Michael Langlois's Blog, page 14

New Release by Scott Nicholson:Creative Spirit

CREATIVE SPIRIT

A modern Gothic thriller

After parapsychologist Anna Galloway is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she has a recurring dream in which she sees her own ghost. The setting of her dream is the historic Korban Manor, and she's compelled to face the secrets of her soul.

Sculptor Mason Jackson has come to the manor to make a final, all-or-nothing attempt at success before giving up his dreams. When he becomes obsessed with carving Ephram Korban's form out of wood, even Anna can't divert his bizarre passion.

The manor itself has secrets, with fires that blaze constantly in the hearths, portraits of Korban in every room, and deceptive mirrors on the walls. With an October blue moon looming, both the living and the dead learn the true power of their dreams.

You probably know Scott as the bestselling author of Ashes and The Red Church, but underneath the tophat and monocle of a successful author is a genuinely nice guy who took time out of his crazy writing schedule to help a newbie edit his first book.

If you haven't read him yet, start now.  The man knows his craft, and puts out the most gripping stuff on the market today.

Just be prepared to buy the rest of his books if you pick this up.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

You can find out more about Scott and his books here.

Filed under: Blog Posts

Gamer Gifts 2011: Quarriors

Have a board game geek in your life?  Wondering what kind of weird damn thing they want THIS time?

Hint, they want this:

Check out this very long, very thorough review from Undead Viking!

And if, by chance, they already have a copy of Quarriors clutched in their clammy paws, you can always buy them the expansion.

*cough*

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The Whatever Shopping Guide

 

John Scalzi has thoughtfully put together two gift giving guides for the book nerds in your life on his site, Whatever.  It takes the form of two threads where authors can post a quick blurb about their current books in order to entice you into a delightful frenzy of book hoarding.  Although, technically, who's to know if you buy a bunch of stuff for yourself and just don't tell your wife Susie about it?   I mean, hypothetically.

The first thread is for traditionally published work, here.

And the second thread is for everything else, here.

Now, I'm sure that you've already given your friends copies of all my books, because you're cool like that.  But if for some reason you want to give them a little something extra, stop by and check it out.

Filed under: Blog Posts

Working in the Word Mines – Promotion

Regardless of the route you took to get your book into the marketplace, you're going to have to do some promotion.  Well, with one exception.  If you got a six-figure advance from a publishing house, then you can rest assured that they'll throw some marketing muscle behind your book.  But if you got a standard deal, or put your book out yourself, you're on your own.

Here are a few things that have helped me get noticed:

Platform

The first, most basic rule of promotion.  Be present.  A good platform will give you a place to build a community, give out information to people who already know who you are, and to provide a reason for new people to get interested in you.  I use this WordPress blog, my Twitter account, and Facebook.  But because I'm lazy, I don't want to update all three.  Wordpress can automatically send things to Twitter, so I have that covered.  For Facebook, I use:

NetworkedBlogs is a free service that can push content from your blog to a Facebook page.  I post things to my blog, and this service creates posts on my Facebook account automatically.  It's free, fast, and best of all, preserves the images and formatting of your blog posts when updating Facebook.

All I have to do now is post once to WordPress, and it goes out automatically to the other services.  Use your platform to stay engaged with your readers and to provide a way to find your work.

Community

Once you have a place of your own, you need to get people to visit you.  The first way is to be active in your online community.  The goal here is not just to give back as much as you can (I'm sure you got plenty of advice from other people's articles and blogs before you got that first book out), but to find opportunities to network with other people.  Things like: guest post on each other's blogs, give and get mentions on book sites, and generally exchange help with your peers.  You'd be surprised how quickly your name will get out if you provide value to others.  Check out sites like Goodreads, LibraryThing, or the writing areas of Reddit.

Reviews

Honest reviews are critical.  A word of advice.  No matter how tempting the anonymous nature of the internet might be, do not create dummy accounts and write glowing fake reviews of your stuff.  Also, don't ask your friends and family to write fabulous reviews, either.  Feel free to ask them to read and review your work, but that's as far as you can go.   Reviews will accumulate naturally over time, but to jumpstart the process there are two things you can do.

First, submit your work to as many popular review sites as you can.  You can find a great list here.  Secondly, you can try a service like BookRooster, which for a fee, will distribute your work to readers in exchange for honest reviews.  These reviewers don't know you or care about you, and the service doesn't ask for anything but honest reviews.  You aren't buying good reviews here (otherwise I wouldn't recommend them), so be warned.  Any reviews you get from here will be posted with a disclaimer that the reviewer received a free copy of your book for review.  The best use of this service is to get some reviews up quickly, and to break the ice so that other reviews will follow.

Advertising

Here's where it gets tricky.  JA Konrath is famous for warning against paid advertising for authors.  And with one exception, I agree.  I tried several different forms of paid advertising, and while I did get sales, it ended up costing me more than the income I got from them.  I had pretty much given up, when a friend of my wife's who is also an author, mentioned Project Wonderful.  PW is an ad network that serves webcomics.  You'd be amazed at just how many different webcomics there are, and how much traffic they get.  I'm targeting sites with 10,000 unique visitors per month and up, and that's on the low end of the scale.  PW uses a bid system, where you bid on a site and the max bid per timeslot gets shown.

First, you're going to want to create some ads.  Here are mine:

Click to embiggen!

