Author in search of a tagline
I might have mentioned I’m not good at marketing. My author friend Kay Lyons recently shared the screenshot below from the Pike’s Peak Writers, which drew a hearty “Oh, hell, yes!” from me. The latest manifestation of my lack of skill in this area came as I’m working on my new website because my web guy, Barney, said the existing one’s backend looks like that second-to-last move of Jenga. You know, where the next person pulls out one tiny block and it all falls down.
Many, if not most, author sites feature inviting, intriguing taglines that give the readers a glimpse into their writing and into their worlds. Mine says:
Patricia McLinn
USA Today bestseller
Mystery & Romance
And that’s the website in progress. The old one had even less.
Hey, you can’t accuse me of overselling. 😉 Clearly, I went for verifiable facts.
I laughingly mentioned this while several of us were chatting after the Novelists, Inc., conference in September. Fellow author Russell Nohelty looked slightly aghast. Possibly because one of his lines on his website is “I write books filled with magic, monsters, and mythology.” That is ever so slightly better than my line (never previously committed to the written word) of “I marry ‘em off or kill ‘em off.”
While the rest of us kept chatting, Russell had his head down, looking at his phone. I thought I’d driven him to that with my tagline-less confession. A bit embarrassing, since he and Monica Leonelle are the authors of multiple well-regarded books on biz aspects of writing, not to mention the originators of the Writers MBA conference and Mastermind. A few days earlier, I’d won a ticket to the conference during a NINC event . . . and here I’d just revealed how monumentally inept I was at marketing/taglines.
Then, Russell lifted his head and said to me something along the lines of. “Here’s what AI pulls together about your books” and started reading from his screen.
If my jaw didn’t drop it should have. I was … I can only use that lovely UK term . . . gobsmacked.
First, because this was an incredibly useful and generous lesson in using AI as a tool around writing and publishing. I’m not using it for my actual writing – to me the point of writing is, well, writing. It needs to come out of me to quiet the voices in my head. (TMI? Sorry!) But, boy, anything I can get AI to do on the not-actually-writing-but-writing-related crud that coats the stories like centuries’ worth of barnacles on a shipwreck is gratefully glommed onto.
Second, because of what Russell found being said about my books and how readers respond to them.
Yeah, I teared up. I had a Sally Field accepting her second Oscar moment. “I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!” (Yes, that’s the real quote. Not “you really, really like me.” Verifiable facts, remember. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/u_8nAvU0T5Y.
(Readers of this blog who are ReadHeads, getting my regular newsletter, probably won’t be surprised I teared up. They know there are many ways to make this author cry. 😉 Not a ReadHead? Come join us and see the author cry. LOL.
Russell also sent me the screenshots of his queries and the responses. He started asking AI to distill what it found to create a tagline and I continued that later, building off his work. It came up with a few possibles, but none completely hit the mark for me.
Next, I heard two Joanna Penn videos –
Timeout here while I say that if you are an author with any interest in a career in this century and without the ability to time travel to the previous one to build a career there, you should be listening to Joanna’s Creative Penn podcast and supporting her on Patreon – value for the money cannot be beat. She sifts through the constantly growing tsunami of AI and other developments and shares publishing-specific aspects with us. Her work is an invaluable resource.
If you’re not an author, but have any interest in the AI space, I also recommend following her. Hey, and she writes intriguing thrillers as J.F. Penn and you can listen to my interview (on behalf of readers) with her on my Authors Love Readers podcast.
– on using the AI of NotebookLM. What appeals to me about this tool is you control the information or data that the AI uses. That’s a major safeguard against hallucinating . . . though it’s easier to fall into the echo chamber trap if you’re only feeding it what you already think/believe.
But for what I tried it for first – creating FAQs from some podcasts I’d done for authors – it performed great.
That encouraged me to try another of its uses, one I’d first seen on a different Joanna Penn video: An AI audio conversation based on material you gave to Notebook LM. In my case, the material came from the screenshots of Russell’s AI inquiries about my books. (For those interested, I converted the JPGs of the screenshots he sent me to PDFs, using the free Canva PDF converter. Downloaded the new PDFs to my files, then uploaded them to Notebook LM. Clunky, but fairly quick.)
And that produced an audio that . . . gobsmacked isn’t strong enough this time . . . blew me away. I blushed. I teared up. I thought, Wow, if my books do half that for readers, every bit of my 35-plus years of work has been worthwhile…
I turned it into a video you can now see on YouTube.
Yes, it is long. I considered trimming it, but I’d rather spend that time writing on Death on Riddle Road (Secret Sleuth, Book 9). Please, please just let it run, even if you walk away from it, and/or run it at a faster playback speed. Either way will avoid the YouTube gods smiting me.
(Speaking of YouTube gods, I’d hugely appreciate you following me there and liking this or other or all(!) videos. 😉 )
Yes, the voices are a touch smarmy. OTOH, all I did to create it was click some buttons. IOW more time for Death on Riddle Road.
No, I still don’t have a tagline I really, really love. But, hey, I’ve been gobsmacked, I’ve blushed, I’ve laughed. I’ve cried. I’ve been blown away. That’s what matters most.
Because it’s all about the journey.
Oh!
Wait! … could that be the kernel of a tagline? What do you think?
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