Writers in the Storm

Writers In The Storm welcomes Tara Lain, a public relations and advertising executive who makes use of her promo savvy to promote her second career, writing erotic romance.

A lifelong writer of serious non-fiction, Tara didn’t fall in love with EROM until 2009 and, through perseverance and hard work she had the first novel she ever wrote published in January of 2011. She capped off that same year by being voted Best Author of 2011 in the LRC Awards and had her Genetic Attraction Series named runner-up for Best Series of 2011!

When we heard her talking about media and self promotion at our Orange County RWA meeting, we knew our readers would love hearing how she shot her writing career straight to the top in just a year’s time.

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Special thanks to Writers in the Storm for inviting me today. I brought my soapbox and will climb up on it because I want to talk about an aspect of promo.

Many authors have a love/hate relationship with self promotion. Others have a hate/hate relationship. Every hour you spend in promo is an hour you aren’t writing. But the fact remains that there’s not much point in writing if there is no one to read your books.

Some authors say the best way to get an audience is to write a great book. I would argue back that writing a great book is a good way to attract a bigger audience, but first you have to make people aware of you as an author.

That’s where promo comes in.

I am an e-published writer of erotic romance.  My success lives and dies online. In addition, I’m a public relations and advertising professional in my day job so when I started writing romance all my instincts said “help people get to know you.”

The first thing I did was blog.

Recently I’ve heard some writers say that blogs are dead. All the good blogs have been done. Boy is that a bad excuse for not doing promo. People might as well say all the good books have been written so why write one. There is always an audience for an interesting blog.

There is, however, one excuse for an author not to have a blog. If you honestly hate the idea so much that you know you won’t keep your blog up, you’ll neglect it and let it go for months with no posts, then don’t start a blog. But be a wildly active Facebook participant and newsletter hound to make up for it. Or  consider joining a group blog where all the responsibility doesn’t fall on you. (I belong to a group blog too.)

A blog is an author’s home base.

You might say, “Isn’t my website home base?” Only if your blog is on your website! A website, no matter how good and how frequently changed, will never be as dynamic as a blog.

A blog allows an author to talk to readers directly. Even when hosting other authors, your personality and interests shine through.

A blog is a place to invite your readers to participate in your writing life. You can host blog hops, blog tours, contests. Invite other authors you admire, write about subjects in your genre. Cheer when you get a great review. Cheer somebody else’s great review. And of course, post nibbles from your books.

Practicalities:

• Authors scream “what do I write about? I have nothing to say.”Nonsense. Imagine you have to make your living as a non-fiction writer and need to come up with short articles to keep food on the table (because in a sense you do). My new release is about a witch. I am blogging about the history of the witch trials, what male witches are called, black cats and why they are associated with witches. I’m also blogging about writing sex scenes, why my heroes are so beautiful, why read a male/male romance, how covers influence book selection, and a lot more.
• How often should you blog? I blog two to three days a week on two blogs. Many authors blog every day. A blog is a living document and you want people to routinely check back for new content. As a general rule, if you can’t post once a week minimum, don’t start a blog. But writing blogs every day isn’t necessary. You can Instead, try scheduling blogs for a week or more in advance.
• Promote your blog on Facebook and Twitter. If you are a real blogaholic, join Triberr and increase the number of people who visit your blog exponentially (but you have to be willing to post often to get the benefit of Triberr). [Triberr help]
• Develop a mail list (how to do that is a subject for another blog) and promo your blog posts.
• Join Blog Hops and drive lots of people to your blog.
• Start blogging BEFORE you're published. I started one of my two blogs about six months before I was published. I knew a publisher was interested in me, but I didn’t have a firm commitment yet. I started my blog mostly focused on other authors I liked plus fun posts on kissing and such. I used my newly selected pen-name and slowly built a following. Then I hopped onto other social media after I sold my book.  By the time my first book was released, I had the number one bestselling book on my publisher’s website that week, which was a big deal for a brand new author.
• Have fun with it! While not quite as interactive as Facebook or Twitter, a blog is a conversation. It’s personal and people can comment back. Enjoy it.

Stepping off the box now.  As you can tell I am an unrepentant promo fanatic. I have seen so many things accomplished in my own writing life (like being named Best Author of 2011 in the LRC Awards) and in the careers of other writers that I directly attribute to promotion.

It would be so wonderful if publishers and agents would handle all of that for us, but the fact is that we live in a social media world and social media is personal. Even if publishers promoted new writers, we would STILL have to do self promotion because readers know the difference. So take a deep breath and embrace the blog.

Tara's Blog

Visit Tara's website

Beautiful Boys Books

Tara's latest Book, Spell Cat

By Laura Drake

"The secret of good writing," says William Zinsser,
"is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components."

This is one of the first lessons I tried to tackle as a writer. And I needed to. I’ve been known to get a bit carried away with the words, if you know what I mean (my fellow WITS bloggers are snickering – do you hear them?)

For those of you just starting to rein in your rampant prose, the following articles may help:  Here and Here.

I think one of the coolest things about writing is that learning it is like trying to get to the center of a rose that’s opening.  Every time you master one layer, there’s another, more delicate and subtle than the last.

