Vixenwriter

If someone had told me five years ago when my first book was published that I’d be mentioned in a NYT article, I may have had trouble believing it. I’m very, very blessed. Let me get that out of the way. It’s something I try to remember every day, no matter how craptastic the day is.

The NYT article entitled With Kindle, The Bestsellers Don’t Need to Sell – is on the front page of this morning’s New York Times and it’s about how free can be a great promotional tool. I think the title is a bit misleading – sure if you do a free giveaway you can rank at the top of the bestseller’s list in the Kindle store, but the point of a free giveaway is to expose a large group of readers to an author’s voice to hopefully bring a portion of them back as readers who will then pick up your other titles which aren’t free.

This happened to me, but the giveaway in October wasn’t the first time. I’ve always given my books away for free in contests. Before Triad came out I have believed that giving away my books is the most effective form of promotion. Other authors disagree, but as this is my blog, LOL, I’m saying it’s effective and that’s backed by five years of experience.

I not only give away my own titles, but I love to give away other people’s books too to hopefully hook readers on something I really loved. For me, the cost is not about – “I spent X and on this title I need to make Y in royalties” because promotion should never be about a single title. It should be about an author’s voice. When you’re starting out, you need to find a way to stand out, to give readers a reason to choose your title over the twelve or twenty also out that day. Banner ads can’t compete with word of mouth, IMO. Real people talking to their friends about something they loved. Of course you take a chance that people who read the book you gave them will hate it, LOL, but that’s a chance you always take as a writer. You do the best job you can and you set the book free out there. Some people will love it, some will hate it. You just hope the balance is weighted in the love it camp.

A free book is the absolute best way to show your work. How can it not be? How can a banner ad compare to that? Sure it gets your name out there if people visit whatever site you’ve placed the ad on and name repetition is important too (I do blog ads so I do obviously believe in the efficacy of ads as well). Digital books are even easier to give as prizes – you can send them immediately, there’s no trip to the post office and the cost to the author is lower just due to those facts alone.

Let me quickly distinguish this form of free from piracy – piracy is NOT free. Piracy is people other than the owner of the material offering up a download to everyone and their brother online to steal. Thousands of downloads at a time. This is not helpful. This is not “sharing” because you can’t share what you don’t own. And pirates don’t own those sorts of use rights. Piracy sucks. It hurts authors and my opinion of it is quite clear. Don’t do it and call yourself a fan or a booklover. You can steal an MP3 player from Best Buy and call yourself a fan, but you’re still a thief.

Back to the topic at hand – free as a tool. Because my numbers are quoted in the article and because I don’t normally discuss them in such detail, let’s break out what success means in this context:

Giving Chase is a title that released from a recent start up at the time, Samhain publishing, in 2006. The other three books in the series followed with the last releasing digitally in 2007 and appearing in a staggered fashion in print roughly 10 months after digital release. The books were not erotic romance, but highly sensual, small town romances, a total departure from what I had written before.

Samhain did a Kindle giveaway for Giving Chase once before and I got a nice bump but at the time, it was print that really pushed me into a whole new readership. At that point, Kindle wasn’t as widespread as it is now, not all my books were available at the kindle store and so that success was moderate, but still nice.

Some years later, with Kindle being far more successful, I began seeing increases in my numbers as my books began to list there. It was at this time that they asked me if they could use Giving Chase as a free giveaway for the whole month of October. I agreed.

Why did I agree? The book still sells well for a book that is now 4 years old, but it’s an old title. What did I have to lose really, from all that exposure? If it fizzled, I wouldn’t be out a whole lot and sometimes it’s good to take a chance.

Samhain promoted it. Kindle promoted it and I promoted it. The huge number of Kindle fans who’ve started blogs and lists of the free offerings at the Kindle store listed the books. The level of chatter about the free offerings was far greater than the last time we did a giveaway. This, IMO, was hugely important.

