Iris Murdoch Made the List!
Thanks to all of you for your emails letting me know what a great job my staff did while I was on vacation. I received so many email that I haven’t had a chance to respond to everyone yet.
I had a wonderful trip visiting family, traveling to Prescott, AZ, Albuquerque NM, Washington, DC, Sparta, NJ, then back to Albuquerque. Of all the places visited, Sparta, which none of you will have heard of, was by far the most beautiful. Situated on Tomahawk Lake, it is lush, green, and peaceful. Forget any negative stereotypes you have of New Jersey and visit Sparta if ever you get a chance.
Last month Grael Norton, Wheatmark’s director of marketing, posted a blog that included a list from The Telegraph of the “100 novels everyone should read.” I was very happy to see that a book, Under the Net, by my favorite twentieth-century novelist, Iris Murdoch, made the list. It was the first time that I’ve seen one of her books included on such a list. (Oddly enough, of Murdoch’s twenty-six novels, Under the Net was my least favorite.)
Murdoch’s novels have elaborate, sometimes gothic, plots, that keep you turning pages, while dealing with serious themes like morality, good and evil, the unconscious motivations of human action, and the nature of free will. If you’re an aspiring or active novelist, I recommend you read one or more of her books to see what one of the masters of your craft can do. The Unicorn, Henry and Cato, and A Fairly Honorable Defeat are all good first reads.
Unfortunately, in the late ’90s, Murdoch fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease. Her decline and death are chronicled in the book Elegy for Iris by her husband, John Bailey, and in the film of the same name staring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench.
By the way, some of the books on the list of “100 novels everyone should read” I really don’t get. Why is Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern considered a classic? I slogged through it to the bitter end hoping to find out why, but never did. And, Moby Dick must get interesting at some point, but it didn’t happen in the first chapters, which I’ve read a few times during my various unsuccessful attempts at reading the entire novel.
Who are your favorite novelists? Let me know in the comments!
Even Kerouac secretly did this
I was reading this article my friend and colleague Jack Rochester mentioned on The Fictional Café recently, and it got me thinking.
Specifically, it got me thinking about the myth that your first draft is the “purest” expression of your work, and that editing it will somehow compromise your artistic vision.
Of all the authors out there, Jack Kerouac probably contributed to this myth the most, since he publicly railed against self-editing, and the story of how he drafted On The Road on a single, giant scroll in only three weeks is legendary.
However, if you read the article above, you’ll see that Kerouac both meticulously outlined his book and had already written portions of it before that inspired three-week period.
Not to diminish Kerouac’s accomplishment in any way—it’s still impressive—but the truth is that “Writing is rewriting,” as the saying goes.
So true: I wrote eighteen drafts of my first screenplay—and it’s still bad!
This doesn’t just apply to fiction, either, or only to long-form writing. Our blog posts and even our emails can benefit enormously from getting better at self-editing.
If you could use some help with this, and you’re local to Tucson, AZ, I invite you to check out my colleague Barbara McNichol’s upcoming Wordshop on October 25th.
If you are a:
- Blogger, author, or journalist
- Business professional
- Administrative assistant
- Marketing copywriter
- Grant or report writer
This Wordshop is for you!
All the details are here.
Happy Wednesday,
Grael
Grael Norton
Wheatmark, Inc.
PS: October 25th is a Saturday—before the
holiday crush begins and you’re too busy to
think about this. It’s also the last time
Barbara’s holding a Wordshop this year, so
don’t miss out!
A social media site that costs nine thousand dollars to join?
A social media site for the 1%? No, this isn’t a joke. It’s real!
You can check out the article about it here.
I didn’t link to this article just to shock you, or to piss you off.
(Though if you’re signing up for the site as others are reading this, I tip my hat to you, Richie Rich!)
I linked to this article to remind you of the incredible power of targeted marketing.
This is marketing that is targeted at a particular audience—not just “everybody.”
“My book is for everybody,” authors say to me.
No, it’s not.
Every book has an ideal target audience, an “avatar reader.”
This is the kind of person who would buy your book based on the title alone.
