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Gearing Up for Getting Out: The Conference Experience

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This post will appear two days after I and my wife return from this year’s Bouchercon, “The World Mystery Convention.” I’m writing it as I prepare to make the trip. September 6th through 9th fellow writers in the crime-mystery-thriller genre from around the world will have converged on St. Petersburg, Florida, to trumpet their most recent works, bask in the limelight, hustle for new deals and contacts, and generally squeeze the flesh and shamelessly self-promote.

If only I weren’t dreading it so.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m very much looking forward to connecting with friends I typically only see once or twice a year, precisely at these sorts of gatherings. In many ways the genre has provided me with my tribe, and it’s populated with smart, witty, unpretentious and hard-working writers of every stripe.

In particular, I’m very much looking forward to sharing a panel with Jess Lourey, who appeared here with Shannon Baker at Writer Unboxed on August 26th (“Write What You Fear: Why, How, and a Lifesaving Bonus Tip”). I just wish we didn’t have to do it at 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning.

Not only will 90% of the attendees be sleeping in or demonstrably hungover from all the parties the night before—Friday night is infamous for such festivities—it will be 5:00 AM for me, since I’ll still be on west-coast time, meaning I’ll have to rise and shine at 4:00 AM BT (Body Time) to ensure I actually stumble in on time. As for being articulate—who knows?

I’m also looking forward to taking part in a Thursday morning panel on historical research, given how relevant that is to my own recent novel, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday. The downside: a great many conference attendees will not yet have arrived, so this panel too is likely to offer only limited exposure.

Given such vicissitudes (I hear you ask), especially considering the expense of travel and accommodations, why bother making the effort at all?

Ah, Grasshopper, allow me to explain.

[Read more…]

Writing, Politics, and the Fuzzy Grey Line Between

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A few weeks ago, I was teaching a class on writing authentic antagonists to a group of children. I asked the kids, aged nine to twelve, to yell out the name of their favourite villains so I could write them on the board. The idea was to get a list of favourite villains, and then break down their attributes and what made them such great antagonists in their own stories.

We started with the villains I expected: The Joker, Voldemort, Darth Vader, and so on.

Then a couple of the kids started laughing to themselves. They whispered to their friends nearby, and there was more sniggering. “Do you have another villain to add?” I asked, expecting, perhaps, Professor Pippy Pee-Pee Poopypants — the antagonist from the Captain Underpants movie, and a name guaranteed to make anyone with a juvenile sense of humour collapse into giggles.

But, no…

Instead, the kids shouted out the name of a prominent American politician.

Writers and Politics Don’t Mix

The issue of whether or not fiction writers should share their own political thoughts in public places, especially blogs and social media, is one that comes up time and time again. I’ve certainly been warned never to share my own politics online.

“You’ll lose potential readers,” common wisdom says. “You won’t get an agent. You won’t get a publisher. No one cares about your opinion. Your job is to entertain with your stories, not espouse your political beliefs in public.” [Read more…]

When to Put Your Best Writing Forward

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photo adapted / Horia Varlan

Put your very best writing on the first page of your manuscript, I was once told, and the rest will rise to the challenge. This is a good thing, because your very best writing belongs on every other page, as well.

In fact, today I want to convince you why your very best writing belongs everywhere.

Synopsis

Most writers consider it a necessary evil, so why spend more time on it than you have to? Here’s why: if you treat it as a precious piece of storytelling, you might sell your book. Or a movie option. Infuse your synopsis with voice and drama and character. Make the reader feel something. Such synopses are out there, writers, and yours may be competing with them.

Website

Think of visitors to your site as browsers in your personal store. You wouldn’t want to leave punctuation and spelling errors lying around for them to stumble over, would you? Your customers are already hindered by having no beautifully designed book to pick up and flip through. Make your graphics and digital copy pop off the page to shake your reader’s hand in a way that says, “I am a competent, confident writer that you can trust for your entertainment needs.”

Blog posts

Blog posts have come a long way since those first steam-of-consciousness missives by “iamawriter” in the 1990s, when capitalization and correct spelling were optional. These days it couldn’t be more different. In 2014, while promoting my first novel, I was surprised at the hoops my publicist sent me through just to come up with original content for book bloggers. She vetted all posts and sent them back with comments like “you can write a stronger opening.” And I could.

