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Inside Marketing: All Aboard!
BY BUNNY MINER
Blogging and Your Author’s Platform
Ok, sound off about how you did with your challenge from my last blog. (crickets chirping). Come on, you can do it. Put yourself out there and add something in the comments after this post on how starting your blog, regulating when you post on your blog or looking for similar blogs to comment on has worked for you this past month.
I’ll admit right here in the actual blog post that I’m not great at keeping up on my own author blog and guess what. I don’t really have any followers! Now I have a friend who posts regularly and she’s fun and quirky and you really never know what she’s going to blog about because she’s a bit scatter-brained and gets easily sidetracked (Squirrel!). But it works for her! People check back regularly to find out what actually comes out of her keyboard and onto the blog.
That being said, it’s a really well done blog. She puts time and thought into it, but her ideas come from everywhere. She’s also eclectic in her writing so she’s able to pull in readers from many different genres.
So what does this have to do with your author platform? Well, here’s the thing. Your author platform is all up to you. Nobody’s going to put in the time to research or the work to make it happen. Being an author is hard work. Don’t want to discourage anyone, but your job doesn’t begin when the book is published or end there. It’s really a mid-point for you. You need to build a following before you publish your book and you need to nurture those relationships afterwards.
Here’s everything you need to know about an author’s platform: . . . Ok, not really but kind of some of it, anyway.
A platform is something you stand on; an idea you work around but not something physical like a train platform. With the Platform 9¾ in mind, though, this is more of an author’s platform. Who doesn’t know what this refers to? J.K. Rowling hasn’t created just an author platform, she’s created a complete movement! So, millions of people around the world know who J.K. Rowling is and who Harry Potter is. Here’s some of what she did right:
She created Visibility. People know who she is, they’re aware of her work and where to find it. She knows how many people see her work. She’s part of the communities that would read her book and she influences those people in those communities.
Then she became an Authority. She built credibility and became the queen of middle grade fantasy. She was able to show she had Proven reach. It’s not enough to say you have visibility, you have to show where you make an impact and give proof.
Some ways you can do this is by showing the size of your email newsletter list or website traffic. Also, and here’s the blog thing again, if you get a lot of comments on your blog, that shows your proven reach as well. So help out others: comment on their blogs and invite people to comment on yours!
Finally, J.K. knew her Targetaudience. You absolutely need to be known and visible to the people who are going to buy your books. Posting and commenting on blogs that have romance followers, won’t help you sell your children’s book.
So research the blogs you comment or guest post on if you want them to buy your books. If you just like romance and want to comment, of course you should, but know that isn’t going to build your platform.
Having the above four bases covered with help you build your platform. But blogging isn’t the only way to build your platform. It’s only part of the puzzle. Next time I’ll talk about other things you can do to build your platform.
Until then, though, here’s another challenge for you! I want you to pin down your target audience so you know when and where to do those other things (gain visibility, become an authority and being able to prove your reach).
Cyber-see ya, next time!
Bunny
Bunny Miner joined Xchyler Publishing in May 2014. As our point of contact for bloggers and reviewers, she spends much time on the web looking for her next victims…er, um, assistants.
Bloggers and reviewers are an integral part of our marketing team and is very grateful to them for all the work they do on behalf of our authors. If you’d be interested in being a blogger or reviewer for Xchyler Publishing, please contact Bunny at BunnyMiner@XchylerPublishing.com.
Editor’s Notes: The Lowly Proofreader
BY RIE SHERIDAN ROSE
I’m Just a Proofreader . . . Nobody Loves Me . . .
Okay, maybe that paraphrase of Bohemian Rhapsody is a little silly, but when it comes to the world of editing, the function is often overlooked, and it shouldn’t be.
After all the editing of the content for logic holes; after the line edit to make sure the logic holes were all plugged; it comes down to a proofreader checking the spelling, punctuation, and giving a final look to the manuscript. Of course, when it is turned in after proofreading, it might not be as final as originally expected.
You would be surprised how often a missed word or punctuation character slips by several readers. Or perhaps you wouldn’t.
