Julia Goldhirsh's Blog, page 2

Book Promoter’s Covid/Coronavirus Response

Hi everyone,

I thought I’d share this for anyone currently struggling with marketing and launching their book right now. If you had a book launch planned and it isn’t going well because of the current crisis, lack of funds from losing your main source of income, or some combination of both, you can check out these free and discounted resources for help.

 

Written Word Media– Forever a gatherer of information and a helping hand for indie publishers. They are offering possible free promotion for authors that have been severely impacted by the current pandemic.
Publisher’s Weekly– has a list of different events, special offers, and discounts being given to authors and publishers during this pandemic.
Bookbub– They have some advice and humor regarding promoting your books during the pandemic.
Creative Capital- Some grants and other resources for artists are listed here.

 

Additionally, if you are in 20booksto50k some of the amazing people there have been offering support for their fellow authors. If I find any more resources, I will post them here in an effort to help as much as possible.

That’s all for now. Stay safe!

Tracking my Word Count with 4thewords

Year of 2019

October (1st month joining 4thewords)-

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Total– 9272

November-

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Total- 48,210–> total was closer to 52k, but it wasn’t all done on 4thewords during Nanowrimo

December-

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Total– 5723

 

Year of 2020

January-

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Total– 7,648

February-

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Total– 16,252

 

March-

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Current word count– 22,918

Total Word count for this year– 46,818

Project completed because of 4thewords and writing challenges-

I’ve done three 10k writing challenges and Nanowrimo since joining this. I think those events combined with the game have helped me up my writing game. Since joining this website, I’ve complete 2 short stories and 1 book, and I’m in the process of writing 2 more book. Overall, it’s well worth the money, and I plan to keep using it going forward. It has been an amazing motivational tool.

Projects completed-

“War of the Twin Swords”- Arthurian sword and sorcery short
“Gabriel is Cursed”- book 2 in the Spellbound series
Autumn themed story (short story with no official name)

Projects in progress-

“Rise of the Half Breeds”- book after “War of the Twin Swords”
“Belladonna Was Betrayed”- last book in Spellbound series
Secret political satire/ apocalypse novel i’ll be doing under a pen name.

Word count goal for this year– 150,000 (based on 12,500 avg words per month)

Tracking my Word Counts with 4thewords

Year of 2019

October (1st month joining 4thewords)-

[image error]

Total– 9272

November-

[image error]

 

Total- 48,210–> total was closer to 52k, but it wasn’t all done on 4thewords during Nanowrimo

December-

[image error]

Total– 5723

 

Year of 2020

January-

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Total– 7,648

February-

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Total– 16,252

 

March-

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Current word count– 15,096

 

Project completed because of 4thewords and writing challenges-

I’ve done three 10k writing challenges and Nanowrimo since joining this. I think those events combined with the game have helped me up my writing game. Since joining this website, I’ve complete 2 short stories and 1 book, and I’m in the process of writing 2 more book. Overall, it’s well worth the money, and I plan to keep using it going forward. It has been an amazing motivational tool.

Projects completed-

“War of the Twin Swords”- sword and sorcery short
“Gabriel is Cursed”- book 2 in the Spellbound series
Autumn themed story (short story with no official name)

Projects in progress-

“Rise of the Half Breeds”- book after “War of the Twin Swords”
“Belladonna Was Betrayed”- last book in Spellbound series
Secret political satire/ apocalypse novel i’ll be doing under a pen name.

“War of the Twin Swords” Cost

This is my first effort at publishing and selling a short story, so I’m trying not to go too overboard on costs. I suspect this will be a loss leader, but I’m hoping it will be a good enticement for a new series that I’m working on. The costs are as follows:

 

Cover Art- $90 for a premade cover.

Copyright–  $55

Editing/ proofreading– TBD

Formatting– TBD

 

Total costs so far– $145

 

I’m having some beta readers look at it to keep costs down and will also be looking into free/cheap formatting options as well.

