Category Archives: Marketing and promotion

Florida and KU

21 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by in Books, Marketing and promotion, Self-publishing, Travel

≈ 3 Comments

Tropical Storm Nestor inspired me to hurry to Florida. I really didn’t want to have to drive through the storm, so Thursday turned into a long driving day, and I managed to reach Mount Dora by midday on Friday.

I spent Thursday night at a free county park in Georgia, Barrington County Park. It would have been much nicer if a neighbor hadn’t needed to run his generator all night long and if an off-leash black Lab hadn’t really wanted to investigate Zelda, far beyond what Z was comfortable with. Sigh. And it was half an hour off the highway, so added an hour to my overall drive. Next time, I think I’d just sleep at a truck stop or a Walmart. But it was a nice drive down exciting dirt roads and good to get off the highway for a while.

I’ve since had a lovely weekend with my dad and stepmom in Mount Dora. We didn’t do much, but it’s nice to be here. Upon arriving, I told my dad that for Christmas I wanted enough storage to download a ton of books to a device, enough so I really can carry a library with me, not just have a library available in the cloud. My extended time without internet was fine, except my book supply with too limited. He promptly handed me a card for my Fire tablet and I spent Saturday morning downloading approximately 500 books.

Yay, reading material! Boo, temptation! I’m trying to resist the impulse to reread everything I own by Robin McKinley, Dick Francis, and Kathleen Gilles Seidel, all of which I’d kind of forgotten about because they were buried so deep in my Kindle library.

Meanwhile, I wanted to mention that Cici is part of Magical Escapes, a Kindle Unlimited book promotion this month. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber and like fantasy, lots of interesting titles are included in the group. And if you’re not a KU subscriber, you still might find some books you like! I downloaded several, but with all the driving, I haven’t had a chance to read them yet. (Also, I admit, Robin McKinley is distracting me. I’m rereading Rose Daughter for the umpteenth time. It’s not in KU, but the Kindle edition is available for $2.99, which is a good deal, IMO.)

Auto-Buy Authors

22 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Marketing and promotion, Personal, Self-publishing, Zelda

≈ 20 Comments

I wrote a blog post last week and didn’t post it, because it was sad, and also because it stopped being true. I spent much of a day saying good-bye to Zelda, torn between rushing her to a strange vet and letting nature take its course, eventually deciding through many tears that the most loving thing to do was to just be with her, letting her know how much I loved her.

Nature decided that it was a bad day, but not the last bad day. A couple days later she ate a little chicken and by yesterday she was walking again. Not with any speed, and I’m still pretty sure that the baddest of bad days is coming soon… but it’s not going to be today, and that’s sufficient unto the day.

Meanwhile, I am puppy-sitting and working my way through that scary to-do list. I made definite progress — I think I’ve whittled it down to about twenty items, but of course, the twenty items left are some of the worst and scariest. One of them is so tiny — fix the Subscribe button on the sign-up widget — but the fact is, I have absolutely no idea how to do that and am probably going to easily spend a full day working on it, feeling frustrated and annoyed the whole time.

Is that a good use of my time? Obviously not. Does anyone really care if the subscribe button doesn’t look like a button? Well, I do, so yeah, probably there are some other obsessive people who would be bothered as well. Mostly, though, I think it feels like a symptom of my life being outside my control. So many things I can’t fix, can’t make better, but here’s a thing I could/should be able to fix. I wonder if I could convince myself that leaving it alone would be a signal of acceptance? And signal is not the word I want, but I can’t find the right one.

Speaking of things I can’t control, I’ve been experimenting with ads this weekend. I’d really like to get book sales back to where they were before I tried putting Ghosts into Kindle Unlimited. I was never earning enough money to live on, but I was steadily managing to push off the day when I’d have to start filling out job applications. That day is now zooming toward me. Is it ironic or just sad that one of the big reasons I’ve been avoiding a 9-5 is my reluctance to leave Zelda alone all day?

