Writing and Publishing News

Have you ever arrived at a book festival or speaking engagement without enough (or even any) books to sell? It happens. I’ve had some close calls when shipping books to an individual for a conference or to the event location. In one case, the books were there, only no one could find them. In another, the individual forgot to bring them from her home to the event. In both cases, I did get my books in time.

I know authors who have counted on their publishers or printers to ship books to them or to another destination and someone dropped the ball. The books did not arrive in time.

Here are some things to consider when you need to order books from your publisher or printer:

• Order far in advance of the event—say a month before.
• Have the books shipped to you and you either ship to the event or schlep them there yourself.
• Get the name of the person who takes your order.
• Follow up with that person a few days after the order is placed.
• Ask for a tracking number so you can track the shipment.
• Even if you ship books ahead for an event, also carry books with you along with plenty of promotional pieces. If your shipment doesn’t arrive, you can display copies of your book and take orders
• If you’ve had your books shipped to the event, check to make sure your books arrived before packing to travel there.

The most important message in this guide is to plan in advance, think ahead, do not procrastinate—place the order in plenty of time in case of problems with lost or damaged packages.

You’ll find this and many other tips, ideas, information and resources in my books, “Publish Your Book,” “Promote Your Book” and “Talk Up Your Book.” These three books are available at Amazon.com in print, Kindle and audio as well as at most other online and downtown bookstores. Or order them here: http://www.matilijapress.com

If you love a mystery, especially one with cats, check out my Klepto Cat Mystery novels. “Catnapped,” “Cat-Eye Witness” and “Sleight of Paw,” all by me, Patricia Fry.

If you have been a published author for more than a few months, you are beginning to understand the scope of your responsibilities as marketing agent. You know now that, in order to sell copies of your book, you must promote it. You now “get” the concept that if no one knows about your book, they won’t be buying it. Right?

So you have built (or plan to build) a website around the theme of your book. You are visible through several social media sites. You have your book at Amazon. You’re seeking reviews and asking people to post them publicly. But what about personal contacts?

Are you going where your audience is? Are you talking about your book wherever you go? Have you even told the folks on your email list about your marvelous book, yet?

You’ve probably heard the term, “elevator speech,” or “30-second pitch.” Every author needs one. By way of explanation, I might say, this is your opportunity to share information about your book—to let people know it exists and to sway them to purchase it.

Here are some tips:

• Prepare an interesting, catchy pitch to share with folks you meet while you’re pursuing your daily activities. This might be at work, during sales meetings, at the coffee shop, in line at the post office, at social gatherings, at the airport, on the subway, etc.
• Listen to potential customers’ questions and comments and adjust your pitch to accommodate them. In other words, talk about aspects of your book that would be of most interest or value to the individual. If I’m talking to a non-cat person who has friends and family with cats, I will focus on the gift aspect of my Klepto Cat Mystery books.
• Be alert to legitimate opportunities to talk about your book, so that your spiel and the timing of it are appropriate and timely. If I see someone wearing a shirt with a cat figure on it or buying cat food at the grocery store, I might start a conversation with them by asking about their cat. Then, where appropriate, I introduce myself as the author of the Klepto Cat Mystery series and hand them a bookmark featuring one of my books.
• If you have trouble formulating an elevator speech or you find it difficult to talk off the cuff, join a Toastmasters Club and participate. You will be amazed and pleased at how quickly and expertly your skills will develop.
• Practice, practice, practice.

Readers today like to have a relationship with the authors they read. The more personable you are and the more enticing your spiel, the more books you will sell, guaranteed.

I’m Patricia Fry. You can learn more about me and my work here:

http://www.matilijapress.com

http://www.patriciafry.com

For addition help, support and education for authors, join SPAWN (Small Publishers, Artists and Writers Network) http://www.spawn.org

Thank you for the many comments with regard to my recent blog tour. Numbers of you were interested in the process and the results. Some of you are on the verge of doing a blog tour yourself sooner rather than later. I’d like to hear how it goes. Keep me in the loop.

I’d also like to say that the results of a blog tour, as with the results of any large promotional effort—having a booth at a well-attended book festival, speaking to a large group, etc.—can be measured in something even more valuable than immediate sales. What is that something? Exposure.

Exposure leads to sales. Someone may have heard about your book when it first came out, but didn’t buy it. When they see it again at a book festival or at their favorite site during a blog tour, this reminds them that the book exists. Without that second or twenty-second reminder, they may never purchase it for themselves or for their friends. They may have forgotten all about it.

Exposure can compute into sales over time. Think about your own purchasing habits. Do you always buy something you think you might want the first time you see it or hear about it? Of course not. Sometimes you aren’t sure you actually want it. You want to think about it. Sometimes you forget about it until you see it again or hear about it again. You may or may not buy it at the next opportunity. But the second time you see or hear about it, your interest may be piqued a little more. If you run across that item again and the timing is right, you may eventually purchase it.

But if you had never seen it or thought about it after that first time, you would definitely never purchase it.

