Bleen, my least favorite, most hated aspect of publishing is marketing.
From everything I have read, and researched, marketing is all about finding your ideal audience. Well, I am about as far from finding my audience as I am from finding needles in hay stacks.
I start off with this so you understand I am far from knowledgeable, I am just an author who is trying things one baby step at a time, and often feels like I took one step too far underwater. Not a good feeling for a hydrophobe, like myself.
In point of fact, Burning Embers was born from my frustration with marketing problems, and my desire to share what hasn’t worked with other authors, and learn from one another what does work.
But here are some things I do know about marketing.
Newsletters. Personally, I send out my newsletter once a month, on the first Wednesday of each month. I have a reader magnet, The Viscount of Sternboard, A Realm of the Light Novella, that I give away to newsletter subscribers. I only have a modest following, about 750 subscribers at present, but the services provided by Story Origin have been incredibly valuable to me in maintaining that number.
Blog. I run a blog at jqmserv.wordpress.com. Every Monday evening I post a book spotlight, every Wednesday I post an author interview. Every so often, not as often as I should, I post something on the other days as well.
That’s about it. I have profiles on multiple social media platforms, but am not particularly active on any one individual platform. That is mostly because I am over the social media phase, and only use to keep in touch with friends and family.
What marketing strategies have worked for you, or is presently working for you, that you would like to share?
I have been listening to ‘Man In The Iron Mask’ by Alexandre Dumas. There is a scene where four or five poets argued about what words rhyme and don’t rhyme. What types of rhymes are acceptable in contemporary French poetry. I’ll tell you what, I caught a fit of the giggles.
As some of you may already know, Burning Embers is publishing a Dystopian Anthology later this year. As a natural consequence, I have been engaged in very similar discussions. Rather than talking about cadences and rhyme schemes, I have been talking about constitutes a dystopian story.
I suppose not much has changed over the 150 years or so when Man In the Iron Mask was published. When authors & poets congregate, we did, we do, and we will talk about literature.
Mornin! JQM here, checking in for the first time in a while.
My Goodness, February just started and it feels like it is already half over. I can’t believe it.
I have been distracted for a couple reasons this month, the biggest reason is because I am attempting to craft a short story for Burning Ember’s upcoming dystopian anthology. My idea is killer, and the best BETA readers and editors in the Indie community, so I think it will work for the anthology. Submission deadlines are March 31st, so we’ll see.
Other than that, not much has been going on with me.
The February theme for the Burning Embers blog is a Fireside chat, so that basically means I can say whatever I want as long as it is relevant to writing. And this month I want to chat about time management.
I constantly fail at time management, multi-tasking, and creating enough time in my schedule for things I want to accomplish. So if any of you have any tricks you use to better utilize your time, I am all ears.
What I wanted to say was that every day only has 24 hours. And if you are like me, then 9 of those hours (Monday-Friday at least) are set aside for work – that includes traveling to work and the amount of time I spend at the warehouse. Then I take an hour or so for exercise or stretching, 8 or so hours for sleeping or attempting to sleep as the case sometimes is. Somewhere in there I need to find time to do household chores and spend time with my wife and children and puppy. That does not leave me much time or energy for writing. Hence why I have been pondering so much on time management and how I can better utilize my writing time.
I have no solution, every time management schedule I have attempted has failed me in the past. This is an ongoing trial for me. But one solution I have created that seems to work for me is this. I created a spreadsheet of different writing projects and prioritizing them in order of deadlines. The spreadsheet has helped me focus my attentions when writing. But I am open to any other ideas that may have been useful to you.
The Burning Ember Theme for October is Newsletters
I don’t much about newsletters (NL).
I have a NL that I send out monthly, but I am no expert on the subject. But all the same, here are my thoughts.
Why I send out Monthly:
There are authors who send out newsletters monthly, weekly, bi-weekly, or whenever they feel like it. I chose for consistency sake to send mine out monthly. A monthly newsletter is not too difficult for me to create, and is easy for me to remember to schedule. As a reader, I think weekly or bi-weekly newsletters are too frequent, and anything less than monthly is too inconsistent.