Is it worth it to stack promotions?

Now this isn’t going to be a one-size fits all answer, but I’m going to show you my results from a day where I stack promotions and the results from a day where I had only 1 promotion website running.

 

Promotion sites stacked-

E-book hound- $20

Book Barbarian- $35

Fussy Librarian- $28

ENT (E-reader News Today)- $40

 

Results as of 3:00pm EST-

6 sales

40 page reads

Honestly, it’s looking pretty dismal right now. I’m holding out hope that I’ll see bumps from 5pm to 8pm EST (around the time when people start getting home from work here and in California ).

 

Here are the results for two websites where I didn’t stack promotions-

Book Rebel- $20  (September 10th)

Sales- 4

 

Bargain Booksy- $35

Sales-4

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pitching Your Book and Selling to Bookstores with Alex Stargazer

Introduction

Hello everyone! Today I’m co-authoring a blog post with Alex Stargazer, a YA LGBT fantasy writer. We met on Twitter and decided to combine our collective efforts for a bit. Enjoy! Oh, and make sure to check out our respective blogs: Julia Goldhirsh and Alex Stargazer.

How to pitch your book as the right genre 

 See what types of people are interested in your book. Who wants to review the book, how old are they etc?
Make a list of the types of tropes you have in your book.
Search on Amazon to see what other books have those tropes
Ask your readers how they would define the book. See what readers say about it during beta reading.
Use the template below to help get started 
Look for novels that seem similar to yours and that have similar tropes. How do those writers classify their books?

 

Age of audience–  12-18 (Typically YA or MG)

Time Period–  Modern (Urban), Past (Possibly historical)

Genre- Science focused, magic and sorcery focused, end of the world focused, love focused, etc.

You can see a further breakdown of genres here.

To craft your pitch-

Grab them with the first line–   A dark fairy tale with a twist.
Introduce an enticing trope–   At the turn of the 20th century, a Rapunzel in a greenhouse battles an evil nymph
Leave them with something that makes them want to know more– with help from a messenger with a mysterious past.

Here is another hook that I’ve used– An enchanted Rose spellbound to a greenhouse prison. 

How to sell books to bookstores

Some of the main things bookstores want when looking for books are retail discounts, ISBNs, and a price on the barcode. This makes selling your book easier for them and will make your book an easier sell in the long run. Here’s what I’d recommend so you can have those things for the bookstores.

Ingram Sparks– Get on Ingram sparks. No seriously. Do it. It will make you a lot more palatable when you approach bookstores. 
Bowker– Purchase a barcode from Bowker and have your cover artist put the barcode on there for you. You can get your ISBN there too. Make sure the price is on that book.

Alright, so now that you have that out of the way, here’s what you can do to reach out to bookstores. Note that this is not a one size fits all approach, but this worked for me. 

Library– Submit to your local library. 
Bookmarks and business cards-Have some bookmarks made and ask your local bookstores if you can give them bookmarks
Barnes and Noble– Fill out the forms they provide on their website. They even offer the option to get your book reviewed through their website.
Books a Million– Fill out the forms on their website.  (They do not accept Print on Demand titles).

One thing I did was that I had some bookmarks designed and printed through Vistaprint. I contacted some local bookstores and cafes to see if they’d be interested in taking the bookmarks. Often when I went in a customer or two would ask about the book, I’d give them a short pitch and the customer would express some interest. This resulted often times in the buyer purchasing the book off Ingram. 

 

If you’d like to see more of my content, you can sign up for my mailing list here.  

 

Below are some pictures of my book in the library and on bookstore shelves.

 

Alex’s Suggestions for Getting into Bookstores

To begin with, I second Julia’s suggestion regarding bookmarks, and this is something I will be doing myself. Bookmarks give you physical presence, author branding, and credibility. But let’s not forget the most important element: pitching your physical book to the manager. This is exactly what I did at WHSmiths, and it immediately grabbed the attention of the manager. At Waterstones, I was unable to meet the manager in person—and when I pitched him via email, it didn’t work.

