Writers in the Storm

All of us at WITS do our best to bring you information about every aspect of today's publishing. Today's post delves into a unique project, and New York Times bestselling author, Deb Holland, is here to tell you all about it -- the good, the bad and the OMG!

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By Debra Holland

The idea of a multi-author anthology set in my bestselling Montana Sky series was born in the Spring of 2013. The prior year, I’d written a collection of short Christmas stories, Montana Sky Christmas, and loved the experience. I had more ideas for Christmas stories and knew I wanted to write a second collection.

The Problem: My deadlines for the year didn’t allow time to add a book of short stories.

One of my long-time favorite authors, Andre Norton, had several multi-author anthologies in her Witch World series. Authors or aspiring authors would write a story set in Andre’s world for the anthology. Other authors, like Mercedes Lackey, have done similar anthologies.

But, to my knowledge, no indie-pubbed romance authors had done it... Yet.

My Original Idea

• Open my Sweetwater series to other authors to write in, using my characters as secondary characters in their stories.
• Include a few of my stories, but have the majority of the book written by other authors.
• Use a multi-author anthology as a promotional opportunity.
  
  ~ The stories would showcase each author’s writing.
  
  ~ Each author was allowed to link her anthology story to her own books or series.
  
  ~ All the anthology authors would be able to cross-promote and gain new readers.

Initial Steps

My very first step was to contact literary attorney Elaine English and have her draw up a contract for the authors in the anthology.

A Summary of How This Stage Went:

1. I compiled a list of Western or Western Romance authors who were friends of mine. One declined because she didn’t want to give up her rights to her story. Five said no due to deadlines. My biggest surprise was how many said yes.

2. The invite included some of the details about the contract.

• It was a writer-for-hire situation
• A flat fee of $500 for each story
• I retained the rights to each story in the anthology.

Note: I figured it was only fair to pay the authors up front for the stories, since (once the book earned out) I would be benefiting from the royalties.

3. I chose a word count of 3000-12,000, and stipulated that the story must be heartwarming, although it did not have to be a romance.

4. The short story must be edited before submission to me.

5. Submission deadline of August 15^th, 2013. Publication date -- September, 2013.

What Worked Great

Once the group of authors was signed, I started a private Facebook page so everyone could communicate and get to know each other.

Being together on Facebook made it easier to talk about story ideas and make sure each author’s character names were unique.

A few of the authors turned in their stories way before the deadline, and the rest were mostly on time.

We all expected to have the anthology published well in time for the holidays, yet my own deadlines were stressing me out. It was a huge help to obtain a pre-order button so the book would be for sale, yet I’d still have time to work on my part of it.

The other authors of the anthology have all been very good sports about the entire process, and have likely worked harder than they imagined they would.

The best part of the experience has been reading the other author’s stories—all very different and special. I loved seeing their creativity. They’ve also added some new characters and businesses to Sweetwater Springs.

All the authors have been supportive of me and of each other and I couldn’t have asked for a better group of ladies to work with. I’m very grateful to them.

The Stressful Parts

While I had a fun time reading the stories, some were not nearly the quality of writing I’d expected. It had never occurred to me that some of these authors hadn’t written short before, and that they’d be handicapped by writing in my world, not their own.

At that point, I had the sinking feeling of: Oh, no! What have I gotten myself into?

A Summary of How This Stage Went:

1. Although every one of the stories was copyedited and clean, many needed a lot of developmental editing. I did far more editing than I’d planned. Worst of all, I had to push back the September publishing deadline.

2. I did not provide was a character “bible,” which would have made things easier on the other authors. This meant I had to answer a lot of questions about my characters and my town, even as other deadlines loomed.

3. I was trying to finish Harvest of Dreams by its August 31 pre-order deadline and the story was fighting me all the way.

4. I wanted to contribute one story to start the book and one to end it but I ran into an unexpected writing block: I couldn't find the heart of my story.

I began to doubt my ability to pull this off, and worried I was going to let down the other ten authors. I’d cracked the editing whip and made them work so hard to polish their stories into jewels and yet I wasn’t contributing a similar caliber story.

5. Formatting was a major stumbling block.

I thought it would be a simple matter of cutting and pasting to combine all the stories. (NOT!) E. Ayers rescued me and ended up formatting the whole thing. E. put in hours on the formatting before I ever sent the anthology to the official formatter.

The downside? Whenever I had to add a story or bio, I had to send them to E. so I didn’t mess up the formatting

6. The week before Sweetwater Springs Christmas had to go to the formatter, I was still writing the ending story for the anthology. That week, I had crazy bedtimes.