As an author who wants to develop a large readership for your books, you cannot stop promoting—ever. And you cannot consider any promotional activity a failure based on a low number of sales. If you reached a lot of people with your information, if more people now know about your book and how to purchase it, your activity did not fail. You achieved something more valuable than sales—exposure. But as I indicated in my anecdote above, exposure is meant to be built upon. You can’t stop promoting and expect to keep selling books.

I visited five blogs during my book tour—all of them designed to attract readers for books such as my Klepto Cat Mystery series (Catnapped, Cat-Eye Witness and Sleight of Paw). Sales were brisk during the week of the tour. But just look at the possibilities as far as exposure for these books. If visitors to these blogs averaged even 30 each, that’s 150 visitors who may or may not have heard of my series before. Add to that the people who stopped in that week at my own two blogs and my Facebook, Twitter and list promotion, as well as the promotion each blogger did. This number might reach as many as 500 or 5,000 or more. I sent my enewsletter with information about the tour to nearly 2,000 subscribers.

I think that authors have difficulty taking exposure seriously because it isn’t something concrete like sales. You never know just how many people have been affected by your promotional efforts and you probably never will. Exposure is not something you can typically touch, feel or measure. You have to trust that it is there working for you anytime you reach out to your audience—your potential readers.

I’d love to hear/read some of your stories around the theme of exposure. Have you experienced the results of exposure along your book promotion journey? How do you regard exposure—how important is it to your efforts?

Well, I did it! I finally went on a blog tour. I’ve wanted to do it ever since I first heard about this form of book promotion, but I didn’t get excited about it until I began writing fun fiction books. It just didn’t sound like much fun or that it would be worthwhile to organize a book tour for my publishing and book marketing books. So the first tip I would offer is, make sure your book is conducive to this type of book promotion. While, certainly, some nonfiction books would do well promoted through a blog tour, this mode of promotion is most conducive to fiction and, perhaps, other books that are fun, entertaining and meaningful in today’s world. Children’s books might do well on a blog tour directed at educators, librarians and parents, for example. I can see a unique book on gardening-fun, party-giving ideas, humor, a fun book on words and countless others being successfully marketed via a blog tour.

What is a Blog Tour?

Okay, let’s back up a notch. A lot of people—even savvy authors—have asked me this week, “What is a blog tour?” You’re probably familiar with the concept of “guest blogging”—being a guest blogger. Doing a blog tour is similar to being a guest blogger, but more organized and targeted. Generally, for a blog tour, you isolate a certain number of blogs to visit during a certain period. It’s exactly the same as doing a book tour throughout your state or several states during a certain period (a week, month or so), only a blog tour is conducted via blog sites and not in person.

Steps to Creating Your Blog Tour

1: The first step to organizing your blog tour is to do a study of blogs that are frequented by your target readers. You may not even be aware of how many blog sites there are related to the theme or genre of your book. Do Internet searches to find them. Here’s a tip—some bloggers list their favorite blogs at their blog sites. Add these sites to your search. Here are a couple of blog directories to help you in your search: http://blogtopsites.com and http://www.technorati.com Of course, I always recommend doing a targeted search using keywords such as: “blog” along with words related to the theme of your book—“cats,” “romance,” “dark mystery,” “political drama”…

2: Check out each potential blog site. Is it active? You want to participate with a site where the host posts regularly. If the last post was dated 2009 or if the host posts every three months, walk away. Does this blog site get a lot of comments? This is a good sign that people are visiting—and you want to involve yourself with a site that attracts a lot of your readers. Does this host do blog tours? You can find out by looking at their “review policy,” for example. Also scroll through the blog and see if you can locate guest blogs (blogs written by someone other than the host).

3: Decide how long you want to run your tour. I did mine for five days and that kept me pretty busy. I recommend starting slow. Committing yourself to a two-week tour right out of the gate might be overwhelming.

4: Choose a time-frame. Make it at three-weeks or a month out.

5: Contact those hosts whose blogs you want to visit. Check their “review policy” to find out the best way to contact each one. Let them know that you are scheduling a blog tour and you’d like them to be a part of it. Give them your time-frame, describe the book you’ll be promoting, give a few suggestions for entertaining posts you could produce and offer to giveaway copies of your book.

6: Decide on an activity for each stopover. What are some of the activities you could engage in? Some blog hosts have a set of questions they ask their guest bloggers related to the theme or genre of their book. Some will review your book for the blog tour. Some want you to come up with something—an excerpt from your book, an article about why you wrote this book, your experiences writing the book, something about your cast of characters, etc. One of my blog hosts had her cat interview my cat character. That was fun and it attracted quite a few comments. I also got to write about my writing process, which is often of interest to other writers within the same genre.

7: Maintain communication with each blogger who agrees to be a part of your tour. Once you’ve set a date with each blog host, find out when they want to receive the material for your stopover and make sure you are prompt with it. If they plan to do a review, ask if you can provide them with a digital or print copy of your book. Remind each host a week ahead of the tour and again a few days before. On the day before each of my stopovers, I sent an email to the host sharing my excitement for the tour and eagerness to promote it and participate in any way possible.

