Tim Flanagan's Blog, page 27

The Council of the Faerie Queen

For the second book in the Moon Stealer series I wanted to explore the land of the faeries, but like most countries and worlds where different cultures co-exist, there is often conflict. Behind every conflict there is usually someone dictating what happens. In this case, the Faerie Queen.

In her magical form, the Faerie Queen is tall, slim and beautiful with black wavy hair that tumbles over her shoulders. But, when her magic fades, she appears in her true form, an elderly woman, her spine twisted and bent. From her tower she commands an army of dark creatures from the Underworld: Donestre, Orcs, Fire Elves and Grindels, to help her in her search for ultimate power and control. However, the problem with a lot of hired help is that they have no true allegiance to anything other than gold. When the coin stops, so does their loyalty. The Faerie Queen’s magical abilities come from a Runestaff called Pendreich’s Bane. The Runestaff once belonged to the evil King Pendreich who lived many centuries ago. During his long and aggressive reign the lands became wasted and dark until Mount Fury erupted and cast a layer of ash over the lands. He died in a cloud of rock dust that burnt his flesh and choked his lungs. For many years the Runestaff was lost, buried beneath the layers of compacted rock and soil, until it was presented to the Faerie Queen at a winter gift exchange ceremony. The Faerie Queen is aided by her adviser Lord Sliptongue, a short elderly man whose frail body is hidden beneath over-sized purple robes. However, his power is in his snake-like voice that whispers the lies and rumors that fuel the Queen’s anger.

Superb digital art by Kristel Ann Raymundo

Read about some of the other characters in the Moon Stealer series.

The E-Volution of Marketing

Writing your book is the easy bit! No, it really is. The hardest bit has only just started. What are you going to do with your book now that it’s done? Do you think you can wait for people to ‘discover’ it amongst all the other millions of books that are available? Needle and haystack come to mind! It’s not going to happen. You have to market you book and that takes planning and just as much hard work and time as it did to write it. Unless you are already a major star, traditional publishers don’t have the budget to promote and market your book, whilst Indie Authors don’t have the capital either, so it’s left to you to tell the world about it. So what are you going to do – put an advert in post office window?

I’m going to be writing several posts and articles over the coming weeks/months about marketing, how to plan, form strategies and execute them (without bloodshed). Today I want to start with a little history lesson. Bare with me. I think it is important for you to understand how marketing has changed in the last decade, that way you will have a better understanding of what you should be doing today.

In the good old days…

Many people used to shop locally in the high street, relying on word-of-mouth as the many form of recommendation. People lived in communities, had limited choice and expected polite and efficient customer service. But, once newspapers, radio and the television arrived, the consumer became bombarded with adverts that told them what they should be buying. Word-of-mouth declined. After-all, you didn’t need Auntie Beryl telling you to buy this washing powder or that brand of fish fingers, you had a celebrity or a professor of crumb covered fish doing it instead. By the 1970′s communities became mobile and began buying from the large shopping areas that were cheaper for businesses to operate from. The pricing war followed. Unable to compete on price and with small advertising budgets, high street shops began closing. In the 1990′s the internet arrived and big businesses began advertising to the masses, quickly realising that this new faceless shopfront was even cheaper for them to operate from. Word of mouth and personal recommendation declined, replaced by big budget advertising. Then came the hero of the hour – 2003 and Web 2.0 encouraged interaction, it became the social media that we recognise today. Talking to one another once again, albeit on the internet, has now caused a decline in traditional advertising. Human beings now rely on other human beings to tell them about their personal experiences with this product, or what they thought of that book. And these are views from all around the world.

So now we are talking again, where do we go from here?

Traditional advertising was about pushing a message in front of an audience, but now we have to nurture our customers in a much gentler and subtle way. Social media interactions require a gentle pulling of your market to achieve the desired effect – a book sale. There is a journey you need to take your potential customers on, one that will also ensure lasting relationships. After all, you’re going to write lots of other books they will want, aren’t you?

The journey of enlightenment:

Know – Help potential customers find out you exist.

Like – They need to like you.

Try – Allow the customer to try something for free.

Buy – Create a quick and easy way for customers to buy from you.

Repeat – Increase sales of your back catalog.

Recommend – Get your customer to talk about your book.

Because of the way the internet has changed the way we market to our customers, you need to put a lot more effort into social interactions to look after and grow your readership. And, you can do this as effectively as a big publishing house. It’s no longer good enough to shout about your book, we now need to have conversations with the world and make sure that the world listens and likes who you are, before they will be willing to take a look at your best-seller.

