Writers in the Storm

by Lisa Hall-Wilson

What to do? Facebook has changed – again. There’s more competition than ever for reader attention.

Writers are frustrated and it’s easy to understand why. How do you build a business when the goal posts for success keep moving? What’s the point?

Facebook is probably the slowest platform to build an audience on, and shooting yourself in the foot by listening to bad advice only makes it more difficult.

Choosing to build platform the right way will insulate you from the changes Facebook continues to make because those changes are often intended to deter those who cheat and try to game the system.

Here are 4 of the worst pieces of advice I’ve heard when it comes to building a writing platform on Facebook:

Promo your books to every group every day.

This feels a whole lot like spam.

There are three kinds of groups on Facebook: Open, Closed and Secret. Closed groups are searchable but you have to ‘join’ in order to see the posts. (Secret groups are the same only they won’t show up in searches, you have to be invited to join.)

So, you’re a member of XY closed group. The posts in that group will appear in YOUR news feed because you’re a member. Those posts won’t show up in your friends’ news feeds unless they’re also members of that group.

With an Open Group everything is public. When you post in ABC open group, then EFG group, This-Writer-Group, That-Fiction-Author-Group, etc. that post can (and will) show up in the news feeds of your friends. Over and over and over. Same status – same link – same image.

See why it feels like spam?

Instead of posting to all of these groups at the same time, pick the two or three groups most likely to be interested in that content and spread out posting there over 24 or 48 hours. Craft unique status updates to each group. Show up for the conversation.

Friend every member of every group so they're more likely to see all your posts.

This is how people land in Facebook jail and are then mystified how it happened. Facebook states that you’re only to ‘friend’ people you know outside of Facebook. Too many people tell Facebook they don’t know you outside of Facebook and you land in Facebook jail with friending privileges suspended.

You’re much better off to be a useful contributor to a group and have people send you a friend request – because they’ll feel like they ‘know you.’ Or turn on the follow button on your Profile so they can follow you – whatever they’re comfortable with.

Communicate early, often, and frequently ... but not about your books.

If you never post about your writing how will people know you’re a writer? Most people want to ‘know’ a famous author (you don’t need to debate what ‘famous’ means).

They want to get to know you, but they’re also interested in what you’re working on, books you have coming out. They love being asked for input – I need names for my main character – suggestions? Here are the two covers my publisher asked me choose between – what do you think?

Every status update is an opportunity to show your writing skills, you don’t need to trumpet that, but absolutely give that insider-look into the writer’s life and process.

Promote all the time or no one will know about your book.

This is the flip side to the above problem. If you’re a ‘buy my book’ 24/7 channel you become easy to ignore. OR people will hide you from their news feed – banished to Facebook Hinterland. Once you land there, it’s nearly impossible to prove to people you’ve changed your ways. Not only that, if people label your posts as spam in their news feed Facebook will further penalize you and show your posts to even fewer people. Before long you’ll be posting to an audience of your mother and best friend who are too polite to tell you how annoying that is.

This bad advice is often paired with: automate automate automate. Yes many platforms will let you cross post to Facebook. This isn’t bad if you’re crafting a post specifically for your Facebook audience AND you show up and contribute to the conversation you’ve started.

Do you have questions for Lisa? Which Facebook tips
worked the best for you? Which ones were not so hot?
Do you have social media pet peeves?

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ANNOUNCEMENT:
Lisa is teaching a class Beyond Basics: Using Facebook To Build Platform on May 8^th. This is a 2-hour online digital classroom session where she’ll go beyond the basics to learn more advanced techniques. Get her best tips for finding and creating content, best practice on sharing content, and how to drive more traffic to your blog or website.

About Lisa

Lisa Hall-Wilson is an award-winning freelance writer, syndicated columnist, and Facebook aficionado. She specializes in interviews, profiles, marketing copy, event promotion, and social justice, and teaches online classes for writers. She writes dark fantasy fiction.

Lisa never turns down an opportunity to go to the theatre (live or for a movie) and can't resist a good story (especially if there are monsters). She hangs out on Facebook…a lot.

Fine her at her website, Through The Fire, on Twitter or -- you guessed it -- on Facebook.

photo credit: SalFalko via photopin cc

By Chuck Sambuchino

Once your book is finished, it’s time to start submitting to agents. For this, a simple first step is to create a new Microsoft Word or Excel document so you can keep detailed track of your submissions, target agents, resource materials, and more. The document will help you personalize query letters, find more agents to contact, and know when to follow up on submissions.