Even when reading a hardback from one of the major publishers, it is amazing how many times a reader stumbles over a misspelled word or something else that a good proofreading should have caught.
When a piece comes into the publishing house, it is expected that the author will have made it as perfect as they possibly can in their own eyes. No matter how hard you try as a writer (and this is my official day job, so I know how hard you try,) you don’t see everything. For one thing, you have lived with the manuscript for a very long time, usually, and your mind can play tricks on you—often filling in gaps automatically as you read something for the thousandth time.
A proofreader is looking specifically for the types of mistakes that will irritate a reader most when they expect a polished final product. They comb the edited manuscript word by word to make sure that every word is spelled correctly, that all punctuation is in place, and that no words have been left out. (And—at least in my case—give their opinion on how the book reads to a reader. This may not be typical proofreading, but I am still learning.)
Not all publishing companies have a specific editor in charge of proofing. Xchyler has several. It is a function whose importance cannot be over-emphasized. Proofreading can give a book one more level of polish toward becoming a gem.
Rie writes, edits, and proofs for The X from her home in Austin, Texas. A prolific writer, her short story, “Seven-year Itch,” is featured in Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology. Her first project for The X, The Mage and the Magpie by M.K. Wiseman, is slated for release in August, 2014.
Editor’s Notes: Ramping Up The Tension
BY JESSICA SHEN
While plot and character and setting are all well and good (I mean, I GUESS those components are important…) what will really keep your reader up to ungodly hours of the night flipping pages is tension. Tension, conflict, peril—these all compel us to keep reading to find out what happens next. You could have a great plot and fascinating characters, but if you don’t have tension, you’ve got a bland story that hasn’t got a hope in hell of keeping anyone’s attention.
So, how do you introduce tension into your story? Assuming you’ve already nailed down your characters and your plot (I can’t do all the work for you, right?), here are a few things to think about:
- Make things hard for your characters. We like to see them struggle—that’s what makes a good story! Would we all love Harry Potter as much if all he had to do to defeat Voldy was look up his address in the phone book and avada kedavra him in his sleep? Okay, that’s a bit extreme, but how much less compelling would it have been if he hadn’t struggled in school, or fought with Ron and Hermione, or had any of the hundreds of small difficulties he went through? If your character is riding a bike for the first time, don’t give him a natural talent for bike riding. If she has to mix up a potion, make her a terrible cook.
- Use examples from other media and/or everyday life as source material. One of the most effective pieces of advice I’ve given was to an author who had written a battle scene. It was a decent battle scene, but it was missing that extra bit of oomph. I told him to watch the first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan, then to go back and rewrite the scene.
If you haven’t seen the movie before, here’s what happens: Tom Hanks lands at Omaha Beach in the beginning of the Invasion of Normandy. It’s horribly chaotic and messy and gory. At one point, he loses his hearing from a grenade blast, and—here’s the clincher—our hearing gets knocked out as well. The audience is thrown headlong into the action. It’s a phenomenal representation of the horrors of wartime, and a cinematic masterpiece, and the author came back with fantastically nuanced and powerful scene that blew my socks off.
If you’re having a hard time with a particular scene, look to another source that does well what you’re trying to do. I’m not saying that you should copy it, but hopefully it can give you some good perspective and inspiration. (By the way, the author was Ben Ireland, and the scene is from Kingdom City: Resurrection. Go buy it today! How else will you know what I’m talking about?)
Now, for some more technical advice:
- Passive voice. Try not to use it. It’s inevitable that you will, but try to keep the ratio of passive verbs to active verbs around 1:4. Passive voice sits primly with her hands crossed across her lap. Active voice climbs trees and shakes leaves down on unsuspecting passersby. The problem of passive voice is that it so often is the default. Do a search and replace for passive verbs and try switching them to active verbs. It may not seem like much, but over the course of a paragraph, a page, a chapter, you’ll find that the text is lighter, bouncier, stronger, more alive.