Anyway, ads. I had fun making them, but so far, they’ve been a pointless waste of money. My clickthrough rate is 0.13%, which is roughly equivalent to 0.

ad for A Gift of Ghosts with gray background and lots of text
The long blurb
ad for A Gift of Ghosts with gray background and lots of text
The simple blurb
ad for A Gift of Ghosts with gray background and lots of text
The fancy ad

I might do better with more comparable authors — the authors I chose were almost at random, just people I liked, with audiences sizable enough to give me a big, reasonably inexpensive pool. (Robin McKinley, Sarina Bowen, Ilona Andrews.) So here’s a question for you: who are your auto-buy authors? Oh, and comments on the ads also welcome. Feel free to make suggestions!

Disinclined

08 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by in Marketing and promotion, Randomness, Zelda

≈ 11 Comments

I woke up this morning feeling… disinclined to engage with the day.

The preceding sentence, both in structure and content, is what happens when you’re reading too much marketing advice. Bah. It’s not that I dislike marketing, actually — more than once in my previous job, I wondered whether I’d have more fun working for the marketing department. I liked selling books. I just don’t like selling my books.

I keep promising myself that I’m going to work on that piece of the self-publishing puzzle — really, truly, any day now — but it makes me want to go back to bed. The crawl under the covers and not re-emerge until summer going back to bed, not the snooze for an extra ten minutes going back to bed.

Anyway, despite my disinclination to engage with the day, a cute little furry face bouncing around at the end of the bed was persistent enough that I dragged myself up and took her for a walk in the rain. I’d thought it was just drizzle when we left the van, but it become clear quite quickly that it was rain-rain. The kind that’s going to sop through your shoes and soak your socks; force you to keep your head down or get water in your eyes; turn your blue jeans into deadweights with minutes. Bizarrely enough, it was very nice. It fit my mood so perfectly. I was grouchy to begin with and there I was, getting soaked and uncomfortable and cold — it was like the universe agreeing with me, it was a day to stay in bed.

The nicest thing about today’s rain is that it was supposed to be yesterday’s rain. The weather forecast for yesterday was bleak and it was both my birthday and S’s day off, which meant bleak was annoying. As it turned out, the weather didn’t reach us as scheduled, so we had an early morning opportunity to fulfill my birthday wish and take Z to the beach. The only thing better in life than taking a puppy to the beach is taking an old dog to the beach and watching her run around like a puppy.

zelda at the beach
My camera batteries died, so I didn’t get to take nearly as many photos as I would have liked. But Z ran and dug and sniffed and had fun, which meant I had fun, too.

After the beach, we stopped in Trinidad for coffee. I already had coffee and it had started to rain so I didn’t much want to go into the shop, but I kept S company anyway. It turned out they had gluten-free chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing, so for my birthday breakfast, I had a chocolate cupcake. Yum. And then we went home and I made gluten-free blueberry pancakes and bacon for my second birthday breakfast. Yeah, it was a high-carb day. (Asparagus risotto with chicken-apple sausage for dinner, more carbs!)

Today’s plan: to write some words. And maybe bake some granola. And for dinner, cioppino over rice, possibly with some gluten-free garlic toast, and definitely with a side salad. Meanwhile, to sit and watch the rain turn the view into an impressionist painting while staying dry inside. I might even admit the truth — that despite the date, it feels like winter! — and turn the heat on.

Cici in Paperback on Sale

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Cici, Marketing and promotion, Self-publishing

≈ 8 Comments

Very, very, very temporarily — as in, it might just last a few hours — Cici and the Curator is on sale in paperback for $5.50. This is literally the cheapest it will ever be — I can’t set the price any lower and I earn nothing from the sale — so if you’d like a paperback copy, now is a good time to buy.

The story is: my dad and stepmom want to celebrate my book releases with a lunch-time book party. I suspect it’s Grace as much as Cici that they think deserves a celebration, because I spent a lot of time very frustrated with that book, but I find this to be a very nice idea and I want to give books to the guests. Alas, author copies take FOREVER. Seriously, two weeks before they even get shipped. And if you want them quickly, you’re going to pay an arm and a leg for shipping.

But an Amazon shopper can get her paperbacks via Prime, no shipping, and by the end of the week. Even at its absolute lowest possible price, the book is more expensive than an author copy but in the circumstances the speed and shipping costs make up for the price difference.

So I lowered the price to buy a bunch of paperbacks to give away. But if you would also like a paperback copy, it’s your chance. I’m going to set it back to $11.99 again, which is the price that earns me $1 in the extended distribution model, but the change takes 24 – 48 hours to implement.