Now it’s time to create your list of potential agents to query.

As you start compiling agent names and contact info, think in terms of casting a wide net. Scour databases and websites to put together the largest possible collection of reps to contact, then start winnowing down your list as you go along. Understand right off the bat that not every agent is for you. You’ll only be targeting a fraction of the active reps out there—seeking those who represent the specific type of book you’re writing.

Before you go looking for agents to contact, you must define what you’ve written. In other words, when push comes to shove, you have to classify it as something. So what type of book is it? (Note that novels are broken down into genres, while nonfiction is broken down into categories.)

Some writers will have no difficulty with this step—immediately telling their friends that they’ve written “a romance” or “a thriller” or “an illustrated picture book.” But other writers will not be so sure when it comes to this step, questioning the exact classification of their work, and therefore not knowing which agents to target.

Your goal is to try and break the story down into what it is fundamentally. From there, you can still look for more specific market offshoots. Let’s run through some examples of category dilemmas:

Example 1: You’ve written a legal thriller and can’t find many agents who represent this vein of books.

Your mistake is that you’re specifically looking for agents seeking “legal thrillers” when you should just be looking for agents seeking “thrillers.” A popular genre of novels—such as a thriller—has many subcategories, including techno-thrillers, medical thrillers, legal thrillers, climate fiction thrillers (“cli-fi”) and more. But most agents won’t get into the nitty-gritty when explaining what categories they want. They’ll just say, “I seek thrillers.” And anyone who says just that is a great target for you.

Some will personally lean toward your subgenre of thriller while others won’t. You won’t know where they stand in terms of favoritism and leanings, so just query all available markets and hope for the best. Also, there will be a few agents out there who explain outright in their personal information that they seek “legal thrillers.”

If you see an agent get specific like this and put out an APB for the exact type of book you’re writing, that’s a great potential match for you, and you can say “Because I’ve read that you are actively seeking [x], I thought you might enjoy my novel, [Title].” 

Example 2: You’ve written a science fiction young adult book and don’t know whether to contact young adult agents or sci-fi agents.

The answer is to query young adult agents. If it’s a book for kids, it’s a book for kids. It’s not like young adult romance should be treated like adult romance. If it’s fundamentally young adult (YA) or middle grade (MG), you should query for those categories. 

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(Hi, everyone. Chuck here chiming in for a second. I wanted to say I am now taking on clients as a freelance editor. So if your query or manuscript needs some love, please check out my editing services. Thanks!)

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Example 3: You’re not sure if your book is suspense or thriller because it blends the two.

You won’t find a whole lot of agents who put out a call for a crossbreed of genres, such as “thriller and suspense” or “Western and horror.” Instead you’ll get a lot of agents simply asking for “thriller” and some asking for “suspense,” for example. Feel free to query all of them. In your contact letter to the agent, you can alternate between the classification terms depending on what the agent’s needs are, or you can just query them all stating upfront that it’s a “suspenseful thriller.” 

Example 4: You’re writing one of the categories of fiction that some agents may rep, but virtually none request specifically in their guidelines.

If you’re dealing with a lonely genre of fiction, such as “humorous fiction” or “medieval fiction,” and can’t find many target reps for the book, you can always seek out generalists. Some agents will be very specific concerning what they want and don’t want. But plenty of reps will instead say something like “I’m open to any area of fiction that’s done well.” If an agent openly says they have no restrictions concerning submissions, feel free to contact them and hope for the best.

This problem of possessing an “under the radar category” is even more common with nonfiction, where it can be difficult to find someone who gets specific enough to ask for “books about Wicca” or “books about exterminating unwanted pests from your home.” If you’re writing nonfiction like this, your strategy, again, should be to seek generalists. Also, another good strategy is to find other books in the marketplace that resemble yours and see who repped those books.

Example 5: You’ve written a novel that doesn’t fit into any so-called genre.

Some novels will be easy to categorize, such as fantasies, Westerns and horror. But what about novels that do not fit into any of these popular commercial genres? Chances are, you’re going to call it “literary fiction” or “mainstream fiction.”

Literary fiction means the novel 1) does not fall into any popular genre type, and 2) focuses on character more than plot, and values impressive voice, style and technique from the writer.

Mainstream fiction is a similar category, but the term is used to describe non-genre stories that have mass appeal and can transcend literary fiction readers, into such opportunities as book clubs. In other words, the two categories are remarkably close to one another, and the difference in names is more for marketing than anything else.

