So screwed up

Prudhoe Castle main entrance

 I may have complained about Good Reads in a previous post but I am not apologising for doing so again. It is the most infuriating site I know.

I saw a post on Facebook  recently that someone is prepared via a webinar to explain how to use Good Reads, so I thought I could at least watch and listen and maybe enlightenment would strike. 

Seems I cannot get into the Good Reads site any more. My User name, password, etc, do not foot the bill any longer.  I asked to change the info and  was told (eventually) to contact my admin supervisor  (or some similar term). What it fails to do is give me any clue How To Reach that person.

 So I guess the helpful webinar is going to be missed by me because Goodreads  is so screwed up I cannot use it.

Are you an Indie?

Not long ago being an Indie author meant paying to get your books printed and shipped to you, and then selling them, one by one, as best you could in your local area. Waterstones would look down their nose at your slim little volume and local libraries would take one grudgingly, flick through it and say “Oh, but it’s such small print.”

Then the ebook and Kindle appeared on the scene and everything changed except the work - the hours, days, weeks and months of research, writing, editing, and re-editing to get a manuscript ready for publication – that hasn’t changed at all.

But everything else has and is still changing. An indie author now needs to market and sell their books in a very different way.

An ebook can be transmitted, in an instant, anywhere in the world. But to make this work, you must be online, with internet, blog, website, and a working knowledge of social media. You also need to be alert to the constant changes in this world.

Never heard of metadata? You need to check this site: an expert at writing metadata. Make sure you know about keywords and categories. Decide if you are sticking with Amazon and ignoring every other selling channel, or if you want to sell through other outlets as well.

Then there’s the question of designing a cover yourself or paying someone to do it. Some people believe you must pay for editing not once but twice and sometimes three times. By the time you have paid out all this money, it is doubtful if you will ever get that money back in royalties.

Then there is advertising. Such a tricky business many authors are signing wannabe authors up to expensive courses on how to achieve success with online ads. Teaching people to write has become a college, university and freelance opportunity - and an expensive one at that. How many people can afford £20k for a university course to teach someone to write a novel? 

Not I. I'll just soldier on, learning by doing it the hard way. By trial and error. Doing something and seeing if it works. Discarding it if it does not. It keeps me out of trouble. If I were twenty something and craving a career as a successful author, all thee expensive routes might be worth taking, but I'm not, so it isn't. Oh, and by te way, have you noticed I now have an author page? Jen Black's Author page should find me.

Social Media: is it any good?

Sometimes I think I waste my time on pointless social media activity when I could be writing more of the next story. But then I think I need Facebook and Twitter 'cos my readers are there. How else will they ever get to know about me? Without paying out good money I don’t know any other way to grow a readership for my blog and books, and paying out goes against the grain. If I were 25 and had a whole career ahead of me, then spending hard-earned money on promotion would be a good idea. But I’m not 25, so it isn’t.

(Note to self: read Chris Syme’s post: “Taming the Social Media Beast.”)

Social media is often useful. How else would I know the single dads and lonely widowers that proliferate on Facebook are scammers doing what is known as “catfishing?”

OTOH, the constant stream of words can get irritating, and that is a good time to take a break from both Fb and Twitter. I know I’ll drift back, but the rest does me good, and I get more writing done. And see more of my other half!

If readers want to friend me, I welcome them, but I don’t beg for “likes.” Authors often send out requests for me to like their page or book or whatever, but if the person and their work is unknown to me, then I don’t respond. If I have read the author and truly like their books, then I do.

“50 people who love your books and tell their friends about them are worth a whole lot more than 500,000 fake followers somebody bought from a click farm in Bangladesh.” (Until I read Anne Allan’s blog, which I dip into every now and then, I never knew about click farms anywhere.)

I often doubt that social media is any good for selling books. Endless “buy my book” Tweets, or repeated quotes from your books do not sell books anymore. I’ve often read that my social media should be 20% marketing and 80% interesting, friendly stuff that’s useful to my readers. So I try sharing funny memes, inspirational author quotes, and pics of my dog Tim; I’ve shared grammar jokes, tales of my hols in rural France, and pics of Aidan Turner and Rafa, but I’ve no way of knowing how much good it does me.

