writing
Book Marketing Collaboration Wins by a Mile
June 01, 2008 21:55
Book Marketing
Collaboration Wins by a Mile
Five steps for great teamwork
by Julie Ann Shapiro
Book marketing is not a solitary event. It’s not like writing a book. It’s a social process involving networking and promotions to generate buzz about your book. One of the more fun ways to get the momentum building is through marketing collaboration with other authors.
Collaboration among authors works like a track relay team where each player runs and passes the baton to the next runner. If one member of the team drops the baton and forgets to do his or her part the whole team loses.
In athletics, teamwork is a necessary component for success. The same is true in a collaborative environment like book marketing—where an idea shared can transform a good promotions effort into a great one that catches on like wild fire. Collaboration makes the sum greater than the individual components.
Instilling the attitude for true collaborative teamwork is difficult. In a way, it’s like a “think tank”—a place where ideas and strategies develop and are nurtured. Inherent in this process is acceptance of the collaborative effort without fear of recrimination or rejection. Respect is crucial.
The core elements to collaboration involve:
Setting up expectations
The collaborative process works best by setting up expectations from the getgo. Understand what each person wants and needs. Have fun exploring this and seeing how you can work together to help market each others’ books.
Developing open communication
Trust each one another. Respect the other’s viewpoints, and listen to what each other has to say. It also involves including each other in the process. Remember, they’re part of your collaborative team.
Willing to share
Brainstorm together. Test out opportunities that benefit both parties. Recognize when the other’s niche is needed, even if there’s nothing in it for you. For instance, one author might see a call for a column on mystery writing. The other might notice a call for something on magic realism. It takes all a couple of seconds to share this kind of information. When the other party knows you’re thinking of them in this way they’ll be quick to reciprocate.
Committing to teamwork
All parties need a willingness to work together. When one party pulls out of this process it’s as if a team mate drops the baton in the track and field race causing the process to fail.
How to do you get collaboration started?
Start talking to other authors. Get to know each other. Make friends in social network media environments like Facebook and writer related forums and in your local community.
Open the dialogue. For instance one author might say to another,” Hey, I admire your books. Are you looking to do more marketing? Would you be willing to brainstorm and see how we can help each other?”
An author might answer, “Wow, that sounds great. How about we do some joint book reviews? Why don’t we interview each other? Hey, what about guest blogging on each others’ blogs?”
The sharing of opportunities like this can not only be beneficial, but a joyful learning process. Once you agree to help each other out in this collaborative way, remember to always emphasize trust and comfort in the process. Remind each other,” Book marketing is not a solitary event. We’re running this race together. We’ll sell books and have fun.”
Julie Ann Shapiro is a novelist and short story author and is widely known for her magic realism style prose. She has completed two novels the first is Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries, published by SynergEbooks.com in December 2007. Her second novel, Three Drop Pennies is a semifinalist in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Contest. Julie is a Pushcart Nominee and has published over seventy short stories, including the story collection, Flashes of the Other World, published by Pulp Bits in August 2006. The author is a recurring flash fiction workshop leader at the Southern California Writers Conference. Her website is: www.julieannshapiro.com
Five steps for great teamwork
by Julie Ann Shapiro
Book marketing is not a solitary event. It’s not like writing a book. It’s a social process involving networking and promotions to generate buzz about your book. One of the more fun ways to get the momentum building is through marketing collaboration with other authors.
Collaboration among authors works like a track relay team where each player runs and passes the baton to the next runner. If one member of the team drops the baton and forgets to do his or her part the whole team loses.
In athletics, teamwork is a necessary component for success. The same is true in a collaborative environment like book marketing—where an idea shared can transform a good promotions effort into a great one that catches on like wild fire. Collaboration makes the sum greater than the individual components.
Instilling the attitude for true collaborative teamwork is difficult. In a way, it’s like a “think tank”—a place where ideas and strategies develop and are nurtured. Inherent in this process is acceptance of the collaborative effort without fear of recrimination or rejection. Respect is crucial.
The core elements to collaboration involve:
- Setting up expectations
- Developing open communication
- Trusting each others input
- Willing to share
- Committing to teamwork
Setting up expectations
The collaborative process works best by setting up expectations from the getgo. Understand what each person wants and needs. Have fun exploring this and seeing how you can work together to help market each others’ books.