For example: The Rich Person’s Guide to Social Media—How to Keep the 99% from Cluttering Up Your Online Feeds
Or: The Thrifty Buyer’s Guide to Coupon Clipping—Save an Average of $20 Every Time You Visit the Grocery Store
See how that works? These two books are unlikely to appeal to the same reader.
On the other hand, there’s a group of people out there who will say: “That book is for me!” in each case.
It works with fiction, too, though it helps to communicate more information with the cover:
Clear and Present Danger. Comanche Moon.
The Firm and The Client.
Even Remembrance of Things Past!
If you’re having trouble marketing your book, odds are this is the primary culprit.
Discovering your target market can be tricky, though. If you need some help with this, why not join us in the Authors Academy?
This Friday we’ll be holding Office Hours. It’s a chance for all our members to get together in an open Q&A session with the Senior Faculty to discuss their unique marketing challenges.
For some, folks, their challenge is the very first step: identifying your target market.
If you’d like to join us this Friday and get instant access to all of our archived marketing presentations as well, just click here.
Happy Monday,
Grael
Grael Norton
Wheatmark, Inc.
PS: Office Hours is as much about the feedback you can get from other members as it is about the help you can get from us. Members share their top info with the other members there, and everybody wins!
Can a book change your life for the worse?
Last week we discussed life-changing books.
For most people, that means “life-changing for the better.”
But is it possible for a book to change your life for the worse?
This article from the Sunday Book Review in The New York Times considers the question.
For my part, I love the idea that a book can be a bad influence—just like it can be a good influence.
I also happen to believe that it’s true!
But that’s not what this article got me thinking about, which is the subject of influence itself.
Books are perhaps the most influential media out there.
They can convince people to dress up like characters on Halloween (and on other days, too.)
They can convince people to make major lifestyle changes, like changing their diets or beginning an exercise program.
They can convince people to drop everything and go on a spiritual quest.
They can even start wars.
There’s just one problem: most of the time, you have to buy a book (or at least know about it) to read it.
In marketing, we call this a “barrier to entry.”
That’s why the most successful authors on the planet have a “free line”—an electronic medium like a website or social media where their readers can read their work and connect with them without having to spend any money.
This way, those authors can begin to influence readers who may not yet be paying fans.
If you’re slacking off in this critical department, you’ve got one last chance to check out my complimentary online presentation “The One Way to Market Your Book” this week.
Here’s a hint: it’s all about influence!
I’ll see you there,
Grael
Grael Norton
Wheatmark, Inc.
PS: And if you find your influence with your audience waning, why not register for a quick refresher?
“Never have so many said so little to so few”
A lot of people would have you believe that blogging is passé, or even dead. They think if you’re not on the “bleeding edge” of technology, you’re wasting your time.
“Never have so many said so little to so few,” they say. And they have a point: many, many people’s blogs are read by their family and close friends only.
Is blogging dead? No, but writing a boring blog is!
You may have noticed that we’ve been playing with a new format here at Wheatmark for the last couple of days.
That’s because I just attended a GKIC Fast Implementation Bootcamp in Tempe last week.
Dave Dee, one of my mentors, taught a course on email marketing that was just incredible… but when I got home and reviewed my notes, I realized I’d already learned these exact same techniques… four years ago!
I just hadn’t bothered to implement what I’d learned.
The moral of the story? You’ve got to actually do it!
So if you’ve been having trouble implementing a great blog, I invite you to attend my colleague’s Authors Academy presentation tomorrow on how to write a blog post that will find its audience and perhaps more important, will be shared.
Atilla will be teaching how to craft blog posts that drive traffic and attract readers like flies to a picnic!
This presentation is for Authors Academy members only. If you’re not a member, you can take care of that unfortunate situation right away by clicking here.
Once you sign up, you’ll have instant access to our archives, where there are dozens of presentations available for you to watch and listen to on demand, and most important—take action on immediately!
Take it from me: don’t let four more years go by without making the kind of progress you should be making as an author.
See you there tomorrow,
Grael
Grael Norton
Wheatmark, Inc.
PS: Authors Academy members also have exclusive access to Office Hours, where senior faculty members answer all your questions about marketing and publishing your books. It’s killer!
