Marketing Flurry

After digging out of 20” of snow a week ago, this week found me hit with a marketing flurry. I have felt out of my depth since I hit the marketing side of publishing. Even though I’ve read a ton about it, when it came to actually making a plan the details overwhelmed and paralyzed me. So I’ve waded into the fray, rather than jumped.

This week started off with receiving my book trailer from Keith Strunk, who put it together for me. I had an unplanned public unveiling of the trailer at the Willow Grove Writers Coffeehouse, and people seemed to like it. I know I sure did!

So one thing I did this week was start a YouTube channel for myself. At the moment, however, the channel has no content, as I am having the dreaded “technical difficulties” loading the trailer to the channel.

 

Coming Soon to a Viewscreen Near You!

The next marketing task that surfaced was an interview I did with Linda C. Wisniewski for the Bucks County Women’s Journal. My first interview as a professional author!

The interview of course kicked off a round of social media posts announcing it—Facebook, Twitter, Google+. I also hopped onto my website and added the link to my News & Events page—which I managed to do without breaking the Internet!

Finally, because I felt the need to have some focused marketing help, I joined BadRedHead Media’s 30-Day Book Marketing Challenge. The amazing Rachel Thompson sends us one tip and how-to every day for 30 days, and we then implement them. We are 3 days in, and so far I have spruced up my Twitter bio and header, pinned a tweet to my feed, and begun Following people with a more targeted focus.

So my week has been filled with flurries—marketing flurries. It’s good, though, because I feel a little more settled in my marketing mindset. I may never be a marketing powerhouse, but I am moving forward—and that’s what counts.

How about you? Did you dive in the deep end with marketing, or wade in hesitantly?

Marketing Bits and Pieces

A while ago I blogged about the next steps in the publication process, now that my edits have been completed. At that time, I was asking for blurbs from fellow writers. I am pleased to say that they came through with some wonderful blurbs for my book! So what now?

We have finalized the title, THE WITCH OF ZAL. It’s a much better title than my working title of OZCILLATION in that it is much clearer as far as genre, market, and content. It’s easy to pronounce and easy to remember. And I get all shivery when I say, “The title of my book is…” It’s still hard to believe!

The cover is still in development (believe me, I will share it with you as soon as I can!), but I have moved along some of my own marketing efforts. Like what, you ask?

I just received a completed Academic Guide from Deb Gonzalez, who did a great job breaking down the book, thinking up class activities, and aligning all of it with the Common Core Standards many schools are using now. The Guide touches on everything I would want kids and teachers to discuss. I am so glad a writer friend recommended Deb to me—I’m very pleased with the results.

I also have put together Book Club Questions for library use. Several writer friends with book club experience helped me polish them up and deepen the focus. Where would I be without my writer friends?

I chose twelve quotes from my book and created visual memes that I can use on Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media to hopefully intrigue people enough to check out the book. I really enjoyed doing these, as it uses my graphic arts skills, which I rarely get to use these days.

I am toying with book trailer ideas. I have two alternate scripts, one which requires a voice over, one which does not. I have some visuals I like to get me started, but I am searching for music to excite me. I have some leads, and will be following up. Since I used to make my living as a video editor (earning two awards for my work), I should be able to put one together once I have the pieces assembled.

Most of the things I have been working on are things I can do on my own and at my own speed. I have the feeling that once things start happening, they will happen at full tilt and leave me breathless, so the more material I already have in my pocket, the better.

These are also marketing avenues I am comfortable with and enjoy. I am hoping that readers will sense the excitement I felt in creating these media and get excited, too.

So that’s how I’m using the current down time. I am keeping busy while waiting for my book cover and my final release date! I’m also, of course, working on other stories, since writers never stop writing.

Stay tuned for future developments!

The Internet—Sanity-saver and Crazy-maker

We live in a hyper-connected world. This is not a secret. I am a part of this world. This is also not a secret. So when my Internet started crashing every 2-3 minutes, this was a problem.

I work from home, fitting my writing in around my daughter. I am online a great deal for many different business-related reasons. So when my Internet would crash about every 2 mouse-clicks, you can imagine my frustration. Especially since this went on for days. I worked around it as best I could and waited for the repair man to come (which he did a few days ago).

I wasn’t surprised at how hair-pulling-ly upset I was to lose the Internet for work reasons—but what did shock me was how much I missed it for the non-work reasons. How many times I tried to check email. How many times I idly clicked over to Facebook. How many times it pulled me from my work EVEN THOUGH I KNEW IT WAS BROKEN.

This got me thinking that maybe I am a little too addicted to the web. Goodness knows that as a stay-at-home-mom these social networks are vital to my staying sane. Being able to converse with an adult and stay in touch with what’s going on outside of preschool? Priceless. But I may have gotten to the point where I need to be a little stricter with my time online.