- Dynamic language. Use it. Why say something is bad, when you can say it’s terrible, awful, heart-rending, or horrifying? I’m not saying you need to replace all your $0.02 words with $0.25 words, but don’t be afraid to be bold. You can always turn down the drama if it’s too much.
- On that note, don’t use the same words to describe something boring and something exciting. Let’s say we’ve got two pictures: one of a girl (perhaps her name is Passive Voice) staring at a wall, and the other of another girl (Active Voice) hiding behind a tree while a bear approaches. You could say that both girls are still, or unmoving, but why not say that A.V. is, for example, paralyzed in fear? Our minds are powerful things, and make connections where there might not be any—so when you use the same words to describe two very different things, especially over and over again, we begin to associate one with another.
- Vary your sentence structure. Use literary devices. Keep things interesting for your reader, both in content as well as visually.
One last thing to keep in mind about tension: it should always be increasing. Yes, it will fluctuate up and down throughout the story, but the general trend should always be upward as you build up to the climax.
As you flesh out your characters and add those twists and turns to your plot, don’t forget that while the components that make up tension can often be small and unseen, they in some ways will be the most important part of your story. Tension determines whether your book gets put down at bedtime, or accompanies your reader in long into the night.
Jessica Shen lives, works, and edits from her home in northern California. Kingdom City: Resurrection by Ben Ireland, was released in February 2014. Her latest project, Vanguard Legacy: Reflected by Joanne Kershaw, was released in March 2014.
Jessica’s next project, On The Isle of Sound and Wonder, a Steampunk fantasy by Alyson Grauer, is slated for release in November 2014.
Inside Marketing: Taming the Beast
BY CELESTE COX
Social Media: The Not So Unfriendly Monster
For some of us, and quite possibly all of us writers, social media is a feared concept. An it-must-not-be-named that we promise we will work on, but never really do. It’s the monster you know is living under your bed but are too afraid to face. You hope that as long as you feed it every so often and never directly look at it, it won’t gobble you up in the middle of the night.
Well, believe it or not, you don’t have to be gobbled up to be successful with social media. Nor do you have to spend every waking moment linked to it. If you have an understanding of your brand and audience you can be successful and even enjoy meeting the monster too.
Your Brand
Whether you’ve already written your novel, you’re in the process, or you’ve just begun, it’s important to know what makes it unique. To start, ask yourself:
- Why should an audience invest in my novel?
- What is my novel specifically offering them? Ex: Knowledge, romance, entertainment, thrill, a mixture?
- What rating should my audience expect? Ex: If there’s violence, is it mild, heavy, extremely graphic? G, PG, R?
- What’s the style and tone of my writing? Ex: Sarcastic, literary, first person, third?
- Even the formatting is part of your brand. Ex: In Jack Weyland’s novels the internal thought is always italicized.
The goal is for your reader to hear your name or see your novel, and know what to expect. Your name and novel should evoke certain thoughts and feelings for the reader. Ex: The name, Stephen King suggests a novel that is strange, scary, mysterious etc. A Stephen King fan would be confused if they picked up King’s latest novel and it were about a ballerina torn between love and her career. The most important thing to remember is to be consistent.
Your Audience
Now that you’ve got an understanding of your brand, it’s time to find the audience to match it. It’s a common misconception among writers that the bigger the audience, the better. True, a bigger audience could mean more sales, but not if the audience could care less about you or your book.
Imagine a scuba diving instructor at a Steampunk convention. He’s trying to sell his how-to book on the proper use of scuba diving equipment. Yes, there’d be a lot of people there, but it’s unlikely the scuba man sells a single book. (Unless of course his scuba gear is based on the 19th century and is powered by steam—now that would be something!) Point is, you need to start with an audience you are 80-99% sure will be interested: your target audience.
How to find and research your Target Audience:
- Find novels you feel are similar to yours and study their audience. Don’t waste time on the big fishes. For example, if your novel is a paranormal teen romance, don’t immediately look to Twilight fans. That audience is too broad, but you can bet it started with vampire fans and lovesick teens before it became what it is. Find novels that are emerging from the woodwork. Ones that are getting more and more reviews among a smaller, specific crowd.