400+ pages of hearwarming stories ~ $4.99 on Kindle

BUT... I’d finally found the “heart” in my beginning and ending stories, and I adored the one I wrote for the middle of the book.

Somehow, all the work managed to get done.

7. The formatter returned the anthology with a few days to spare before the pre-order, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I uploaded the ebook to Amazon.

8. The formatter turned her attention to the print version and everyone, once again, read their story. Errors were fixed.

By the time we finished the book, it was all sort of a blur.

I anxiously waited for the first reviews to come in. Usually, my super fans read and review my books within 24-48 hours, so when I didn’t receive a review in that time period, I began worrying.

When the first review—a five star—was posted, I nearly cried with relief.

As of now, we have seven five star reviews. The anthology is currently on the Amazon Top 100 lists of Western Romance, Romance Inspirational, Fiction Holiday, and Short Stories.

What I've Learned for "The Next Time"

If I did a multi-author anthology for my Montana Sky series again, I’d do several things differently.

• I’d allow a lot more time--perhaps a year--for the whole process.
• I’d certainly work with this group of ladies again, both because they’re talented writers, good friends, and we’ve been through the learning curve together.
• An anthology might be easier with fewer authors, so that’s something to keep in mind. Also with fewer authors, the word count per story could be greater.
• I’d create a detailed “bible” of characters and places, including the childrens' ages for the year the anthology is set.
• I’d have in the contract that the story would have to be both developmentally edited and copy edited.

Another possibility would be to put out a call for submissions and have authors submit stories with no guarantee of being accepted. I’d just take the top 6-10 best submissions.

Most of all, I’d go into the experience with a different mindset.

Knowing the difficulties and time requirements in advance consuming the anthology will allow me to plan accordingly, so I’ll be less stressed during the experience.

Have you ever worked on an anthology? What did you like or dislike about the experience? Do you have insights to add, or questions for Debra?

Let's give her a warm welcome down in the comments!

About Debra

I’ll say it right up front – I don’t watch Fear Factor. It gives me the willies. But that’s not the point of this blog. Well, not entirely.

I’ve been noodling a new book idea for a while now. Noodling is all I’ve done. For a while. And every time I think I’m ready to start, I try to think of a different angle to take the story. Why? Because I’m scared to go there.

I’m not overly superstitious, I don’t have a problem with ladders or black cats or salt spilling. But I don’t do well talking about certain fears. Because if you talk about them, they might actually come true.

So, back to noodling.

The other day I was chatting with Laura Drake and she asked, “What’s the next book about?” I blurted, “Horses,” and hoped she wouldn’t ask more. Yeah, you guys are laughing. We all know Laura won’t leave it at that. Especially not when there’s a horse in the story.

That not-so-innocent word led to a full-blown brainstorming session. At one point we were both sniffling into tissues. By the end of the discussion, Laura left me with one bit of advice (or was it a warning?) – “You have to write THAT.”

I hemmed and hawed. She wasn’t buying. Instead, she pointed me to a blog she’d recently written for It’s Only A Novel about writing through your fear (if you guys haven’t read it, you really should).

I kept going back to a recent Facebook post. An author I follow was poking at her track record for writing things for her main character that then happened to her. See, it can happen.

Yeah, Laura wasn’t buying it either. She volleyed a Donald Maass quote at me: “Take your protagonist’s greatest fear and go there.”

But it’s not my character’s greatest fear. It’s mine.

I got the sharp end of the cowboy boot for that attempt.

So I started cooking the noodles for this story, writing down plot points, cowering from others (shh, don’t tell Laura). Then the other day I was talking to Kathryn Craft about “going there” with the hard topics. Kathryn, in her infinite wisdom, pointed out that it’s our responsibility as writers to create a world where those events happen.

You guys can hear me whimpering, right?

In a previous book, I gave one of my absolute favorite characters Alzheimer’s. It’s a disease that scares the crap out of me. And yes, I cried while writing those scenes.

There’s a sticky note on my desk with a quote that helped keep me moving forward with that book:

No tears in the writer,
No tears in the reader.
No surprise for the writer,
No surprise for the reader.
- Robert Frost

I moved that sticky note to where I can see it, took off the writer floaties and jumped into this new book. Scary parts and all. I’m still cowering from one plot line and I honestly don’t know if I can go there. But I’m willing to face at least one of the fears that was keeping this book in noodle phase for so long.

What about you – have you ever shied away from a story line because you were afraid of what it would bring? Or is writing your way of facing your fears?

About Orly

After years of pushing the creativity boundary in corporate communications, Orly decided it was time for a new challenge. Three women’s fiction manuscripts later (plus a handful of picture books), it’s safe to say she’s found her creative outlet.

