There’s a Crime Fiction Writers group on LinkedIn that I belong to. Recently, this question was posed: what’s the difference between crime fiction, thrillers, and mysteries? I thought about it and responded:
Crime fiction: the party’s going to happen
Thrillers: the party’s happening
Mystery: the party’s over. Who drank all the beer?
I can say that, after a short trip to Key West, Florida, I’m more interested than ever in the concept of “setting as character”. Key West is so rich in history, personalities, and opportunities that you’d have to be made of wood not to see the story-telling potential in the place.
After walking around the streets and docks of the small island, story ideas and plot lines just started sprouting. I’ve already got a heist-caper halfway planned out in my head, thanks to the rich environment.
he letter began with a simple statement.
“If you’re reading this,” it said, “I’m probably dead.“
A sick feeling ran from the pit of my stomach to the back of my throat as I read that sentence. I wanted to put the letter down, bury it under a stack of papers, burn it, but you don’t just stop reading something like that and pretend you never got it. I kept reading.
You think you know everything that happened—all those days, months, weeks that went by—but you don’t. You don’t have a crystal ball. You aren’t psychic. You can’t know all the reasons I had for doing what I did. And since you’re the one that killed me, it’s only fair that I set you straight.
Seven-thirty a.m. in Georgetown, Penang and breakfast was an iced chai and a vegetable dosa hot enough to melt the paint off a car. I sat outside under an awning, wondering if the tiny vinyl chair, wilting in the tropical heat, would hold my weight until I was done. A dozen feet away, a Chinese man in a stained apron stood at a butcher’s block, lopping the feet off of dead ducks with a cleaver and dropping them into a white bucket. Every fifteen minutes, a young boy would arrive, put the feet in plastic bags, and take them to the market across the street. Exhaust from scooters put a gasoline tang in the air, but then a breeze from the ocean–never far away–would clear it away. Three-wheeled bike rickshaws pedaled by, flicking their bell every block, trying to attract custom. I watched the butcher wipe the cleaver on his apron as the sweat trickled down my spine and the small Malaysian neighborhood woke around me.
(This blog post is the second in a two-part series. Read Part I here!)
In the first part of this post, I discussed the important of having blurbs or varying lengths for your book and a set of cover images ready for any occasion. You might also find the following handy to have around when you’re neck deep in promoting your newest title.
You
Almost every online opportunity to display a book also includes a chance to show off the author. Don’t miss this chance to sell yourself!
Your Records
This is a little nerdy, but I have a .txt file of all the URLs that matter to my career or to my books. There are many occasions when you may want to include in an email or blog post not just the URLs where readers can buy your books but also your Goodreads profile, a positive reader review, or a place readers can review/rate your book directly.
Here’s an excerpt:
AMAZON/KINDLE [Author page] http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00642SZQO [Three Shorts] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0062OM416 [Hard Way] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0062OMHD6 [Match] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0062OMGBY [Kind] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0062OMW9A
The primary objectives here are convenience and accuracy: you don’t want to have to Google your own Amazon page or try to type these things from memory with the chance that you’ll screw it up and send valuable readers to a “404 Not Found”.
(Again, I use a text file to avoid unnecessary errors; since you’ll often be using this text file to copy and paste links into websites, don’t take a chance that hidden word processor formatting will mess up your links.)
(Also, make sure you keep the “http://” in the URL.: many sites do not add it for you, with the result that if you copy and paste just the “www.” part of the URL into an input box, for instance, it will error.)
Your Sites
As a former IT professional, I can tell you that this next piece of advice is normally a security no-no: keeping your usernames and passwords written out. But let’s face it: you’re going to have a half-dozen or more (maybe many more) accounts related to your writing career and its promotion that have nothing to do with your “regular” online life.
I didn’t have any of these accounts before I started epublishing:
Many of them can use the same user/password combo, but others have different requirements. With this kind of madness, I ignore my inner IT Manager and keep accounts listed in a document* on a secure site with one strongpassword (a capital letter, a number, a symbol, and a minimum of eight characters,). As a backup, the passwords in the document are also just strong hints for myself, not fully written out.
This saves me immense time when I’m trying to do promotion: I don’t want to waste time and energy trying to find or remember my Twitter, Facebook, and website password to promote a simple blog post.
*I treat sites that deal with my financials [Amazon KDP, where you have payment info] differently. I do not list these in the master document I describe above.
Your Results
This section is entirely up to you, but I find it handy to have a spreadsheet of any part of the promotion process that is iterative. For instance, I have a spreadsheet of all the book bloggers/reviewers I’ve discovered and keep running tabs on: Name, Date Contacted, Date Submitted, Queue (i.e., wait time), email, blog URL, Affiliations (do they blog for a group or just themselves), and Notes.
For my blog posts, I keep a running tally of the Title, Date Posted, and whether it was a Guest Blogpost or not. You get the picture. Anything you might likely lose track of is often best kept in a worksheet.
Summary
With promotion being a large chunk (some might say the larger chunk) of an epublished author’s job, keeping well-written, carefully constructed information about yourself and your books accurate, up-to-date, and accessible saves time…time better spent writing the next book.