Writers in the Storm

Penny Sansevieri

Now that everything has turned into 24/7 holiday shopping, you may wonder if it’s too late to get your book onto someone’s *must buy* holiday shopping list. While it’s late in the season to be thinking of your holiday strategy, there are some great things you can still do to nudge sales in your favor.

1. Purchase with purchase

Shoppers love purchase with purchase offers; in fact, studies have shown that shoppers are 90% more inclined to buy when they get something in addition to what they are already buying. Which is why sales tend to inch higher in cosmetics when they offer a free bag of lipsticks or samples when you spend a certain amount of money on their products. In the case of purchase with purchase, I will sometimes offer a lower-priced book, or copies of books I have on hand when they buy the book I am promoting. In other cases, I’ve known authors to partner up and offer each other’s books as purchase with purchase which is a great way to co-promote your titles.

2. Donation

We all love doing charitable works and there’s no better time to push this than during the holidays. What if you donate $1 to a charitable organization or cause for every book bought between certain dates? You’ll want to let folks know to email you their receipt (unless they bought the book from your site or directly from you at an event).

3. Buy one, Get one

Getting great deals is what it’s all about around the holidays, no? So here’s a fun trick I’ve done with great success. If someone buys your book – either on Amazon or from you, gift them an eBook copy of it for themselves or to give away if they want. Or, you can send actual books but keep in mind that this can get rather pricey. If you do this, I suggest pushing folks to order from you directly so the books can be shipped at the same time and you don’t have to pay Amazon their hefty percentage for selling your book.

4. Bag stuffers

If you have bookmarks for your book, see if you can drop them at local retailers who might be inclined to use them as bag stuffers for customers. You’ll be surprised how many local retailers would love to support a local author, and, with the shopping season kicking into high gear, you could really rack up the sales this way. Make sure your website URL is on there and if you’re doing any of the other holiday promotions mentioned above, make sure that the promotional information is front and center on your website to help draw buyers in!

5. Freebie giveaway

If you have other books, I would highly encourage you to do a freebie promotion for a day or two with a link to your new title or whatever book you are pushing for the holiday season. For example, we have an author who has five fiction books out and he’s using his older one as a freebie tool to drive holiday sales to his more recent book. There’s a holiday offer in the back of the book (in this case, he’s doing the donation).

6. Holiday Fairs and Events

Though this will take a bit of time, most of these fairs don’t book up. Call your local Chamber for a list of event dates or check online, then contact the organizer and see if you can get a deal on a booth or share a table. You’ll be amazed how much traffic these events get so close to the holidays. Also, if you have a book that ties into an event or fair consider doing that, too. For example, we have a pet-holiday parade and craft fair here, and I’ll often see dog and cat books there. It’s a great place to zero in on your exact right market!

Bonus tip!

Post-Christmas: You can really pull in a lot of holiday sales using the “Now get the gifts you really want” mantra. I always encourage authors to do promos for their books, especially if they have a pretty low price point. Some marketing people say that many shoppers have buyer’s fatigue post-Christmas, but I have not known this to be the case. Some of my best book sales happened in January, but again, the price needs to be right. So offer your book or books at impulse buy pricing. Generally anything $9.99 or below is considered an impulse buy, if it’s an eBook then $4.99 and lower.

Logistics: For some of the promos that require you to know if the consumer bought the book, make sure that you’re clear that you need the receipt emailed to you. You’ll want to put this on your website, and, possibly on the blog that offers this deal. Be clear and uncomplicated about what they need to do. For example, if you’re donating money to a good cause make sure that you have the receipt so you know they bought the book. Also add those buyers to your mailing list so you can stay in touch with them.

How to get the word out: Now that you have your promotion lined up, it’s time to let your readers (and future readers) know about this. I suggest putting up a blog post, maybe even doing a quick update to your home page copy to reflect this promotion. If you’re on Twitter I recommend sharing this several times a week leading up to Christmas, and to also post your promotion on Facebook. There are some great hashtags you can use, too. Here are a few you may want to incorporate in all of your social media:

#holidayshopping
#holidaydeals
#holidaygifts
#savemoney

While it’s always nice if you can get a jump start on holiday sales, it’s not always reasonable given all we do as authors to promote our books. And considering that the above ideas generally won’t take up a lot of time, if even one of them brings in new sales, it could be a really great thing and give you some ideas for next year’s holiday season, too!

What sorts of book promotions do you love? Do you find holiday sales appealing yourself? What books are you looking forward to reading over the holidays?

About Penny

Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. Penny is the author of five books, including Book to Bestseller which has been called the "road map to publishing success."

AME is the first marketing and publicity firm to use Internet promotion to its full impact through The Virtual Author Tour™, which strategically works with social networking sites, blogs, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, YouTube, and relevant sites to push an authors message into the virtual community and connect with sites related to the book's topic, positioning the author in his or her market. In the past 24 months their creative marketing strategies have helped land 11 books on the New York Times Bestseller list.

