Which came first: The audience or the book?
Last time I revealed what to me was the most significant lesson learned during my last thirteen years running Wheatmark: that publishing success requires actively building an audience. A natural question many authors have about this is: Should I start building an audience for my book before or after I write it?
Ideally you’d write your book and build your audience simultaneously, so that your audience-building activities could inform the content of your book, and you could use your writing as a resource for your audience-building activities. But the deeper answer is: It doesn’t matter, because you’re going to have to do both to achieve publishing success, and you have to start somewhere! Let me illustrate this with two very different publishing success stories:
1. Start with an audience, then write a book: Just over a year ago, when Mark Baker published The Game Changer: A Simple System for Improving Your Bowling Scores, he was a renowned bowling coach with top-tier clientele, including several of the best bowlers on the PBA Tour. He had lots of fans and followers both online and offline. He’d been involved in bowling for over thirty years: as a competitive bowler earning four PBA titles along with numerous other awards and accolades, as a sales manager for Cal Bowling Supply, and as the developer of Camp Bakes, one of the premier bowling camps in the world. In short, Mark had an audience. As a direct result, The Game Changer sold over 2,000 copies in its first month after publication and 6,000 in its first year.
2. Write a book, then build an audience: Over twenty years ago, when Angelyn Miller first published The Enabler, she was not a recognized expert on codependency and enabling—the subjects of her book—nor had she published any books before. She wasn’t a degreed practicing psychologist with a large clientele, either. In short, Angelyn had no audience. Her first publisher, Hunter House, invested substantially in getting The Enabler placed in brick-and-mortar bookstores (in the age before Amazon mattered) and listed in the right catalogs. Angelyn pursued and obtained a master’s degree in counseling psychology. She appeared as a guest on several radio shows and at a conference. The Enabler was recommended in several nationally syndicated self-help newspaper columns. Angelyn has built a substantial audience since the first publication of her book, and it shows. The Enabler has sold tens of thousands of copies, including over 30,000 since its republication with Wheatmark in 2001. When Angelyn publishes her second book, her audience will be there, ready and eager to buy it.
So don’t beat yourself up if you’ve spent all your time writing a book and haven’t built an audience for it yet. Pat yourself on the back for the major achievement that having written a book is, roll up your sleeves, and get to the work of building your audience.
Which came first the chicken or the egg? It doesn’t really matter if you’re making a chicken omelet.
Sam Henrie: Why I Started Wheatmark
In the late 1990s I left my position as Director of Logistics at the mid-sized tech company I had worked at for nine years. I left with two great gifts: enough money to take some time off and the entrepreneurial bug. During my nine-year tenure I watched the tech firm grow from a local business with a handful of employees and under $1 million in annual revenues to a global enterprise with nearly a thousand employees and over $100 million in annual revenues. The experience had me hooked: I knew I would to start my own company. Doing what, I did not yet know.
At the time I was investigating the book publishing business; I wanted to understand why some of my relatives (I come from a family of writers) were having trouble getting their books published—books that were exceptional, and ones I was convinced had good chances in the market place. My research led me to a New Yorker article detailing how mightily the major book publishers were struggling to make a profit. Inventory costs were killing them—for historical reasons publishers, not bookstores, are responsible for the cost of unsold inventory. As a result publishers were becoming skittish, publishing ever fewer titles and taking ever fewer chances on new authors, not willing to risk the cost of bookstore returns and unsold inventory. That’s when I had a light bulb moment. Online bookstores didn’t need to carry any inventory to give readers all the information they needed to make their buying decisions, and print-on-demand (a new book manufacturing technology) allowed books to be printed to order. Combine these two innovations and presto you had no-inventory book publishing. The publishers’ problems were solved! In fact, without the need to invest in inventory, and given online bookstores’ access to a huge global market, authors could inexpensively self-publish and bypass the publishers altogether. My literary relatives’ problems were also solved!
Then the second light bulb clicked on: I could start a company that would provide authors with all of the services they needed to self-publish using the combined power of online bookstores and print-on-demand. I’d be scratching my entrepreneurial itch and helping some of the most interesting people on the planet—authors—to succeed. I setup a desk in my living room, got to work, and Wheatmark was born. Thirteen years, thousands of published titles, and two office relocations later, Wheatmark is still helping authors find success, though now not just by publishing their books, but also by helping them with the all-important work of finding and building their audiences.
More about that later….
