Writers in the Storm

By Piper Bayard

Some of you may recall my previous article where I explored some of the challenges of book marketing and announced that I was going to seek professional help. I would love to come back to you now and tell you that I found the perfect arrangement that led to phenomenal sales without me having to create one more ad on some program that changed its format yesterday, causing me to spend hours I didn’t have trying to figure out the update. However, I only tell you the truth.

What I found was that I didn’t hate marketing enough. I’m sharing my journey, hoping you can benefit from my experience. I also want to learn from the WITS hive mind down in the comments.

What did I buy?

I got the whole package from my professional media company:

• Amazon Ads
• Book Bub Ad
• Pimping to Reviewers
• Goodreads Giveaway
• Blog Tours
• Coaching

Biggest Lesson: The Cost of an Advertising Campaign Is Not the Cost of the Advertising Campaign

I basically bought all the bells and whistles. It cost around $7500 up front. However, that price was not actually the price for the campaign. Let me explain...

The Amazon Hustle

Hiring someone to do our Amazon ads is not the same thing as buying the Amazon ads.

Amazon ads are designed to make money for Amazon, and not necessarily to make money for us. We are just the cash cows to be milked by Amazon, especially because Amazon is literally in competition with us with its own publishing endeavors.

The pros set up three Amazon ads for me on the same book to run concurrently.

One was Automatic, meaning Amazon algorithms determined where it would appear. The second was based on Keywords, which appear according to the search terms shoppers type in. The third was an ad targeted at Products, and it appeared to potential customers based on their searches for other people’s books.

The real hook of Amazon ads is that Amazon only charges for clicks.

In other words, Amazon shows the ad far and wide, but authors are only charged if someone clicks on the ad. Sounds great, right?

The amount an author is charged, called a “bid,” varies and can be set by the author. However, Amazon algorithms make recommendations for bid amounts that can vary from a few cents to a few dollars per click. In my experience, if an author strays too far below the recommended bid, the ads simply don’t get seen. Bids were frequently over $1 and even over $2 per click for my Bayard & Holmes thrillers.

Authors can set daily limits on the ad spend, but $20/day was recommended by the pros. Those charges were in addition to the money spent on the ad campaign.

The pros said it takes around seven impressions before most people click on an item.

It can then take more than one click to sell a book. One advertising pro told me that one sale for every three clicks is an excellent rate.

Amazon keeps a tally in the campaign account online of how much money was spent on ads and how many sales were produced. If an author pays for three clicks at $1.52 per click and makes one sale, the record will show $4.56 spend and $12.99 in sales. Yay! Making money! . . . It looks great on the page and inspires people to create more ads and spend more money. 

However, it’s entirely likely that each book sold makes much less in royalties than it cost to pay for the three clicks it took to sell it. Add to that the fact that almost always, authors put their books on sale for ad campaigns (I did), and every three-click sale loses even more money. As a result, running the three ads cost me an additional $650/month above any return. 

What did the pros have to say about this? They said that the only way to change this trend is to keep those ads running and make sure the keywords are updated regularly. They were happy to provide that service for me for another $400/month if I so chose.

In Summary 

Look closely at Amazon ads and make sure you are not spending more to sell a book than you will make in royalties, or that if you are, you’re doing it with a reasonable expectation that things are going to turn around before you go bankrupt.

Review and Promotional Copies

Another added expense of a campaign are the review copies and promotional copies for giveaways. The reviewers that I met almost always wanted hard copy.

Author copies take a solid ten days to two weeks to arrive. If you’re like me, you like to strike while the iron is hot so occasionally I sprang for retail copies of the things I didn’t have on hand already. Books I had on hand to send cost the price of the author copy plus the cost of postage. By the time I got royalties back for the retail books, sending them was around the same cost as buying and shipping the author copy. That was true even if the author copy was sent directly.

Do that fifteen or twenty times, and there goes another $200.

Reviewers

An option the pros gave me was to hire a paid reviewer. I was willing to try everything so I did. In my case, this was a total waste of money. I don’t think he even read the book. He wrote it up on his website, which I can’t tell that anyone reads, and he put about three sentences over on Amazon for me. That’s it. Definitely do not recommend that!

One positive experience with reviewers, though, was that I met several reviewers who do not charge and who have excellent websites. I have made friends with a few of them, and I look forward to working with them in the future.

Goodreads

The pros set up a Goodreads account for me and put my books up for a giveaway. They also provided me with how-to instructions to continue engagement and build an audience.

The giveaway was successful in that I had a few thousand people enter. It’s on me, though, that I did not continue Goodreads engagement so I cannot speak to how that would have turned out over time. I would love to hear what your experiences are with Goodreads.

BookBub

The pros ran a BookBub ad for me that garnered more than 54,000 impressions and rendered exactly nothing.