Developing open communication
Trust each one another. Respect the other’s viewpoints, and listen to what each other has to say. It also involves including each other in the process. Remember, they’re part of your collaborative team.
Willing to share
Brainstorm together. Test out opportunities that benefit both parties. Recognize when the other’s niche is needed, even if there’s nothing in it for you. For instance, one author might see a call for a column on mystery writing. The other might notice a call for something on magic realism. It takes all a couple of seconds to share this kind of information. When the other party knows you’re thinking of them in this way they’ll be quick to reciprocate.
Committing to teamwork
All parties need a willingness to work together. When one party pulls out of this process it’s as if a team mate drops the baton in the track and field race causing the process to fail.
How to do you get collaboration started?
Start talking to other authors. Get to know each other. Make friends in social network media environments like Facebook and writer related forums and in your local community.
Open the dialogue. For instance one author might say to another,” Hey, I admire your books. Are you looking to do more marketing? Would you be willing to brainstorm and see how we can help each other?”
An author might answer, “Wow, that sounds great. How about we do some joint book reviews? Why don’t we interview each other? Hey, what about guest blogging on each others’ blogs?”
The sharing of opportunities like this can not only be beneficial, but a joyful learning process. Once you agree to help each other out in this collaborative way, remember to always emphasize trust and comfort in the process. Remind each other,” Book marketing is not a solitary event. We’re running this race together. We’ll sell books and have fun.”
Julie Ann Shapiro is a novelist and short story author and is widely known for her magic realism style prose. She has completed two novels the first is Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries, published by SynergEbooks.com in December 2007. Her second novel, Three Drop Pennies is a semifinalist in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Contest. Julie is a Pushcart Nominee and has published over seventy short stories, including the story collection, Flashes of the Other World, published by Pulp Bits in August 2006. The author is a recurring flash fiction workshop leader at the Southern California Writers Conference. Her website is: www.julieannshapiro.com
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To Kindle or not to Kindle?
March 29, 2008 05:08
To Kindle or not to Kindle?
by Tom Maremaa
That's the question I wrestled with before deciding recently to move ahead and publish two novels, The Lottery Ticket and I Am Marjan, as Kindle Editions in the category of literary fiction.
It was not an easy decision: I had written both books with the intention of placing them with a New York agent and a conventional print publisher. Both works came to me spontaneously and wrote themselves over a period of time, working long nights and weekends, as I channelled the voices of each narrator emotionally and through some creative process I can't describe. Both works, modesty aside, are originals; nobody's done before. So what happened?
I approached the usual list of agents, but found no takers. Both books never made it to the eyes of a curious editor or publisher. My original agent at Curtis, Brown, Ltd, the president of the company, had long retired; my editor at William Morrow & Co. had left the company to go off and write his own novels in New Hampshire. Needless to say, I was at loose ends. Productive, considering I had a demanding day job, but cast to the winds of an unknown fate. Both books deserved a chance.
The Lottery Ticket was about a murder trial in Silicon Valley, dealing with a comically dysfunctional family, ripe with heated exchanges of dialogue among the various members of that family. There was an interweaving of portions of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a counterweight to the story. Having lived and worked in Silicon Valley for a number of years, I prided myself on making the narrator's voice and language as authentic as I possibly could. The book served up a tasty slice of life in the maelstrom of the tech world. New York wasn't interested and didn't come calling. Maybe if I had set the story in the City . . . and changed the characters to New York types . . . and . . .
Well, the same thing occurred with I Am Marjan, a tale of magic realism about an extraordinary lion, based on the true story of Marjan, the one-eyed lion in the Kabul zoo who came to represent the suffering of the Afghan people under the tyranny of the Taliban. I told the story in the first person, in the voice. That seemed appropriate, but was it? A story in the voice of a . . . lion? Again, I expended much time and energy in querying agents, but the results were the same.
When I returned to both works recently, I found parts that needed some re-writing and re-shaping, but essentially, both novels just needed to find an audience, a readership, a younger generation willing to take on the reading of an e-book. That's when I decided to run with Kindle Editions.
I'm not recommending this as the only course of action for writers who have produced new work. It may be better to let new work age a bit, like a good wine, and then revisit that work to see if it has possibilities and can attract a readership. Not every work should be blindly produced and published as an e-book, whether on Amazon Kindle or elsewhere.