An Amazing Resource: Picmonkey
A robust image and photo editor that can do everything can be overwhelming, especially when you’re staring at a blank canvass trying to figure out what kind of banner image would go well with your Facebook author page.
On the other hand, applications that focus on a single aspect of design, like PicMonkey, can inspire you and save you a lot of time in such situations.
PicMonkey is a free online photo editing service that lets you create stunning photo collages on the fly. Visit Picmonkey and start creating your collage, which then you can share on Facebook, Pinterest, or print it on any marketing piece.
As an example, we quickly put together these two collages using PicMonkey: one from our book covers, the other from stock photography.
Book marketing tip: A cheap and easy way to schedule your Pinterest pins
Pinterest is an amazing tool for authors but only if used regularly. Unfortunately, pinning can be a major time waster and may gobble up the precious minutes you should be … writing!
One way to get around this is to schedule your pins a week at a time.
There are programs available that will allow you to schedule your pins. The bad news is that the ones I could find are all subscription based, starting at $10.00 a month and going up to $100 for noncommercial users. While that might be affordable for some, it may not be for authors on a limited budget.
The bottom line behind scheduling is planning. Remember the old adage: for every hour you spend in planning you save three in work time. If you take an hour a week to plan your pins, you can then pop in the pins every evening in just three minutes.
The best time for pinning is in the evening hours after 8:00 p.m. EST. So that’s your first tip. Plan your pinning time to fit into that period.
Here are the guerilla steps to becoming an amazing pinner!
1. Create a list of pins, keywords, and #hashwords to use with pins.
2. Make a list of the different kinds of pins that you want to pin.
3. Create a spreadsheet or simple Word document.
4. Find the pins (your own) or repins and copy the link for each one. Put in your spreadsheet. Fill in the keyword and description for each pin.
Schedule a time every day between 8 pm – 1 am and pin one to five pins during this time. If you have done all the work ahead of time—collecting pins, keywords and composing description—it will take you no more than three minutes to pin.
While this is not as fun as having a program that does it automatically for you it gets the job done. If you set up a system, you will get the same results as paying for a subscription-based program.
Remember, even with a subscription program you still have to put in the time to find pins, keywords, and write descriptions. So, though you don’t have the convenience of having them sent out automatically, by making the process easy you are more likely to pin on a daily basis and get the same results as a paid subscription.
To learn about real book marketing strategies and to get a jump start on your marketing, check out the Authors Academy.
How to do book research using Google online forms to gather information
“Content is king.” The statement has been used so much it’s become cliché. Nevertheless, it is still true and creating valuable content means you provide information not available anywhere else.
One way to do this is to do your own research. Collect data online by asking a group of people to provide responses to a question or a series of questions. The information that you collect is uniquely yours so it can be a big selling point for making your book stand out authoritatively.
Let’s say you’re a historical fiction writer and you want to find out what people’s responses are to visiting a particular historical site. You could create a form with a question and then share it with those people who have visited the site by asking on Twitter or Facebook. A better way would be to connect with the historical site and ask for permission to survey their visitors. If you share the results of the form with them and acknowledge the historical site in your book in a positive way, they may be glad to share the form with their list.
There are many ways to create a form on the web. You can write your own if you have coding skills but, for most of us, the easiest way is to use an online form service. Some are free and others charge a monthly or yearly subscription.
One of the best options is using Google Drive. Under Google Drive, you have an option for creating a form that you can send in an email or post on a website or Facebook page. You can view a short video tutorial [3:31] that will get you up and running quickly.
The information gathered from your form can provide statistical information to write a chapter in your book or an article or news release.
If you’re an author and feel stuck in your book marketing, get a jump start by learning about the best and latest book marketing strategies in the Authors Academy.
How to grow your author fan club
Behind every successful author is a dedicated group of fans. Let’s call it your author fan club.
This club may not include card-carrying membership with dues, name tags, or annual parties, but it does exist in some form or other. As an author, you need a faithful group of followers to ignite your book sales, show up at your events, and promote by word of mouth everything that comes off the press.
I do realize that when you start out, this fan club consists of your closest family members. They do come to your events, don’t they? No matter how small a fan club you have, the truth is, you do have one, and your task is to make it grow.
The easiest way to get started is to start collecting email addresses from your author website.
Of course, all that is much easier said than done.
Collecting email addresses from casual website visitors with nothing but “Sign up for Updates” is not going to happen unless you’re an A-list celebrity author. We’re all overwhelmed with too much email clamoring for our attention already. Our mailboxes overflow every morning with stuff we know we should read, would like to read but simply don’t have time to read every day.