But in publishing, time moves at a different pace. Everything is a lot slower. I saw the ranks so I figured I was doing well, but pretty much forgot about it in the chaos of the holidays, having my family visiting and the kids being home. (I did just stop looking at the Amazon pages for the books because free also means people who don’t really read romance will grab the book and hate it. Hate is fine, but really, my skin is only so thick so it’s best for me not to read those reviews, LOL.)

So I got a ping from Crissy Brashear, the publisher of Samhain some weeks back wherein she told me what those numbers were and I nearly passed out. When she broke down how the other three books in the series did – I realized we’d achieved a 10% return on those who got the free download who then went and grabbed the other books.

10% is a big number. A really big number when you consider the age of the titles. My other kindle available books got a nice bump too. When I look at the numbers what I see are the small press books doing the best. Why that is I can’t say for sure, but I think several things are in play:

Am I a millionaire? No. I still get excited when I find a five dollar bill in a pocket of old jeans. Do I believe that in this case, free books have bumped up my name recognition and overall sales? Yes. Yes and it happened with something that’s an expression of who I am as an author. That’s priceless in an age where you can go into any bookstore and see shelf after shelf of books. I’m not a NYT bestseller (yet), I don’t get book tours or even free ads from my publishers. I’m scrambling and fighting to reach midlist and beyond.

Promotion is a fact of life for authors. Most of us find it time consuming and exhausting. Some authors don’t do any at all, but I can’t afford not to. What I have to do is think about promotion in a comprehensive fashion because like most authors, I have a thousand other responsibilities in my life and I still have to write the books I need to promote. Spamming a thousand people at facebook every day with comments about my book being the awesomest on the planet will not help, in fact it turns people off. Spamming twitter won’t help either.

To those who repeat the “just write the best book you can and they’ll come” mantra – I have to disagree. Unless you’re already established, what’s going to get that reader to grab your book over the one a shelf over? Each month you’re competing with hundreds of other titles similar to yours in some fashion. Those of us who aren’t at the Nora Roberts level (which is most of us because hello, it’s pretty rare to achieve that – and you know she works her butt off too to keep that) have to be smart about raising our titles above the rest, about standing out in a non-trainwreck way (and you all know who you are – all publicity is NOT good publicity in this case).

At the end of the day, something like giving away a book or a track from a new album IS important. Free won’t make you a success if your book or your song sucks, or if you can’t keep up pace and continue to put out good work. But it’s underrated. It’s totally simple, which is part of the beauty, isn’t it?

We’ve got a time: 8:30 AM
On a date: July 16
And a Room: The Harding Room

While we have some great sponsors including: Books on Board, Red Sage Publishing, Samhain Publishing, Quartet Press, and Smart Bitches, this is a streamlined event and we would ask you to bring your own tea, coffee, hashbrowns or donuts. That’s right, it’s BYOTCH-D.

For the Rogue Digital Conference

Kassia Krozser of Booksquare.com and a frequent speaker on the publishing circuit and the head of a new romance epublisher, Quartet Press, will start us off by focusing on digital issues, particularly the contrasts between traditional print publishers and digital publishers. She will be highlighting the efficiencies of the latter, challenges (and strengths) for the former, and questions authors (and maybe readers) should be asking. Kassia will touch on timing of reversion of rights, territorial rights in the worldwide digital audience, chunked content, and the spectre of being paid on the net.

Sarah Wendell of SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com, co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms, and lecturer will discuss digital promotion and some self publishing numbers shared by authors as well as the results of the Smart Btiches eBook Reader Olympics.

Jane Litte from DearAuthor.com will share with you the five questions you need to ask your agent about the Google Book Settlement. She will discuss how evolving technology may affect the number of ereading devices in the future such as transreflective LCD screens, the popularity of netbooks, tablets, and dedicated readers and the rise of the smartphone.

Angela James, executive editor of Samhain Publishing will present the digital publishing model and how it works along with the pros and cons of publishing with a digital publisher (aka why you may or may not want to go this route with your next book) with a straight look at the money.

Maya Banks and Lauren Dane, two epublished and print published authors,  are ready to share the hard numbers about digital publishing and why they’ve both chosen to keep one foot in the digital publishing pond.

