You’re always working toward the click in social media. With pre-written messages, you aren’t just looking to make people remember your name, you’re looking for something that makes them think “I need to know what the hell he’s talking about” and click the link. They can’t buy your shit if they don’t click the link. And that’s the endgame – getting people to buy your shit. You are not playing around on social media because you’re a great artist, you’re playing around on social media because you are in business to make money.
So a good tweet is made up of three things – a hook, a hashtag, and a link.
I’ve already talked about the hook. It’s kinda like your back cover matter, only super-condensed. Or it’s a cover blurb, only super-condensed. When I tweeted about Midsummer, a Bubba meets Shakespeare novella, I made mention of A.J. Hartley, because he’s a Shakespeare expert. When I tweet about Of Lips and Tongue, I mention that it’s one of the best novellas released last year. When I tweet about Pawn’s Gambit and War Pigs, I’ll mention that they are finalists for the 2017 Manly Wade Wellman Award (Congrats to Darin Kennedy and Jay Requard!).
Your hook is that “Wait, what?” moment. It’s what makes the person seeing it read further. It’s what cuts through the noise, and there’s plenty of noise out there. You can (and will) have multiple tweets about each release. You can make one funny, one serious, one scary, one referential to another work out there, whatever. Just use part of your 140 characters to make it interesting.
You need at least one hashtag, preferably two. I’m just getting better at this, because hashtags baffled me for a long time. Hashtags are the way people filter social media. If someone wants to see all the tweets and posts about ConCarolinas, they can search using #concarolinas, and all the posts using that hashtag will pop up.
Do not use very specific hashtags. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you aren’t a huge bestseller. If you aren’t James Patterson, using a hashtag with your name is useless. If no one will ever search for the hashtag, it’s just a waste of space. I find that #kindle #amazon #audible #audiobook #ebook #bargain #free #fantasy #horror #scifi are all broad enough to be useful, while #falstaffbooks or #johnhartness would be absolutely useless. No one is searching twitter feeds for those terms, so don’t bother with them.
Don’t overdo it with hashtags, either. After a while, it just becomes a parody of your content and the message is lost. I think one or two is plenty.
The link – this part is easy. You need something that people can take action on, namely to buy your shit. But there are a few things that go into making a link, and some of them you might not know about.
- Universal Links – We all know how much is sucks to have your book available on ten different platforms but you can only fit one link into each message. Well – Books2Read is your new best friend! Books2Read makes universal links for your book. You just go to their site, insert the buy link from any online store into the field, and it will scour the internet for everywhere else the book is available, and create a Universal Link that points to ALL of them! What happens is that your customer clicks the universal link, and they are directed to a page that says “Hey! This book is available all over the interwebs! Where do you want to buy it?” You customer says “Here!” and clicks their favorite ebook store. Books2Read sends them there, and remembers their choice for next time. So next time they click any Books2Read link, it takes them to the book on their selected store. This gives you the opportunity to share the link to all online stores in one shot, and your readers can get your shit wherever they want.
- Link shorteners – most social media aggregators like HootSuite or TweetDeck have a tool that will shorten a link for you. I don’t use them. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I use bit.ly. Bil.ly shortens the links, lets you customize the link, and gives you tracking for the link. All with a free account. I use them for all my link creation.
So there you go, the short version of how to build a tweet that sings instead of sucks. Build a hook, a hashtag, and a link, and then go promote the fuck out of your stuff! Remember, art is awesome, and as soon as you make enough money, you can make all the art you want!
Evolution – Souls Collide – J.D. Blackrose
One of the best things about being a publisher is bringing projects to life for new writers, or writers that haven’t broken out as big as I think they should. The Soul Wars by J. D. Blackrose is one of those projects. It releases today, and I couldn’t be more proud to be associated with it. You should click on the big picture and check it out.
The Soul Wars started with one question. I was reading one of the Jane Yellowrock books, I forget which one, and once again, there are gunshots, injuries, fire, and turmoil, all happening at night, naturally.