I’m told that if you Tweet that a book is free or on sale, people notice. I once had 19,000 plus downloads on a free book, but that was back in 2012, and I don’t think that sort of rush happens anymore. But maybe I shall try it and see what happens. I must admit it is a while since I tried a "free" week.

Odd world.

The world is a strange place these days. First Brexit and now Trump. It is difficult to know if one is wise to book a holiday next year in case by then the world will have changed out of all recognition. People are talking about the feeling of the country being like this before the outbreak of the Second World War, but maybe that’s being just a tad too pessimistic.

I hope so. I’ll just plod on doing what I normally do and hoping for the best.

Twitter and Facebook are  awash with comments. Everyone now voices their opinions and expects the world to agree. Lately we’ve watched the arguments develop between rival political groups both here and in the US and it seems that s/he who shouts the loudest often wins the argument. (Of course, that doesn’t mean they are right. Only that they shout loudest.)

Reading social media statements is often a hoot because I’m convinced that some swig a bottle of wine (or the equivalent – insert your brew of choice) and then get busy with their ipad or iphone. Grammar and spelling are forgotten (or never learned), and it seems to me that those on the left of the political centre shout loud and often. Those on the right of the centre maintain a stiff silence for the most part, probably because they don’t want to receive a van load of rude tweets and posts.

I suppose the silence makes the lefties think a) those on the right are cowards b) they know they are wrong anyway and c) I’ll say it again, louder just to see if I get a response.

People argue about tennis players and actors, not to mention rape scenes on Poldark. They’ll probably argue about a whole lot more in arenas where I never venture. Strictly is argumentative enough for me – and I do wish that Tess would stop interrupting the judges, and that the silly shrieking with glee that goes on would stop, too. Sometimes it sounds like a kid’s party. Oops! Now I will  have everyone descending on me complaining that I dislike spontaneity and the sounds of happiness. It's not true!

It's OK. Tim (above  right) will keep me sane.

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!

Learning new tricks

Changes for a new, summery feel, done on a day where the temperature in our garden has reached 26 degrees. (I'll see how I feel about it on a cold, rainy day.) Even Tim the dog has laid around, curled up or sprawled out behind me, his back touching mine as I pulled some weeds, which is why I've posted a nice cool picture of the stream that was roaring down the valley in flood not so long ago.

I'm making a determined effort on using social media after attending out training day at Shepherd's Dene on Friday, focussing on on Facebook and Twitter. I've never been very sure of what I was doing with Twitter, but I have a better understanding  of it now. I'm busy searching out hashtags - it took me a long time to realise they existed so that like minded posts could be grouped together - and collecting @addresses. Heaven knows if it will make any difference, but I'll feel as if I've done my bit and made it worth Caroline's time teaching us all.

I'm also editing for the umpteenth time, and still making changes. It is amazing how much I can still sharpen the dialogue and tighten up the plot when I thought I'd "finished it" ages ago. I thought I was editing for typos and silly mistakes only. Of course, I still find quotation marks missing at one end of a sentence, and sometimes there's a full stop instead of a comma. Occasionally predictive text has gone and done something silly, so I've learned to look for that now. But the Dowager Queen is slowly emerging from this edit as a much more active character determined to save the Scots throne for her daughter Mary.

If anyone has comments on the new look of my blog I'd like to hear them. I think some people found the black background difficult. I hung onto it for so long because I always thought it showed off the photographs as nothing else could. I still think that, but recognise it is time for a change.

Book marketing for SPA

Here's a new name - Squarespace 7 - which I will forget the moment I closed the page on screen....

The self-publishing landscape is shifting and, as ever, authors struggle with marketing.

You'e probably noticed, like me, that Facebook has been overtaken by marketing people, which explains why Fb is using more and more sophisticated algorithms to filter out what they call “less-relevant content.”

FB’s advertising options now are easier, cheaper, and often more effective for authors. An author can “boost” a post for a few dollars which helps, though does not guarantee a popular post will go viral.

Social media is a much more visual medium now. Authors may find Pinterest, Instagram, and even Snapchat can help them. Instagram is great for author visibility, but does not lead to sales the same way Pinterest does.