When in doubt, I always ask my mentor James Joyce, What would he do? Would he be able to find a publisher for his collection of short stories, Dubliners, or his autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Ulysses, the greatest work of fiction written in the 20th century? I think the answer is clear: Joyce would not hesitate for one moment to publish his work as e-books. It's hard to believe but Joyce struggled for years to get Dubliners published; even his fellow Irish printers refused to print the stories in the collection because they found the material somehow objectionable.
As it happens, Joyce's last story in the collection, "The Dead," is without doubt the greatest story I've ever read in the English language. It will stand the test of time, as will Ulysses, which only got published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach in Paris because Joyce had some good friends to help things along, like Ezra Pound, friends who supported him and believed in his genius. Ulysses would never find a publisher in New York today; it's too experimental, too difficult, too long. It's not solid commercial work; not genre or formula, is it?
Amazon really did something extraordinary by introducing Kindle; the impact is not yet fully known. But for me, it's truly the wave of the future in publishing. I can't see how the conventional model will sustain itself with hard-bound books going for $25 a pop, books that appear unreadable a second time around, books that end up remaindered and forgotten. Remember, a Kindle Edition of your book is always available, never "out of print." Currently, there are over 115,000 titles available in the Kindle Store on the Amazon website, although the device itself is backordered and not available for purchase (demand for a $400 device is huge, apparently).
A younger generation of readers is emerging, and they're building up libraries comprised of e-books (you can store up to 80 books on the device). They're reading the classics in e-book format, and not thinking about having the feel of turning paper pages in the conventional book. That's a big change. The stats are remarkable: there's been a 59% increase in sales of e-books in 2007, according to the data from the International Digital Publishing Forum. This year, the number could grow higher still.
For a long time, nobody thought downloads of songs from a website would take off; we were stuck in the $20 price range for a CD of which we only wanted to listen to two songs. Apple and iTunes changed all that (full disclosure: I work at Apple in software engineering).
We may be at a similar inflection point with e-books. Amazon has a device that's quite exceptional, though not by any means perfect. But it's already building a huge library of titles, priced reasonably, from which you can choose.
What does it take to convert your manuscript to the format that Kindle can display and render? Well, the mechanics are straightforward enough. You convert an existing book into HTML format, sign up with Amazon, write a brief description of the book, then do a book design -- and you're in business. All those steps can be time-consuming (they were for me, and I'm a software engineer), but not impossible. You end up playing many roles beyond writing: you get to be your best editor, best HTML web monkey, best book designer, proofreader, marketeer. I wouldn't take on these tasks unless you've got some distance from your manuscript; you've reached a point of objectivity with regard to the quality of the text, a point where you don't fall in love with every word on every page. That helps.
Ultimately, it's the originality of what you've written that survives the test of time. If your work is like the work of others, you may find a home in conventional print publishing. Publishers like to see work that they've seen before. They want you to be "like" another writer they're comfortable with, so you can be marketed as the next Stephen King or John Grisham. That's how it works, in my view. Now if you want to reach another level of readership, which can be a very risky business because it takes time, and you're willing to take a chance and do work that hasn't been done before, you can rest assured your work won't be in vain. You can move toward publishing it as an e-book, on Kindle, rather than relegate the manuscript to your basement trunk.
Tom Maremaa is the author of a half dozen novels, including most recently, Soldiers of Orange, a semifinalist in the ABNA competition. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he studied languages, literature and philosophy at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and worked on his Ph.D in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked as an editor, teacher of writing, tennis professional, and software developer. He lives with his wife in Silicon Valley, and travels widely to learn about, and understand as many cultures and languages as he can. He can be reached at tom.maremaa@gmail.com .
Why You Should Take Digital Fiction Seriously
March 03, 2008 11:54
Why You Should Take Digital Fiction Seriously
by Julie Ann Shapiro
The book publishing world is a hard if not brutal business. I know 50 outstanding writers that don’t stand a chance of getting published by the mainstream industry and of this group each writer in turn probably knows another 50 and so exponentially we’re looking at 1000 writers with books that under regular circumstances wouldn’t stand a chance of making it. But the good news is there’s a whole world of opportunities opening up in the digital publishing arena. Before I go into that I want to tell you the typical cycle from writer to literary agent to a mainstream publishing house.