I have developed the bad habit of clicking over to Facebook every time my minimized tab shows a new interaction. This is one reason I cannot have Twitter open in a minimized tab—the pressure to check those frenetically-paced postings is too much. I have also gotten into the habit of checking my four email accounts when I am “bored”—which coincidentally happens when faced with things I don’t want to do.

While I’ve never missed a deadline, I can tell I’m wasting a lot of time. I could get things done faster. Spend more time with my daughter. Have more leisure time for other things. Maybe even sleep more!

So I’m going to try to cut back on how often I check the Internet. We’ll see how it goes!

How do you control your urge to cyber-splurge?

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Overload Paralysis

A few years back, when my daughter was still an infant, we lived for a time on the island of Chincoteague, VA. Since I still had commitments back home, I would make the trek up and down the Eastern seaboard twice a month, my car filled to the brim with all the ridiculously large items a tiny baby seems to need.

Almost every time I needed to start packing up, I experienced a strange phenomenon: I couldn’t do anything. I would find myself standing in the middle of the living room, frozen. My mind whirled with the long packing list I had, as well as with all the things I needed to do other than packing—cleaning, bill paying, etc. I had so much to get done that I couldn’t do anything at all. The overload would paralyze me.

I sometimes get that way about writing, too. I end up with so many projects going on at once, that when I do get some free time to work on something, I end up doing something totally unrelated to writing. The overload of work can paralyze my creativity and my motivation. Right now, I am editing 2 novels, polishing up 2 short stories, have 2 blogs due every week, and have to maintain the constant round of social media—Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads… Not to mention reading the dozen or so blogs I follow regularly.

It can be overwhelming enough that I want to hide from it all.

There is a way to break the paralysis. The answer is both easy and hard.

Pick something.

Do it.

That’s the big secret. Do something, anything, on your list, and you can advance into productive work. But what to pick? Hardest thing first? Easiest thing first? It depends on your mood and your personality.

If I have a very long list but most of it is little stuff, I will do the easiest first and work up to the hardest. By doing the easy things first, I get the instant gratification of checking things off my list and seeing the list get shorter quickly. If I have a shorter list but the tasks are more complex and time-consuming, I will usually do the hardest one first. That way I know the most difficult (and often the most time-consuming) one is done and the rest will be easier and usually take less time than that first one. So, sometimes I inch my way up to the top of the hill, and sometimes I start at the top and coast down.

Of course, there are always things that are not on your To-Do list that crop up and need to be done. Those you just have to incorporate based on their necessity. I immediately need to take care of my daughter when she falls off the bed and hits her head, but the crayon drawn on her closet door can wait until I have more time. The phone call from my family needs to be answered, but the one from an unknown number can leave a message.

Do you experience overload paralysis? Do you have a different way of busting out of it? Or do you have a method of organization that bypasses this overwhelmed reaction altogether?

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The Princess Blogs?

Not long ago, I read Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries. I enjoyed the use of the diary format—it brought immediacy to the action and intimacy to the character. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, if the diary format could be as successful today as it was then. 

The Princess Diaries was written in 2000—not ancient times, certainly, but before everybody and their mother had a blog/MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Kids today are highly comfortable posting their lives on the Internet, and their “diaries” are their blogs. In The Princess Diaries, Mia says that she wanted to write everything in the diary because she didn’t want anyone to know that she was a princess. That sort of secrecy would be impossible with an online journal or blog.

So, would a diary format book become a bestseller in today’s market? Possibly—kids still know what a diary is, and some may even still keep a “paper” diary. I suspect, however, that as the kids of today become the writers of tomorrow, the diary format will turn into a blog format. Will this lose some of the intimacy of the form? Kids writing on a public blog (even a fictitious one) are unlikely to be as forthcoming and honest with their thoughts and emotions. Although kids today are more willing to put themselves “out there” than most adults, they are aware that it is a public forum, and I think that will inevitably lead to some self-censorship. This could lead to some constraint of the form, some limitations to how far it can be pushed. 

A cousin to the diary format, the epistolary novel is also looking at a sea change. With letters dying out, replaced by emails, chats, text messages and the like, will epistolary novels go the way of the rotary phone? 

In her blog, Tracy Marchini notes that one of the defining characteristics of an epistolary novels is that time elapses between each letter—and a lot can happen in that time. With emails, the elapsed time between communications dwindles from several days or weeks to several minutes or hours. Granted that it only takes a moment for someone’s life to be irrevocably changed, it still brings a different cadence to the communication. 

Like the diary novel, I think we will see the epistolary novel morph into a new form—a “communication” novel involving email, chat and text. I also think this will be a smoother transition than the diary novel, because so many of the basics will remain the same. An email is, after all, often just a letter in digital clothing. 

Do you think these forms will evolve into something new, or die out altogether? Are there other formats that technology will make obsolete or change substantially?

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