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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 [at] xchylerpublishing [dot] 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.
Editor’s Notes: The Art of Negotiation
BY TERRI WAGNER
Before We Edit
“We have accepted your manuscript, and are offering you a contract.” Those words generally make an author jump for joy. As your future editors, we have mixed feelings when that offer comes around. First, we are as excited as you are about your being offered a publishing gig. It somehow gives you that confirmation you really are an author. And it gives The X another feather in its publishing quiver. Only later does reality seep in, and seep is the right word.
Here at The X, our contracts lay out your manuscript’s future. It is a map to a finished, polished, published piece. It is as much our work as yours. Our names only appear as fine print on the frontispiece, but we know (and by then you will know) it was a team effort.
The X contract will give you a fairly specific timeline so you have a pretty good idea of when that book/anthology is coming out. And marketing comes into play the day you sign the contract, so we don’t leave that out either. But that moment between “I got a contract” and “my book is printed” (we still use that term although in fact most are digital these days) is a million years (so it seems) of hard work, haggling, and compromise.
After the contract is signed, we schedule a launch meeting. We write up an agenda to discuss the entire “map” to your published piece. We set dates, work up a master plan on editing, and marketing, and try to address an author’s descent into publishing madness.
However, there is this space of time between “accepted, contract, launch meeting” where an author’s attitude is unfortunately sometimes set in a dangerous and possibly contract-breaking way. So, today, I want to warn you about some things you might want to consider just after you sign that contract, and before that launch meeting.
First, do not assume that an accepted manuscript means all that remains is some tweaking, and you are good to go. We provide access to your manuscript’s evaluations. Please take the time to look that over, and seriously assess each review comment.
These evaluations are done with a professional eye to assessing the value of a work. It is the first place we note troublesome issues. Here is where you will find what you did well, and more importantly, what you did not do well. Sometimes, and this may hurt to hear in the initial excitement, what we decided was “there’s potential” here. When you see words like needs character development, needs clarification, needs some background, climax peters off, etc. PAY ATTENTION. Those comments are for your benefit, and editors you work with WILL address each of those issues.
Second, never assume one round of editing is going to be enough. This is for the long haul. We want you to look professional, and likewise, we want The X to look professional. That takes effort, time, and sweat equity. Prepare for the haggling. As editors and authors work together, things can become dicey. The odds are that the “I’m the author, we do it my way” spiel will not end well. Ultimately, you may regret that attitude.
Dicey, haggling, and compromise are not exacting words. They simply point out that an author and an editor are going to “see” things a bit differently. We promise our editors will work with you. Think of it more as the truism: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That finished manuscript will include your vision, your editors’ refinements, and together will be a whole neither of you could have accomplished alone.
Editors are not out to get you; they are out to protect you, and polish your work. It is not only our job, but our joy. I may hate to send back a chapter for the fifth or sixth time, but I will not stop until it is right. Why? We both want that perfect professional piece. When I am working with an author, and the light bulb clicks on in their head, I’m somewhere pumping my fist.
Third, bring your own “map” to the launch meeting. If you did that first step of reading the manuscript evaluations, you know what is going to be discussed. Come prepared to ask questions, support your viewpoints, clarify your meaning. Come prepared to learn. Editors very, very rarely say “my way or the highway.” Most of the time, it’s “how can you write that so it’s better understood by your reader?”
Once I had the opportunity to do an amazing and insightful project BEFORE editing was even discussed. On a Google doc, the author wrote this is what happened in chapter one; and I wrote, this is what I read in chapter one. The light bulb went on for both the author and I. Assuming we are both on the same page is a rookie mistake made by both author. When the author comes prepared to discuss evaluation issues, we know this is going to be a signature piece for the X. And frankly we want all our works to be signature pieces.
So after the contract signing, the self-congratulations, the relief and joy of having that title “author” begins to wear off, settle down, and prepare for business. The sooner the author is ready to tackle the issues, the easier the actual editing process becomes. And if the initial process (before actual editing) seems to take too much time, take heart. It usually means the actual editing will be clean, fun, and quick (and painless).
Terri Wagner lives, writes, and edits from her home in Alabama. Her most recent project, Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology, was released in May 2014. Her next project, The Mage and the Magpie (The Bookminder Book 1) by Megan Wiseman, is slated for release in August 2014.