I spoke with a couple renowned indie authors I know, and they told me that BookBub is very hit and miss these days. Some had had the same experience as me, even though they had experienced great success with BookBub ads in the past. Do with that what you will.

Blog Tours

The pros also set me up with several bloggers who ran either articles or interviews. Blog comments are down everywhere, so I could not tell that these appearances amounted to much for me or anyone else. These days, the real action seems to be over at Substack.

Overall Takeaway

As far as I can tell, there is no way for an indie author to hire their way out of spending substantial time and money on marketing. The pros say that "it’s a long game," and they aren’t kidding.

My best advice after my dance with the marketing pros is to first be clear with the fact that while writing is an art, publishing is a business, and businesses take time and money for marketing. The extra twist to the business of publishing is that successful marketing tactics change faster than the weather in the Rockies. What works brilliantly this month might not work at all in another six months.

The pros can definitely help get things started and point us in the right direction at a steep cost, but unless there’s a trust fund to throw down what is potentially a black hole, the bulk of marketing work is still on us authors. There must be ways to do it, but as best I can tell so far, successful marketing is a second full-time job no matter how great the books.

Best of luck, my fellow writers. If any of you hit on the magic marketing formula that makes authors "J.K. Rowling Rich," please do share.

Questions for the WITS hive mind:  What marketing efforts work for you? Does anything work consistently? Has anything worked in the past that no longer works now? Do you see any upcoming trends? Please share your valuable tips in the comments.

About Piper

Piper Bayard and Jay Holmes of Bayard & Holmes are the authors of espionage tomes and international spy thrillers. Please visit Piper and Jay at their site, BayardandHolmes.com. For notices of their upcoming releases, subscribe to the Bayard & Holmes Covert Briefing. You can also contact Bayard & Holmes at their Contact page, on Twitter at @piperbayard, on Facebook at Piper Bayard, or at their email, BayardandHolmes@protonmail.com.

Though crafted with advice and specific tips for writers, SPYCRAFT: Essentials is for anyone who wants to learn more about the inner workings of the Shadow World.

“For any author, this is the new bible for crafting stories of espionage.”

~ James Rollins, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Demon Crown

All post photos purchased from DepositPhotos by the author.

by Lynette M. Burrows

To borrow and slightly twist Samwise Gamgee’s words*, the great stories, the ones that really matter, are stories about people, about their relationships. Relationships are a large part of what your readers relate to because we can’t escape them. We all have relationships with other people. Whether they are friends, acquaintances, enemies, or lovers, your characters' relationships can break a reader’s suspension of disbelief or indelibly mark your reader’s heart.

This is the first of a two-part series that will help you learn to develop unique and compelling relationships by understanding that each relationship is its own entity and how to create compelling relationships in your stories.

The Relationship As An Entity

Friend or foe, character A doesn’t act exactly the same way when she is alone as she does when she’s with Character B (and vice versa for B.) One key point K.M. Weiland teaches is to make the relationship an entity in itself. Basically, she means treat the relationship as a third character. One way to embrace this idea is to think about how the ethics of a group can lead an individual to behave differently than she would if she were alone.

Knowing what the relationship is and how the group reacts differently as a group than each individual would, will give your story more depth and meaning to your readers.

Relationships are composed of many parts. Some of those parts may not overtly be in the story but will influence every interaction between the characters. First, you must understand that there are many types of relationships.

Types of Relationships

Your characters may only have one relationship or many relationships in your book. Choose the type of relationships you will create for your characters with your story goals in mind. Here are a few types to consider:

• Parent and child
• Siblings
• Romantic partners
• Friends
• Teacher and student
• Mentor and mentee
• In-laws
• Neighbors
• Business Partners
• Parent and teen
• Roommates
• Extended family
• Doctor and patient

There are many more types of relationships. In longer stories, relationships can be interconnected such as the antagonist is the ex-boyfriend of the big sister or best friend of the protagonist. Revisit the stories you love and look for the clues to the relationships the main characters have.

When you treat the relationship as an entity in your story, the dynamics between your characters will create motivation and movement that keeps your story from becoming too plot driven. 

Example

The story of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is a quest. If Tolkien hadn't created the friendship between Frodo and Samwise Gamgee, it would have been an entirely different story. Tolkien created that relationship out of his own experiences, but that relationship influences how the plot of the story moves forward.

Samwise is a loyal friend and servant to Frodo at the beginning. And Frodo accepts his role as master. 

Over the course of the story, Frodo questions Sam's loyalty and resents his protectiveness. Samwise learns kindness and acceptance from Frodo. Over the corse of the story, Sam also gains confidence in his decisions. As both characters learn, they change, and their relationship changes from master and servant to equals. 

How Many Relationships

As with any other story writing advice, there is no right way to creating relationships. Nor is there a right number of relationships.