Like I said, I earn nothing from the sale (unless you use the above link, in which case, I might earn .11 or so as an affiliate fee) but the paperbacks are quite pretty and I’d be happy to know that more of them are out there in the world!

Published

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in Campground, Marketing and promotion, RV, Self-publishing, Vanlife

≈ 9 Comments

http://books2read.com/cici

I’m at Trimble Park, one of my favorite campgrounds, and I spent all day yesterday on the computer, fighting to post Cici in the various places that I publish books. All the usual suspects, in other words, including Google Play, which honestly has such a ridiculously bad interface that I’m not sure it’s worth the bother. I kept telling myself that I should just wait until I went back to my dad’s house because internet is a lot faster when it’s not a cell connection, but I guess I felt persistent. 

By evening, it was up in most spots — not Apple, of course, because Apple takes forever and a day — so I went ahead and sent an email to my mailing list. This morning I posted to Facebook, my three different pages, and paid $5 for an ad, so that people might actually see the post, and now I’m posting to my blog, and then I will be done with publishing Cici. This is why I’m really not a very good self-publisher — one is supposed to do all kinds of marketing, release day promotions, newsletters, giveaways, ad campaigns, blah-blah-blah. Does knowing what one is supposed to do and not doing it mean that one is: a) bad at business, b) rebellious in all the wrong ways, c) lazy? All three, obviously. But Cici is available for purchase, so at least I’m getting the “Step One: Write a Book, Step Two: Publish It” part of self-publishing right. 

Meanwhile, it is raining. Not heavily, but persistently. The main reason why I am sitting in this lovely campground is to dump the tanks and I cannot express how unenthusiastic I am about doing that in the rain. Also, I left stuff outside which is now going to have to come into the van and be wet and drippy inside. Sigh. But! The good news is that it’s a lovely tropical summer-feeling rain, so I should be counting my blessings. And I need a shower, anyway, so probably I should just enjoy it. But sewage in the rain always seems to smell more: psychological, I think, not real, but still.

And the clock is ticking, so I guess I can give up on the rain stopping before I pack up. It’ll be good for me, right? Right. 

Cedar Beach Campground

06 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Campground, Grace, Marketing and promotion, Mom, Personal, Zelda

≈ 5 Comments

In the distance — not so very far away at all, but obscured by trees and campers and people stuff — I can see a glimmer of blue. A lake. And I assume it has a nice beach, because this campground was, over the weekend, absolutely filled with families and kids having fun.

I, however, haven’t looked at it, because Zelda can’t really walk and she makes bad choices when left alone. Bad choices! I used to tell R, when I sent him off to do things with his friends as an early and then late-teenager, “Make good choices,” and eventually he said the same thing to me whenever I left the house. It always made me smile.

But I would scold Zelda with that phrase if I could. Alas, she wouldn’t understand. But if I leave her on the floor, she jumps onto the seats to look out the windows, and if I leave her on a seat, she jumps to the floor so that she can go try a different window. She wants to be able to see my return. So no walks for me, because every jump for her causes a yelp of agony and yet she refuses to not jump if I’m not immediately available to stop her.

I like my campsite, though. The campground is very much a seasonal place, a mix of permanent installations and trailers that look like they’ve been here for a while with some short-term spots. But there was a grassy row — I’d guess four campers could get squeezed in if necessary — that I had all to myself. With a cute family kitty-corner to me with three small kids and a brand-new trailer and very Canadian accents. They made me smile, too.

Today is seven years since my mom died. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, about why she is the only person I want when I need to cry. She was a brisk mother. My ex once described her as “austere” to me, which I thought was totally wrong, but she did not suffer fools gladly and his experience of her was undoubtedly different than mine. But she could be quite dispassionate. I could cry to her and she would be warm and loving and sympathetic, but she wasn’t going to take on any of my pain and she was going to stop me as soon as she decided I was wallowing.

It occurs to me that maybe I said it best in my eulogy for her, so I’ll link to that: my eulogy for my mother.

But I didn’t need to be a grown-up with her. It wasn’t about love, it was about her endless ocean of calm. She was extremely good at pulling small children’s loose teeth, because she didn’t particularly care how much you fussed. If you were ready to have the tooth out, she was going to yank it. If you weren’t ready, she was going to shrug and leave you alone. I think she was probably an excellent nurse.