When she’s not talking to her imaginary friends, she’s reading or at least trying to ignore everyone around her long enough to finish “just one more paragraph.” Orly is the founding president of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association.

You can find her on Twitter at @OrlyKonigLopez or on her website, www.orlykoniglopez.com.

by Sierra Godfrey

When Writers in the Storm asked me if I would write a post about how to design a newsletter as a follow-up to Steena Holmes’s excellent post on The How and Why of Author Newsletters.

My first thought was “sure, but that’s easy!” 

Of course it’s easy—for me. I’m a mild-mannered graphic designer by day. But the truth is, it isn’t that easy to people who don’t design graphics for a living. And as it turns out, there’s more to designing an effective newsletter than just some slick graphics.

To help me illustrate what you need to do, I asked my client Lorrie Thomson to help.

Lorrie is a women’s fiction author whose debut novel, Equilibrium, was published in August 2013. I designed Lorrie’s website and I also did her Facebok page and You Tube channel to ensure complete visual consistency. That is, no matter what account of Lorrie’s you visited, you knew it was Lorrie.

That was the goal—and it’s the goal for any business in which you want to promote and protect your brand. (What’s your brand, you might be wondering? Answer: you.)

I didn’t design Lorrie’s newsletter, however, although we always meant to get to that eventually. Meanwhile, Lorrie has sent two newsletters since her publishing debut, and I wanted to see if they’d been successful.  The open rate—or the percentage of people who opened the newsletter—wasn’t huge. So that was one of things I wanted to help resolve.

But first, let’s talk about the basics of designing a newsletter.

1.  Sign up for a newsletter service.

Steena touched on newsletter services in her post. Most newsletter services are free to use (but usually cost a small amount to send the emails), allow a high degree of customization, and provide excellent statistical information.

Statistics let you know who is opening your newsletter, what they’re clicking through to, and all kinds of other valuable knowledge—so you can better focus your content. We’ll talk more about how to focus content based on statistics below.

Some high-quality and easy to use newsletter services are MailChimp and Vertical Response, both of which I have used and liked. Other services I haven’t used but which come recommended are Constant Contact and iContact.

Note: To find a comparison of top email services, click here.

One of the biggest advantages of a mailing service is that they adhere to anti-spam laws so you don’t have to worry about it. Plus, they automate subscriptions and unsubscriptions, which can be a nightmare to manage on your own.

One last note about newsletters and services. They assume you obtain your list members legitimately—that is, people willingly subscribed. Do not add anyone to your list who hasn’t opted in. It will only annoy them and your newsletter will have had zero effect.

2.  Decide how the newsletter should look.

Here’s the part where you might groan and say, “It’s easy for you. I don’t even have Photoshop!” Don’t worry. If you’re not hiring a designer, then a good newsletter service will provide templates. Typically, you can use a wizard, a template, free-form text, or upload a professional design.

Tip: if you hire a designer for your website, ask about newsletter templates, You Tube, Twitter, and Facebook branding to be packaged in as well.

Here are some thoughts from Steena and I on the the subject:

• Steena Holmes said in her post: "Newsletters should match your website brand or your book cover." I agree.
• Also keep in mind, subscribers may not remember they signed up for your newsletter! Make sure your name is displayed prominently.
• Also, include a picture of both you and your book somewhere in the newsletter text to break up the chunks of text and increase readability.

If you’re not sure how to recreate a graphic, the best bet is to go with your name, large and clear.

Lorrie Thomson’s first newsletter used one of the stock generic templates provided by her newsletter service, Vertical Response. It was fine, but it lacked her name and any other identifying information about her:

For her second newsletter, Lorrie went in and pasted a graphic from her website and her picture. Now we have her book and her photo.

Much nicer! But it could be better. I wanted to see her name blazing across the top, bigger. That’s an easy fix. Steena recommended using the same format each time with a newsletter, and you can do this nicely with a template that provides graphics for each section. That’s what I did for Lorrie. Here’s the third version, which I designed for her as part of this post.

Everything is simple here—I made custom graphics for the header and the subheads. The rest I took from Lorrie’s web site. You can do this, too. Read on.

3.  Get your hands a tiny bit dirty.

You can customize a newsletter with a little work. I’ve created a blank template for you to use. Click here to download.

Note: There are a few steps to complete once you go to that link so that you can use the template.

• Right click on the newsletter template and select Save As.
• Save it as an HTML file (choose HTML from your file type drop down box).
• Then you can upload the HTML file to your newsletter service.
• Addendum: You can also open the file in a text editor like Notepad and select all the code that way (just do a Control- A on a PC to get it all quickly).