(Info appropriated from Angela James’ blog)

I’ve said it before but I’ll repeat – I’m not an expert, I just know what works for me and what doesn’t. I’ve watched a lot of authors promote their work over the years and you know the one thing that always stands out as a huge fail is overly aggressive, in your face, spam promotion.

I’ve spoken about this before but you know, judging by the volume of author spam I get at Facebook, myspace and in my inbox here at home, it needs to be said again.

There is a difference between effective promotion and standing an inch away from someone yelling at them to buy your book. Effective promotion is often subtle. Author spam is not subtle, nor is it effective.

Here are some examples: At goodreads I frequently get books recommended to me. Most of the time it’s stuff I’d never read, but whatever, people like to share their preferences and I’m not bothered by that. What I am bothered by are authors who recommend their own books to me. Authors who recommend their own books to me REPEATEDLY, while using phrases like, “my book is a thrilling mix of eroticism and mystery!” or whatever.

I find authors who recommend their own books to me to not only be sort of sad, but also annoying. This is not effective promotion. Oh I know, there’s always one woman in your local chapter or on your loop who says how she sold eleventy million books that way. And you know what? I’ve never heard of them. If this was an effective way to conduct yourself, don’t you think Nora Roberts would do it?

The problem is manifold. First it makes everyone wary of having authors in their groups or on their pages because one dbag gets in there and pimps the ever loving crap out of their book in every single conversation. We all suffer for that because now I feel hesitant to enter any group with big, capitalized warnings about author promotions being banned. Not because I’d do that, but because I’ve got to prove that I’m not that jerk instead of getting to know the group and being a regular member.

This spills outward, especially with ebooks. It’s difficult enough to educate people that digital books are real books and they are good, well edited and worth reading. But when you’ve got all these spammers out there, it paints us all with that brush and that pisses me off.

I started out ignoring the various invites and book recs until I began to drown in them. Then I started unfollowing and unfriending and then the same people would simply invite me to be their friend two days later. Over and over again until I had to block or ban them.

Lots of people like to use professionalism in sentences to look good. I wish more people would simply ACT professionally. Things that come to your house or email that you didn’t ask for when they’re advertising a product are called what? Spam. That’s right. And whether it’s some sort of drug to make your penis bigger or an announcement of part 14 of your werecow series from poodlebutt press, it’s all the same. SPAM.

Successful authors do not act this way.

I know it seems insurmountable, this promotion deal. It seems mysterious and expensive and totally beyond a mere mortal’s ability – but it’s part of the gig. So you can decide at the outset to do everything you do with professionalism or at the very least, not invoking the fury of eight hundred people a day via facebook or myspace. You can watch what other authors you admire do, see how they conduct themselves. Are there things they do that you could give your own spin to and try a few times? When you begin to do something at myspace or facebook, you can pause and ask yourself if by saying, “well it would take me a lot longer if I actually chose who I invited carefully” if you’re really trying to build a career, which involves the goodwill of readers and others, or if you’re just punking out and taking the lazy way. If you are doing the latter, be prepared for authors and readers to be pissed at you, be prepared to be that author readers talk about having to block, or that author other authors roll their eyes over because you invited them to your facebook fan page YET AGAIN.

Here’s a basic tip: If I wanted to join your fan page, I would do that. I would seek it out myself. You inviting me to your fan page a dozen times in two months will not make me want to join your fan page on the 13th invite. No, it will make me block you and not ever feel much inclined to buy your books or rec them to another human being. Now, I could be alone in this attitude, but I don’t think so. I think many in our community are sick and tired of this in your face promotion. We’re not selling used cars on television in 1974.

We’re creative people and I am completely confident that we can come up with new and interesting ways to promote without making everyone cringe when they see our names.

I’m pleased to announce there will indeed be more books in my Federation series with Berkley. Insatiable will be out in July of 2010! This is Daniel Haws’ story (you meet him in Relentless)…

Insatiable – the sequel to the author’s futuristic romances, Undercover and Relentless, in which a soldier in the Federation’s shadowy and ultra-secret Phantom Corps is sent on a mission into Imperial territory to smuggle out a woman who may hold the key to turning the rising tide and winning the war before it starts

As some folks may be aware, Amazon has been informing those small publishers who sell POD books through their service they must use Amazon’s POD service, BookSurge.