To learn more about Penny’s books or her promotional services, you can visit her web site at http://www.amarketingexpert.com. Follow her on Twitter @bookgal

Holiday photo credit: smilla4 via photopin cc

Jen Karsbaek

So, you have a new book coming out, not a ton of marketing support from your publisher, and not much of an advance you can put towards your own marketing budget. What on earth can you do to get the word out about your book?

Well, there’s this awesome community of readers out there who are extremely passionate about books and absolutely love to share information about what they are reading with their (sometimes quite large) audiences. Now, these bloggers aren’t your marketing team, but if you can find the ones most likely to love and review your book, they might help you build some nice buzz and word of mouth.

But how do you go about orchestrating reviews with the bloggers who could really do something for your book?

1. Find bloggers who fit your book

If you have a good sense of what your comparative titles (also called read-alikes in some circles, books which are similar to yours and which are likely to have similar audiences) are, a good place to start is by searching for bloggers who have reviewed (and preferably liked) those comp titles. Make sure you check out their review policies though, to be sure that they are currently accepting books in your genre. The review policy may also tell you what sort of lead time the blogger requires and how likely they are to be able to actually review your book.

2. Evaluate the bloggers on your list

Hopefully you found a ton of bloggers who you think would be a good fit for your book, but unless you have free range with e-arcs you probably can’t send a book to everyone. You may be tempted to just pick the blogs with the biggest audiences, but they are often the ones who are busiest, so you need to weigh bigger audiences against blogs where you are more likely to get reviewed. Big audiences may also not be as helpful as you think if the blogger in question doesn’t really have authority in speaking to your genre.

3. What to offer book bloggers

Obviously you can offer a blogger a copy of your book (which they will probably accept for consideration of review, not for a guaranteed review), but you can also increase your chance of getting blog coverage if you can also book an interview, guest post, or giveaway. All of these things require more work and/or resources on your part, so be sure you are able to commit what is necessary before you offer these things.

4. How to approach book bloggers

Most book bloggers have jobs and family lives that come before their blogs so be respectful of their time and approach them in a professional way. Book pitches should be done via email, unless another method is specified in the blogger’s review policy.

Pitches to bloggers should be approached in much the same way that you might approach a query letter for an agent or editor. In a pitch, as in a query, you will want information on ‘the hook, the book, and the cook.’ In other words, a brief hook to grab the blogger’s attention, pertinent information about the book, and a brief author bio.

If you’ve done your research on the blogger you are pitching, the hook may be something about why you believe that they might like your book, instead of only being about the book, since you’ll get into more in-depth information about the book in the next paragraph. It is fine to use your back cover copy or other marketing copy to describe your book in the pitch, but please also include your publisher and the book’s release date, at minimum. This information can help a blogger make a decision about whether they could possibly fit your book into their editorial calendar. Your bio can be very brief, but feel free to include any writing awards you have won here.

In your pitch you will want to be clear about what you are offering. Occasionally authors send bloggers pitches that make it sound as if they are asking for the blogger to buy and review their book, which usually leads to the blogger simply ignoring or deleting the email. Be clear whether you are offering a physical review copy or an electronic one, and if you are open to doing a guest post or interview, that information can be conveyed here as well.

So that you don’t waste your time crafting personalized pitches to bloggers who are unlikely to accept your book for whatever reason, it is a good idea to check the review policies of the bloggers you most want to have review your book.

Review policies are documents written up by bloggers to say whether or not they are accepting anything for review, what sort of things they’re open to seeing pitches about, and often how much lead time they prefer and what formats they like to read in as well. This is a step you may want to take as part of your initial ranking of bloggers, but even so you will want to check review policies again before you send out pitches. Being able to personalize your pitch with information gleaned from a review policy makes you look like someone who respects a blogger’s time and preferences, which can definitely help you get in the door at a busy blog.

There are many things you can do to optimize your experience of working with bloggers, all of which are detailed in my Short Fuse Guide to Working with Book Bloggers (which is free until the end of the year, so if you think you’ll need it at some point, get it now!). If you’re pressed for time and don’t want to read 8,000 words of ideas, though, you can boil it down to this: if you work with book bloggers in a professional manner you may not get all rave reviews, but you are likely to get fair reviews, and to get your book talked about on social media and help you build your word of mouth.

What questions do you have about working with book bloggers? What has been your experience with them so far? Are there any bloggers you recommend for a particular genre?

p.s. For our American readers...HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

About Jen

Jen Karsbaek is an associate agent at Fuse Literary where she represents women’s fiction, historical fiction, upmarket commercial fiction, and literary fiction. Before becoming an agent, she ran the very popular book review blog Devourer of Books. You can find her on Twitter as @devourerofbooks. 

