Christopher D. Schmitz's Blog, page 42

State of Writing

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So this guy named J.R.R. Tolkien said “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” Sounds like my upcoming week. Luckily I’m taking a day off on tuesday (well, mostly taking the day off). that should help me get my weekly chapter written.

I got my chapter done last week–plus I got the final draft of John in the John to the publishers, scored a whole bunch of Robert Jordan books at a library sale, picked up tickets to comicon, designed and ordered a bunch of new promo supplies, setup two future bookstore signings, and maybe bought another house. Plus there was that big fundraiser. This coming week might be busier: book signing/library event on the weekend, TV and podcast interviews later in the week, plus prep for Wizard World comicon the following week.

Go Small or Go Home

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So many authors don’t realize the impact of going smaller. In an effort to try and reach everyone under the sun we often try and make a generic pitch that will have broad appeal. Our initial instinct is that everyone will love our newest book and so it ought to be pitched so that everyone will find it accessible.

That’s the wrong mindset. We are naturally led to do it because our books are our babies and no parent can imagine that their child might not be everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve met a lot of kids. Many of them are little crapheads who I’d love to see suffer a few days at military academy. Just like there’s a lot of little dicks running around whose parents praise them, there are a lot of bad books. But there are also kids who are just different. Some adults would love to coach little league—others would rather tutor kids who focus on band or theater. Kids aren’t one size fits all and neither are books. When we try to make kids uniform we strip them of what makes them unique. The same goes for books—if you water down things like genre distinctions in order to give it a broader audience you will only succeed in turning off a larger audience with a book that no longer fits anywhere.

I see it all the time as a book reviewer. People know I like sci-fi and so I get many authors trying to squish a literary fiction tale into a sci-fi mold (yes… SF is broad, but a modern romance tale about two lovers texting their feelings to each other via iphone would’ve been sci-fi fifty years ago by the same metric.) Don’t make your book into something it’s not. Two gushing five star reviews will get you better results than fifty three star reviews that cumulatively say “meh…it’s okay, I guess.”

I heard a promotion idea a while back I’m trying to embrace. I can’t remember where I heard it… probably overheard at some writer’s workshop I attended. “It’s better to have one or two people who absolutely love your book and will tell everyone that they’ve got to read it than having a hundred people who thought it was merely okay. Find those two people.”

There’s a good article over at the MCB Blog about the power of Word of Mouth that sums this up, so go check it out. Stop watering down your book. Let it stand for what it is—even if it means there’s a seemingly smaller readership.

Don’t advertise broader—advertise better. People cross genre boundaries for a personal recommendation.

 

State of Writing

Busy day, busy weekend. I did finish my chapter while on the road this weekend. I also have a new page in the comic done which makes me glad. Looking at upcoming weeks and I’m pretty slammed. I’m hoping to get chapter 11 written in WotT2: Through the Darque Gates of Koth and maybe get my newly contracted manuscript its final facelift before it gets sent off to the publisher. Other than that, I am still taking submissions for Tuesday book reviews, but you may have noticed I didn’t post one last week and won’t again this week—just too little time for reading over this couple week busy period.

One last thing, Wolf of the Tesseract is currently on sale through a special promo service. Go check it out and pick it up for 99 cents! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01JGOEKK6

Don’t be afraid to go nuclear on your FB Ads

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If you are fortunate enough to get some good activity on your social media ads, there are a few things you want to keep an eye on. I get a lot of traffic on the ad for my nonfiction book and thought I’d remind you that an advertisement has one purpose: to sell product.

My popular ad appropriately represents my book, Why Your Pastor Left, which addresses a very niche topic and helps people work through a difficult topic that is often fraught with pain and fresh struggle. It specifically targets certain keywords and an audience who has shown interest in most major pastors, authors, and ministers—I know that the statistics of the problem mean that almost anyone with an active faith-walk who attends church will encounter this or has already. Not everybody is friendly to faith, however. If you’ve followed my blog or delve into the archives you will see that a certain segment of the population feels entitled to troll faith-writers and villainize people who believe differently—I’ll come out and say it: usually atheists who can’t handle opposing viewpoints or logic that doesn’t coincide with their emotions.