What Email Service I use:
I chose MailChimp. It is not the easiest service for me to navigate, but let’s be honest, there is not an email service that would be easy for me to navigate, and a few friends recommended that I use MailChimp’s free service, so there you have it.
What Type of Content I Share:
It is very important to remember that as an author you have a brand, and you need to share only books and content that fit within your brand. I write YA, Children, and Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction that is clean in content, so I choose to only share books and join group promotions that fit within my genre and audience.
I also choose to share at least one personal tidbit about myself. It is usually something that has to do with whatever I am working on, either personally or in my literature, at the time that I am writing the newsletter. For instance, I am fan of the University of Florida Gators Football & Basketball teams, so when they are doing well, or when they are not doing not so well, I either share my frustrations or excitement with my NL subscribers.
What are NL Swaps, and Where to Find Them:
A Newsletter Swap is where Alicia Scarborough and I agree to share one another’s books with our newsletter subscribers. So I will post something about Potion of the Hound, Mystical Mishaps Book 1 on my NL, and she will in turn post something about The United, The Realm of the Light Book 1 on her NL.
There are a few places to find NL swaps, Facebook, MeWe, Prolific Works, etc, but the place most user friendly for me to coordinate all my NL swaps and Group Promos are in Story Origin. If you don’t use Story Origin to coordinate NL swaps, Street Teams, Group Promotions, Audiobook reviews, and the like, I highly recommend it.
That’s all I have for now, if you have any questions, feel free to comment or email me at jqm.serv@gmail.com
Since it has been so long since I posted last, I thought I would give you a quick update about how things are going for me.
I have been extremely busy trying to fulfill publisher deadlines and deal with personal life.
I have 2 ebooks that were recently published on Amazon, I Am Master Serv, A Realm of Zhestoviya (Rai Saga) Short Story, and A Family of Poets, a collection of poetry co-authored by myself and my twin 11 year old daughters.
I am working on Cross of Roses, my fantasy thriller story, while I have had positive feedback from the BETA readers, I know the story can be improved, and I think I know how. Cross of Roses is due to my publisher on Nov 11th, and I have my work cut out for me to get it turned in by then.
And book 3 of the Realm of the Light Series, Perfectly Evil, is with the editor. I am hoping to have it back and turned back in with enough time for a release later this year.
So, if you don’t hear from me again until Nov, it is because I am rushing my hardest to hit my publisher deadlines.
As I shared many, many times, I was given the challenge of creating a 1st draft of a 90 minute screenplay for my novel, The United, The Realm of the Light Book 1. A task I finished at the end of August this year.
It was monumental task for me, mostly because I built it up a challenge I could not complete in mind. The first thing I needed to do was believe I could create a screenplay. Next, I learned how to craft a screenplay. I found a free course on-line, watched a few different You-Tube videos on how to create a screenplay, and subscribed to a Screenwriter newsletter.
Once I had a feel for how to craft a screenplay, all that was left was to do it. I bought a screenwriting software, Final Draft. I learned how to use the software, and wrote it out.
I copied, pasted, and edited the text to fit the formatting necessary for a screenplay in Final Note for the first section, Year The First, of The United. When I completed that, my screenplay was already at 70 minutes. So I cut stuff out until I was about 30 minutes. That done, I moved on to Year the Next, and when I was done with Year the Next, I was closer to 100 minutes. I could not figure out how to condense The United into so short a screenplay, so I talked with a few author friends.
The best suggestion I received was to choose the focus of the screenplay. I chose to focus on the relationships between characters and healing from traumatic experiences. Next I cut content until I was at 60 minutes. By this point I had a good feel for what I wanted to do with my time, and I finished the story at 88 pages (or 88 minutes, 1 page per minute).
It is a horrible 1st draft, and will not make a good film. It is too condensed to really engage the interest of the viewers, in my opinion. However, it is done. And I am pleased with my effort.
My next screenwriting challenge is to create a screenplay for Cross of Roses, my Fantasy Thriller book about a serial killing priest that takes place about 4 years after the conclusion of The United.
In the end, what really mattered was that I believed I could not write a screenplay. I shifted my belief, to accept that I could attempt it. I learned how to do it, though I admit, imperfectly. And finally I wrote it. Now, I am excited to try again, with a story idea that I believe will be more marketable as a screenplay than The United.