From the Wall Street Journal: Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon’s Web site.

You can read more about it here, here at slashdot and

Here at Publisher’s Weekly: Over the last year, BookSurge has been trying to cut into the market share of pod leader Lightning Source and is using the selling clout of Amazon to generate more business. “I feel like the flea between two giant elephants,” said the head of one pod publisher about the upcoming battle between Lightning Source and BookSurge/Amazon. He said although the deal with BookSurge will be more expensive, he has no choice but to make the move since most of his authors expect their titles to be for sale on Amazon. He added that his company will also continue to use Lightning Source for printing as well. Amazon’s BookSurge mandate extends to traditional publishers as well as to online pod houses.

I’m waiting to see how this shakes out. I have a great deal of concern obviously as Samhain and EC are both publishers who use POD technology. Samhain I know is working on it and informed authors via the author loop on Friday of the situation. I know via the articles above that Whiskey Creek books have had their buy buttons disabled already but my checks of my books at Amazon have so far shown my books still available including pre-orders. I’m hoping we can hear answers soo so that anxious authors can at least know what the future holds and start to prepare one way or the other.

Via Booksqure and then Book Club Girl – Funding for RIF (Reading is Fundamental) is cut in the 2009 Federal Budget You can get involved through this link. And by cut, I mean their book distribution program has been totally de-funded.

From Kay McSpadden’s article in the Charlotte Observer: Despite the overwhelming research that shows literacy is the most important skill for any child to acquire for future success, President Bush’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2009 eliminates the Inexpensive Book Distribution administered by RIF. Authorized by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (SEC.5451), the Inexpensive Book Distribution program is not funded by earmarks and has been supported by Congress and every administration since 1975 until this one.

There are a lot of children in this country who don’t have huge libraries in their neighborhoods. Their schools are underfunded and they don’t have support at home for reading. It’s programs like RIF who have supported and encouraged kids to read and in doing so, gives them tools to overcome these stumbling blocks.

From RIF’s Site: RIF programs offer enriching activities that spark children’s interest in reading. And every child involved with RIF gets to choose and keep new books, at no cost to the children or their families.

Although RIF programs are run in a variety of communities, some of RIF’s most important work occurs in communities where students are at great risk of educational failure. Wherever kids are served—at schools, libraries, childcare centers, Head Start programs, parks, community centers, health clinics, migrant camps, or domestic shelters—RIF can make a difference!

This article by teacher Kay McSpadden is illustrative of just exactly why a program like RIF is important. It’s a small thing to most of us with bookshelves to the ceilings, but to a kid who never had a book to call her own until they got one from the RIF program, it’s huge.

The above quote is from George Orwell’s, Animal Farm – one of my favorite books of all time. I’m going to twist the context a bit for the purposes of, well to make my point. (as in, yes I know the original context of the quote and it doesn’t translate here precisely but I love the quote so I’m gonna make it work)

All publishers are not equal. Period. I’m sorry if that hurts people to read but it’s common sense. All shoe companies are not equal either. Nor are all coffee shops or pencils or whatever else. Aside from the basics of personal preference, there’s a pretty big gap in quality between some publishers.

As an author – it’s your job to use your common sense to note this. There are danger signs – for instance, does your editor or other representative of the company return your correspondence in a reasonable amount of time? Now of course different issues require different speeds of response. But you know, if over a long period of time, it takes months to hear back on issues if at all, that’s a problem.

I write for several different publishers both NY and small press and all my editors get back to me within 48 hours on important stuff. I consider that professional behavior. I don’t consider not responding to author’s emails when you’re an author liaison to be professional. I don’t consider the oversharing of personal information when you’ve messed up professional. I don’t consider publishers or editors personally attacking each other, their competition or authors to be professional.