That probably sounded like a digression… but it’s not. Whatever side of the aisle you sit on or whether you attend a church, mosque, or none you will discover that most of the world is very small-minded and violently reactive. You can post a photo to social media of yourself with a giant tomato you grew in your garden and find snarky comments in short order from people asking if your secretly working with Monsanto or have injected GMOs into the fruit (as if that’s really a thing). Most people don’t really know what a GMO is, but that doesn’t stop them from vomiting on your happiness. It’s what people do—and we do it well… we do it frequently because we think that sitting on this side of the keyboard somehow protects us and makes our ideas bigger and better than they are.

Back to my ad—something you need to do is keep a handle on responses and comments. It is nice to have a high comment count. My ad had about 150 comments the first time I ran it and is well north of 50 again as people ask questions and leave thoughts on the topic. Most of them haven’t yet read the book. Those belligerent social justice warriors I mentioned above? I’ve deleted dozens of comments such as “your pastor left because he was probably caught diddling children” and “he left because he realized god is a figment of stupid people’s imagination.”

When you run an ad for your book remember that it is not a public forum! You do not have to leave nasty comments up. You are in complete control and you can AND SHOULD exercise nuclear authority to delete and ban antagonists and trolls. Your ad’s goal is to sell product, anything that doesn’t somehow contribute to that goal should be removed.

Don’t mind trolls—they flock to anything that generates an audience for them to fling poo at. It’s what trolls do, so don’t let their opinions bother you. Advertisements are meant to help you and are paid for by you—so don’t let anyone hijack your promo vehicle.

State of Writing

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I hit all my marks—despite a very busy couple of weeks at work. I think I barely hit my goals, though. I’m trying to get another chapter in this week; I was able to complete one last week plus wrote a new entry into my next devo book. I figure that with John in the John coming out soon I ought to be working on Gospels in the John—plus I needed to write an article of a similar nature for a newspaper column I write a few times a year and so I wrote two versions.

Last week saw the release of a new comic book page for the Wolf of the Tesseract prequel—I’m hoping that in 7-10 days I’ll have the last few pieces I want to launch a kickstarter campaign in order to get the comic fully off the ground and into peoples’ hands.

The Dangers of Sharing your Creativity

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I was recently conversing with Pamela Jane, an author of several children’s books and read an article she wrote about a personal experience with a major publisher. She is an author with books out through a few little companies like Random House, HarperCollins, and others.

Her article, titled You Think it Can’t Happen? How My Two Picture Books Were Stolen by a Major Publisher, was published in Huffpo. It’s worth a read, if nothing else as a cautionary tale. It might also demonstrate the protections that a literary agent provide to authors and also serves as a reminder to document everything.

Writing is more than communication and entertainment. It’s also a business and it’s important to remember that individuals can be easily crushed beneath the wheels of industry. Don’t be so afraid that you never take your ideas out for a test-drive… but don’t be so foolish that you fail to wear your seat-belt, either.

I recently read through Pamela Jane’s An Incredible Tale...

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I recently read through Pamela Jane’s An Incredible Talent for Existing. Not my type of book, but something grabbed me when she approached me for a review, and then that led to another thing, etc. Life is like that, and ironically so is this book. (That initial thing was that my son used to have one of her children’s books and I recalled the cover when I looked her up.)

Much of the book is interlaced with what inspires and motivates her. Frank Baum’s Oz seems to weave through most of Jane’s life as she describes her life with an effortless narration that sounds so much like my own inner voice that I had to laugh at some of her tongue in cheek gaffes that were so relatable and also so vivid that I might have actually been there. I suspect that most readers will feel the same and that it’s a byproduct of talented writing.

The writing is excellent in form and function and I’d recommend it especially for people who like memoirs or autobiographies as it reads as something of an autobiography of an everyman (or everywoman) from the 1960s and beyond.

I write this just coming off a meeting with a half dozen fiction writers who ran a panel discussion on inspiration. That might be why Jane’s affection for Oz seemed so prominent to me; we all have things that inspire us, lead us, and guide us to a better world (one of our own making, for fiction authors). Pamela Jane’s book really demonstrates what inspiration and hope in a better tomorrow looks like as lived out in her own life—all the blemishes, blunders, and self doubt included.

(I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review)

You can check it out by clicking here.

 

State of Writing

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It was a good week for writing. Rainy and overcast for the later half it helped set the tone, I suppose. The first part of the week, however, was super nice which made it difficult for a variety of reasons.

I think I wrote 3 1/2 chapters this week on WotT2. They were full of intense action and so it came easy. I also signed a publishing contract on my Christian nonfiction devo/humor book. The submissions editors loved my cartoons which I added as filler and so I spent much time over the weekend rescanning and tweaking a dozen of them so they could be included in the final product.