 

Another suggestion, which won’t work for everyone, is Kickstarter. I have been able to successfully meet my funding goal thanks to the awesome folks at Kickstarter. What does this have to do with bookstores, you wonder? Again: credibility. It’s easier to convince a manager to buy your book if you can prove that you raised $1000 (say) for your crowdfunding campaign.

 

Your author branding should work to support your message—I intend to display the Kickstarter logo along with Fallen Love imagery in my bookmarks, for example. 

 

Regarding which company you use to print your books (Amazon, Lulu or Ingram) this is a tricky question and one which I haven’t figured out yet. Julia thinks you should use Ingram, which is the traditional choice for getting into bookstores. But combining Bowker + Ingram has an entry cost in the hundreds of dollars, and that’s money that can certainly be better spent. Amazon has the best prices—but branding might be an issue. Lulu’s prices are too high, for paperbacks at least, to be realistic. Personally, I’ll plump for Amazon.

How About Genre?

This is easy if you’re publishing something in an already well-defined genre—epic fantasy, for example; thriller; or cozy mystery. Things get harder if you’re writing something a bit more unconventional like what me and Julia are writing. The general advice—shelve your book in the sub-genre of the main genre, so on Amazon that might be fantasy and then “LGBT Fantasy”—works if you know what your main genre is. It may be that you need to categorise your book in more than one genre. This is a case of experiment-and-see-what-works.

 

I learned this the hard way for Fallen Love. I always knew that, at heart, the story is urban fantasy: the young adult characters, the worldbuilding, the tropes—it’s the stuff of Cassandra Clare or Lauren Kate or (heck!) even Twilight. Yet I hoped it would also appeal to LGBT and Sci Fi readers. The jury is still out on the SciFi part (I don’t have a large enough sample of Sci Fi readers yet) but my experience with LGBT readers is that it’s more often miss than hit. As much as I love the relationship between Mark and Conall, the book has too much complex worldbuilding to appeal to M/M romance readers. For a reader who diets on contemporary gay romance, demons, witches and 26th century Europe are just too much.

 

You can guess I’ll be heavily promoting Fallen Love as an urban fantasy book before anything else.

Conclusion

So how does the intrepid author go about getting their book into a bookstore, and hopefully selling a bunch of copies? Both me and Julia agree on the business fundamentals: you need a good price and discount for your book; a well-chosen target market; and you should have a physical product that communicates your brand. The author’s personal presence is often important as well.

 

If you have raised money in a crowdfunding campaign, or have already sold a decent number of books online, this is something to emphasise. 

 

Julia Goldhirsh is the author of Spellbound , a fairytale spin on the classic young adult fantasy story. You should follow her on Twitter and Facebook or her mailing list to get the latest on her new books, special offers, and cover reveals.

Alex is an author of some excellent LGBT Urban fantasy books with hints of romance. His second novel is called Fallen Love and he has a scheduled publication date of February 1st 2020. You can check him out on www.alexstargazer.com and follow him on Twitter or Facebook to be the first to get updates on cover reveals, new books, and promotions.

How I got into Local Bookstores

Hi there. So for me personally I know my book sells better on the shelves because of the book covers visual appeal in a store. It stands out from other books and catches people’s attention, so I knew I wanted local stores to be part of my distribution. Here are the things I used to get into two of my local bookshops.

Ingram Sparks- Distribution
Bookmarks- (Designed and printed from Vistaprint)
Business Cards- (Also Vista print)
Calling the stores
A friendly demeanor

I had a few days off during winter break and decided to reach out to a few local bookstores to give them some of my bookmarks. The idea would be that perhaps their customers would be interested and might pick up a copy of my book online or ask the bookstore about the book. The day that I did this, I called ahead and asked if it would be okay to bring over some bookmarks. One of the stores didn’t answer the phone, but I went by anyway.  I drove out to a few local cafes and bookstores and gave them my bookmarks. One store happened to have the buyer in that day and said they would buy a few copies to start. Another store said they would take a look at it and ultimately ordered copies for their store as well. One thing that really helped get me in the door was having my book on Ingramsparks and having competitive pricing which meant living with a little less money royalties wise.