Also, late payments occasionally may not be an issue, but late payments as a rule? Not a good sign. Authors put on ‘blacklists’ for bringing up issues – a bad sign, even if you’re one of the authors on the good list. You never know when the tables can be turned on you.

Poor customer service is an issue, a big one. (Martha Punches at EC is a goddess! I love her to death, she’s fabulous fabulous fabulous). If your readers can’t get books, if the books are in bad shape and they can’t be returned, if reader correspondence dealing with real issues is ignored – red flag.

At the same time – this is your business too! That means, you share responsibility.

So as unpopular as this might make me, I’m going to suggest that authors really need to do their damned homework. Now, it’s one thing if you’ve sold and suddenly things go south. But once things go south, a wait and see attitude is far better than continuing to submit new work when no one answers your correspondence for years at a time. And if you get paid late over and over and you keep subbing new stuff – you either need to find a way to make peace with that or not sub new material.

I know the desire to get published but if it makes you blind to red flags, you have to, at some point, realize you share responsibility when the publisher you ignored those red flags over goes bad.

Also? You have a responsibility to be a professional as well. Turn your stuff in on time. Meet your deadlines. Address any issues professionally. Be as easy to work with as you can (and that doesn’t mean you’re a doormat). Market yourself.

In the end, I want to say I hate it when bad companies do stupid stuff and then everyone thinks all epublishing or small publishing is the same. It’s not. Samhain is not Venus, nor has it ever been so. When I first sold a book to Samhain they were new, so I watched and waited to see how they’d do. I knew they had a woman at the helm who knew how to run a successful publishing company and when I saw edits and watched the process, I was impressed enough to submit something else. My editor is supah fabulous, my checks are on time and my books show up when they’re supposed to where they’re supposed to. I can market effectively because I get advance release dates on digital and print.

As much as I love writing for them, if they stopped paying me on time or stopped answering my emails or generally started acting hinky, I wouldn’t write there anymore after my contractual responsibilities were dealt with. Sometimes you’re hemmed in and you can’t pull something because the behavior is bad but not bad enough to violate the contract – that sucks, I’ve been there too and I did my homework. So you make the best of it, call it a painful lesson learned and don’t send any more work their way.

No one is perfect. No contract is perfect, no author is perfect, no publisher is perfect. There are publishers who are better fits for different people. But there are things that simply shouldn’t be tolerated – not getting paid is a big one!

This isn’t a trend and it’s not indicative of all epublishing and small presses either. It’s indicative of bad business practices catching up to companies and sadly, hurting authors. That’s the part that sucks. I know many authors, smart, savvy authors, who write for a company who seems to be on shaky ground right now and it makes me sad.

Your Question: What I’m wondering is how you see the current market of erotica and erotic romance. Do they still have a lot of growth potential in them, have they reached the saturated mark yet, or, for those of us still in the beginning stages of our writing careers in these market, has the boat already sailed and the wake is closing over our heads if we’re not Olympic-level swimmers out of the gate?

LB (or SuperLaura as we’ve started calling her)Well, erotica and erotic romance have definitely tightened up over the last year, but that happens with every subgenre that explodes out of the gate. I have sold first-timers into the NY erotic romance market as recently as a month or two ago, so there is still opportunity out there.

Erotic romance and erotica will always have a more “fringe” marketplace than mainstream romance or even mainstream sensual romance, so the number of slots that will be allocated to erotica and erotic romance are not limitless. But certainly these markets are more robust now than they ever have been. The question is what YOU want to write… if you have erotica in your soul and you’d have to stifle your voice to tone down the heat, I think you should go with it. Recognize that it could be tougher to place your MS than if you were writing something more mainsteam like romantic suspense and just do it anyway. I don’t think you should give up on anything you want to write because of the whims of the market. As long as you can accept that some subgenres are harder to sell than others sometimes, then that is your choice to make. Honestly, no manuscript, regardless of genre, is “easy” to sell, so I think you should write what you feel moved to write.

Your Question: Do you think it’s important for an author to be flexible and adapt easily to the changes in our genre or to stick to one sub genre and master it?