About The Short Fuse Guide to Working with Book Bloggers

One of the very best ways to reach readers is to connect with a passionate and internet-savvy group of readers and reviewers who delight in sharing the books they love with others: book bloggers.

In The Short Fuse Guide to Working with Book Bloggers, literary agent and book blogger Jen Karsbaek shows you how best to approach and work with book bloggers to secure reviews, spread word of mouth, and build strong buzz for your new release. The Short Fuse Guide to Working with Book Bloggers and Fuse Literary’s other Short Fuse Guides are free at Smashwords through the end of 2014 and are available for purchase as Kindle books.

Books photo credit: Sunshine Lady ! via photopin cc

Kathryn Craft
Turning Whine into Gold

Fear can waylay even the most intrepid writer. Recently, I found myself in its confidence-rattling grip.

Followers of this series might be saying, What? This can’t be written by Kathryn, the relentless optimist who would never be caught whining on the Internet and who I’ve come to count on for my monthly shot of can-do attitude!

In order to be real—or “Velveteen,” as Therese Walsh called it at the Writer UnBoxed UnConference in Salem, MA earlier this month—I want to share the perfect storm of emotions I battled when I came home. Is this whining, or just a cold hard look at the life of the writer? You be the judge—but I promise to turn it to gold by the end of the post.

How to stir up a doubt-fest

Start with exhaustion. After a week of joyful interaction with a slew of new writers at the UnConference, my inner introvert needed her down time. Way down, as it turned out. Overstimulation and sleep are rarely happy bed partners. The first night I got home from the conference I slept 12-1/2 hours and couldn’t shake the resulting fog.

Add several handfuls of overwhelm. With a dream team of presenters led by Donald Maass and Lisa Cron, the UnConference prompted dozens of ideas to incorporate into my next novel, challenging everything I thought I had so far accomplished. How would I bring it all together? Even though I’m an experienced writer, I’d never traveled the path this novel needed to take. Sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what to do, and allowing a new vision to distill, is an emotionally challenging but necessary task.

Whisk in separation anxiety ’til dizzy. Before leaving for the conference I had completed all work on my second novel, The Far End of Happy. Writing under contract for the first time, I’d had all of ten months to create this important and very personal project based on my first husband’s suicide standoff—all while launching my debut. It took 17 years of climbing to gain the perspective needed to write about this life-changing event—I did it!—but the all-consuming, high-altitude effort left me reeling. And leaving it behind felt like walking off a cliff into an abyss.

Bake until dough cracks. I fervently believe that the Universe would not call me to write the book of my soul and then kick me to the curb without the tools to make it happen. But it’s one thing to trust the Universe when improving the book is still under my control, and another when my primary role is complete and the team takes over. Doubt creeps in.What if it isn’t as good as it could possibly be? What if I let my publisher down? What if, despite my fervent promotion, it never finds its audience? What if, after all these years of tilling the soil of my soul, and investing so much time and money into my writing education, this book doesn’t matter?

This wasn’t just a recipe for doubt, my friends. With these ingredients I had concocted a full-out crisis of faith.

The antidote to fear

People have been having crises of faith for as long as the human spirit has yearned to be part of a bigger, more meaningful story, and the antidote is readily available in our wisdom literature. Marianne Williamson, in her #1 bestseller A Return to Love, simplifies the issue by saying there are only two human emotions: love and fear. At the root of all negative human emotions—jealousy (I’ll never have what she has), disappointment (I’ll never be able to get what I want), and anger (I’ll never be treated as I deserve)—is always a seed of fear.

And look at all the seeds of fear I’d been feeding on! Luckily, my writing buddies helped me see this and helped me find compassion for myself—an emotion rooted in love.

Williamson suggests, as does the Bible, that love will heal our fear. And what do I love? Writing. As soon as I removed the opening scenes that weren’t working and typed my notes into my document, a resurgence of love and excitement drew me into the task.

Because I had already raised questions about my new project before overstuffed at the creative banquet that was the UnConference, hidden magic had been brewing upon my return, even during my week of despair. As UnCon session leader Meg Rosoff would have said, my unconscious mind was chewing on my problem and synthesizing a solution—and it showed up on the page when I began to write.

And once again, the same journey that led me into the dark forest of my psyche has delivered me to the sun. Through this work that I love, I am healed.

Have you ever noticed that fear cannot touch you while you are actually writing? What ingredients feed your storm of doubt? Let’s be real today. We will not whine, but share the burden of our doubts across empathetic shoulders, and try to love one another back into wholeness.

About Kathryn

Kathryn Craft is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling, and The Far End of Happy, out May 2015.

Her work as a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft, follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she now serves as book club liaison for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads workshops, and speaks often about writing.

Kathryn lives with her husband in Bucks County, PA.

Website: http://www.kathryncraft.com/

Photo credit by Lorena G at Dribble.