 

Here are some of the places that I visited. I will highlight the one I know for a fact purchased. With the other order of books, I was uncertain which store ordered them.

 

Bookstores and Cafes-

The Alchemist
Classic Bookshop
Book Cellar
New Moon Books

Overall, of the three stores I felt like Classic Bookshop was the most friendly and had the best foot traffic. They even do book events through a third party, not through their store location.

Classic Bookshop also has a nice atmosphere and a cafe attached. They have a great selection of books both old and new.

 

Self-Publishing Mistakes to Avoid

These are some mistakes I made when doing my first book. I hope that anyone who reads this will have the chance to learn from my bad experiences.

Mistakes to Avoid

Paying for editorial reviews–   There’s no guarantee that these reviews will go in your favor and they honestly didn’t move the needle for me much, so I would stick to free ones like Indieview, Neoleaf, or Publisher Weekly
Not getting a big enough review team– Customer reviews are really important for several of the big promotion websites, so I would try to hit 20. More than that isn’t needed, but more reviews often can lend you more credibility. I wouldn’t recommend paying money to get these reviews however.
Not having the paperback and e-book cover done at the same time
Setting too strict of a deadline– Because of my strict deadline I overpaid on things like formatting and I wasn’t able to give my final edits due diligence so some things ended up sneaking through the editing process.
Paying for regular reviews– I would not recommend Book Sirens. Everyone I know got spammy or overly critical reviews from them. Plus you’re paying money to get that negative publicity, so it’s a double whammy.
Not having the price on your bar code– This is really important for bookstore presence. I didn’t do this initially, so now I have to go back and pay for one and pay my cover artist to impose the new bar code onto the cover.
 Not doing an influencer outreach– Social media is super important for your book, so if you can get an influencer that likes your book it can give you a huge boost. I recommend at least giving it a try.
Paying for advertising that doesn’t work– I’m talking about things with poor visibility and engagement like people saying they’ll advertise you on their blog of 50 or unknown amounts of followers or that they’ll post on X social media website. Those places are usually too spammy to have good engagement or visibility.

Things you should do–

Newsletter promotions that are well known-   Two on Fiver that I liked for free book days were Dracosama and Uncarved.
Guest posts with businesses like 4thewords or book reviews from the booktuber or a blog with a big following. ONLY do this if you find that they’re a good fit and realize you are taking the risk that they might not like your book.
Newsletter Building– Try to start building your newsletter. The sooner the better. Mailchimp is okay for those just starting out and it’s free.
Set up Jot form–  This is for giveaways and getting newsletter signups when you go to events. It’s way better than pen and paper.
Do events. Yes, even if you have one book– It spreads word of mouth and has gotten me some great buzz that helped motivate me to do my second book
Write– I know everyone says this, but really. Writing your next book shows people that you’re committed to continuing your writing journey.
Build a community– Think about Harry Potter and Pottermore. Heck if you’re good at building an RP website maybe something like that. Fans like a community. The stronger the community, the better your book sells. Most of the books I’ve seen selling well have done this in some form whether it’s on a website or a FB group. (This is something where I need to take my own advice.)
Become part of a Writing Community– The most supportive groups you’ll see are reading and writing groups. Become a part of that in a way that fits you. For me, Twitter and FB are my preferred methods, but you can use Instagram or in-person book clubs. Just do you, but find your people. You’ll support each other and can make each other stronger.

 

That’s all for now. I hope this helps you with your next book. See you next time.