There’s a line in Grace — oh, a paragraph. I’ll quote it:

She wished she could talk to her mom. Just for half an hour. To hear her mom’s voice, to let herself be folded into her mother’s hug. She could imagine the sharp, searching look her mother would give her, followed by the, “Chin up, darlin’. That’s my girl,” words of approval.

Pretty sure my mother never, in my entire life, said those words to me or would have said those words to me. That wasn’t her language, and she wasn’t a southerner. But a look, a nod, a “You’ll be fine,” the confidence in me, but the hug, too. That was my mom. I miss her.

But no wallowing! Moving on, I’m on the road today, headed to a provincial park. Did I mention that I’m in Canada? I’m in Canada. It was fun being confused by the distances on the road signs — 88 miles to Ottawa? How did I get that so wrong! Oh, right, kilometers. Sigh of relief...

And today I’m looking forward to trying out a Canadian grocery store. I’ve eaten only snacks for the past two days — healthy-ish snacks, carrots and nuts and dried fruit and jerky and turkey slices — but I am ready to buy some ingredients and cook some real food.

So those are my goals for the day: get moving, go to a grocery store, eat some real food, and enjoy Canada. And not let Zelda hurt herself anymore. I’m not happy with how the stitches look, but I’m not yet so worried that I am searching for Canadian vets. And she’s putting weight on her foot now, so that’s a good sign.

Eight days until Grace releases. I’m trying not to be anxious about it, but I am. I try to avoid reading reviews, but you have to read the first few in case there are issues with the file or problems with the download. I’m going to bet myself a container of Sanders dark chocolate caramels with sea salt — extremely delicious, not at all good for me — that at least one of the first five complains about pronouns and Avery. If two or more do, I’m going to buy myself something even nicer, although I’m not sure what yet. Maybe a sushi dinner at a good sushi place. A win! (Although if you’re reading this, planning on reading Grace, and willing to write a review, don’t let this influence you, please. I know that people are going to complain about Avery, just the way people complained about not knowing that Henry was black in A Gift of Ghosts, but that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it.)

Ooh, after 10 already, so time for me to get going. More about Grace soon! I’ve got some fun bookmarks to give away, so I need to think about how to do that. But check it out:

spine of book

That is one ridiculously thick book. By my standards, anyway. My sister-in-law’s review: “Oh, it’s so pretty!!!”

Marketing hate

29 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by in Marketing and promotion, Self-publishing

≈ 1 Comment

I have a thing to do. A very straightforward thing, really. I so don’t want to do it. So much so that even thinking about it makes me flee from my computer.

So Amazon has sort of changed the way that they format book info, making the info put into Author Central far more important than it used to be. The basic marketing blurb that one writes (with pain and difficulty, if one is me) gets hidden and requires a click for the reader to see in its entirety, while the Editorial Reviews section is much more visible.

The smart author — eh, it doesn’t even require smarts, it’s pretty basic Marketing 101 — therefore needs to put some info into Author Central in order to have it show up on their book page. (Grammar alert: I am choosing to use the plural pronoun as a gender-neutral pronoun, even though it causes me to cringe in editorial dismay. I’ll get used to it eventually and the world needs gender-neutral pronouns.) Ergo, I should do that. It’s really not hard — read some reviews, pick out some nice statements that people have said, perhaps write to said people and ask their permission if that’s possible, and copy-and-paste the info into Author Central. Within a couple of days, it shows up on the book page.

Easy.

Simple.

Trivial, in fact.

It requires me to read reviews. I don’t want to. I don’t like reading reviews. I like that they exist — I think it’s lovely that I’ve written things that other people have wanted to comment on, whether good or bad (although good is nicer, of course.) But reading them makes me feel exposed and raw and vulnerable, none of which are feelings that I enjoy, and so…

I can do this. Right? My goal for the day: to add content to the Author Central pages for my books. It’ll be pretty obvious if I succeed or not, since it’ll show up on the book pages, but since even thinking about it makes me want to clean my kitchen, take out the trash, do some laundry, and wash my hair… well, we’ll see.