Other works to Ms. Wagner’s credit include Shades and Shadows: A Paranormal Anthology, Mr. Gunn and Dr. Bohemia by Pete Ford, and Conjectrix (Vivatera Book 2) by Candace J. Thomas.
Inside Marketing: To Blog or Not To Blog?
That is the question!
BY BUNNY MINER
Author Blogging 101: When to Start a Blog
Whether you want to hear it or not, blogging is your friend. You’re probably thinking, but who wants to hear what I have to say? or I’m no expert, nobody will read it anyway. (Did I detect a note of whining?).
When it comes to marketing your book, it really comes down to you. Here at Xchyler Publishing, we have a great team to help out our authors, but in the end, the one with the most invested in your book is you. This is your hard work, your blood, sweat and tears, your baby.
Hi, I’m Bunny Miner and I’m the point of contact here at Xchyler Publishing for bloggers and reviewers. Bloggers help an author get the word out about their upcoming book and are able to reach more than just the author’s circle of friends.
Authors often ask me when they should start a blog. Do they wait until they’re well known so they have a following? Should they wait until their book is in print and on the bookstore shelves? My answer is a resounding NO! Do it now.
Don’t worry about all the fancy bells and whistles, you can add those as you go. Just get your blog up and running as soon as you can, before you submit that manuscript to a publisher.
Blogging is something an author does to build a following. Even if the only people you know who would read your blog are your family and friends, start anyway. Include in your blogs a flavor of who you are.
If you’re not literary and high minded, don’t act like you are. If you’re chatty and fun loving, make your blogs sing of your personality.People want to know you and what you think, not what you think someone in an office that may or may not publish your book wants to hear.
Blogging is all about building relationships. So you start with the relationships you already have—back to those family and friends. Often this group of people is called your Sphere of Influence or SOI. With your early blogs, they’ll be there to support you and encourage you.
As you get a few posts under you and they see that you’re not going to flake out on them, they’ll start investing themselves in your blog and start expecting it. With that in mind, please be consistent! You don’t have to blog everyday but do blog on a regular basis, at least every week or two. The more you can blog, though, the more quickly you’ll develop followers. If you can, blog everyday.
Your SOI is just your jumping off point. What eventually is going to happen is that your friends and family will start telling their SOI about you and your blog (because you’ll ask them to!). Then they’ll tell two friends and so on and so on and so on (hey, wasn’t that a commercial . . . showing my age!). This will add followers to you and your marketing efforts.
Remember though, that you should follow them as well. This is about building relationships. There is strength in numbers and authors really should band together to get the word out about each other. Don’t worry, there are more than enough readers to go around. Chances are, if you find someone who likes something similar to what you write, they’ll like what you write as well. It’s not a competition, it’s a collaboration!
When following another author or blogger, don’t just lurk on their site. Add comments and encouragement. Always be honest but also be genuine. I’m a firm believer in Karma, what goes around comes around, so help and uplift one another!
Nothing happens unless you put it into action so I’ll challenge you at the end of each of my blogs to give you something to work on. Please comment back and let me know how you do with the challenges!
1. If you haven’t already, START YOUR BLOG.
2. If you have a blog but don’t post to it regularly, sit down and figure out when you can realistically blog and stick to that schedule. Re-evaluate it every 30 days to see if you need to tweak it.
3. If you’re already blogging regularly, go out and find a blog similar to what you write, whether it’s a genre based blog or another author that writes in your genre, take a look at the blog and see if you can pull any of the elements into yours (asking permission to use their idea with your own tweaks and adjustments helps build the relationship). Also look at the blogs and see if you can comment kindly, honestly and genuinely and then do it.
That’s it from me for this post. Go take on my challenge and report back.
Until 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. Bunny feels that 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. Bunny will be blogging along with the rest of our Marketing Team so check back often for their combined words of wisdom.
Editor’s Notes: More Than The Sum of Its Parts
BY MERILYN OBLAD
Once upon a time, I sat around a flint-knapping debris pile with a bunch of other people, trading life-stories and making what should have been tools out of rocks but were, in reality, just lumps of broken stone. I noticed a certain pattern of restlessness to the stories my compatriots told, which restlessness led to all manner of interesting and far-ranging escapades in their lives.