To entice people at a local event or website visitors to give you their email addresses you must give them an irresistible offer such as a free (downloadable) book, a sample, or a report they want to read.
Then you want to be in touch with them regularly via email.
Then, to keep your email subscribers from hitting the unsubscribe button after the initial fervor wears off you must commit to providing valuable ongoing content or they will drop like flies once the initial offer lands in their email box.
So how do you get your author fan club to take off and grow?
There are many offers out there that promise you a massive list in a short time but I’m not sure that works for most people. The only way I know that does work is to consistently provide something of value and to be as available and responsive to every fan as you can be.
It’s not easy but it pays off.
Share consistent content on your blog by writing helpful and informative articles. Link to other relevant websites and articles on your author blog. On Twitter, share both your blog’s and other people’s articles. You can do the same on your other social media accounts as well: Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, or LinkedIn.
It’s easy to be discouraged in the beginning when you realize that no one is listening. The way to get out of that mindset is to make creating content something that you actually enjoy doing! Don’t make it feel like work.
If you have fun sharing great pictures, if you think sharing tips, resources, and information with others brings a smile to your face and someone else, then you will keep doing it simply because you enjoy it. Keep providing this value for the few fans you have now, and in time you will be providing it for many, many more. To get a more detailed overview of how all this works, be sure to view the webinar “The One Way to Market Your Book” in the Authors Academy.
5 basic tweets for building your author platform
Building your author platform is a daily exercise every author must commit to for a book’s success.
If Twitter is part of your social media routine, coming up with interesting and relevant tweets can be a chore. One way to make this task easy is to create a tweet subject list.
To get started, decide how many tweets a day you will do. Three to five is usually a good number to start with. Leaving it up to whatever happens happens usually means that nothing will happen. So get yourself a piece of paper and let’s get started building your author tweeting program.
For this example, I am going to help you plan for five tweets a day. You can shorten it if you like to three or four.
When tweeting, a good practice is to offer tips, links, and interesting news items that will be of interest to your followers. Obviously, you want to promote your book, writing, and projects you are interested in, but make sure you have plenty of other tweets to balance them out. A good ratio I have often heard recommended is to offer one self-promotion tweet for every ten tweets.
Five possible tweets
1. Blog post update. This one is easy and can be done automatically every time you post. Every time you write a new blog post, let your followers know.
2. Inspirational quote. Keep it on topic about writing, books, book marketing or from an author. Create a list and add to it as you read books, news articles, etc. It’s okay to use a quote from places such as Inspirational Quotes or BrainyQuote, but you will have more impact if you can say you just read it or just found it somewhere.
3. Great image or picture. Great or fun pictures from around the web are okay, but including your own content from time to time will result in making a better connection. If you’re tweeting to build your author platform, keep your photos focused on something to do with your book most of the time.
4. A helpful resource. Share what matters to you. If something inspires you, there’s a good chance it will do the same for someone else as well.
5. Share a lighter moment. Something funny, a witty joke, or a comment you just heard.
If you’re an author and feel stuck in your book marketing, get a jump start by learning about the best and latest book marketing strategies in the Authors Academy.
How to build a Pinterest research board for your book
Whether your book is fiction or nonfiction, you can use Pinterest to create a better book by creating research boards.
What is a “research board”?
Basically, it is a board or series of boards that have images that link to anything related to your book. Take a look at these amazing research boards created by Alexa Chipman who writes young adult fantasy and science fiction.
You can create a board that takes place in the area your book focuses on: a state, city, park, or building.
Create separate boards for different categories of your book, such as: book cover ideas, characters, food, clothes, time period, places, spaces, weather, history, events, and anything else that will get you into the creative mood for writing your book.
For instance, let’s say you’re writing a mystery story that takes place in Corvallis, Oregon. Create a new board called “Corvallis, Oregon.” Now you can pin images, articles, videos, anything, and everything that happens in Corvallis.
3 benefits of your research board
1. Use your board to write description passages. If you have pinned images of a restaurant, you can look at those to get into a visual sense of the place. Ask yourself questions as you look at the pictures. What is the weather like? What kind of clothes are people wearing? What’s the atmosphere like?
2. Measure interest in your board. Do you have any traffic to your board? Use a site like Pinpuff to measure the popularity of your board. Knowing if anyone is interested in your book location can be valuable information to marketing your book in that area.