But it doesn’t stop there – Web 3.0 is already here!

Technology is moving at an unbelievable rate and everything now has to be compatible for mobile technology.  What the future of the internet will be is anybodies guess, but unless you are using it to it’s fullest potential, you will quickly get left behind. So get back onto your metaphorical horse and keep up with your potential readers.

Land Divided

When a lord had multiple sons, it was sometimes difficult dividing his lands out equally, especially when there was gold buried beneath it.

Try the other Mind Games puzzles and don’t forget to like, share and follow this blog.

How Do You Get Noticed In Social Media?

Following on from the article I wrote at the weekend about whether or not Social Media has become too big to be effective, I thought I would follow up with another article along a similar line. The response I’ve had about my article has been very positive. It seems there are many others having the same problems getting noticed amongst the volume of messages that are floating around between connections. Last night I had 1129 tweets on Twitter in just one hour from the 1968 people that I follow. How many of those did I read? Well, honestly? None of them. So, how can we get noticed? Just so we are clear – when I’m talking about Social Media, I’m not talking about it as a social tool for organising your social life, but as a business tool for getting noticed. After all, you’ve spent hours and hours sitting in front of the computer developing a curvature in your spine all in the name of writing, so you need to spread the good word about this amazing book!

Targeted Advertising

There are several ways to improve the volume of people that view your posts, but they all pretty much mean you have to spend some money! Sorry, but life’s like that. You need to start treating your writing as a business and that means developing a marketing plan and putting a little bit of money into it. If you’ve put so much effort into writing your book, don’t prevent the word from getting out there by refusing to spend some money – it’s an investment in future book sales of books you haven’t written yet as well!

Let’s start with Facebook and Twitter. The great thing about these two giants is that they have an amazing database of information about every person that uses their sites. It’s all based on you and what you have ‘liked’ and what you are following, so they have a pretty good idea where to target your advertising. Targeted advertising obviously costs you money. Do you want to spend money? No, of course you don’t, but you can promote your posts and tweets for as little as £4. Obviously the smaller the amount of money you pay, the smaller the number of your target audience it will reach. But, it will atleast guarantee that more people see it than if you don’t promote it. Likes by your friends and family don’t really count in social media – they are duty bound to support you. Some may even buy your book, but it’s the other potential customers in the big wide world that you want to reach, and they are the ones that will pass over your posts because they don’t recognise you and your profile picture so don’t stop long enough to read it. Targeted advertising puts your post at the top of their page, or as a permanent fixture to the margins ensuring that it doesn’t get lost amongst all the other posts. So if you have a new book out that is aimed at teenage boys with a passion for computer games, then that’s exactly who you can target.

As with all plans, make sure you set yourself a budget and don’t exceed it. Only promote when you have something newsworthy to say or sell. Use it when you have a special offer on your book download, as part of a competition or when a new book is released.

Multiple Automated Platform Updates.

This is a great way of saving time and blanketing all different media platforms all in one go. You don’t have to spend ages writing and re-writing the same post on every different platform. By targeting all of the social media you are maximizing exposure and reaching more people. As an example – this article is automatically posted to all my other social media accounts as soon as I press the ‘publish’ button. If you have a WordPress blog (which this one is) you just have to input your accounts to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Tumblr (go to Settings then Sharing). You can also add sharing buttons at the bottom of each post for your readers to share for you. This is a great way of becoming viral without doing anything else. It won’t cost you anything to ask your readers to Like the page and share.

Some companies do this automatically for you including Hootsuite. Their basic package is free, but is limited to 5 social platforms. A more enhanced package starts at £7.99 per month.

Don’t forget to link your Amazon Author Profile as well as your Goodreads profile to your blog if you have one. Every time you post, it’s updated there too. If you are finding that keeping your social media up to date is taking a lot of time out of your day, then multiple posting is definitely the way forward.

Target the people who will talk about you

Find people on your social media platforms that review books. Get to know them and let them have a complimentary copy of your book. When they review they generate more exposure on your behalf. Usually they will post on Amazon, Smashwords and Goodreads as well.

I think that generating conversation on social media is probably the most effective way to get more exposure without doing anymore hard work. But, for it to work you have to have something newsworthy to say, not just an obvious promotion of your book. You need to make you posts and articles interesting, and interesting enough for others to share and report on them. Who better for this job than journalists? This might also get you some crossover coverage with other types of media. I’ve come across a company called Muck Rack which is effectively a database of journalists on twitter, as well as other media. For a monthly fee you can pitch three stories a month to a relevant journalist who will hopefully take your story and talk about it. Their conversations and recommendations are important to their followers and will help to get more effective exposure across Twitter from credible sources. I’m still looking into this, but for it to work for a writer you would need to have some newsworthy to say ever month to make it worth your while. Packages start at $99 per month.