The average literary agent gets 150 queries a day from writers hoping to get their book published. The agent chooses to represent roughly 1% of these books. Agents pitch these books to the publishers who get thousands of manuscripts a year to review. An editorial committee at the publishing house then decides what books to take, but that’s not the end of the cycle. The committee still has to convince marketing that the book will earn out its royalties and advances. One naysayer at a publishing house can literally kill the book’s chances of getting published.
Novels by the established, the well known, the trendy and celebrity types with ghost writers have a greater chance of getting a book published than many talented writers.
Fortunately, digital publishing has arrived on the scene and with the potential to revolutionalize the publishing industry. This means every word, image, sound, animation, and movie can be delivered as a series of digital ones and zeros. In a word, digital publishing has changed our definition of books.
Today digital publishing is anything from an electronic (e-Book), CD-ROM, to a paper-based book or hybrid with Internet inactivity. Many of you have heard the term print on demand. This utilizes digital technology. It’s a means many independent and small presses have adopted to get their books out there and so have the likes of Harper Collins. Often times when book stores today purchase books they are printed on demand to keep costs of production down. It’s a little known cost saving secret and how the publishing industry is evolving.
What digital publishing has done for the book world is to level the playing field and give independent presses a chance to publish the kinds of books they want. More importantly it gives readers a chance to read books beyond just what the mega-conglomerate publishing houses produce.
Most of the mainstream publishers go with what’s safe and proven to make money. It’s less and less about art and more and more about dollars. This is where small digital presses have a chance to offer readers something different and to in turn give new generations of talented writers a chance.
Yes, talent, that’s what you’ll find in the digital realm in my not so humble opinion. It’s fast becoming a home for bold fiction that’s not afraid to take chances much like independent films. As more and more legions of writers are shut out by the main stream publishing conglomerates they will have no choice, but to seek out other avenues. For this reason some may liken digital publishing to self-publishing. While it’s true that anyone can publish something digitally, it doesn’t mean that by association digital book publishers are places to shun or disrespect.
This neglects the marketplace and the recognition that there are a plethora of well respected independent publishers such as Double Dragon Press, Zumaya, Mundania Press, SynergEbooks, New Concepts Publishing, Boson Books, C & M Online, Samhain Publishing, Echelon Press, Silk’s Vault and countless others who choose to offer books digitally. Not to mention the major distribution channels established for ebooks, including Fictionwise, and Mobipocket.
Even the mainstream publishers recognize the dynamic medium that digital books offer. Most of them now have ebook divisions and are seeking to capitalize on the vast Internet audience, the massive amounts of people using PDAs and other mobile devices that support ebook readers. Last fall, Harlequin announced that 40% of its new titles would be issued as ebooks.
The September 5, 2007 article in the New York Times, Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books, talked about Amazon.com's Kindle
,
an electronic book reader priced at $400 to
$500. It
mentioned that the Kindle’s ability to wirelessly
connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site is a
significant advance over older e-book devices, which
must be connected to a computer to download books or
articles.Google also has plans to start charging users for digital copies of books in their database. Despite these two major Internet leaders’ plans to further their reach in the digital publishing market along with the respected publishers in the ebook marketplace, legions of consumers still don’t view digital books as real books. Many consumers in turn are hesitant to purchase ebooks, even though they are vastly cheaper than their paperback counterparts, not to mention the environmental factor of saving trees. In turn many traditional book reviewers will not consider reviewing a digital book. The authors of ebook, digital produced print on demand bookss and even epublishers at times feel like Rodney Dangerfield uttering his famous refrain, “I don’t get no respect.”
It’s time to recognize digital books as real books and applaud digital publishers for giving talented authors a chance. Let’s recognize that they are entrepreneurs living out the American Dream and carving a niche in a difficult market. After all, thousands of very good books are turned down by the mainstream publishers every year for the basic reason that they are not commercial enough…i.e. they won’t generate enough cash.
If you love books, support a digital literary writer by reading and reviewing their books. Good books deserve to be given a chance. This is your literary future, your legacy.
Julie Ann Shapiro is a novelist and short story author and is widely known for her magic realism style prose. She has completed two novels the first is Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries, published by SynergEbooks.com in December 2007. Her second novel, Three Drop Pennies is a semifinalist in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Contest. Julie is a Pushcart Nominee and has published over seventy short stories, including the story collection, Flashes of the Other World, published by Pulp Bits in August 2006. The author is a recurring flash fiction workshop leader at the Southern California Writers Conference. Her website is: www.julieannshapiro.com