This was my first stab at an opening for As I Turn the Pages in answer to the question, “How has dance impacted your life?”

I was an active child with an unquenchable thirst for rhythmic physical endeavor. When my nose wasn’t in a novel I was playing hopscotch and jump rope, skiing (snow and water), diving, taking gymnastics, and cheerleading. But nothing set me aflame like the dance class I discovered when I was sixteen.

Second try:

I leapt into the world feet first and ready for action. When my nose wasn’t in a novel I was skipping across chalked patterns, diving from springboards, slicing hills with my skis, flipping over high jumps—then trying to do any or all of it on the balance beam. But nothing set me aflame like the dance class I discovered when I was sixteen.

Pro tip: Even if the point of your post is to interview another author, fashioning your questions so they elicit a story arc represents your own abilities as a novelist better than five random questions.

Social media comments

You may not realize the impact you make with the comments you leave on other people’s social media posts. [Read more…]

Social Media Phobic? Facebook is (Still) Your Friend

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The news about Facebook’s embroilment in a data-harvesting-cum-political scandal kind of makes us all want to unfriend the platform for good.

For sure, our collective conscience would be cleaner and we’d all be a lot less distracted without it. Some of us would probably even feel a vengeful twinge of self-righteousness seeing Zuckerberg and his cohorts caught at last with the smoking gun that proves their invention is not only bad for us, but just downright bad.

While a breakup with Facebook might inflict some short-term suffering on most folks — pain from the loss of online friendships and a hollow void in that space between minutes that status updates used to fill — for writers and authors, it would pose a nearly existential dilemma.

For better or for worse, Facebook is still the platform for authors from a community-building and visibility perspective, with its unsurpassed power to spread the word, engage readers, and generate promotional opportunities. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat combined could never pack the same punch that Facebook schmoozing can.

Throughout all my years as a writer and a publicist helping writers, a few constants about Facebook have reinforced this belief: [Read more…]

Five Marketing Tools for Authors Who Hate Marketing

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marketing-tips-for-authors

Disclaimer: Hating marketing is not required to use these tools. In fact, if you enjoy marketing, you’ll have a blast using them.

I’m active in several online writing communities, and one of the most frequent things I read about is how much authors hate marketing. It’s usually accompanied by talk about art and creativity, and once in a while someone tosses this suggestion across the virtual meeting room: all you have to do is write a great story and they will come.

Except, thousands of writers have written thousands of great stories and no one, except their parents and their Uncle Bobby in Poughkeepsie, ever came. The hard truth is—whether your path to publishing is via the traditional, indie, or hybrid route—if you want a sustainable writing career that involves receiving income and reaching as much of your target audience as possible, you’ll need to do some marketing. If your target audience is Uncle Bobby in Poughkeepsie, you’re probably that one writer who won’t need to market.

Mention marketing to many authors and the conversation comes to a screeching halt. Marketing can seem like a complex equation that includes long and short-term strategies, talk of ROI, and aliens. Okay, maybe not aliens, but for some, marketing can feel otherworldly. But in its simplest form, marketing is just this: it’s the stories we tell about our stories. How, when, and how often we tell these stories become our marketing plan, whether we ever intentionally create a plan at all.  If you’re a writer and you’re on social media, have a website, blog, or even just talk about your work with friends, you’re already marketing. So here are five inexpensive and relatively easy-to-use tools to help optimize the marketing you’re already doing.

Facebook Shop Template
Most of us know we can create an author page on Facebook, and while recent changes to the platform’s algorithms make Facebook pages feel even more inaccessible, it still makes sense for authors to have one. For starters, it can be an effective way to communicate with fans, especially if you use it to create a private Facebook group. But one underutilized benefit of the author Facebook page is the ability to sell books from the platform.  You’ll need to start by making sure you set your page up as a shopping template.  Written Word Media has a great post that walks you step-by-step through optimizing your Facebook page as a sales funnel. You can find that tutorial here. [Read more…]

 

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