It wasn’t until I tackled a problem with my latest novel that I discovered this next layer. I had a wonderful idea for a story – no, really, it was brilliant! Except for the fact that it sold as a romance, and the hero and heroine didn’t meet right away. So if this was going to work, I needed to crank those first chapters down to their pure essence.

I learned several nuances about writing tight from this exercise:

• I don’t need all the scenes I wrote. When I went back and analyzed my beginning, my first scene was a couple of pages of description of the world I’d dropped the reader into. I took my Exacto blade and cut it down to one short page of the most important stuff; the sweat from the hot day, the dust from the cattle’s hooves – stuff like that. I learned that a short cameo that leaves questions in the reader’s mind can be a good thing.
• I’m in love with my words. I get so carried away by my descriptions that I can go too far. They may be pretty, but the reader doesn’t care. They want to see what comes next, and I was slowing the action. Say it once – the best possible way, and then move on.
• Sometimes what you leave out is more powerful than you can write.

My heroine gets unjustly fired from her job in the second chapter. I had her confronting the person who caused it. It was pithy. It was clever dialog. It felt good to vindicate my character! Then I cut it. As good as it felt to write the scene, it just wasn’t critical to the plot. One of my critters pointed out that by not writing that scene, it made the reader root for the character more. The character was now the underdog, mistreated, but undaunted. I didn’t know that!

Sit down and have a face-to-face with reality; no dodging, no excuses. I looked at my chapters not by how well it was written, but instead, was the scene, paragraph, line essential? Because I didn’t have room for anything that wasn’t. And I was surprised at how much wasn’t!

I had an epiphany! (Don't worry, I went home and changed clothes afterward.) The difference is, instead of writing as I wanted and then cutting the fat, I wrote down the bones, and added muscle. I guess both ways work, but I know I'll only write bones and add from now on. I found it very powerful.

So, did I get it tight enough so the H/H meet fast enough? No. They meet on page 40!  I’m going to save it to sell as a Women’s Fiction instead of a Romance. But I’m so glad I tried, because I learned so much from the exercise.

And man, those 40 pages are tight, gripping, and kick some serious a$$!

Writers In The Storm is especially pleased to welcome our guest blogger, Kristina McMorris. She comes to us from the Pacific Northwest where refuses to carry an umbrella.

Recipient of nearly twenty national literary awards, she’s hosted weekly TV shows since the age of nine, including an Emmy® Award-winning program.

Her debut novel, the highly acclaimed, Letters from Home (Kensington books, Avon/HarperCollins UK), was inspired by her grandparents’ wartime courtship. It was declared a must-read by Woman’s Day Magazine and was a Reader’s Digest Select Editions feature as well as a Doubleday Literary Guild selection. Her second novel, Bridge of Scarlet Leaves (March 2012) has already received glowing reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.

By Kristina McMorris

Unfortunately, for authors—as much as we deeply wish our own books were magically immune to such pride-shredding atrocities—there's no escaping bad reviews. It's just part of the gig.

Of course, this doesn't change the fact that it isn't always easy to gracefully handle a stranger's public declaration that our "baby," whom we've lovingly nurtured through teething and first steps and colicky nights, is flat-out ugly. Worse yet, that our sweet child is so ghastly a creation it should be scorned and forever ostracized.

I admit, I'm confused by this concept. Not that bad reviews exist; the literary world would be a boring one if every reader shared the same opinion. (Case in point, there are enough fans of the movie "Saw" to warrant millions of production dollars and a series of SEVEN films.) Rather, what I'm referring to are the vicious, you deserve to die for writing such a steaming pile of doggy-doo kind. Fortunately, I haven't been the victim of such a review to date, but I'm not naive enough to believe one isn't headed my way in the future.

I can't help but wonder what prompts such anger, and not merely toward the work, but the author as well—particularly when the topic isn't a controversial one. Indeed the internet, in both good and bad aspects, has provided a microphone to the masses, encouraging "anonymous" commenters to often express words they'd likely never say in person. With the promotional trend of free ebooks today, the chances of readers sampling a book that defies their tastes have never been greater.

And yet, the overwhelming advice distributed among writers remains: Do. Not. Respond.

Gripe to your family and friends, even create a voodoo doll akin to a sock monkey if you must. Then, after you've had a chance to cool off, visit a site like Goodreads or Amazon, look up your three all-time favorite novels, and read at least two one-star reviews of each. The nastier, the better—because hey, how could any person in their right mind despise such a work of brilliance?!

To further heal your wounds, reread wise words of advice like…

"If you get a bad review, it's because someone outside your target audience has found your book and gave it a shot. It's no reflection on them as a reader, and no reflection on you as a writer. If, as an author, you don't understand this, your writing will suffer, because you'll be writing not to get bad reviews instead of writing to reward your target audience."   - John Locke

Then there's my personal favorite…

"I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it—how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free."   - Georgia O'Keefe

And finally, once you've done all of the above, it's time to brush away those self-doubts, sit your tush back down at that computer, and, for the readers who eagerly await your next book, forge ahead and write.

Have any readers here at WITS had bad reviews? How did you handle them?

Kristina's Links:

KristinaMcMorris.com 
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Behind-the-book video (2.5 min)