The Magic of Networking by Jenny Twist

This weekend and next I'm handing over my blog to my two favourite people, Jenny Twist and Tara Fox Hall who want to talk about something dear to any author's heart - promotion (and FREE promotion at that!)

So straight away...here's Jenny.

I always assumed, rather naively, that once your book was accepted by a publisher all you had to do was sit back and wait for the money to roll in. Well, it doesn't happen like that. In order for a book to sell, the author needs to have a fan base, to get fans the author needs to be actively marketed. Even the best publishers cannot spend time and money marketing an unknown author. They will only do this for new books from authors who are already best-sellers or for those whom they believe have a really good chance of becoming best-sellers - celebrities writing their autobiographies, for example.

So is this a Catch 22 situation?

Not quite.

The answer is you have to market yourself. Ultimately books sell through word of mouth, so the more people you can get to read your book, the better chance it has of becoming well-known.

I have no money at all to spend on advertising, so all my marketing is through social networking and blogging. Don’t knock it! You wouldn’t believe how many people you reach through Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter: You are only allowed 140 characters per tweet. Make every character count. Put RT at the beginning, which is an invitation for your followers to retweet. Every retweet will reach all the followers of that tweep (Twitter-speak for one who tweets) who may themselves retweet you. See how this works?

Always put the buy-link of your book in there. For example, if you are tweeting about a review by all means put the review link in as well, but include the buy link whatever happens. People buy on impulse. Make it easy for them.

Facebook: Create your own author page and post all your book news there. Invite people to share a link when you’re doing a full-on campaign. Don’t forget to include the buy link!

Join author groups - Yahoo has dozens of them. So does Facebook. I have a master spread-sheet with all the sites I post on so I don’t forget any. I also bookmark all the sites so it’s quick and easy to post one after another. Be careful to obey all the site rules. Some have certain days when you’re allowed to post, some will only allow certain kinds of posts.

Every time anything happens that gives you an excuse to say something, tweet and post it. When a new book is launched, when you have a good review, when you write a blog. You are building your fan-base. Make them remember your name. And remember, if you want people to support you, you must be prepared to support them. Thank them for sharing your link. When they retweet you, reciprocate. You will make good friends who will always support you.

Reviews sell books. Send your book for review to any review site that seems to be appropriate. Again I keep a spread-sheet for each book, tracking where I sent it and the response. As you go along, you will find the sites that like your writing and you will end up with a golden list of those you are confident will give you a good review. Here’s a site with a comprehensive list to start you off:  http://kimberlykillion.com/writers.asp#bookreviewers

Ask other authors to review your work. Offer to review theirs in turn.

Offer to do interviews and blogs. It's time-consuming, but it really does work. When I first started I used to prefer interviews because the blogger did all the hard work. All you had to do was answer the questions. Now I’d much rather write a blog myself on some subject that interests me. It’s more interesting for me than trotting out the same answers all the time and I think it’s more interesting for my readers.

Every time you do this, advertise it on the social networks. Post the link to the site and ask people to comment. Keep revisiting the site to respond to them.

Free downloads: Finally, there is one avenue I have only recently discovered that seems to work like magic. If you have self-published a book you can put it on free download every so often. Amazon’s KDP lets you do 5 free days every 90 days. Advertise it on all the free book sites and promote it like mad.
Only a fraction of the people who download it will read it. Only a fraction of those will review it. But an even smaller fraction, the golden nugget, will become fans. They will go on to buy your other books. They will tell their friends, who will tell their friends.

Stardom, here you come!     

About Jenny Twist

Jenny Twist was born in York and brought up in the West Yorkshire mill town of Heckmondwike,the eldest grandchild of a huge extended family. 

She left school at fifteen and went to work in an asbestos factory. After working in various jobs, including bacon-packer and escapologist’s assistant, she returned to full-time education and did a BA in history at Manchester and post-graduate studies at Oxford.

She stayed in Oxford working as a recruitment consultant for many years and it was there that she met and married her husband, Vic.

In 2001 they retired and moved to Southern Spain where they live with their rather eccentric dog and cat

Jenny's first book, Take One At Bedtime, was published in April 2011 and the second, the highly acclaimed Domingo’s Angel, in July 2011. Her novella, Doppelganger, was published in the anthology Curious Hearts in July 2011, Uncle Vernon, was published in Spellbound, in November 2011,  Jamey and the Alien was published in Warm Christmas Wishes in December 2011 and Mantequero was published in the anthology Winter Wonders in December 2011.  She self-published Away With the Fairies, an intriguing modern fairytale in September 2012.

Her latest novel, All in the Mind, about an old woman who mysteriously begins to get younger, appeared in October 2012.

All Jenny's titles are available from Amazon. Just click on the following links: Amazon US and Amazon UK

Is My Sweet Romance Too Dirty?

Stick with Ted until you're wed?

-  I like it when books leave it to your imagination as to what goes on between the sheets or in the privacy of one's home - that's what relationships are - private - and should stay that way, so congratulations on keeping the book clean and sensitive. Amazon.co.uk review

-  This is a clean read no sex (just reference to) and no swearing!  Amazon.com review

It seems a little ironic that after my last post ‘Is My Romance too Sweet for You?’ (see below), I should now be asking if my ‘sweet’ (and I’m still mildly uncomfortable with the term) romance is clean or…well whatever the opposite is – dirty, I presume?  Can a sweet romance be dirty?  That sounds like a contradiction in terms – an oxymoron, even.  Either way, it seems I have been deluded in glibly thinking that I write ‘clean’ romance!