Don’t Sweat Those One-Star Reviews
I read Light in August by William Faulkner when I was in high school and remember not being able to put it down. It was unlike anything I had read before. The story was so dark. All of the characters led such bleak alienated lives in the unforgiving society of the rural deep South in the 1930s. Faulkner opened a window for me onto a place, time, and people that I was unfamiliar with, and I couldn’t look away. The disorganized narrative style was also new and interesting to me—like some new kind of atonal music.
Out of curiosity I went to Goodreads to see what current readers thought of the book. I was surprised to find 662 one-star reviews, with 7% of readers giving the book one or two stars. This for a book that is always included in any list of the best novels of the twentieth century, and whose author was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature!
The one-star reviewers described the book variously as “absolute torture to read,” “paint-dryingly boring,” and “puzzling and difficult.” One reviewer, Patti, wrote: “What a depressing read! I kept with it, expecting it to get better, but it stayed depressing all the way through and then they died at the end. What a waste of time for someone like me who reads to escape reality. If I want this kind of reality I can read the newspapers.” What Patti disliked about the book was one of the things I liked; it gave me a view into a depressing reality that I wanted to learn about.
Another reviewer, Kerri, wrote “I really disliked this book. The ‘stream of thought’ style to the writing is difficult to follow. I didn’t have the patience for it.” The “stream of thought” style gave me, on the other hand, a compelling new reading experience.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the large number of one-star reviews. Everyone gets bad reviews. Patti’s and Kerri’s reviews might actually encourage some readers to read Light in August because these readers are looking to explore and understand reality’s darker corners, and are bored with tight plots and snappy prose. In the language of modern marketing, some people are in Faulkner’s target market, and some aren’t. That’s as it should be.
I’d much rather you get lots of reviews than all five-star reviews. (Light in August has 31,796 reviews, averaging 3.91 stars.) Lots of reviews means you are doing your job as a marketer and growing your audience.
Perfectionism, Writer’s Block, and Marketer’s Block
Nearly every month I’m late turning in this article for our Marketing Letter and this Publishing Success Blog, to the great frustration of my staff. Why am I late? The old saw comes to mind: “Perfectionism, Procrastination, Paralysis.” My article needs to be perfect because it will be sent to the most important audience I have: you. Because I want it to be perfect, I procrastinate, sometimes to the point of paralysis. And so the article gets turned in late. Many of you have had writer’s block, and will attribute it to the same root cause: perfectionism.
Not so fast! A few months ago I heard a radio program whose topic was whether perfectionists do, in fact, procrastinate more than other people. Two researchers from major universities who studied this subject were interviewed. (My apologies for the missing citation, but I don’t remember the names of the researchers, and couldn’t find information about the radio program on the Internet.) They found that perfectionists actually procrastinated less than other people. They postulated that anxiety and fear, not perfectionism, were the real causes of procrastination—an analysis that seemed intuitively right to me. Maybe the maxim should be changed to: “Phobia, Procrastination, Paralysis.” Thought of in this way, writer’s block is a result of the fear of, and anxiety caused by, the writing task or deadline itself, not of how good your writing will be. Maybe that’s why techniques like having strict deadlines, daily page or word count requirements, scheduled writing times, and private writing-only environments work so well at overcoming writer’s block. These techniques force you to confront and overcome your fear and anxiety.
Why don’t perfectionists procrastinate as much as everyone else? Because their perfectionism necessitates that they confront and overcome any fear and anxiety standing in the way of the (granted, not completely attainable) perfect result they desire. Perfectionism is what makes great writers and books!
It’s also what makes great book marketing. So, don’t let marketer’s block slow you down. Use the courage and techniques you used to conquer writer’s block to conquer marketer’s block, and your perfectionism to make your marketing the best it can be.
PS: Submitting this article five days before the deadline felt really good!
6 simple steps for authors to find Twitter followers
One of the easiest ways for you to build your digital author platform is with Twitter. Using simple search techniques you can find people who are actively engaged in your niche. Since they are already using Twitter, once you make a connection, you can be assured that some of them will help you spread your reach even further across the Internet.
