The Writer’s Predicament

I spoke to Laura Wu on the phone for an hour yesterday. Laura is a “coach” of sorts. She helps writers learn to market their work. She’s written a book called “77 Ways to Find New Readers.” I’ve read the book. Three times. She was very nice on the phone. She has a British accent that I could listen to all day.

So the plan, bascially, is this. Provided the formatter gets the book back to me tomorrow so I have time to proof read it again, I’ll re-release “An Innocent Client” on Friday. The new cover is already finished. I’ve rewritten the book and removed the profanity, so it should be clean (pun intended), but I’ve run into issues with formatters in the past. They apparently have to manually enter the book into their own system in order to format it, and when they do, they sometimes get in a big hurry and make typographical errors. I learned about this the hard way when I had “Russo’s Gold” formatted. There were at least twenty typos in that novel that weren’t there when it went off to the formatter. I’m using a different formatter this time, a company called “TheFastFingers.” They’re already four days late getting the book back to me so their fingers aren’t quite as fast as they advertise. I hope they can at least spell. We’ll see.

Laura stressed the importance of having an excellent product page on Amazon, so I’m going to tweak the product description and the categories and the tags. Once I get it up and running on Amazon and get it uploaded to the paperback distributor — Createspace — then I’ll start giving books away. Giving books away gives me a pain in the you-know-what because I work so hard and so long writing them, but people love free stuff and so I’m going to give some away. I’ll give away ten on Goodreads, ten on LibraryThing, and ten over this website. Then I’ll give away ebooks on the Kindle for two days. I’ll ask the people who win the paperback giveaway copies to write a good review. If they can’t, in good conscience, write a good review, I’ll ask them to please keep their opinions to themselves.

I’ve started the process of doing a blog tour with a company called Goddess Fish. Laura recommended them. The tour won’t even start until January, though. I will, of course, Tweet and Facebook the news of the giveaways and the re-release. I have updated my author pages on all the places that have author pages.

Over the next six weeks, I will re-release “In Good Faith,” “Injustice for All,” and “Reasonable Fear.” Then, the first week of December, I’ll release my new Joe Dillard novel. The title has yet to jump out at me. It will, though, very soon. It always does. In late November and during the first three weeks of December, I’ll do book signings at Mr. K’s here in Johnson City and I’ll do the local publicity rounds. After Christmas, I’ll re-release “Russo’s Gold” with a new cover and all those typos removed and then a couple of weeks after that I’ll re-release “River on Fire” and make it available as a paperback.

I’ll also be pitching the books to book bloggers. That’s always fun. “Dear So-and-So, Would you please read my book and review it on your site? It’s a really good book. Thank you.” In return, I generally get one of two things: silence or a rejection. I get as many rejections from book bloggers now as I used to get from agents and publishers. They are quickly coming to consider themselves the new gatekeepers of the publlishing industry. Some of them are right uppity about it, too. They fit right in.

So that’s the plan. New covers, new formatting, a new Dillard book, less swearing, giveaways, book blog tours, social media utilization, sucking up to book bloggers, and local events. Oh, and pricing. The ebooks will be cheap, anywhere from $2.99 to 4.99. Laura says I should price “An Innocent Client” at 99 cents for the first couple of weeks. I haven’t decided on that one yet. I hate to sell AIC for 99 cents. It took me a year-and-a-half to write that book. But I might. If it’ll help sell the book on a large scale and help get me more readers, I’ll bite the bullet.

The fun begins on Friday. You will find me here, finishing the new book, chewing my nails and gnashing my teeth.