I stopped reading to ask myself: “What do the neighbors think?”
I know there aren’t neighbors right next door, like the suburbs of young families in cookie cutter houses, but there are people somewhat nearby. Wouldn’t they get sick and tired of all this mayhem?
I imagined a society lady, elderly, weak of body but strong in spirit, walking to the front door, rapping it with her cane and telling the vampire that, “This will not do. I need my rest. Keep it down, young man!”
Adelaide was born. I contacted Faith Hunter, the awesome author of the Jane Yellowrock series, and asked if she wanted to do something with this character. Maybe a short story we could write together? Faith laughed hysterically at the thought that I would believe she had any time to write anything that wasn’t required by a contract. She told me, “Write it yourself.” So, I did.
Kara is a Valkyrie, a warrior from Norse Mythology, whose job, like all Valkyries, was to choose those who died with honor on the battlefield and bring them Valhalla, the gods’ realm.
So what the hell is she doing on Earth, babysitting a vampire?
My characters are deeply flawed, and pride is one of their weaknesses. Kara thinks she knows everything, and Gaspard is a master vampire so he knows he knows everything. Such arrogance. This hurts them throughout, but also makes them face their own failings.
The overarching question is: Do vampires have souls? Some vampires behave badly, some are honorable. What would explain the difference? You have to read the series to find out, but one thing is certain…a war is coming that could shake the Earth to its core.
The book is divided into four novellas, Souls Collide, Souls Fall, Souls Rise, and Souls Unite. The first two let you get to know Gaspard, Kara, and Adelaide, and at them and with them. The third is a prequel, and darker, in that it tells you about Gaspard’s past and why a Valkyrie, of all things, is in his service. The fourth wraps things up, but warning – because I have already gotten grief for this – there is a cliffhanger. That way, if y’all like it, I can write novellas five, six, seven, and eight. See my devious plan?
As an aside, I once complained to John Hartness when he left us off on a cliffhanger, and he told me, “Yeah, I’m a dick that way.”
I hope you will go on a journey with Kara, Gaspard and Adelaide, and meet the other characters that weave in and out of the stories. I will tell you up front that one of my favorite characters is Arnaud, and I’m hoping to tell more of his story.
Help Selling More Books – Part 4 – An Unpopular Opinion on Social Media
Let’s talk about social media, shall we? I know, you’re probably tired as fuck of hearing about social media. You’re either baffled by the idea of social media, because you don’t really do the technology thing, or you’re paralyzed by anxiety about social media, because you hate dealing with people and are terrified that someone might talk to you, or you’re annoyed with social media, because people like me keep telling you to use social media and you have no idea what is the right way to do it, and you wish someone would just tell you exactly what to do and then you could do it and get on with your life, but you don’t want it to take up too much of your writing time, because you already have a day job, and kids, and hobbies, and other family, and can barely squeeze in an hour each day to write, and now some asshole has you reading these blog posts every week about how to sell books when what the fuck does he even know about how to sell books anyway?
Does that pretty much sum it up?
I thought so. Look, social media is, at its core, two thing. It is a way for friends to communicate with each other, and it is a way for companies to get their name out in front of customers. There are a lot of types of social media, and it is very easy to drive yourself absolutely bonkers trying to keep up with what the cool kids are using. Is it Instagram? Is it Tumblr? Is it Pinterest? Is it Twitter? Is it Facebook? Is it MySpace?
Here’s a hint – it ain’t MySpace. But any of the others are perfectly valid places to spend time interacting with people and telling them about your books, your life, your cat (people fucking love cat pictures), your poop (less love for the poop pictures), or your kids (they might love or hate kid pictures). It’s all about what you want to focus on. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on scheduled posts on Facebook and Twitter, because that’s what I do. I do scheduled posting on Facebook and Twitter because it’s easy and I can do it without taking up too much of my writing time.