3. Build your book platform while collecting information for your book. What attracts people to go to Corvallis? By targeting those areas, you can fill your board with pins that match interest. People who visit one of your boards will likely visit your other boards. Make sure that they know you are writing a book and that it will highlight areas of their greatest interests.
At Wheatmark, our work with authors does not stop once their books are published. In fact that is just the beginning. That is why we place an emphasis on educating our authors about book marketing.
A quick tip to mentally reprogram your brain to write better in ten minutes
Chapter One:
It was a dark and stormy night…
Stuck in a rut? Can’t figure out how to get started with a bang for your opening chapter?
Try this copy-and-paste method:
Find an opening paragraph of a book that you like.
Copy it.
Then copy it again. One more time.
Now, close your work and write your own opening paragraph. It will have the flow and essence of what you just copied but be in your own words.
This is not plagiarism. The only copying you did was as a writing mental exercise.
For instance, let’s say you copied the opening sentence “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Naturally, you don’t want to use the same words, so you change.
In fact, you change quite a bit:
“It was another dark night with the wind blowing as if it determined to beat the hell out of someone.”
It’s quite different now, actually. It’s definitely a take of the “dark and stormy night” bit, but who would know?
Copying writing as an exercise is a time-tested exercise for learning to write better. Some professional writing courses insist that their students copy pages and pages of text to get them into the flow of mastering a new type of writing.
If you find yourself stuck in writing. Pick up a book by your favorite author and give it a try. You will be surprised how powerfully this works!
At Wheatmark, we believe in helping authors with every step of the writing and publishing process. Whether your book is is in the beginning or final stages to tell us about your project, tell us about it.
How to use hashtags to find your first 100 twitter followers
Today we’ll look at how you as an author can use hashtags in your tweets in order to attract followers for your Twitter author profile.
Here’s the basic information to compose your first #hashtag tweet.
Use the hashtag # symbol before a word you want to target. This will enter your tweet into a conversation based on that thread. Don’t put a space between the symbol and your keyword or between words in a phrase:
#mickeymouse #donaldduck #baby #author #bookmarketing
For this exercise, we’re going to use a fictional author named Arthur J. Author, who wants to build a Twitter platform to sell his new book, Frugal Retirement.
He has just started his Twitter account and has zero followers. He knows his target audience is over 60 and worried about money.
He has come up with a word list that he thinks will connect with his target audience: retirement, senior, senior living, frugal, budget, retirement savings, retirement budget, retirement blogs, retirement living, and how to save money.
Since he has no followers, anything he tweets has little hope of making a connection unless he uses a hashtag to break into an existing conversation. Using a hashtag will literally drop him into a traffic flow, sort of like getting on a highway full of travelers already. It will take him from walking barefoot down a cow path to speeding on the freeway in a BMW.
He starts his first tweet:
Arthur Wannabe’s new book, #Frugal #Retirement provides hundreds of ways to save money. Free report at
[shortened link].He hits send and his first tweet is out the door. He writes a couple more “selling” tweets but does not send them out all at once. Spacing them will be more effective. A good ratio is to offer one “selling” tweet for every ten tweets.
His next tweet that he will send an hour or two later might explain a budget tip, share a quote, funny story on retirement, a video to watch, an article to read by another author or anything newsworthy, fun, or inspirational that will be of interest to his target audience.
Watch this funny video! Aging woman fights back. [shortened link] I can’t stop laughing. #seniors #frugalliving
In this tweet, he has not mentioned his book, but is targeting the same audience with a relevant subject and uses a hashtag to stay in the conversation.
Several of the people who like the video will want to follow Arthur to see what he will offer next.
Twitter is all about building engagement. When using hashtags, every tweet should add something to the existing conversation. While not everyone who reads your tweet will automatically follow you, the more interesting and relevant your tweets are, the greater your chances will be.
After ten or so tweets, Arthur will send another selling tweet. This one is close to his first message with just a few tweaks to make it different:
Frugal #Retirement by Arthur J. Author provides hundreds of ways to save money. Free report at [shortened link] #seniorliving
There are a few behaviors to avoid in using hashtags. Using them could cause your account to be filtered from search or suspended. Twitter guidelines recommend using only two hashtags per tweet. Do not add a hashtag to an unrelated tweet.
Also, don’t use the same hashtag repeatedly without adding value to the conversation or tweet about a trending topic with a misleading link to something unrelated.
Writing tweets with hashtags is an important part of building a Twitter following. At Wheatmark, we believe in helping authors with every step of the writing and publishing process. Whether your book is is in the beginning or final stages to tell us about your project, tell us about it.