8: Promote, promote, promote. Bloggers want to know that you will do your part to promote them and their blog. Early on, let them know that you have a blog site (or more) and a newsletter, affiliations with organizations related to the theme of the book, etc., and that you plan to promote heavily to all available channels. Are you on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Use these avenues to promote your upcoming blog tour and make sure each host knows that you are making every effort to reach your followers and fans. Start promoting a week or so in advance. List all of your stops and give the links. (Note, test each link before publishing.)

9: Promote each event as it occurs. In other words, on day one of your tour, promote that site using all of your channels—your blog, your facebook page, your list groups, etc.

10: Check comments at the blog you’re visiting every few hours and leave your comment where appropriate. In other words, be present; stay connected.

11: Check your stats. Before you start your blog tour, if you have the information available to you, check your current number of book sales for the month/week. If you are in the Kindle Direct Publishing program or with Create Space, for example, or you are the publisher, you have access to sales figures. Check them before the tour and each day after the tour. I checked my sales figures in the morning before each stopover. I kept track of each day’s sales.

12: Show appreciation. Every morning send a thank you email to the stopover host from the day before. If your sales stats were impressive, share them. At the same time, send an email to the host of the stopover for the next day to make sure you are on the same page.

During the Blog Tour

In my case, I had sent all of my interviews, articles and so forth to each host the week before the tour. So I had none of that to deal with during the tour week. I was free to interact with blog guests who left comments and promote the tour. If you are the publisher of your books, you might also be busy shipping books to new customers.

I also jotted down sales stats for each day and I made notes that I thought might help in future tours. You always learn new things along the way.

Oh, and here’s a neat tip—some people who leave comments at blog sites do not provide an email address. If they’re signed up to comment through Google, for example, when you click on their name, you’re taken to their profile where you can sometimes find their email address. Something else you might find there is this person’s list of the blogs they frequent—blogs related to the theme/genre of your book. What a goldmine for those of us who are serious about promoting our books.

How Many Books Can You Sell?

I promised that I would give my sales figures for my five days of touring with my Klepto Cat Mystery series. On a typical week, I sell around 124 Kindle copies of these cozy mystery novels. On my blog tour week, the figures jumped to 247—that’s double the sales for my efforts this week. And I have to tell you it was fun!

Habits of the Successful Blog Tour Author

• You’re organized.
• You’re prompt and reliable.
• You have a sense and a habit of follow-through.
• You understand the importance of promotion and you actively pursue it.
• You act on the leads and opportunities presented.
• You show your gratitude.

I’m Patricia Fry, a 40-year veteran as a writer/author. After years of supporting myself through article-writing and after publishing nearly 40 nonfiction books (most of them for authors), I’m now writing fiction.

Check out my fun little Klepto Cat Mystery series: Catnapped, Cat-Eye Witness and Sleight of Paw (with more to follow shortly). All are available for your Kindle. Catnapped is now in print at Amazon.com.

Catnapped, http://amzn.to/14OCk0W

Cat-Eye Witness, http://amzn.to/1bJiq0x

Sleight of Paw, http://amzn.to/1mGuAXQ

This is the last day of my whirlwind blog tour. I have lots to tell you over the weekend when I share my experiences, evaluation and recommendations. So stay tuned.

Today we visit Kitty Crochet Two. Host Brenda has reviewed my latest two books in the Klepto Cat Mystery series, Cat-Eye Witness and Sleight of Paw. These 5-star reviews are also posted at Amazon. You can check them out at www.amazon.com or at Brenda’s delightful site: http://kittycrochettwo.blogspot.com today, February 14, 2014.

Tips for Authors

It is beyond me how this could happen, but, through this blog tour I’m meeting avid readers of cat mysteries who have not heard of mine. I’m contacting these people through their comments at these various blog sites I’ve visited and asking them where they learn about the books they love to read. Why am I asking them that? Because I want to know where my audience is—where they learn about the books they read and where they purchase them. If you’re an author, you need this information with regard to your audience, as well. You must become visible on these sites—get your book reviewed, ask to be a guest blogger, do a blog tour or leave a comment, for example.

Learn more about this and other book promotion techniques as well as how to conduct your own blog tour in my weekend roundup here at this blog site.

We’re on day three of my first blog tour. Today, we visit Mochas, Mysteries and Meows. For anyone who likes chocolate, mysteries and kitty cats, this is a purrfect place to visit. Not only does host, Melissa give my newest book in the Klepto Cat Mystery series high marks and a great review, her cat Truffles interviews my cat character, Rags.

Stop in and leave a comment.

http://www.mochasmysteriesmeows.com

There’s still time to leave comments and win a prize at the first two stops on this tour:

http://bookread-mumswritings.blogspot.com

http://readalot-rhonda1111.blogspot.com

So far, we’ve sold 89 copies of Catnapped, Cat-Eye Witness and Sleight of Paw during this blog tour.