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What Are You Paying For?

by | Apr 17, 2013 | Books, Writing | 4 comments

you-get-what-you-pay-for-300x298This one is for the writers out there. If you’re not interested in the publishing end of things, feel free to skip on to more fun posts about dogs, cookies, etc.

In my day job, I meet a lot of publicists, editors, authors, and assorted other industry professionals. Most of them are wonderful. Really, really great. I occasionally have contact with a publicist at Penguin, for example, who is so great I’ve been tempted to tell her that Penguin will be publishing my book in November and I wish she’d be my publicist.

Unfortunately, not all publicists are so good at their jobs.

If you’re with a bigger house, you will probably be assigned a publicist. But what if you’re with a small press? Or what if you self-publish? I’d like to take a minute to look at some of the things you may get asked to pay for as part of a package from a packager or from independent publicists.

For example, let’s take a look at some of the offerings from BookTango, which used to be Author Solutions, if I remember correctly.

Here’s something they offer, for a (mere) $799: A professionally written, web-optimized press release about your book that they will

distribute the press release to more than 30,000 opt-in journalists and more than 250,000 news subscribers through our newswire service, PRWeb. While we cannot guarantee which websites will display your press release, our distributed press releases commonly appear on websites such as Google News, Yahoo News and other websites where journalists search daily for relevant news and topics for story ideas.

BookNobodyKnowsWow, sounds good, right?

No. Not right. Sure, they have a newsletter that goes out to 30k subscribers. What’s the open rate for that? And the 250k subscribers are news organizations that subscribe to ALL PRESS RELEASES. That is, they don’t give a hoot about your book, either. Notice how they say they can’t guarantee the book will actually show up anywhere, right?

These are not targeted lists, these are blanket emails. Because of my job I subscribe to a whole bunch of lists like this one and I don’t remember the last time I opened one of these things, let alone actually read more than two lines of the release.

Or how about this one from Jennifer Fusco’s Market or Die website. First, let me tell you something: as far as site design goes, this one’s a hot mess. White (or gray) type on a black background is a huge turn-off. Right there, that’s a strike for me, especially since one of the things she offers for a fee is website critique. But let’s move on to another service, the $300 “Promote Me” service:

Upon completion of the author questionnaire the author will receive: a competitive landscape analysis, a customized Facebook ad, guaranteed to increase your number of likes, one detailed promotion, to launch with the release of your book, Two hours of publicity services – to promote you and your book and a scheduled blog tour –with as many stops as we can possibly book.

Well, okay, that’s full of big words that sound as if they might be useful and worth a few bucks, but let’s get into the nitty gritty.

  • A competitive landscape analysis? Nope. Not going to happen. Not unless your book happens to be in a genre she’s deeply invested in or she has a big staff with wide-ranging genre interests. Plus, authors of fiction don’t compete, so this is utterly useless. I write Romantic Suspense. That does NOT mean I am competing with other RS authors. In fact, the more readers those authors have, the more I am likely to have—a rising tide lifts all boats. I’ve completed more than my share of CLAs for business plans—they’re about how you take marketshare from other companies. But that doesn’t apply to authors of novels.
  • A customized FB ad? Really? That’s something you could do yourself, if you even wanted to, given how little they’re proven to actually do anything. Yes, it may get you more “likes,” but so would giving away a single copy of your book on FB and asking people to “Like” your page to win. “Likes” do not correlate to sales in any significant way. Sales DO correlate to Likes (if you sell a lot of books, people will like you; but if you have a lot of likes, it doesn’t mean you’ll sell a lot of books).
  • One detailed promotion…what the heck is that exactly? Where? What kind? In a shop? Online? Who’s it going out to? What does it consist of? Who’s designing it?
  • Two hours of publicity services—see above: what, exactly, does that consist of? Her talking to you on the phone for two hours? Her talking to other people about you for two hours? Is she any good at that? What’s she going to say and how?
  • And a blog tour with as many stops as possible? Dear god, no. But I am going to deal with that in a separate section, because although Ms. Fusco offers this, there are whole services you can pay for this incredibly poor form of publicity.

Now let’s head over to Promotional Book Tours for a quick look at what can go wrong when you hire someone to manage a book tour for you. These are not expensive, so you may think “well, why wouldn’t I? I know I need to go out on a blog book tour…”  Let’s have a look at their “Value Tour” for $149.