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About Chuck

Chuck Sambuchino of Writer's Digest Books edits the GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS and the CHILDREN'S WRITER'S & ILLUSTRATOR'S MARKET. His Guide to Literary Agents Blog is one of the largest blogs in publishing.

His 2010 humor book, HOW TO SURVIVE A GARDEN GNOME ATTACK, was optioned by Sony Pictures. Chuck has also written the writing guides FORMATTING & SUBMITTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT and CREATE YOUR WRITER PLATFORM.

Besides that, he is a freelance book & query editor, husband, sleep-deprived new father, and owner of a flabby-yet-lovable dog named Graham.

Find Chuck on Twitter and on Facebook.

photo credit: susivinh via photopin cc

by Sierra Godfrey

Remember when you started your blog? Maybe you were an unpublished writer and fellow unpublished writers followed your trials with you, cheered you when you got an agent and a book contract, and then became readers. Maybe you’re still unpublished but your focus has changed. Maybe your career was already in full swing, but you started your web presence with a free blog.

However you began your presence on the Web, you might have a bunch of reasons for moving your blog now—you might have a new shiny website with incorporated blog, or maybe your old blog was hacked, or maybe you just want a new way of blogging. Once you have your new home on the web, you’re good to go, right? You can delete your old blog, right?

Wrong!

Let it live. You need that old blog to increase your online profile print, and you need it to stay up because readers who have gone away or have bookmarked your old blog will come back, sometimes months later. And you don’t want to be unfindable! I know a NYT bestselling author who had a fairly informal blog that was well-followed by lots of other writers –and agents, too. Then he built a brand new author website complete with a new blog. Unfortunately, he deleted the old one and I didn’t know it until I check in months later--and couldn’t find him. I didn’t know he’d transitioned, so he was just gone. He’d built a huge following of writers on his old blog, and he effectively lost that following when he moved without a trace.

So, you know to keep that old blog.

There’s a little bit of management that goes with old blogs, though. You can’t just leave an old blog by itself. Here are four things to keep in mind once your old blog goes dead:

1. Put up a notice saying you’ve moved.

If you don’t say you’ve moved then no one will know to go to your new blog! Don’t expect people to figure it out. Spell out the URL. Set your big “I’ve moved!” post so that it’s top-most post. Put your new URL loud and clear – in the sidebar, at the top, anywhere that people will see it. People link to old posts and you might not even know it. Incoming traffic to your old blog might not see your “I’ve moved” post so make sure you put your announcement in other places too—maybe a pop up box or in the sidebar. Update your footer with your new URL.

You might even consider editing your old posts with a note at the bottom that you’ve moved and list your new URL.

2. Turn comments to off.

Don’t leave your comments open because spammers know when blogs aren’t being tended to and they descend like a swarm of Dementors. Spammers know that leaving nonsense posts with their website URL in the comments scores them a trackback URL – which raises their Google ranking. It’s insidious. Lock them out.

3. Strip out time-dependent content

Do you have a graphic saying you’re part of a 2011 debut author’s group? Take off anything that might fool visitors into thinking your blog is dead rather than merely in hypersleep. Even better: strip out your sidebar content (keep your tags and archive posts though).

4. Consider repurposing your old posts.

Take some time to go through your old posts. Maybe you want to keep only the best ones, maybe you want to list the most-visited ones. As blogger Sarah Van Barger puts it, “When I started blogging, I’m not sure that SEO was even A Thing and if it was, I surely didn’t know about it. While my content was good, my titles were too quirky and mysterious to inspire much click through and all my photos were saved as “008138ejplorb.jpg.” This was also the age when people used any old photo they found – regardless of copyright and I wasn’t any different.” Sarah recommends finding your best posts and finding a good, legal image for them. She says you should rename the photo as something SEO-friendly – ”woman-using-computer” not “9109282joli.jpg” and that if you named your post something ‘clever’ the first time around (like song lyrics), rename it something obvious and Googleable. Another idea from Sarah is to offer your old blog posts as guest posts.

Hope that helps. These things are all part of managing your online profile and presence—I know, snore-fest stuff, but important when you’re trying to wrap your arms around what it means to be the fabulous author that you are.

Have you transitioned a blog? What worked for you? Any lessons learned you can share?

 About Sierra

Sierra writes fiction that features strong heroines who grow from the challenges they face and always get the guy in the end. A graphic designer by day, she lives in the swampy yet arid wastelands of the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. She has zero will power when it comes to chocolate. In fact, she is the inventor of mix-less trail mix — just leave the chocolate chips.

You can find more of her sass at www.sierragodfrey.com.