There are many New Marketing Tools. Email newsletters, paid advertising, a compelling author website are all very well, but an author can build on this foundation.

There are opportunities for cross-pollination between marketing platforms and tools. “For example, Squarespace 7, launched last fall, offers enhanced social media integration for cross-posting blog posts and book news, as well as an Amazon Block for authors to more easily add a link from Amazon to their site. It also offers authors new Cover Pages that allow for a splash page to promote a particular new book or offer.”

There is a move toward a “less is more” approach: basic pages on social media, viewed on a mobile device, promoting the book and its key offerings—but little else.

NewMedia keeps the message basic in order to stick out in a crowded market. It is just a “four-screen site” for the book, with a home page to capture attention, the next screen with more info about the book, a third screen about the author, and a final screen with reviews and testimonials.

Integrate SumoMe into a WordPress site and it offers plug-ins like List Builder (which promises to increase daily email list signups) and Heat Maps (which help an author see where their site visitors are clicking. BookGrabbr offers an easy way for authors to share selections from their books through social media accounts, making it easier for followers on LinkedIn and Facebook to learn more about the title. The tool also offers in-depth analytics, such as how many impressions (friends of friends or followers of followers) the book received, how many people clicked the “Buy Now” button, and the demographic and geographic information of the readers.

Email marketing gives you a direct conduit into your readers. Entice readers to your list by offering a free novella or novel, and then get as much traffic onto the page where you’re making the offer as possible.

Read the longer piece:
Marketing self-published books requires leveraging both new tools and tried-and-true strategies
By Alex Palmer |
Sep 25, 2015

Is it luck or is it skill?

An article in the Telegraph by Arts Correspondent Hannah Furness, gives me hope.

Rachel Abbott has been named as the 14th bestselling author in the last five years on Kindle, after having her book rejected by ten agents.

She joins a list that includes  E L James’ Fifty Shades series, Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn and cult authors including George R R Martin, Suzanne Collins and Stieg Larson and has beaten Yann Martel, Jojo Moyes, and Jeffrey Archer, after releasing four novels on the Amazon e-reader.

 She retired in 2010 and decided to write a book for her own pleasure. Her first novel was priced at £1.99 – not cheap by Kindle standards – and began to get noticed after Abbott used her marketing experience – she ran an interactive media company, developing software for the education market - to get exposure through social media and forums.

She is one of hundreds of thousands of authors who have chosen to self-publish with Kindle, and is the number one bestselling independent author in its charts.

Kindle is now celebrating its fifth anniversary, after growing from 400,000 titles to more than four million. Analysis of its sales figures, released yesterday, showed Huntingdon, Cambridge, buys the most books per capita, while Yorkshire was crowned “the romance capital of the north”.

H'mmm. Memo to self - must find those sales figures, and must also promote myself though social media. and with reference to the title of this post, I think it is a mixture of both - plus something else - a knowledge of social media!

Facebook changes

I never noticed that some people “Like” their own posts on Facebook as soon as they post them. If I had noticed I would probably have thought Why Bother? But it seems that it does matter, after all. Facebook’s interface has changed a lot lately and the most disliked changes were to the news feed and the introduction of the Ticker.

Now I must confess I hadn’t noticed a Ticker. (Sometimes a six-year-old could do better than me with Facebook.) Now I read that Facebook selects which of your friends’ posts you see showing up in your news feed. Under the new “Edge Rank” system, friends that don’t “Like” and comment on your posts usually stop seeing them altogether before too long. I had noticed people "disappearing" from my news feed, but thought they had given up on Fb and gone on to better things. In order to compensate for not showing your posts in some of your friends’ news feeds, Facebook added the Ticker – the box in the right-hand column that lists the activities of your friends as they happen. Ah, I had noticed that in a passing glance sort of way. I didn’t read it.)

Now if you “Like” a post, that action is noted in your friends’ ticker boxes, making them aware that you have posted something even if it doesn’t show up in their news feeds. So the next time you see one of your friends “Like” their own post, they probably aren’t giving themselves a pat on the back. Instead, they’re giving you an opportunity to check out a post that might never make it into your news feed. The article I read recommended that we all “Like” our own posts all the time – which probably defeats whatever intention the Fb wizards had in the first place!