- Read the reviews voted most helpful. Take note of what the readers liked and didn’t.
- Go to the authors’ social media accounts and study what the fans are saying.
- Understand them. They are your target audience and your potential fans. You are writing or have already written for this audience. Think of them as your investors. They are the readers more likely to take a chance on you and your novel.
SOCIAL MEDIA
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking once you put yourself out there you’ll be surrounded with that awful sound that means no one cares: silence. Maybe it’s already happening. But now you know your brand! You understand your audience. And you can face anything. Think of yourself like James Bond just receiving your gadgets. Now here’s how to use them.
- Be interesting. If you haven’t gone on any great adventures lately, that’s fine. You don’t actually have to be James Bond. Interesting things are things people don’t normally see. Anything ranging from an image, quote, article, your own thoughts. Keep it fresh.
- Images are your friends. People are more likely to look at them than text. Instead of excerpts of your novel on their own, add that sentence or paragraph to an image. Like a meme, for example. If you aren’t familiar with any programs to put text on an image, an easy and completely free place to do this is at http://pixlr.com. Don’t waste too much time making it pretty though. As long as the image is somewhat interesting and eye-catching, it will do.
- Anything funny. People like to laugh. If it’s consistent with your brand, try to bring humor into your posts. And don’t panic if you’re the opposite of funny. You can always share and re-re-tweet what others have posted, though you shouldn’t only rely on that tactic, which brings me to,
- Be original. You’ve studied your audience to try to understand them, not to completely transform yourself to be like the authors they already follow. A carbon copy is never interesting. You want to show your audience that you’re offering them something they’re likely to be interested in, while giving them something different: you!
- Be helpful. People love to learn new things, especially if the information will help them in their pursuits.
- Be relevant. An article on getting published won’t be as helpful if it’s ten years old.
- Take Notes. Check out which of your posts received the most response. Try posting more of the same and continue tweaking things accordingly.
- Remember your brand. Anything you post should reflect your brand. You can have a variety, but if your novel’s genre is horror and you’re constantly posting pictures of baby animals and Disney princesses, your audience will be confused and wander off.
Socialize. There’s a reason it’s called social media yet so many of us only post things with a comment and a like here and there. It’s not enough. You don’t have to engage with everything, but if you find something helpful or interesting let the person know. When you help a fellow author out, they are more likely to do the same. You might even call it networking.
And there you have it. A quick guide to facing your monster-y friend, social media. Just remember to be consistent and have fun with it. And when it feels overwhelming and you just want to lock the door and run, remember that you deserve to have your work read and people deserve to read it.
Celeste Cox is a superhero by day and a writer by night. She’s also the publicist for The X. She’s earned an Associates degree at Eastern Arizona College where she took several classes in creative writing.
When she isn’t performing all her superhero publicist duties, she spends her time either composing music or building and designing websites, including her own blog, http://www.lifelaughterlovetheblog.com. Celeste loves the marketing world and figuring out what makes it tick.
To contact any of our X Team authors, or request interviews or books for review, email Celeste at CCox xchylerpublishing com.
Editor’s Notes: To Edit or Not To Edit
BY ELIZABETH GILLILAND
We creative types tend to be a bit temperamental when it comes to our work, and for good reason. We’ve put months, years, sweat, blood, tears, and endless buckets of caffeine and chocolate into our projects. They are, in short, our babies. Our beautiful, double-spaced, 12-point-font babies.
But lo and behold, sooner or later, some jerk editor/proofreader/critiquer is going to come along and give you the dreaded feedback. And no matter how much we as authors may say we want you to rip our work to shreds—however much we may know we need it to make our writing better—secretly, deep down inside we’re hoping to hear, “It’s perfect! Nothing needs to be changed! Not only are you the best writer of your time, but you are also a remarkable human being and . . . dare I say? . . . incredibly good-looking.”
. . . Or maybe that’s just me.