You’ll need to play with the HTML a tiny bit. Here’s how to do it:

• Create your own image and then upload to your web space. Use the header and subheader images in my template as a size guide—download them and paste your own graphics over them.
• Upload the images to your web space. In the HTML, replace the full image URL in my newsletter template with yours. For example, your image URL might be “http://www.yourname.com/images/yourheader.jpg”
• Find http://www.sierragodfrey.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/header.png in the code and replace this with yours.  You also might be able to upload directly into your mailing service; if so, do this after the next step.
• With your mailing service, start a new draft email and click on the “code” or “HTML” view.
• Copy the entire HTML code for the newsletter template and paste it in your draft email code view.
• Make sure to test your links and make sure that all your images are showing up correctly. Common problems include not pasting the image URL properly.

4.  Use statistics to focus content.

I sent out a holiday mailing to my business clients last year. After the mailing, I checked my statistics. I could see that my mailing had an 83% open rate (people opened the email and looked at it), which was pretty good.

I included a link in the email where people could download a PDF of gift tags I’d specially made for the holiday mailing. The download had a 20% click through rate—all right, but not great. That got me thinking. If fewer people opened the link, perhaps the link wasn’t well placed or it wasn’t relevant.

This statistic allows me to rethink my links and what I was presenting. You can do the same thing—and you should do it each time you send out a newsletter. Try different things and then pay attention to the statistics. This is called conversion testing and marketers do this all the time.

• Lorrie’s first newsletter, the one with the generic fall template, had a 52% open rate and a 0% click rate (meaning no one clicked on any links in her newsletter). That’s not so hot.
• Her second newsletter with branding she’d included still had only a 56% open rate, but a 1% click rate. With a mailing list that hovers near 100 people, that wasn’t good enough.

So now that we know our challenge is to get Lorrie to have a higher click rate, we’ll consider different ways to encourage that.

5.  Use content strategically.

Scott Stratten, the clear-talking mind behind the UnMarketing brand, says that there are three categories we put email in when it arrives in our inboxes:

• Spam/trash/not reading.
• Will read later.
• Must read/react.

Great article from Scott: http://www.unmarketing.com/2013/03/21/avoid-the-cleanse-how-to-keep-your-subscribers/

Obviously, we want our newsletters to be in the third category. Scott suggests creating a relationship with the reader before the newsletter even arrives—and you should.

Your newsletter signup page should thank the reader for signing up. Be funny. Be unique. Engage with readers, because frankly, newsletters are asking a lot: they ask a reader to spend time in their regular day of email deluge to read yours.

Steena made the point very well that newsletters are about the reader, not the author. What can your newsletter do for the reader?

6.  Email subject titles are incredibly important.

CopyHackers did a test for newsletter subject lines and found that the emails with the name of the sender in them had a higher open rate. According to their tests, CopyHackers says including your name in the subject line increased conversion rates.

Note: Other findings were interesting too—be sure to read their article ~  http://copyhackers.com/2013/03/email-subject-lines/)

Lorrie’s first newsletter had the subject “Fun Fall happenings” with the 52% total open rate. Her second newsletter had the subject “E-book sales, blogging, and book clubs" with the 56% total open rate.

Her third newsletter had the subject “Wrap up the holidays with Lorrie Thomson's signed Equilibrium.” It had a 50% open rate one day after sending, which was excellent. Even more promising, it had a 3% click rate. So more people were opening it faster, and they were clicking on links. With a full week of people getting back to work after Thanksgiving, this out-of-the-gate result was already looking good.

You can view Lorrie's 3rd newsletter here: http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/1432533/46cae1d457/542767569/80c567efe4/

As CopyHackers says, be conscious of your subject lines and conduct your own experiments. Play around with it, but think about subject lines as part of your newsletter design. Test different ways. Include your name. 

7.  The Art of War for newsletters?

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says:

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”

Sun Tzu probably didn’t know that his point about engaging people applies equally well to newsletters as it does to war. If Sun Tzu had sent out newsletters, what would he have done?

• He would have chosen a good mailing service so subscription options are easy for his readers.
• He would have known that people have a limited amount of time to read email, so he would engage the reader from the get go by creating a relationship.
• He would make sure to use graphics that reflect his branding (my guess is his involve knives) and his name would blaze clearly.
• He would craft subject lines to capture the reader’s attention and he would definitely study his statistics to see where to improve – so he could deliver that extraordinary newsletter.

Have fun with your newsletter and remember that even if you don’t get it right the first time, you can keep playing with it—but do try different things.

 

Have you created some newsletters already?
Are you willing to share what worked and what didn't?
Do you have any questions for Sierra?

We want to hear all about it down in the comments!

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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.