Studies show that in real life, people can have 150 relationships during a lifetime. At any point, in a person's lifetime, only 3-5 of those relationships are likely to be close ones. Each relationship is unique to the two or more people involved.

The number of relationships your character has and forms during your story will depend on the genre, the plot, and the theme or point of your story. Be deliberate about the relationships you develop. Start with the smallest number of characters.

In any story, there are at least two entities, a protagonist and an antagonist. Both of these characters have a relationship with each other, even if it's only as antagonist to one another. Usually, they each also have relationships with other characters.

Once you've identified the relationship between your antagonist and protagonist, identify the other types of relationships you may need. For your story to work, does the protagonist need a best friend or a lover? What about school friends or work friends and neighbors? The easiest and most natural relationships of your protagonist are family members. But unless your story is a family saga, you don’t want all your protagonist’s close relationships to be family. 

Do the same process for your antagonist.

Words of Caution

Unless you are writing super long sagas, you cannot recreate the numbers of, or the complexities of, real-life relationships.

Make certain only one relationship fulfills a specific role in your story. Too many similar relationships can muddle the story so much your reader stops reading. 

You now have a list of anywhere from two to ten (or more) different relationship types, ie characters, to fill in your story. It’s time to make them work for the story. How?

Make the Most of Your Story Relationships

As in real life, story relationships are more complicated than a role or what they can learn from one another. The key elements to making the relationships in your story memorable to begin with interesting groupings of individuals.  

Choose Interesting Groupings

By interesting, I mean choose character groups or pairings that will create some tension. (See "Beguile Your Readers with Tension, Suspense and Conflict" for the difference between tension and conflict.) A few ways tension can exist between characters include attraction, natural antagonism, language barriers, or societal rules. 

Look at the pairings in your favorites, in classics, and in bestseller fiction. Examples include: Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, Romeo and Juliet, the trio of Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, Luke Skywalker and Leia, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or Hawkeye and Black Widow. What causes the tension between each of these groupings? 

Make your main relationship, the one between your primary characters, different from the relationships with side or supporting characters. 

Make Your Characters Individuals

If a character is only developed as “the friend” or “the spouse,” that character will be flat and uninteresting. Every character that shows up as an individual gives your reader another chance to connect. Yes, even the spear carriers, passersby, and crowds should be an individual in some small way. 

Wait, you say? You’re protesting that to make every character an individual will make your book too long and too boring? 

Think about the movie, Toy Story. The main characters, Woody and Buzz Lightyear, have obvious differences that make them individuals. Their roles of cowboy and astronaut influence their actions and dialogue. But Woody has leadership skills, a grasp of reality, and will put himself at risk for others. Buzz has charm and confidence but doesn’t know he’s a toy.

Now think about the side characters. Hamm, the piggy bank, Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, and Rex each display their own personalities through their much smaller but unique bits of action and dialogue. The writers probably know a lot more about these characters and their relationships to Woody and Buzz, but only a little shows on the screen.

Return to that favorite book of yours and look for the side characters and how their relationships come across. How does the dialogue and actions between characters help you understand what their relationship is?

Relationships in Fiction Are Complicated

So far, we’ve touched on how each relationship is a unique entity in your story, relationship types, relationship groupings, and making each character an individual.

Overwhelmed yet? Don’t be. You get to decide how complicated and deep each relationship is in your story. 

Creating fictional relationships can be an organic discovery process that you improve with rewrites and practice. You can base your fictional relationships on the real ones you experience or observe. Analyzing other authors’ books for how the relationships work in their books will help you internalize what works for you.

Part Two discusses what components you need to create relationships your readers can’t stop reading about.

Which fictional relationships have you enjoyed the most? Do you write the relationships between characters as a separate entity?

* “It's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered.” Samwise Gamgee, The Fellowship of the Ring, Lord of the Rings, J. R.R. Tolkien

About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows is an author, blogger, creativity advocate, and Yorkie wrangler. She survived moving seventeen times between kindergarten and her high school graduation. This alone makes her uniquely qualified to write an adventure or two.

Her Fellowship series is a “chillingly realistic” dystopian alternate history. The story follows Miranda, one of the elite who dared to break the rules but in 1961 Fellowship America following the rules isn’t optional. Even the elite can be judged an unbeliever and hunted by the Angels of Death. Books one and two, My Soul to Keep, and  If I Should Die, are available everywhere books are sold online. Book three, And When I Wake, is scheduled to be published in late 2024.

Lynette lives in the land of OZ. She is a certifiable chocoholic and coffee lover. When she’s not blogging or writing or researching her next book, she avoids housework and plays with her two Yorkshire terriers. You can find Lynette online on Facebook or on her website.

Images within the post were purchased from DepositPhotos.com

By Janice Hardy

One of the problems with telling is that’s is often hard for writers to know when they’re doing it.