No matter how much we know we should want and need and crave critiques, we all still have that kneejerk reaction—the screw you! I’m a genius! You don’t understand my masterpiece! moment.
But after the steam hissing out our ears clears, we can usually acknowledge that, yes, there was a huge, gaping plot hole there with the space time continuum, and yes, I was perhaps wish-fulfilling a little too much with that character who looks exactly like me and falls in love with an Australian movie star named Grugh Schmackman, and no, I probably shouldn’t have spent an entire chapter describing his abs.
Some of these changes are no brainers. Some of these are problems we probably realized before we sent the manuscript out but were sort of hoping that no one else would notice, blinded as they were by our sparkling, witty prose.
Occasionally, however, you may receive a critique that completely comes out of left field. That churns your stomach even after you’ve allowed it ample time to digest. That may change the original vision you had for your story. That may, in fact, turn your baby completely upside-down on its head.
Poor baby. 🙁
The nice part of having an editor/proofreader/critiquer go over your work is that they’re outside of the story, with a clear, un-emotional view of things, and sometimes from that distance, they’re better able to make judgment calls. Thus, there are times when these critiques can send you into an entirely new direction and give you a better story than what you started out with.
For instance, I’ve recently been working on a book that was my shiny, pretty baby, complete with a hefty subplot that took up approximately 30% of the page count. I sent it off to critique partners who suggested I trim back the subplot and focus more on the main character. I did, a little, but thought that subplot was important enough to keep it in, maybe taking up only 25% now. I sent it off to my agent, and she suggested I trim back on the subplot even more. It got down to about 15%, which I thought was good enough, but no such luck. She wanted more. More! More! She was Edward Scissorhands-ing my beautiful baby.
I admit, there was a moment of panic. This subplot (although sub by name and therefore, in theory, less important) was the reason I’d started writing the novel in the first place. Cutting it back meant taking out some of my favorite moments, and I honestly didn’t know how to fill the void that would be left without it in my book.
But, trusting my agent as the superhero that she is, I went ahead with the revisions and took the subplot down to probably about 5%. And you know what? She was right. Not only is the book way more focused, but I learned about 1000 times more about my main character because I no longer had the cushion of that 30% to hide behind. It was a hard critique, but one that ultimately made the story much, much better.
HOWEVER—and I probably shouldn’t be admitting this as an editor—but we don’t always know everything. Yes, we are on the outside looking in and that can sometimes make us less biased, but no matter how much we love and champion your book, we are also outsiders. Voyeurs peering in through your window—albeit, invited voyeurs, which makes it only slightly less creepy. All of which means sometimes, we give advice that might be fine in theory but just doesn’t work in practice for your book.
At the moment, I’m working with a very talented author on her soon to be published book. A change was suggested early on in the process that wasn’t a bad idea, per say, but that she realized as she began trying to implement it that it just didn’t work. That it was making her baby less of her baby and more of Frankenstein’s monster. And she made the courageous decision to step up and say, Hey, that isn’t working for me. We have to figure out a different way.
So I guess if you take any advice away from this highly contradictory blog post, it would be that sometimes you have to change your baby. Sometimes that will require severe, heavy alterations that require a lot of work. Major reconstructive surgery, if you will.
But at the same time, trust yourself and your instincts. Think through all the possibilities, even give it a good old college try if you’re not sure if something will work . . . and if it doesn’t, you don’t have to do it. You DO NOT have to do it.
But don’t be afraid of changing because you’re afraid of the effort or because you’re so set in your ways that you refuse to give your writing the opportunity to be better. Because that would be a shame for everyone involved.
And when in doubt, chocolate is always a great sounding board. 🙂 Happy writing!
Editor, ghost writer, and story coach Elizabeth Gilliland writes and edits from her home in Utah. Her latest project, Conjectrix, the sequel to Vivatera by Candace J. Thomas, was released in the April 2014. Her next project, Accidental Apprentice by Anika Arrington, is slated for release in the fall of 2014.
Elizabeth’s short story “Mouse and Cat” appeared in A Dash of Madness: a Thriller Anthology publishined in July 2013.