A lot of people will tell you that this kind of shotgun, junk mail posting on social media is worthless, annoying, and will alienate fans. I will tell you that on weeks that I do not do scheduled posts, I see an average of 10% less sales than on weeks where I do scheduled posts. I sell between 30-50 books per day, depending on the month and the recent releases, so we’ll say I average 275 books per week. So I sell about 28 books more in weeks that I do scheduled posting. That’s worth around $75 cash.
That is more money than I am willing to leave lying on the ground for the hour that it takes me to schedule a week’s worth of Facebook and Twitter posts.
I also do a lot of organic Facebook posting, sharing, and interacting with people. I don’t hang out on Twitter a ton, but I go on there every once in a while and go on a retweet or liking binge. But I hang out on FB a lot, so I do a lot of organic activity there in addition to my structured posts.
Here’s the way I set it up each week. I block out about an hour on Saturday or Sunday (the days of the week I am most likely to not write) to do my social media. I have created Word documents with pre-written tweets that I copy and paste from. Yes. this is time-consuming on the front end, but if you write 2-4 different tweets for every product you release, and save them all in a master document, it’s really easy to stay on top of it. If you’re coming into this with 25 backlist titles, that’s going to be a pain. Too bad. It’s still worth it.
All this is my opinion. None of my opinions are humble. That’s your last caveat. From here on out, we’re presenting this as the Gospel According to Hartness. Don’t like it? You don’t have to read it. You are welcome to do your social media however you like. This is what I do, and how to copy what I do. If you want to do it, go for it.
So – I have a Word document with 2-3 prewritten tweets for each thing that I have out there. That’s every book, every audiobook, this website, my Patreon, my mailing list, and my podcast. I don’t promote everything every week. Some stuff is older backlist stuff that I just promote when I don’t have a new release. Some stuff I just rotate through. My Patreon gets promoted every week, my newsletter gets promoted every week, and this website gets promoted every week, These things are evergreen, and I always want as many eyes on them as possible, so I make sure they get promoted. Any new releases get promoted first, then new audio releases, then most recent releases. I try to promote at least one product from each of my three main series every week.
I use Hootsuxte to aggregate my tweets and auto-schedule them. Because I’m an early adopter, the plan I’m on costs me less than $10 each month. The same plan now costs $15/month, which is still a bargain. Because ain’t nobody got time to sit down every day and schedule a shitload of Twittering.
I set things up so that I send out a tweet (which cross-posts to Facebook on my timeline, my author page, the Falstaff Books FB page, and the Falstaff Twitter feed) every hour on the hour between 9AM EST and 6PM EST. That’s ten messages every day promoting me and my work. I do this Monday – Saturday, with the idea that fewer people look at Twitter on Sunday, so that’s often the day I’m using to build the following week’s posts.
Then I go back through and send one message per day for every product that Falstaff Books has published or has scheduled for pre-release. Every book we’ve ever done gets promoted every day, once per day. It’s all I can do, because we have a promotional budget of somewhere near seventy-five cents, and this fits within that budget.
I try to make the messages funny and interesting. I use Bit.ly to build all the links, because I can shorten them, and it offers some tracking. I used to embed my Amazon Associates link in the messages, but someone pointed out that it was against the Amazon Associates TOC, so I stopped.
But that’s it. I end up programming somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 tweets per week, and it takes me less than an hour. It will take you time to get the list of messages built, but once you have that established, you can get all this done in not a ton of time.
Is this better than real engagement with your buying public? Not by a long shot. Is this better than sitting around bemoaning the lack of sales? Yes, by a long shot. If commercials and junk mail and spam weren’t effective, we wouldn’t get so much of it. And you’re not just sending out ads for dick pills, you’re telling people who actually like you and/or your work what’s going on with you. This is much more targeted than that email about your schlong or the RedPlum flyer in your mailbox yesterday. So give it a shot. I find it valuable, maybe you will too.
By the way, I’m working on the page to let y’all buy autographed paperbacks from me. If you want to check it out, click the link that says “Autographed Books” at the top of this page. Thanks!
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