My Favorite Venues for In-Person Promotion

In this article, I’m going to rank some of my favorite venues that I have personally used or that I plan on using as part of my promotion and why. I hope this helps you in your publishing journey.

Medium sized anime conventions–   I’m talking a minimum attendance of 1,000 people. I would also ensure that the booth cost is worth it and that the layout isn’t too spread out. You want a compact set up that ensures that you’ll have a lot of foot traffic. If you want to do a convention booth try going to that convention first or look at the layout for the convention to see if you’ll be likely to get a lot of foot traffic. Below are some anime conventions that you might want to try.

Otakufest– I had a good experience there considering the hurricane and that it was my first convention. I made a profit on my first booth with just 1 book for sale.
Anime Iwai– This is a small but mighty con. It’s hard to secure a spot (there were only 15 this year, but the cost is lower and competition if you secure a booth is low. They also have a loyal fan base).


Library Local Author Events–  If you get into the library system through your local libraries local author system, you get the chance to do a booth at their once a year event. This means you can table for free at an event where your target audience is already their looking for books to read.
Middle Schools, High Schools, and Colleges–  If you live close to your old high school, try setting up an Alumni talk. For these types of events you want to keep the focus on inspiring the students, not purely on marketing and selling.
Barnes and Noble– Try for a smaller location. The Coral Springs location was warmer and more accommodating than Boca Raton when I was looking to set up a signing. To do this you’ll need:

Business casual attire
1 page print out of some positive reviews (include blogger and editorial reviews if you have them)
A blurb of your book
A physical copy of your book
Business cards
Your availability


Coffee shops– Pick somewhere that has a lot of writers and readers that frequent their venue. Here are my two favorites for my area

Starbucks– People love to go their to socialize, write, and study
Underground Coffee Haus– This place is a hole in the wall local to south Florida. They do nightly events, stay open late, and have a used bookstore in the coffee shop.
The Alchemist– It’s a half-indoor/ half-outdoor coffee shop with excellent foot traffic. They do tons of events and the staff are friendly and accommodating. They’re always looking for ways to get even more foot traffic.

Preparation for NaNoWriMo

Personally, I will be taking on two projects for NaNoWriMo this time around. One is for an anthology I intend to submit to a 20Booksto50k anthology. The other is Cursed, the second book of the Spellbound mini-series. Here are some things I plan to do for preparation and the word count I intend to put out to get there.

Daily goal for weekdays (Monday-Thursday)- 500 words/ 1.5-2 pages per day= Total 8,000

Daily goal for weekends (Friday-Sunday/ Thanksgiving)- 2625 words per day= Total 42,000

I know this sounds strange, but I’m more productive on weekends and don’t want added stress during the weekdays with my lesson planning. I also have some days around Thanksgiving where the school will be closed.

Preparation beforehand-

Characters–

I have pre-made Character Profiles for each character. If you don’t have time to do this I recommend just writing down their basic looks and 10 things your reader will never know about your character. This often leads to some of those things bleeding into your writing in unexpected ways.

Plot–

I have done a pretty basic outline that includes a climax, the direction I want the overall plot to go and a general how I plan to get there plus how I plan to wrap it up. You can view my bare bones outline Cursed Outline. I struggle most with endings and character revelations, so as I expand that’s what I’ll be focusing on.

 

Setting-

I have a good idea of the setting, but I plan to do some Historical research since it will take place in the early 1910’s. I’m going to write out any important details I want to give to the reader to help them ground themselves in the chosen time period.

Templates For Your Writing Project

I took a free online class that offered a great templates for Character creation, so I’m leaving that template with my writing as an example for you to view.

Preparation for my short fiction-

This is something I’m re-working, so the first thing I plan to do is make a character outline for the two main characters. I will also take my previous critique done on the story into account and write out how I plan to address each of the things that the critique group thought the story was lacking.

Finally, here are some Preptober prompts to help you. I’ll be using these as well to help build my story before November.

Nice job! You made it to the end of the article!

 

Your code word: tricks