As you set out to establish your online identity as an author or future author, it’s important to start building your Twitter followers as soon as possible. Maybe all you have come up with is the title for a book. As long as you have a basic idea of your niche, you can start making important connections on Twitter.
To get started, here are six ways to add followers:
1. Start by simply letting Twitter search your email address book and show you people on Twitter you already know. You may have forgotten to add friends and family to your fan base and these people are excellent choices to get you started. With Twitter, no one is obligated to follow you back, so adding someone is a pressure-free way to make contact.
2. Begin by knocking on doors and letting people know you exist! You are not going to sell them anything or push a flyer in their face. It’s much, much simpler and easier than that: every day find a hundred new people to follow. Some of these people will follow you back as a simple courtesy.
3. The secret to building a relevant Twitter follower base is knocking on doors that already have something in common with you or your book. To do this, you can use Twitter’s search feature and find other authors similar to you. Pick some famous authors in your niche. Go to their profiles and look at whom they’re following. These are people they think are important to follow. Simply go down the list and follow the people you yourself relate to.
4. Next, look at who’s following these authors. Follow their followers. Here you will want to be more selective. Some of these people have nothing in common with the person they are following. Some people will use programs that automatically follow a certain large number of Twitter profiles every day. If your book is on cooking, including folks who are selling on eBay or weaving baskets may not be helpful.
5. Use the search feature again and this time put in keywords that are relevant to your book. Use a hash tag before the word. Let’s say you wanted to find readers who like Westerns. Simply put #western in the search area. Once the list is generated, scroll down to add those who look like good niche connections.
6. Besides using the search box for keywords, search for the title of popular books in your field. This will provide a list of people who are commenting about books in your niche. This is a great source of readers to get connected with. Make a select list of those who are serious tweeters. These people may not only read your book but are likely to spread the word.
By using Twitter search you will find an almost endless supply of new people to connect with every day. While I have mentioned searching by keyword, author, and title, you can also search for events, geography, holidays, and news that relate to your perfect target audience.
Building a serious Twitter following does not happen overnight, but if you are consistent in following new people every day, you will be surprised how your list will grow.
Of course, this is only one part of becoming a serious Twitter user. Once you have made a connection you will want those you follow to follow you in return. This happens when you create a powerful Twitter profile, tweet regularly with interesting and valuable information, and respond to those who connect with you.
Canva: A powerful social media tool for authors
Canva is an amazing online program that allows you to create professional social media images for free with just a few clicks.
You can create invitations, advertising and promotional projects that include printed materials (up to 2,000 prints), product packaging, presentations, film and video presentations, commercials, catalogs, brochures, and probably anything else you can think of. There are some restrictions (do check out its “One-Time Use License Agreement”) but for the most part almost anything is free to use and free to share.
Melanie Perkins, cofounder of Canva, announced recently that “100,000 new designs were created every week by more than 330,000 users.” So far avid users have created more than 1.5 million designs using Canva.
With over a million free images, tons of professional templates and 100+ poster-ready fonts, there’s absolutely nothing to stop you from producing memes, photo collages, Facebook photos with call outs and social media banners and buttons. If that’s not enough, you can purchase additional professional layouts and images for just a dollar. Uploading your own images is also easy.
Get Started
To get started, go to the website, http://www.canva.com.
Start with the free tutorials. There are a couple dozen so far. The first five teach you a few basic procedures that take less than a minute to click through. The rest of them will train you to become a professional media graphics pro with step-by-step actions. No one will be able to tell that you didn’t spend hours in Photoshop or hire a $100-an hour graphic artist to create your image.
You can begin your project with a blank layout and work from scratch, adding circles, buttons, and text. A simpler way, though, is to select one of their templates and easily switch out the demo photos with your own. For instance, one of the layouts has a set of six different circles of various sizes. Each circle comes preloaded with an image to give you an idea and feel for what the finished project will look like. To personalize it, click on an image and replace it with the image of your choice. If you need to you can adjust your photo for the perfect fit.
A program like this makes updating your Facebook events a breeze. Use an image of Rover rolling in the clover, add a cartoon balloon button, type in some silly text and you have an instant meme that can go viral. Your friends will definitely be impressed. You may not want to tell them how easy it was, though!