Well, in a perfect world I think everybody should get to write what they want but since when is this a perfect world? Some subgenres are more popular than others–all you have to do is go to a bookstore to see that this is true. I think we can all understand that it would probably be easier to sell a historical romance set in London than one set in Warsaw and that the market for romantic suspense is probably bigger than the market for futuristic romance. With that said, sometimes an author’s voice doesn’t always translate well across certain subgenres and themes.

Flexibility can be a great thing but so is being a real master of your subgenre.

Laura Bradford, when she’s not fielding emails, making phone calls, reading manuscripts and wielding her superagent powers, is also a very good dancer and she makes me laugh and happens to be one of my favorite people in the world. You can find her at the Bradford Literary Agency.

Because she is made of awesome. Just sayin.

Your question: I’ve been working on something for Laura for a while now. It’s an alternate earth/paranormal and is so big I’ve split it into three books. When do you stop editing and just submit the thing? I want it perfect. But if it’s not something marketable, am I wasting time by continuing to tweek, tweek, tweek it?

LB: Well you always want to make something as polished as possible before you send it off to an agent, but sometimes there is a fine line between polishing and obsessing. And it is possible to tweak your voice right out of your work. I have no way of knowing whether something is marketable until I see the material, so I can’t really give you a straight answer.

If you love the work, I think you should give it every opportunity to find a home, whether it is in NY or elsewhere. If you believe in it enough to think it deserves publication, you have to just bite the bullet at some point and let some kind of industry professional see it. Believe me, there is no shortage of people out there who are dying to tell you whether they think something is marketable or not.

Your Question: How would a typical day in the life of Laura Bradford be?

LB: It varies, of course. Most days I start out with a task list and then inevitably a call comes in, or a contract, or a problem of some kind that shoves itself to the head of the line. Generally I start by day by sorting through my email and prioritizing first anything from a client or editor. If I am pitching a new project, I will make those calls first thing. After that, I will work on client material. On any given day, I have about 8-12 pieces of client material that needs my attention–could be a proposal for the next book in their contract, could be an option, a new manuscript, an edited manuscript due for delivery that they want me to read through. All of this can take the entire day, and does. Then there are contests to judge, questions on Lauren Dane’s blog to answer, pitch letters to write. I also need to keep up with my electronic queries, so they don’t pile up too much. It stresses me out when I see that I have 100+ unopened queries in my inbox, so I work hard to keep that under control. I read hard copy submissions at night, usually.

Laura Bradford is a literary agent who is, as I’ve mentioned a few times, made of awesome. She has her own shop – Bradford Literary Agency and works incredibly hard for her clients (I can totally attest to this fact)

She answered a great many of the questions so I’ll post two of them for now and follow up as I get them. Thank you so much to the totally fabulous, shiny and sparkly Laura Bradford for your time!

1. is she looking for anything in particular in submissions at the moment as regards to genre?

LB: No, nothing in particular at the moment. Anything commercial (as opposed to literary), any variety of romance, mystery, urban fantasy, women’s fiction, YA. I like material that is really fresh and different… unusual settings and themes. Unusual mixes of genres.

2. On Laura’s site she welcomes electronic query letters but not electronic submission. Am I reading that correctly? No subbing the synopsis & 3 chpts by e-mail?

If she doesn’t really think the book clicks with what she’s selling these days, will she, if possible, make a recommendation to another agent that she thinks might work out better?

LB: It is really hard to read off the computer screen all day, which is why I prefer to limit electronic queries to query letters only (without sample chapters). As for 3 chapters being enough, if I am hooked by the sample, I will definitely ask for more. If I am not hooked by the first 3 chapters, then that is a problem. If the voice really, really works, I might still ask for more on the off chance there is a plot problem that can be fixed.

As for recommending another agent if I pass, I really don’t do that. If the MS was good, I’d want it for myself. If I pass on it, it usually means I don’t think it is ready for publication. If I don’t handle the kind of material you’ve sent, which is another reason I’d pass, I would generally tell you.