Show, don’t tell is subjective, which is why one rule doesn’t cover it all. It depends on the genre, the market, the audience, the point of view style, and even the narrative distance. What works for an omniscient third middle grade novel might feel told in a first-person romance written for adults. 

If you look at only the text, you risk missing “told prose” in your writing, since a sentence that technically shows can feel told in context. It’s important to examine the different levels of telling so you know what to look for.

Here are three places to look for told prose.

1. Telling at the Sentence Level

You’ll find most telling at the sentence level. Most of these types of tells can be caught by searching for common red flag words, such as because, since, or when.

Keep in mind “tell” is subjective. A sentence can tell and still read and work fine. It’s up to you to decide if the sentence would be stronger with or without the telling. Such tells include:

Telling that Explains

These explain the reasons why characters feel or act as they do. They also sneak into the manuscript when you fear the text isn’t clear enough and you have to explain information so readers “get it.” Most times, they really don’t need that extra help. You’ll often find filter words in these types of tell, such as “looked” and “felt.”

Telling that Summarizes

These tells take a shortcut by summarizing instead of dramatizing. They often read as though someone is watching the scene unfold from the sidelines, giving a general overview of the action. They might even sound like a summary you’d find in an outline instead of a novel. Sure, you might get the point across to your readers, but it’s not an entertaining read.

Telling that Conveys Information

Many tells exist only to convey information the characters would never think (or have reason) to share, such as world-building details or character backstories. They often sound too self-aware, or read as if the author was jumping into the story with a mini-lecture. These types of tells are good old-fashioned point of view shifts.

2. Telling at the Paragraph Level

If the told prose is explaining or summarizing a situation, the telling can affect an entire paragraph or even a page. You’ll find these tells most often when you pull away from the point-of-view character and start describing what’s going on from afar. These told sections can read like a summary of the scene in your outline. It might even read as if you planned to do more, but never got around to it.

Infodump Telling

An infodump drops in the reasons why something is important in the overall world or setting of the story, and infodumps focus almost exclusively on information relating to the world. This is information readers “need” to understand the story, but in most cases, dramatizes it or backgrounding that information leads to a much stronger story.

Backstory Telling

These tells explain the history of a character, place, or item and why it’s important. Frequently, they’re more extensive than an infodump, sometimes using flashbacks and long internal monologues to reveal frequently unnecessary history. Backstory telling usually focuses exclusively on the histories of the characters, explaining why characters are the way they are instead of showing those behaviors and quirks in action.

3. Telling at the Scene Level

Telling doesn’t stop with summarized paragraphs, and it’s possible to tell an entire scene. These are some of the sneakier types of tells, because writers rarely think to look for told prose at this level. These are scenes that contain important information, but you don’t show the scene unfolding—you just explain it and why it matters.

The most common scene-level tells are flashbacks. They dump history or explain backstory, since showing the scene tends to stop the story. Flashbacks are particularly tricky because they’re often shown, but they’re still telling readers information.

What’s annoying about these tells is that technically, they’re not traditional tells. They just read as though the author is summarizing or explaining events in the novel while nothing is happening on the page. Readers get bored, skim through them, and complain nothing happened in the novel. Since these scenes look like solid, functioning scenes, writers are left scratching their heads and wondering what’s wrong and why no one wants the book.

What Are You Trying to Tell Your Readers?

No matter where you find your told prose, before you revise it, take a step back and consider this: What are you trying to tell your readers? Once you pinpoint what’s important and what needs to be conveyed in that sentence, paragraph, or scene, you’ll be better able to choose how to show that information. Look for ways to:

• Suggest motives through what a character does, says, or thinks.
• Show world-building rules through how those rules and details affect the character’s actions or behavior.
• Show character backstory by choosing details and actions that had an influence on someone who lived through that history.

Show, don’t tell is a troublesome beast, but it’s a tool like any other. If you think about how you want to use it and what you’re trying to say, you’ll have a much better sense of how to convey that information to your readers.

And showing them a fantastic story is what it’s all about, right?

Do you struggle with show, don’t tell? Where do you most often tell?

About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author and founder of the popular writing site Fiction University, where she helps writers improve their craft and navigate the crazy world of publishing. Not only does she write about writing, she teaches workshops across the country, and her blog has been recognized as a Top Writing Blog by Writer’s Digest. She also spins tales of adventure for both teens and adults, and firmly believes that doing terrible things to her characters makes them more interesting (in a good way). She loves talking with writers and readers, and encourages questions of all types—even the weird ones. 

Find out more about writing at www.Fiction-University.com, or visit her author’s site at www.JaniceHardy.com. Subscribe to her newsletter to stay updated on future books, workshops, and events and receive her ebook, 25 Ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now, free.

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