The all-important Blurb

 

"Better to perfect the blurb before you publish." 

I wish I had read that sentence years ago! 

But I’m finally learning something of the trade, so I have been browsing top-selling books in genres similar to mine. I used to think the blurb should tell what the book is about, but now I know it is to reveal the genre/subject without confusing or contradicting the title or the cover. And, of course, it should make the reader want to read the book.

Bookshop browsers have, for many reasons, a short attention span and the bottom line is that the blurb needs to be concise. Don’t add anything that is unnecessary. Arouse the curiosity of the potential reader and make them look inside the book. Do it by creating questions.

If the reader cannot guess the genre, then the blurb has failed. Check that it is punchy, flows well and check for errors. Match language to target audience, do your homework and your research. Make sure your best point is in the first line, because Amazon will truncate much of the blurb. If your book isn’t selling as much as you’d like, then take a long look at your cover, the title, the blurb and the story idea.

The blurb is the easiest thing to change, so start with that.

Only dimwits forget the market

Every so often I trawl through my documents file and get rid of stuff I don't need any more. Sometimes I find little gems - here's one, written a long time ago by Stephen King. I've shortened it a good deal  but you can find the original if you google it. The comments in italics are mine

Tips for writing from Stephen King

Type. Double-space. Use a nice heavy white paper. (I wonder if he does the equivalent on a computer?)

Be self-critical. (Sometimes I think I'm too self-critical)

Remove every extraneous word. (And by do they creep in....)
You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new. 

Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft
When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off. 

Know the markets
Only a dimwit would send a tender story about a mother and daughter making up their differences on Christmas Eve to Playboy … but people do it all the time. If you write a good story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion? Would you send your kid out in a snowstorm dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top?

Write to entertain
Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. (I think serious ideas survive in the UK fiction. Not that they are always an entertaining read.)

Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?”
The answer needn’t always be yes. But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.

How to evaluate criticism
It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone – or even most everyone – is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

An agent? Forget it. For now
Flog your stories around yourself. If you’ve done a novel, send around query letters to publishers, one by one, and follow up with sample chapters and/or the manuscript complete. And remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be able to take your pick of good agents.

If it’s bad, kill it
When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

The Marketing Headache

Let's face it, marketing is a headache for most indie writers. We're just not geared for it. This is the one time when I really bemoan the fact that I'm not published by one of the big publishing houses, because then they would have a department that took care of marketing. Naturally, not all authors get the same kind of marketing push, but any push at all would be better than the way I'm doing it!

So, I'm re-evaluating how I do (when I get around to it, that is) my marketing. I've relied on Facebook, but FB has changed so much that it ain't working any more. The yahoo groups I used to use seem moribund now and I'm not sure if there are  equivalents hiding in the undergrowth. It seems that authors mostly tallk to other authors via FB, which is good but I'm not sure that authors are into buying books in quantities.

While I'm on the run-up to perfecting my soon to be released book, I shall be scouting the blogs of successful authors to see what they recommend. More than authors on FB these days I see people who want to sell or teach me how to make a million sales in a week. It must surely be the new industry of IT! I followed Mark Dawson for a while, but his course is far too expensive for me to consider, plus which there are an awful lot of words to wade through before you get to anything useful or sensible. I wonder how many takers they have? Will everyone suddenly be using new and different techniques for selling online? I watch with interest.

Taking Note

I'm a notetaker when I listen to talks, especially when the subject is writing. The trouble is I rarely go back and read the notes I've taken. Take the batch I found yesterday, torn out of a notebook and stuffed inside another, smaller notebook;  notes, unloved,  from a meeting I attended in 2014 and have totally forgotten.

The heading is "Marketing = Product - Price - Promotion - Place."
Half-hearted notes below this state that I must know to whom I am selling my product; well the answer to that is easy - anyone who reads, and will buy. Do I have an average client in my head? Of course not. I haven't a clue what kind of people read historical romances. 

Price, the notes say, reflect the quality of the  product in people's minds. Price them cheaply and people won't think they're worth buying. I didn't take note of the obvious corollary - that expensive books  must be "good quality" because I don't think that is necessarily true. I love reading and buying books, but I won't pay above a certain price for them - usually. I did pay £18 for a Dunnett hardback some years ago, but that was most definitely a "one-off." My notes say 77p/99$ is the lowest price on Amazon

Which leads to Place - where to sell?  I know the answer to this one - and in my own confused way, I have been tracking down web sites where readers are searching for romantic historical fiction. So far I've limited my efforts to Twitter and Facebook. No paid ads and no use of Instagram or anyof the other, younger sites. At least I know I shouldn't promote my books where the taste is for thrillers or crime. 

My notes say Promotion depends on whether you are selling ebook or print, but I see many authors promoting both on the same sites. I don't know if it works for them or not. It takes me all my time to promote e-books and let the reader discover there is a print copy - I did one for Queen's Courier and Abduction - when they go to the Amazon site. I hope that comes as a nice surprise.

But then, I'm probably not doing any of this as I should be doing it.

Getting people to buy

85% of the U.S. population uses social media which means  if any self-published author wants to sell their books, they should start  using social media. Sometimes I wish I'd taken marketing at university instead of plain old English Lang & Lit but then marketing was barely heard term at the time. Already I can hear my d-i-l telling me "Marketing is not selling, Jen."

She has tried many times to explain the difference to me, since her field is - you guessed it - marketing. 

A normal dictionary definition of marketing is: 

"the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising."
However, the business online dictionary goes further:

"The managementprocess through which goods and services move from concept to the customer. It includes the coordination of four elements called the 4 P's of marketing:
(1) identification, selection and development of a product,
(2) determination of its price,
(3) selection of a distribution channel to reach the customer's place, and
(4) development and implementation of a promotional strategy.
For example, new Apple products are developed to include improved applications and systems, are set at different prices depending on how much capability the customer desires, and are sold in places where other Apple products are sold." 

Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/marketing.html#ixzz48cWB0Yg9
So now you see why I wish I'd done this at uni. How on earth do I go about discovering peoples' habits, hobbies, interests? Help!

Marketing blues

I wrote a great blog post, pressed the publish button and the darned thing disappeared. I hope this is not a sign of how my day is going to go. So I'll start again. Now my book is out in the big wide world, I'm contemplating how to get people to buy it. Marketing is the tool, say the Createspace experts.

Marketing, they tell me, is the process of communicating with the rest of the world and telling them about your book, making them want to buy it without doing any direct selling. Who is your target audience, they ask. Anyone who reads historical fiction, I say. Not good enough. Who are they? Where do they live? What age group, social class? What are their hobbies? Which newspapers do they read?

I shrug my shoulders. Haven't a clue. Anyone between the ages of 14 and 94 might read historical novels, and the only link between them is probably just that - they like historical fiction! (I had to pick numbers, but I'm sure there are people over 95 and under 14 who read historical fiction!)

There are lots of sites on the internet these days who do nothing but promote books. Some charge, and there are lots of warnings from authors who've paid hard-earned cash and been disappointed with the results. So I think I shall steer clear of such places. I'm not enamoured of the way Twitter is flooded overnight with promotional post which I assume originate in the USA. I whizz by them - as they come batches this is very easy to do. The general opinion seems to be that 1 tweet in 10 may mention your book as long as you are offering other contents on the other 9. That seems reasonable to me, and the same seems to operate on Facebook.

This time I've let everyone know (or I will have done shortly) that my book is available, and this is a first for me. I'm slowly investigating lists of promotional sites, and may yet come up with some goodies. I'll stick with my promotional yahoo groups and see what the results are like.

It's quite a game, this writing lark. I thought the writing was the hard part!