In other writing news, yesterday was a zero-word day, so today is going to be better. In general, though, throwing out my plot and starting over has been good for me. I think the lesson I need to learn is that I’m not a plotter. The story works best for me when it heads off in its own direction. This one is doing that. I’m very much liking Grace. I thought I knew who she was and I mostly did, but she has more of a sense of humor than I realized before getting into her head. She’s the “good daughter,” but not because she feels the need to please people. She’s much more about taking care of people that she privately thinks are a little too incompetent to take care of themselves, and her family amuses her a lot more than I expected them to.

I’m not going to make myself do the Author Central thing before writing, because I suspect it would be more likely to mean no writing. Ugh, but I do need to figure out how to make myself do it. Bribery? Wine? Some type of reward? Some type of punishment for failure? Maybe an alert on my phone to go off every hour until it’s done… I wonder what I’d come up with after I’d been waking myself up for 36 hours in a row?

I think I’ll flee the computer for a while and think about this later!

Home for the holidays

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Bartleby, Marketing and promotion, Personal, Pets, Self-publishing, Zelda

≈ 2 Comments

R is home from school, which makes me happy, happy.

Except that because he’s 6’4″ and the daybed available for sleeping on is not, I’m sleeping in the living room on the small bed. This would be fine/is fine, except that Bartleby, who is the smallest creature in the house (well, bar any unknown creatures like spiders or beetles), is a bed hog. I cannot count how many times I woke up last night feeling like there was no room for me, only to discover that somehow the thirteen-pound chihuahua had angled his way into half the space and Zelda and I were curled up in what was left.

I would try to move him back but he sleeps like a log in the water. You push him and he rolls closer. Whenever I would finally give up and get up enough to lift him into a better position, it meant entirely re-arranging the bed. He finally wound up sprawled across the pillow like a cat, with Zelda and me in the remaining 3/4 of the bed.

R will be home for three weeks, which means B is going to have to get a little more reasonable about sharing the bed. I’d say I’d leave him on the ground, but past experience has taught him that if he makes a low rumble on the ground closest to my head for long enough, I will give in and pick him up. He’s trained me well. But we’ll figure it out, I’m sure.

Yesterday, Ghosts was included in a mailing from themidlist.com. The download numbers were great for a site that doesn’t change for advertising: 695 copies downloaded during the day. I spent money this summer to have Ghosts automatically posted to multiple sites ($15 for 32 sites) and didn’t get results from any of them that were noticeable, plus $30 on Digital Book Today for about 180 downloads, so the midlist results are pretty impressive, comparatively. (Probably I should be writing this on my business blog instead of here — c’est la vie.) Anyway, the weird thing was Amazon’s sales ranks. The sales rank didn’t rise during the day for hours. Instead it kept getting lower. My fascination meant a ton of wasted time while I looked at the sales rank and tried to calculate the math. If 300 downloads meant that my rank dropped 3000 numbers, how many free downloads was Amazon getting? I felt like I was discovering some fascinating business news–Amazon free downloads reaching an amazing peak–but when I came home from bringing C back to her mom (at 8 or so), Ghosts’ rank had skyrocketed to about #280 in the free store. It’s dropped back to 300+ now, so that was its peak, and the numbers were just a glitch or delay in Amazon’s reporting.

Next week I’m running my first ever promotion on A Lonely Magic. Now that it finally has a new cover, I’m doing the Kindle Countdown Deal and lowering the price to .99 for a week. I’ve paid for one ad, $20 on Booksends, so I’m not exactly going crazy with the promotion. But since I haven’t finished writing the sequel yet, there’s no hurry.

Speaking of writing, I should go do some. This feels like writing, but it’s not the kind that might ever let me stop feeling anxious about my mortgage payment, so it probably doesn’t count.

But R’s home. Yay!

Dark Side of the Sun Event

23 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Marketing and promotion

≈ 3 Comments

Oooh, isn’t that cool? I’m going to be attending this event on FB on Friday. The host suggested we do giveaways so I’m also going to be madly giving away copies of A Lonely Magic. He suggested two or three, but I’m sort of thinking that if you show up and chat for a few minutes, I’ll count that as your ticket for a free copy. And if you’re thinking that means I’m done–YES! You are correct. Final proofread corrections completed on Friday. Createspace file created today. I’m not going to publish it until July 10th, so it’s still a few weeks away, but sometime this week–the 24th, I think?–you’ll get to read its very first review.