Well, that’s a few ideas for you all. I’m looking into other ways of promotion and will report back as I go. Let me know what you have tried and what has worked for you.

One last thing….

Don’t forget to like and share this article!!!!

Has Social Media become too BIG to be effective?

I’m a relative newcomer to the wonderful world of social media and had resisted the trend to join until I released my first book through Amazon. At that point everyone said that I must join Facebook and get a blog, and, being a good boy, I did as I was told – after all, I’m sure they know what they’re talking about, don’t they. But, I must admit that recently I’ve begun to doubt how effective it actually is as a means of promoting myself and my books.

Now, as a social tool for friends it’s very useful, but this article concerns using social media as a way of generating business for writers. I’m aware that social media has, in the past, been at the forefront of promoting people, businesses and trends, but it could be said that it has grown so big that it has become a victim of it’s own success and become unworkable.

So before you shoot me down in a volley of Facebook and Twitter labelled arrows, please hear me out.

A Popularity Contest.

Social networking seems to have become a numbers game. “My accounts got more friends than your’s!” Has it just turned into a popularity contest or do the number of followers genuinely represent the number of people who want to know about you, your life, and ultimately (especially for a writer) your books? If everyone else’s social media accounts are anything like mine, there are simply too many people connected to it to be able to see what they are actually posting about. I don’t read the posts that come up on my news feed because there are simply too many, I scan through the first few then go and do something else. Take Facebook for example, my personal profile (not my business page) has 946 friends and I follow 826 other pages. If every one of those people and pages post just once a day, that is a total of 1772 posts that go on my news feed. It’s been reported that Facebook apparently only post something like 15-20% of posts to their actual destination, unless you pay of course?! But, lets assume that all 1772 posts get to their destination and I happen to have nothing better to do than be on the computer all day, and I spend an average of 5 seconds reading every post just in case it contains something I’m interested in, then I’m wasting 2 hours and 27 minutes reading posts! This sounds trivial, but I don’t have the time, and I’m sure others don’t either, to read about who’s fallen out with who, or how cute this picture of an animal is, or even, as exciting as it may seem to them, what they are having for their dinner accompanied by a picture of their actual dinner. But, these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. I also have a Facebook Fan Page and belong to 34 groups of writers and readers just on Facebook. I’m using my figures to demonstrate the volume of numbers that one person can be ‘connected’ to, but I know that my numbers of friends and followers are pretty small in comparison to others.

Connecting to Readers

Anyway – I’m beginning to go off course. I’m a writer and I want to connect with readers, but I’m not sure how many potential readers actually get to see my posts. My feeling is that they have turned off, sick of having the hard sell rammed down their throats and moved elsewhere. Hard sell is definitely not the way forward, by the way. I post about my life as a writer as well as the background research on characters and locations in my books. I even spend ages making little puzzles for readers to get interactive with my blog. But, even if you are a reader who has chosen to like or follow an author you are a fan of, chances are you will still find it very difficult to find that author’s posts amongst the slush of other posts.

As well as Facebook, I’m also a member of Twitter, Stumble, Goodreads, Pinterest, Linkedin aswell as having my own blog. I know there are many other social networks out there, and the list is growing longer all the time, but I’m limited to 24 hours in a day, and as a writer, I want to write (plus, occasionally I need to sleep, eat and spend time with my family, and work). When I look at the numbers of followers, likers and friends that I’m connected with across all medias it totals 12,536. That’s a lot of people! I know that some followers will be duplicated across the different media, but how can we expect our messages to get through so much other traffic.

What’s the Answer?

So, back to the first question – Has Social Media become too BIG to be effective? In my opinion, yes it has. Will I stop using social media? No I won’t. Although I don’t think it is an effective way to get readers to buy your books, I do think it is a useful place to find people who can provide Book Reviews, Editorial services, Artists as well as a place for advice and to connect with other writers. So, where can you find readers? I’m starting to concentrate more of my time and energy in promoting myself local to where I live – building up links with the local newspaper, going into schools and talking to kids that might want to read my books, getting involved with local bookshops, supporting the local businesses and meeting people face to face. We are not just a faceless line of code in a computer post! We are people and nothing is more effective than talking to someone face to face.