Facebook, Twitter and blogging

Crinan

Is it me, or does anyone else think that interest in blogs, Facebook and Twitter is dwindling? Facebook is less and less interesting but that is possibly because Facebook is narrowing down the posts that I see. Certainly the variety of posts is not there any more. If I click on something, I get more posts of a similar nature, and I'm now up to my nostrils in videos of cute animals doing cute things. Nothing wrong with them in and of themselves, but too many is just ... too many. Likewise the pics of cruelty to animals. I can do without those images haunting my dreams. If those pics help the animals by stirring the conscience of someone in America to help the poor creatures, then that's good, but there's nothing I can do from the UK.

Twitter seems to have been taken over by American authors advertising their books. Perhaps my choice of followers has something  so with it. I haven't exactly been active in seeking a wide variety of Twitterers. When someone follows me, I usually follow back, so I suppose I can only blame myself there. Must widen my circle of interest.

Blogs I used to follow seem to have tipped over into oblivion, with no posts going up for the last few months. There are less followers coming to my blog, but that might be because the blog posts are linked to both Facebook and Twitter. If people read the blogs on either of them, I don't see any record of it back on my blog. So I could be read by more and more people and not know it. Or I could be read by fewer and fewer people, and be aware of it. How can I be sure which is really going on? Anyone know?

Christmas & Social Media

It's time Christmas was gone. We're at the boring stage now - soggy wet weather, wind and rain, temperature around 5 degrees C. Fridge full of leftovers or odd scraps that won't make anything else. People getting crabby with too much food, too much wine and not enough exercise. TV mostly rubbish aimed primarily at kids.

Did my best. Can't help or change the weather, but regulated my intake of food and wine, took a walk every day. Yesterday stopped a young dog from plunging into swollen stream to reach young owners searching for him - the chances of being swept out into the nearby river were pretty high.

Did some work every day, too. Going back to Twitter this morning, noticed how several people keep trying to stop authors promoting their books. Don't understand their logic when they promote a) themselves b) their own authors and c)what they had for breakfast lunch and dinner. That's interesting? To whom? The truth is that everyone on Twitter is promoting something, even if it is only themselves. The urge to join in is there, and if  a book is the only thing you have to talk about, then why not? Nobody is forced to read what comes up on Twitter. I skip a lot of posts to find the ones that hold some interest for me. Live and let live, I say.

Social media and writers

I’ve noticed lately that interaction via my blog seems less than it used to be. I get the nasty feeling that my posts are boring the pants off everyone. Feedback via Comments grows less and less, possibly because the word verification thingy is annoying and frustrating – I know I find it so on other blogs and often give up without getting my comment to “go” through. And I'm aware that going to Australia for six weeks meant my blog deviated from the usual writing based topics - perhaps that turned people away.

There’s another suspicion I have though; that other media are attracting people away from blogs in general. Not only Facebook and Twitter, but mysterious things called Pinterest and Tumblr. I have no idea what they are and I’m not about to find out. It is easy enough to waste time on FB and T without joining more things! If this is the reason, it is something I cannot change.

 Writing has always been my main interest blogwise, though sometimes I feel like blowing off steam about one thing or another. Or I’ll record something that I may want to come back to at a later date – blogs are handy vehicles for that. But there’s only so much you can say about writing without repeating yourself.

That’s when I go to Twitter in the hope of picking up some item of interest.
I can scroll through a lot of posts and pick out what I’m interested in and ignore the rest. That may sound rude, but as people follow me, I feel obliged to follow back – it seems only courteous – which means I get loads of tweets from people I don’t know about things I’m not interested in.
But turn it the other way about and it also means there are a lot of people seeing whatever I choose to put out. But there’s the difficulty - as far as Tweeting goes, I’ve never really got the hang of it. How to say something engaging and witty in 140 characters defeats me, but others seem to find it no problem at all. I sit and stare at the screen but nothing comes to mind. I'd never make an advertising person!

 Facebook seems easier. I actually have an occasional conversation there with people I know or have come to know. The only person I know who doesn’t have a FB page is my other half, but he may yet be persuaded. They say it is the most likely place readers will look for new reading material, so that seems a good enough reason to stay there. If forced to choose, I’d opt for my blog and Facebook.