What’s included in this two week promotional tour:

  • Your book blurb, book cover, and author information posted on 50 blogs.
  • A contest that runs for 2 weeks. (Prize minimum of $50 ARV*)
  • A Total of 15 – 18 Tour Stops with approximately.
    • 10 Book Reviews
    • 2 Guest Posts
    • 2 Interviews
    • 3 Book Excerpts

OK, that sounds good, right? If you’re going to be on 50 blogs in the two weeks before your book goes on sale, that’s got to be worth money. Except let’s look at this closely.

  • What appears on the 50 blogs is nothing more than the standard publisher’s information — cover, blurb, bio. No excerpt. No review. Nothing to actually interest the readers…if the blog actually has any readers (more on that in a minute).
  • 10 Book Reviews. Wow, great! Except…who’s doing these reviews? Have you seen the reviews on Amazon and GoodReads? There’s nothing that says how experienced the reviewers have to be or how in-depth the reviews will be.
  • 2 Interviews. With whom? About what? On a blog that will be read by whom?
  • 3 Book Excerpts. Why wouldn’t you just host this on your own site? Why would you go off to someone else’s site and put an excerpt there?
  • 2 Guest posts. This is the real meat, and if you can’t get yourself two guest posts on blogs that are actually pertinent to your subject matter, believe me when I tell you they’re not going to do it either.

It’s not that you shouldn’t do a blog tour, it’s that you shouldn’t pay someone to organize it for you. The way you organize a blog tour is to find blogs that are pertinent and become an active member on those blogs. Comment, or follow the blog’s owners on Twitter or FB and connect with them there. When your book comes out, you approach nicely and ask whether they would feature your book in any way they like, as a review or with an interview or by having you as a guest, or allowing you to do a giveaway. If you don’t know who the tastemakers are in your genre, what on earth makes you think some random service will?

Also, here’s what it says for people who want to “host” blog tours on the Promotional Blog Tours site:

Have you had your blog at least 3 months? Do you love Books? Do you want more Exposure for YOUR blog? Want to earn prizes?

Nothing about how many people actually READ your blog. So your book could get reviews on sites with fewer than 5 actual readers. And you’d be paying for it. Wouldn’t that be fun? On that note, several people offer to advertise you from their Twitter sites, etc. Back to Market Or Die — she has 280 followers. Why would you pay for your book advertising to go out to 280 followers?

Which brings me to the next problem I see all the time. Marketing gurus I’ve never heard of on panels and at conferences.

Now, I don’t know every industry professional. Not by a long shot. But if you’re going to bill yourself as a marketing guru, I damn sure ought to know who you are. And I ought to know who your clients are if they intersect my life in any way at all. That is, if you’re at a conference like Bouchercon, I ought to know you. If you’re at RWA, I ought to know you. Your clients’ names should be in my mind all the freaking time because those are the major conventions of the two genres in which I am involved.

Twitter egg avatarBut you would not believe how often I hear supposed marketing or social media “experts” talking at conferences and I’ve never heard of them. When I go look them up, I’ve never heard of their clients, so what good can they possibly be doing for those people? I look on Twitter and they have an EGG as an avatar. I kid you not. Just because conference organizers don’t do due diligence doesn’t mean you should fall for it. If you hear something from a speaker at a conference, do not assume it’s true. Do not assume it’s right. Do not assume it’s even this year’s information. Do your own research.

“But I don’t want to do the research! That’s why I want to hire someone!”

And there’s the rub, of course. It is easier to plunk down the cash and hope someone else will take care of it.

But there’s a lot of cash you don’t need to drop. Ever.

How many hours do you have to work to earn the $800 press release, the $300 promotion package, the $150 blog tour? Let’s say you’re a well-paid professional in your daily life, making $50/hr. That’s 16 hours of work for the press release. You can definitely do better giving 16 hours of your time to making connections. Six hours for the promotional package. Yep, in six hours you can certainly do the necessary work to promote your book yourself and get your name out there. And in the three hours it requires to pay for the book tour, you can easily request a couple of spots from bloggers in your field.

And if you’ve never been to a conference, I’d highly recommend thinking about doing that rather than anything else with your promotional cash. Because meeting people in person, despite how difficult it may be for you, is worth more than all the rest of this put together. (I have my own post on conferences over at Women of Mystery.)

Save your money. Invest yourself. You’ll be far better off in the long run.

Amazon, Anyone? Why I Use LibraryThing.

by | Apr 10, 2013 | Books | 0 comments

I am a big fan of Amazon as a retailer. I think they do a great job selling things and their customer service is excellent. I’m not a fan of them as a publisher; I find far too many basic errors in their books (things that shouldn’t survive an editor’s pen), the quality level is uneven at best (I find it hard to imagine that they turn down much of anything, good or bad), and—to put it bluntly—they’re ugly.

