epublishing

Writer’s Block: Help Is a Penstroke Away

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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.

[Read more…]

Which Ducks? The Author’s Promotional Toolbox: Part I

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If there’s one truth I’ve found in the new world of electronic publishing, it’s that the primary task once the book or collection is written is promotion. And a corollary to that rule–one I’ve learned the hard way–is that it’s of immense value to have as much descriptive information about your project written, saved, and accessible as possible. To do pain-free promotion (or mostly so) you need to have all of your ducks in a row. The question is: which ducks?

Even modest self-promotion efforts require synopses (long and short), descriptions (long and short), author bios, and cover images (of many sizes). What might be less obvious are the record-keeping tricks that will help you down the line: a list of username and passwords for your social media accounts, the URLs to your book or books on all of the major sellers’ sites, URLs to your books on review sites, and so on.

This list is far from complete, but it’s one I’ve built up from actually slogging through the process; it’s battle-tested. If you can add to it, please give me your 2 cents in the Comments section!

Your Work
I would recommend having the following blurbs/synopses/book descriptions ready and waiting in a Word document (better yet, keep them in a .txt file so you don’t get any strange formatting errors when you paste into an HTML input box).

Also, I should stress that you should work on these and have them ready before you need them. It can be depressing and enervating to have to write some of this stuff while a book blogger’s website sits there, waiting for you to fill in the required information. It’s very satisfying to simply open up the doc, copy the relevant part, and paste it in about three seconds.

  • A very short description of your book
    One sentence, preferably under thirty words. This is your “elevator pitch” in trad pub terms. It’s a catchy summary of your book that you can use in anything from email signatures to blog posts to Tweets.
  • A short description
    400 characters or so. This is the Smashwords maximum for their “Short Description” field and is probably a good length for other sites as well where length is critical.This short description was also useful for fleshing out my book description in a Librarything giveaway, where I ws competing against 75 other titles to attract readers’ attention.
  • A long description
    This might be called “long”, but I would still recommend keeping it under 200 words. You can use this for your Amazon description and in introducing bloggers and book reviewers to your work.

Your Cover
Your cover may well sell your book and the majority of online book stores and bloggers will give you the option of adding it to your book’s description. It’s critical that you catch a would-be reader’s eye with it. Thoughts:

  • Understand the requirements of image resolution (72dpi for the web, 200dpi+ for print) and format (.jpg, .gif, .png for the web; for print there are many others, but usually .tif).Be sensitive to file sizes. Some sites may automatically “downsample” large files, but individual bloggers will not be happy if you send them a 12mb, 300 dpi image of your cover art which they will then have to either alter themselves or (more likely) demand you do it, anyway.
  • Have multiple versions handy. I have 8 versions of my short story anthology’s cover: one thumbnail (60px tall), one small version (144px), four of varying sizes for others’ websites (200px, 210px, 216px, and 423px), the ebook cover itself (823px), and a 300 dpi version for possible posters and brochures.This is overkill, but you see where having at least a thumbnail, small, medium, and large versions might help. If you have hired someone else to do them, make sure you ask for a stable of varying sizes (and note that resizing them yourself without proper image-editing software can often result in a poor quality image).

Part II will cover what information you should have ready about the author (that’s you!) and a suggestion on a tip sheet that you might not have thought of before. Read it here.

Librarything Giveaway, Take Two

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My second Librarything Giveaway is now about three weeks old and, like my first in early December ’11, I’m happy with the results.

(Addendum: For authors interested in the Librarything Giveaway, check out my previous post for tips or go straight to LT’s Giveaway page. Thanks for pointing that out, Adan!)

I sponsored a two-week Giveaway of my second short-story collection, Three the Hard Way, a set of three crime fiction stories. I emailed the list of takers from the first Giveaway (about 55 people) and announced in certain other channels (I didn’t want to email blast friends, family, and acquaintances who may have already supported me by buying the collection).

The Numbers

Here are the numbers:

  • Although the Giveaway period was shorter than the first by almost two weeks, I had 79 takers, an improvement of 24.
  • Of the 79, 55 responded within 7 days. At the time of this writing, 15 haven’t responded at all. With Christmas and New Years in there, I’m happy that the delay wasn’t even greater. I was also curious to see what effect new Kindles and Nooks might have on the Giveaway, but I can’t tell if the (modest) surge was from better exposure or new e-readers.
  • The breakdown of requested formats (which might surprise you) to date are:
    • 19 Amazon Kindle gifts
    • 12 PDF files
    • 23 Smashwords coupons
    • 10 .epub files
  • At the time of this writing, I’ve had
    • 6 Amazon reviews
    • 8 Goodreads reviews
    • 13 Librarything reviews
    • 3 Smashwords reviews
    • 2 blogger comments

Notes

  • I offered 450 copies of my book; the reason for the high number is listed here.
  • I worked on the description of the book and edited it several times. Basic HTML (bold, italics, links, etc.) is allowed and you can use it to your advantage. A short but powerful description is a must. Some writers in the Giveaway are really missing the boat on this one.
  • I made LT and Goodreads “friends” through both Giveaways and I think this is a key to future success.
  • It’s not much, but I use the respondent’s first name in the salutation of my letter back to the readers. If the respondent mentions something personal in their reply, I try to make a comment on mine (for instance, one woman was undergoing shoulder surgery the next week and had participated in the Giveaway to get reading material for the recovery, so I wished her well, then sent her a coupon for a free copy of one bad twelve, my master collection of shorts).
  • I plan to send out reminders at the one month mark for the “no replies” to encourage them to get their copy.

Thoughts

  • I’m still surprised at the number of people, as in my first Giveaway, that signed up for a copy but didn’t respond to me when I emailed asking what format they’d like. I’m not offended by the no response, but it takes some effort to read through my LT description and click “Yes, give me one of those.” Why wouldn’t you send me a one word reply to get a free book?
  • I love the Librarything Giveaway opportunity, but their execution of it could be better. The list of winners is simply posted as an HTML table on a webpage. To make use of it, you have to copy and paste into an Excel sheet and massage to get a workable database.Also, if you’ve done more than one giveaway, the most recent group is listed at the end, which leads you to believe they’ve overwritten your new contact data with old. Wouldn’t take much to simply post it above the old.

That’s about it. I may plan a giveaway in the ramp-up towards publishing my first novel, A Reason to Live, this Spring. I’ll post numbers from that and any other Giveaways I take part in. If you’ve had success (or failure) with an LT Giveaway, I’d love to hear about it!