Late last night I also got an email with pencil work on page 4 of my comic book, so I’m also excited about that. I’m hoping for early summer!

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Announcement: John in the John under contract

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I wanted to write a bit of a special announcement this week. I have officially signed a contract with eLectio Publishing for my Christian humor/devotional book, John in the John (a daily reader meant to be left in the bathroom.) You can learn more about it at http://johninthejohn.my-free.website/ as well as potentially contribute a piece for the second installment (it was always planned to be a series).

The book should hopefully be out near the end of the year and I’m actively looking for about 30 contributing stories for #2: Gospels in the John (the website has a sample of the kind of writing I’m looking for and other guidelines).

Hey! Who took my Reviews?

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I’ve written before about how critical of a role reviews play for authors—especially on Amazon.com which is responsible for well over half of a typical author’s online sales. That said, it can seem like a devastating blow when a review suddenly disappears. It happens. It happens often enough that there has been much written about it. That doesn’t change that fact that it feels like a kick in the nuts when it happens—especially when you practically had to bleed in order to get a few reviews in the first place (it’s difficult as an indie author—don’t be fooled by all those ads on facebook claiming to make you rich by submitting your unsolicited manuscript).

Tracey Cooper Posey does a pretty good job over at her blog of summarizing the history behind why Amazon enacted some rules to keep the integrity of book reviews relatively intact (http://tracycooperposey.com/amazon-reviews-being-deleted/)  as a response to some massive TOS violations (I even remember this happening around the time of my first novel release).

Here are four reasons why your Amazon reviews might get pulled down.

They came from friends and family. You’re not supposed to get biased reviews and so anything obviously coming from a friend or relation will get yanked.
They all came from the same location. Amazon isn’t stupid—if all of your reviews come from the same IP address they are going to jump to conclusions and assume foul play.
They were too vague. Generic or bland reviews are often an indicator of purchased reviews which can be copied and pasted onto literally any book—they don’t really sway opinion and aren’t helpful to customers and so Amazon pulls them.
They were purchased. Straight-up against the rules and unethical… water gets murky when you start asking “what do you consider ‘buying’ a review?”

Perhaps the best course of action is to ensure that you circumvent having your reviews flagged by Skynet’s terminator algorithms.  Here are four tips to that effect.

Maintain a line of separation with readers. Authors should get an “author page” for facebook to keep a boundary. Sometimes the amazon death robots troll the waters of social media to see if any of your reviewers like/follow your personal profiles so that they can go and zap reviews and kill your hopes and dreams. (It may be part of a plan to force writers to utilize Amazon Author Central.)
Add a disclaimer to your reviews/make sure your reviewers do as well if they are getting a free copy. It helps point out that this was a requested review and notes that some kind of relationship has occurred in the process of obtaining a review/putting a book in a reviewers hands.
Be careful what you’re linked to (understand what Amazon considers “financial compensation.”) If you’ve purchased a gift card through your account as part of a give-away and the winner buys your book Amazon will take down any resulting reviews assuming it was a kick-back. You can’t buy them a copy of the book for the same reasons.

It has gotten tricky because Amazon is sometimes takes a hard line when it comes to defining “financial compensation.” If you send a copy of a physical book after a review as a thank-you those reviews sometimes come down. If you gave money to a charity to help a blind cat with mange that was featured in an Alanis Morisette television commercial and your reviewer once bought an Alanis album, it might come down. Yes. Sometimes they are that draconian.
Backup your more authoritative reviews (from well-known reviewers/services, etc.) under the editorial review section of your author central profile. This doesn’t necessarily help with your star/review rating but it preserves them and puts it front and center for browsing readers.

For your peace of mind it might be best if you seek reviews as ardently as possible but not read them closely. If you’ve ever gotten a 1 or 2 star review you will know what I’m talking about. From what I’ve gathered online, it may also be wise not to poke a sleeping bear. I’ve read stories from authors who sat through hours with Amazon customer service only to stop after threats of having their books banned and dropped from the site for questioning their authority… kinda like giving an M4 and a license to kill to a power-mad mall security guard. I’ve had my own issues with amazon customer service and would recommend seeking new reviews rather than chasing down old ones that the amazon demons dragged off in the middle of the night—after all, your next biggest fan is right around the corner.