Then you want to search for comics to display them on.  There are several different parameters you can set around spend per day and max amount per bid, as well as a host of other controls for both spending and the regional scope of your ad.  I've had success with both targeted ads, which means I found comics that I though matched well thematically with my books, and with a campaign.  A campaign lets you target all of the sites that match certain criteria, and automatically makes bids for you.  This allows you to spend the least money possible across the largest range of comics that fit your parameters.  The upside  is the increased coverage, but the downside is that your ads may show up on comics whose readership will have no interest in your offerings.

Here's a shot of my current campaign:

One more thing.  When someone clicks on your ad, you can send them straight to Amazon, or wherever your books are sold, but you might consider a landing page instead.  This allows you to show something a little more compelling than the default product page, as well as give them multiple choices for how to buy.  Here are the pages for Bad Radio and Walker.

Note that at the bottom of each there are links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.  The nice thing about these is that can can be affiliate links for your books.  These are basically custom links from the site that sells your books, that give you a small percentage of each sale in return for referring the buyer to them.  These are easy to set up and well worth the trouble.

That's pretty much my promotional strategy in a nutshell.  If you have any other tips that work for you, leave 'em in the comments.

Filed under: Blog Posts, Writing

Off Again

Oh, Phoenix.  I wish I could quit you.  You know, because I'm tired of flying across the county every other week to see you.

So, I'll be back in a couple of days, but in the meantime here's a picture of …

BB, The Most Confident Rabbit in the World!

You're welcome.

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I'm Not the Only One

 

You know how I'm always going on about what a genius Vincent Chong is?

I'm not the only one.

Seriously, did you think I was making that up?

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Thanks, Folks!

So very tired. Must. Not. Check. On. Book.

I'm not going to lie to you, Marge.  It was a hell of a launch weekend.

That said, next time I suggest that a good launch date might be during a holiday, feel free to give me a good smack.  Tired or not, though, things went way better than I expected, all thanks to you.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bed.  FOREVER.

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Launch Day: Walker

Walker Launch Day

Twenty-four hours ago Daniel Thorsen discovered that he had the power to walk between worlds. 

Twelve hours ago he was contacted by others with the same gift.

Tomorrow he will be running for his life.

What do you say when offered a lifelong position in the most powerful and corrupt secret organization in mankind's history?

If you want your life to last longer than the job interview, you say yes.

In exchange for wealth, power, and training for his newly discovered powers, all Daniel has to do is help them reach a new, unsuspecting world.

To make things worse, a group of desperate escapees pin their thin hopes on him, willing to risk everything on a miracle that Daniel has no idea how to provide.

Shackled with a restraint bracelet, constant surveillance, and superhuman captors, he must outsmart an overwhelmingly powerful enemy and seek freedom in the one place that is left to him, a new world that only he can reach.

Walker is now available on Amazon and Smashwords!  It'll be another few hours before it shows up on Barnes & Noble.  Sorry Nook folks.

I'd like to thank the following people for helping me get out a second book this year, which I frankly didn't think was possible.

Vincent Chong – Artist, genius, and all-around nice guy.  The cover for Walker is simply stunning, and I can't thank him enough.  Check out his portfolio of amazing work here, and see his notes on this cover here.

Diana Cox – This was my first time to work with Diana, but it won't be my last.  Walker clocks in at about 90K words, and not only did she handle the job in record time, but her attention to detail bordered on the miraculous.  If you find a mistake in this book, it's because I failed to follow her advice.  She's that good.  Of course, that's not surprising for someone recommended by JA Konrath and Blake Crouch.  Find her here.

Team 52Novels – Once again Tina at 52Novels proves that she can work with anyone, no matter how crazy.  She routinely handles weird formatting requests, inline graphics, and vague rambling from me with grace and aplomb.  Thanks, Tina!  Thanks also to Rob and Amy Siders for their quick responses and professionalism.

Debbie Semple - One of the things I'm happiest about in my books are the hand-crafted graphical touches that Debbie creates for me.  She has a real knack for turning text descriptions into spot-on representations of things that exist only in my imagination.  Don't let the size of her creations fool you, there's a ton of work in each one.  You can get in touch with her here.

The Wife – As always, thanks to my wife Susie for patiently putting up with me day in and day out.  Especially the days when nothing seems to be coming out right

And, of course, thanks to all of you for your patience and encouragement along the way.  It means more to me that I can say.

Thanks.

Filed under: Blog Posts

Tag-a-Palooza 2011

 

Friends, I've called you here today to enlist your help with our mutual friend, Amazon.  Yeah, I know.  We all like the guy.  He's funny, always polite, and who can forget the time he drove Patty home after that party, even though she lives in Norway?

But it's time we faced up to something we've all thought, but never talked about.  The guy is dumb.  Sure, he knows the difference between a fridge and a tire (usually), but once you get past the big distinctions, he's kind of lost.  Especially about books.

To help him out, I'd like you to tap him on the shoulder and give him the benefit of your experience.  How, you say?

Click here
Look or search for the word 'Tags'
Check the box next to 'Supernatural Thriller'


Won't you please help him out?  If not for Amazon, then for me?

Frankly, I spend a lot of time with the guy, and anything that will keep the urge to strangle him down to a minimum will be a big help.

Thanks.

Filed under: Blog Posts

A Word from Vinny

Vincent Chong, the mad genius behind the covers for Bad Radio and Walker, has a post up on his blog where he talks about creating Walker's cover.  You can even see a shot of the cover without the typography, which is pretty cool.

Take a look.

 

 

Filed under: Blog Posts