I was in my mid-twenties then, and was an awkward combination of shy introversion and cocky confidence in my newly completed college education. In spite of that confidence, I was deeply aware of my lack of exotic life-experience and was dreading having nothing to really say for myself.
The moment of reckoning pounced on me, and with an embarrassed flush, I told everyone that my life wasn’t very interesting. I was raised in Las Vegas, NV, educated in Reno, NV, and then in Provo, UT, but had really done nothing else. I was completely embarrassed and wished that I could disappear and take my story with me (I really don’t like talking about myself, then or now), but the most wonderful thing happened after I ground to an ashamed halt. The leader of the group looked at me, and in the kindest voice I’d heard in a long time, told me that I said my life wasn’t interesting, but he bet it was interesting to me. To my utter surprise, he was right. My life is interesting to me.
You see, my life then, and even more so now, is filled with learning and thinking and making sense of my life experiences, all things I revel in. I adore learning and understanding things that I previously haven’t. So, I am an educated woman, schooled in the art of history and analytical thinking and writing. That means I studied the small details of the human experience as they changed over time and learned to carefully piece them together into a comprehensive whole. Or, at least as comprehensive as I could make it.
I have tried to understand why events happened the way they did and what impact they had on humanity. For instance, a storm in the English Channel/Atlantic Ocean in 1588 created such difficulty for the Spanish Armada that they were defeated by a far inferior force, the English Navy.
That defeat allowed the English to gain supremacy in Europe in terms of naval power, which led to a substantially greater interest in the New World (since you had to get on a boat to get there and with their greatly expanded fleet, they could afford exploratory expeditions), which in turn led to a greater colonial presence of English in North America than other nationalities, which meant that the English experience with government influenced the creation of the United States Government, rather than say, the Spanish or the French, as you see in South and Central America. And all of that because of one storm. See what I mean? Totally intriguing.
I wrote quite a bit throughout my college years, starting with short-sentenced, choppy analyses of historical documents, and culminating with a long-winded 93-page master’s thesis exploring the impact of music on gendered ideas of honor and duty during the American Civil War. (Fascinating stuff, really. Who knew popular music could define a war for an entire generation?)
I write less now, since there’s little call for historical essays outside the hallowed halls of higher education. And I don’t claim to be a writer of anything else. (Periodically I try to write a little fiction, but I get stuck in my need to explain everything in minute detail and can’t move the plot along at a reasonable pace.) I have tremendous respect for those who do write, since their efforts have kept me entertained for decades.
Speaking of which, I am (of course!) a voracious reader. Nancy Drew Mysteries started me on the reading path of no return, quickly followed by fantasy and sci-fi, tender romance, and an unexpected foray into Jane Austen fanfic, plus the occasional international thriller. I constantly find myself analyzing the books I read, seeking patterns and trends in individual authors’ works.
Now, I put those analytical skills to good use by helping other writers with their writing. I’m a proofreader, which is a very good job for me. I catch the mistakes that fall through the cracks of rewrites, line and content editing, formatting, and more rewrites. I am into the details, much like I was as a student of history. (See? I told you it’s a good job for me!)
Between then and now, I was a research assistant (also a good job for me), a fabric cutter, a grader of standardized tests, a tutor, a nanny (a deeply rewarding job), and a front desk clerk at a motel. I’m looking forward to using all that lovely life experience I didn’t have at the flint-knapping pile in my new role as an editorial assistant with Xchyler.
With all of that, some things don’t change. I’m still an introvert. I still observe and think more than I speak. And I still pay attention to details and try to place them in the larger picture. To put it into tired cliché form, I try to see both the forest and the trees, forsaking neither because understanding does not occur without both. And understanding is one of the things that make life interesting. To me, at least.
A lover of all things historical, MeriLyn Oblad has both a BA and MA in History, the former from the University of Nevada, Reno and the latter from Brigham Young University. She brings more than a decade of document analysis, an eye for fine detail, and seven years of writing local histories to the Xchyler table.
When not proofreading for Xchyler, she volunteers with the local heritage society, reads prolifically, and occasionally can be persuaded to sew quilts for loved ones. MeriLyn (pronounced “Mary Lynn”) currently resides in Southern Utah and spends her Sundays teaching music to about 40 children.
MeriLyn is currently plowing through an immense pile of short stories for our Mr. and Mrs. Myth anthology competition, her first project with The X.
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