For the social media strategist who likes to create a bunch of media images and space them out with timed releases onto their social media sites, Canva cuts the creation process by an easy 50% or more!
3 Simple Author Tips
1. As an author, you can take a quote from your book, add a picture and share it on Pinterest. Find 30 quotes from your book, search your files for 30 pictures and spend 30 minutes cranking out these power shots to add one a day for 30 days of book promotions.
2. You can create flyers for your book by picking a template, adding your book cover and a “buy now” button and include your website or Facebook page.
3. You can create banners for your next Facebook contest that are eye-catching and professional!
Try it. For easy book promotion, it doesn’t get much better than this.
You can add consistency to your author brand by creating social media banners, headers, and photos for each of your networks by matching colors, fonts and images. Canva has drop and snap templates for the leading social networks. Twitter banners, Facebook timeline templates and blog headers can all be created, tweaked and published in one easy session.
Once you create an image you like, you can save it to your computer as an image or PDF. You can send it with the click of a button to Facebook or Twitter.
It’s time to sell your book!
Once a book is published, the first time author may think the job is done. Unfortunately, there is still a lot more to do!
It’s time to switch from your author hat to your marketing one!
You may have heard that the best time to begin marketing your book is day one. Building a following does take time. But it doesn’t mean that it is too late to start marketing at any point in the publishing process. In fact, you can market a book that is years old and still find success if you apply yourself with enthusiasm and hard work.
This article is about creating the right mindset for selling your book. If you love meeting people, talking to crowds and have no problem with meeting strangers, you may think that selling your book will be easier than someone who would rather stay in the background. Surprisingly, though, with all the many ways to promote your book from home, the introverts have just as much book selling power as the extroverts.
The key to selling your book is very simple. Find out how you would best like to tell people about your book and do lots of that. Public speaking, getting in front of the TV camera and telling a hilarious story on the radio will definitely sell books, but there are also quiet ways that work as well.
Every author must find their own way to make connections with readers. That in a nut shell is simply what book marketing consists of — making connections.
The biggest factor you might have to work with in the beginning is not giving up because you try one or two methods that don’t work. Determine from the start that “quitting” is not an option. Then when one door closes or becomes too difficult to push through, back up, regroup and try something else. If you keep trying you will find the key that fits your personality, time, energy and your pocketbook.
I mention pocketbook because that may be one of the options that you will decide to take. At least in the beginning, if you haven’t a clue on how to sell books you might want to hire a publicist, a PR agency or someone to help you out. There is nothing wrong with this at all. In many ways it makes a lot of sense. Instead of spinning your wheels madly in sand and going nowhere use the expertise of a publicist to find out what is the “magic” that will work for your book. Once your book gains some momentum it will usually be much easier to continue on doing the things your publicist was doing.
Another option to explore is to hire a book marketing coach. A coach can help you navigate the different ways to sell your book and prevent you from going off in too many directions at once. This is one of the major hazards for the beginning author. There are so many ways to sell books that one might think one has to do them all. You don’t. A couple of ways that are done consistently will easily outperform hop, skips and jumps from one thing to another. Of course finding those one or two ways in the beginning may very well include a few hops and jumps. A coach can narrow down that search considerably by talking with you, reading your book and giving you thoughtful guidance and recommendations of what to do for your personality, knowledge and time that will best work for you.
If hiring a coach is not something you want to do or perhaps cannot afford, consider group training. Wheatmark offers an excellent program called the Authors Academy that consists of great articles and in depth interviews with successful authors. They also offer group calls and opportunities to ask questions and get feedback.
Whether or not you go with any of the choices above you will still want to do this next option and that is to find out as much information as you can about book marketing.
Wheatmark has an extensive list of great articles on book marketing that you can discover for free through this blog’s archives. There are also many other sites that offer free articles that you can find simply by searching for “how to market a book” and “book marketing” on Google.
Finally, I suggest that you buy a few books on book marketing and read at least a few pages every day. The more you read and explore how to market your book the more chances you will have to find the magic bookselling door that will work for you. John Kremer’s, 1001 Ways to Market your book is a great one but there are also many, many others that will help you to get out there and sell your book.