But that is what I stand accused of now!  You can imagine how surprised I was to receive an email this week from a reviewer who claimed she was unable to finish reading The Apple Tree because, effectively, it was not ‘clean enough’ for her tastes!  My disappointment, I hasten to add, was short-lived.  Since it took her more than four months to make her monumental decision, it was hardly at the forefront of my mind. However her comment did shock me and make me wonder, yet again, about romance sub-genres and whether we poor writers will ever be able to please all of our readers all of the time.

The two reviews quoted above both relate to The Apple Tree and both clearly refer to it as being ‘clean’.  A little research into the first reviewer shows her (or him) to be a discerning reader while the second is a reputable reviewer.  Could they have got it wrong?  How many more classifications can the ‘sweet’ sub-genre be broken down into?

A look at another romance writer’s blog was extremely helpful.  In her delightful blog (http://Sweetnotspicy.blogspot.com), Morgan Mandel describes Sweet as showing attraction between the sexes but with intimate contact being limited to sweet kisses, while Sweet Discreet allows implied but not detailed sex between the hero and heroine. This must be “either understood to be behind closed doors; or, if it's mentioned in the here and now, no graphic and/or overly long details dwelling on body organs and body responses.”  Morgan’s definition is extremely useful and it places The Apple Tree very cleanly (sorry!) in the Sweet Discreet category.  But is this a category universally understood by readers, writers and, indeed everyone else?

The condemning of my novel to some unclean category also raised another question in my mind.  Am I being hypocritical in allowing my characters to have sex, but refusing to describe it?  As discussed previously, it's a conscious decision not to describe their intimacy, but should I also refuse its existence?  Hmm.  

In The Apple Tree my heroine is on the threshold of her twenty-seventh birthday; she has already been married and is a doctor, to boot.  The hero is at least the same age, possibly even in his early thirties, absolutely gorgeous, eligible and with girls falling at his feet on every street corner.  Would it be realistic for these healthy heterosexuals, with no religious or cultural constraints, to resist their powerful sexual attraction for each other until after they are married – i.e. throughout the course of the entire novel, especially when their two best friends are living together quite openly?  

I would love to know what other romance writers feel about this and I would especially love to hear from readers of romance – after all, they are the ones whose preferences really count in such matters.

The Painful Cost of Self-Publishing

The internet is full of people blogging about the wonders of self-publishing.  Ebooks are cutting edge and, according to many, the only way forward for writers old and new.  Most bloggers, however, acknowledge that chasing success is a very difficult race to run.  For some it’s punishingly painful.

Producing your ebook is the easy part in this almost-impossible quest for fame and fortune.  Once you’ve uploaded your precious novel to the various portals that will sell it for you, your work then begins in earnest.  Amazon won’t promote it for you, of course, and without promotion you are literally lost.  After your loyal band of friends and family has bought their copies sales will grind to a halt unless you become very active.

So what do you do?  Well you can sit on social network sites like Twitter and Facebook all day telling as many people as you can how wonderful your book is and begging them to buy it.  Some people might find that easy enough to do, but I’m not one of them.  Perhaps it’s my natural British reserve, but I never was good at blowing my own trumpet.  I want people to discover the good things about me for themselves. Fat chance!  With over 1.6 billion search queries a day, what chance does little old you stand of being noticed by the masses?  Well, unless you have 1.6 billion willing followers, that is.

Of course there are success stories, but they are the exception, not the norm.  The grim truth is, you have to put yourself out there, raise your followers up into the thousands and then, if you can bear it, spam them to death with tweets about your wonderful work in between thinking up  encouraging or witty tweets to keep them interested!  Now I can tweet like a good ‘un about other people’s achievements but when it comes to self-aggrandisement, I cringe with embarrassment.  Writers need nerves of steel, but all the ones I know are as sensitive as dormice.

Review blogs are a great solution, but by no means an easy one.  I’m an ace writer of polite - even grovelling - requests for superior bloggers to review my work of art in the hopes that a kind word from them will send readers flocking up the Amazon in their boatloads.  The fact is that attracting the attention of popular review blogs is almost as difficult as finding a literary agent, which of course, if you had in the first place, you wouldn’t be self-publishing!  Of those that do reply, some can be so abrupt, it’s like a slap in the face.

 

Of course there are some kind altruists in blogland who will accept your work, though they almost always begin with a warning about how busy they are.  I had one who informed me she would get around to reading my opus in six months’ time.  That’s genuinely how busy and in demand this wonderful and rare species of the human race is.  After all, most do it for love in their spare time and who, nowadays, has an abundance of that in their lives?

Keeping up your own blog (and persuading people to read it), responding to others, writing interviews and guest articles to generate interest in your work is time-consuming indeed.  Meanwhile your next piece of literary excellence sits on your computer neglected and reproachful.  And of course, when you do finish it, guess what?  You have to start all over again…