My advice to other writers who are new to self publishing – social media is useful, but don’t put all your efforts and hopes on it, it’s just one way to get noticed, but it’s not the only one, there are many others. Save yourself time by linking your blog to your social media accounts so they are all updated at the same time. And besides, you need time in the day to write.

As a little experiment, comment on this post or simply leave the message ‘I’m a believer!’ so I know how many of the 12,000 actually read the post and got this far! If you share this post to others then my faith in social media might well be restored. Apart from eating humble pie, I might even celebrate by offering a set of signed books to a random sharer, but I’m keeping the lid on my pen, just in case it drys up while I wait!

P.S. I’ve just spent an hour of my life writing this post, when I could have been working on my latest book!!?!?!!

Bank Community – Map

As promised, following on from my previous post this week about the Bank of England, here is an internal map of the building together with the separation of the rooms into sectors and their uses. To gain a greater understanding of the map and the Bank Community, please read The Moon Stealers and The Everlasting Night, chapter 16 onwards.

The Bank of England, London

One of the new locations I used in the third Moon Stealer book, The Everlasting Night, is the wonderfully grand building of the Bank of England in London. In the book it has been transformed as a base for a group of survivors trying to rebuild a community following the attack on the human race by the alien creatures. But, the Bank of England has it’s own, rather gruesome history. It is often known as the ‘Old Lady’ of Threadneedle Street, named after Sarah Whitehead, whose ghost is said to haunt the bank’s garden. Sarah’s brother, Philip, a former employee of the bank, was found guilty of forgery in 1811, and executed for his crime. Sarah became ‘unhinged’ and every day for the next 25 years she went to the Bank and asked to see her brother. When she died she was buried in the old churchyard that later became the Bank’s garden, and her ghost has been seen on many occasions since.

The Bank of England was founded back in 1694 and was housed in Walbrook in the City of London. The purpose of the Bank was to fund the building of a powerful navy after a crushing defeat by the French in 1690, leaving the country in poor financial health. King William III and his government, had very poor credit and as such the Bank took possession of the governments balances and controlled the issue of banknotes in order to raise the funds needed to build ships. Banknotes in those days were hand written and cashiers had to sign each note and make them payable to someone. It wasn’t until 1855 when they were printed, in black with a blank reverse.

The Bank of England holds the official gold reserves of the UK and many other countries. The vault, which is situated beneath the City of London, needs keys that are three feet long to open. The Bank of England is the fifteenth largest custodian of gold reserves, holding around 4600 tonnes. These gold deposits were estimated in February 2012, to have a current market value of £156,000,000,000.

Make sure you follow the blog by adding your email to the link top right. Coming soon – an internal map of the Bank of England, together with the adapted uses of the rooms as featured in the Moon Stealers and the Everlasting Night.

Have a look at some of the other locations that feature in the Moon Stealer series.

WIN all 3 Moon Stealer Books

London radio station, Magic FM, are running a competition to win signed copies of books 1, 2 and 3 in the Moon Stealer series. Visit there website to enter, closing date is 30 April 2013.

Good Luck

Book Signing Event – 9 April from 2pm

The Window display is up!

To celebrate the release of the third Moon Stealer book, The Everlasting Night, I will be attending the Oxfam Bookshop in Deal, Kent on Tuesday 9th April from 2pm onwards. All three books will be available as well as the retro style edition of Book 1, which is proving very popular with teenagers. Please pop in and have a chat about the books, get a signed copy or just say ‘Hi’.

Hope to see you there!

Oxfam Bookshop – 5 High Street, Deal, Kent.

First Review Of Book 3

The Moon Stealers and the Everlasting Night is officially out on 8th April, but you can already get it from Amazon. Anyway – the first review is here! It is from a very loyal fan called Maria Foley who lives in America and I have reproduced her review below:

“This book is delightfully gripping and addictive from the first paragraph! I have to say that, in my opinion, this is the best book in the series. It’s darker than the first two, but it’s an intense ride to take your imagination on. It’s worth the edge of your seat anxiety that is absolutely delicious. Once again he has created a fascinating world with believable people out of his imagination. This world is an action packed adventure of epic proportions. He can do what few writers can do well and that is shift from of person’s point of view to another effortlessly and with no confusion to the reader. He can also write in new characters that you immediately love and care about. His writing style seems flawless and impeccable on the page. He is a very visual writer, so the pictures develop in your mind as you read. The movie that plays is unbelievable.

5 Stars Mr. Flanagan!”

The original review can be found on Maria’s Book Junkie Blog.

You can read the first 3 chapters of Books 1, 2 and 3 in my Interactive Bookshelf.

Don’t forget to click the follow link at the top of the page!