I am not a huge fan of Goodreads, though I know many people like it and I do have an account there because it seemed the thing to do. It is too “facebook-y” for my liking. I don’t want a(nother) social network, I want a place to list, rate, and categorize my books and—when I wish it—to find someone to talk to about them. And I don’t even like FB itself, why would I want something that seems to operate pretty much the same way? I was not devastated when Amazon bought Goodreads, though I don’t like the idea of the consolidation of data points, but I don’t use GR enough to care all that much.

What I do use, and use extensively, is LibraryThing. I have two accounts there. One that’s public, one that’s private. The private account lists everything, including things that say “OMG SO FREAKING BAD” in the notes. But that’s not stuff anyone else needs to see. The public account lists, for the most part, things I’ve rated 3 or more stars. Occasionally lower-rated things sneak in because I am too lazy to switch over to the private account to put them there. It’s a way for me not to end up buying the same book twice, which has been known to happen, especially with re-releases.

As an aside, there seems to be some confusion, even among those who should know better, about whether Amazon also owns LT. To quote Tim Spalding, the founder and majority stakeholder,

…it’s well known that Amazon has an indirect but real stake in LibraryThing—they bought Abebooks, who were our first minority partner. People keep reporting that Amazon has 40%. That’s simply not true—it fails to take account of our second funder, Bowker. (I remain the majority; I can’t say how the rest divides up.) But this certainly muddies the message.

 

LT offers possibilities for readers to get free books for review, but doesn’t run contests the way GR does. It has forums for discussion, but they’re not super-busy and the code of conduct is fairly strictly enforced…not something I’ve noticed on either GR or Amazon. I find it, for the most part, quite civilized. Which may be its death knell, of course.

On my home page at LT when I log in, I see not only the most recent few books people I am connected to have added, but also local events going on at bookstores near me, and the most recent posts in the discussions I am following on the forums. Other stuff, too, but those are the main things. It’s clean, not cluttered. It’s not fancy or flashy, not even pretty, to be honest, but I don’t care about that. It doesn’t have a lot of money behind it, so changes happen very slowly there, which I quite like.

So if you’re among those who find the Amazon takeover of GR problematic, I encourage you to check out LibraryThing. It may not be for you, but maybe you’ll find a happy new home.

When in a Reading Slump

by | Feb 28, 2013 | Books | 0 comments

SEAL Team 666 by Wes OchseLately, I’ve been in a reading slump, with nothing appealing to me. And then I remembered that back when it came out, I grabbed Weston Ochse’s SEAL Team 666. Now, this is not my usual read, but everything about it called to me (including the bits of stuff Ochse had written for Criminal Element), so I had to have it. I took it out this afternoon on the train and found it was just what I needed to pull me out of my slump.  Yes, there are the occasional somewhat dubious word choices, but they are easily balanced by the sheer wonder that is sentences like this one:

The image of a gang of demonic Stretch Armstrongs slinging themselves from the top rope of his imagination like whacked-out serial-killer midget professional wrestlers wrenched his vision back to his compatriots.

That, my friends, is pure poetry.

TItular Troubles

by | Feb 25, 2013 | Books, Writing | 2 comments

Fallen Angel by Jonelle PatrickSo recently I’ve run up against a problem I never foresaw. Well, I foresaw part of it — I fully expected that when I sold my book, my editor would want to change my title. What I didn’t anticipate was that we wouldn’t be able to come up with one.

Now, currently, my title is DEAD AND BURIED. It’s not an exciting title, I’ll be the first to admit, but it’s very descriptive of the book. No spoilers to say there are dead bodies, buried bodies, buried secrets, etc all over the place in the manuscript. After all, it’s romantic suspense.

The problem is that my editor feels as if the title doesn’t say “romantic suspense,” it just says “suspense.” Fair enough. I tend to write suspense with romantic elements rather than romance with elements of suspense.

But every title I thought sounded good ran into the same problem — too much mystery, not enough romance. So I was on the phone with Clare Toohey and she suggested I just give up and call it Ethan and Lucy Enjoy Romantic Suspense Together.

Well, fine. But you know, this is part of a series, which means that the next book would be Tara Jean and Jake Enjoy Romantic Suspense Together. And the series, naturally, would be called the Enjoy Romantic Suspense Together series. So the full title of the first book would be Ethan and Lucy Enjoy Romantic Suspense Together (Enjoy Romantic Suspense Together Series Book 1).

It didn’t get me any closer to a real title, but it did give me a laugh. I hope it gives you one, too.

*I chose this picture to go with this post because I like that cover and it’s my publisher—see the little DNA-looking thing in the bottom left corner? That’s their logo.