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Posts Tagged ‘book marketing’

Why Create a Fan Base?

June 4, 2013

A Loyal Fan Base is an Indie Author’s Best Friend

Indie Authors Need to Build a Fan Base
If you’ve visited here before, you know I’ve spent a lot of time lately talking to, for and about indie-authors. It’s hard for me not to, since I’m smack in the middle of the indie revolution myself with a Readers Favorite Gold Medal-Winning novel – Reichold Street.

But I’m not here today to promote my book. I wanted to follow-up on some of my earlier posts, like I promised I would. “Yeah, right,” I can almost hear you saying, “who does he think he’s kidding, an indie author always needs to promote himself.”

Duly noted.

A Dedicated Media Page
However, as I mentioned in my post “I Need a What?” back on March 14, 2013, one of the most important things an indie author can do for himself (or herself; there’ll be no chauvinism here) is to create a dedicated media page.

At the same time, I confessed to you that I didn’t have one myself (bummer).

Well, that little faux pas has been corrected. A few days ago I launched the media page dedicated to my novel, REICHOLD STREET. Now all I have to do is simply sit back and wait for the media inquiries to come in, right?

No … although I certainly wish it was so (sigh). Wishing, after all, is so much easier than doing.

But it isn’t going to happen without some rigorous promotional effort (ain’t nothin’ comes easy, my grandmammy used to say) … no, wait, that wasn’t Granny … that was an old Lynyrd Skynyrd lyric.

Doesn’t matter. You get what I mean. I still gotta work at it.

———-
You have my permission to take a moment to actually listen to “Nothing Comes Easy” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. It’s a great song.
———-

Collect Email Addresses
The following month, on April 24, 2013, in “Six Indie Author Mistakes”, I talked about how a great many indie authors avoid collecting e-mail addresses because they think having readers and followers on their social media is enough … and I confessed to being guilty of THAT avoidance, too.

Well, I still think not collecting e-mail addresses is one of the biggest mistakes an indie author can make. I won’t reiterate the reasons (I assume you’ve gone back to re-read the post link, right?). Suffice it to say I’ve done something about that, too.

I’ve decided to use Mailchimp for my first foray into email address collection. When it came to decision time, I picked them over some other equally interesting providers.

You want to know why, of course. They are an excellent service and I could give you a lot of mumbo-jumbo reasoning about it now but, quite honestly, I picked them because MailChimp is free for lists of up to 2,000 subscribers.

Being an indie author, and not an über-rich John Grisholm, J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, free works really well for me.

Giveaways
I don’t have the first email to send to followers just yet … I thought it might be a good idea to wait until I had something specific to promote or, better yet, to give away.

“Giveaway? What will you give away?” I just heard you ask. Part of myself, actually. No, not in a literal sense, as in arms or legs or spleens (although I am in the National Bone Marrow Registry), but in an intellectual property sense.

I’ve received some fascinating reviews for REICHOLD STREET. Just take a look at a few:

———-

Five Stars!

… a master of the art of character development. You can hear each voice clearly in this extremely moving account during the turbulent 1960’s. Some walk away with fame; a few never survive the haunting essence of this place.

Five Stars!
~ Reviewed by Anne B. for Readers Favorite
Herron’s characters come to life on the pages and march straight into the hearts of readers in this character-driven plot. It’s easy to recommend this book.

Five Stars!
~ Reviewed by Jean Brickell for Readers Favorite
I was fascinated by this enthralling book. The boys of Reichold Street each have story to tell….

Five Stars!
~ Reviewed by Top Book Reviewers.com
… a must-read for people of all ages. Herron has created an intense depth of emotion that connects all the characters. Reichold Street is an indie novel you want everyone to hear about … truly amazing.

———-

What does all that have to do with any of this? Try to overlook the brash (again) self-promotion, and notice the common thread.

See it?

Character Development
Since so many reviewers seem to think it’s something I’m good at, I thought I might share my thoughts on how I achieve it.

To that end, I’m writing a CREATING BELIEVABLE CHARACTERS document to share my not-so-secret secrets (20+ pages, so far, and growing) that I will share with you, absolutely free, in my next post. When you see it next time, you’ll just list your email address to receive your copy.

Hope you enjoy it!

As always, comments are welcome (and appreciated).

Tags:award-winning writing, book marketing, character development, indie writers, self-publishing, using social media
Posted in Award-Winning Fiction, Book Promotion, Free Stuff, Market Your Book, Self-Published | 6 Comments »

Save the Cat

May 23, 2013

Big Summer Storm or Creative Inspiration?

About Creative Writing
The more I write, the more I’ve come to believe that many of the things they taught us in high school and college, except for the whole “earth is round” thing, was nonsense.

Particularly everything they had to say about creative writing.

My home office is full of books on writing from that time (and quite a few from now) and those books are literally full of useless garbage about either (a) dangling participles, (b) misplaced modifiers, (c) the correct placement of semi-colons, or (d) finding a happy place in which to write.

Stephen King was much closer to the truth of creative writing in his excellent book ON WRITING. It is, by far, the best book I’ve ever read on the writing process. I’ve already gone through it, cover to cover, at least four times … and I will read it again.

Whatever you may think of the subject matter of his books, King hasn’t written nearly 50 novels, all of them best-sellers, by being the only guy in town to write horror stories or fantasy.

He didn’t do it by strict adherence to Strunk & White’s ELEMENTS OF STYLE or the AP HANDBOOK, either.

He did it by being one hell of a good storyteller.

King could set a story in a sleepy town in Maine, put the guts of that same story into an enchanted car, write about an obsessive book reader rescuing her favorite author, tell it all in a story about a rabid dog, or set it around a struggling writer and his family in a nearly deserted, snowed-in summer resort.

For that matter, so can you.

Because any way you look at it, it’s the same story. You can even add elves and dragons and trolls, or talking animals in the world just beyond the closet. It’s still the same story. And, surprise, surprise, it’s all about the story.

Be a Good Storyteller
I had the pleasant surprise the other day of discovering Guy Bergstrom and his fantastically witty blog about writing: THE RED PEN OF DOOM. I’m going to have to write and thank him … and I definitely think he’s a blogger to follow.

In one of his many posts I was introduced to the late Blake Snyder. Blake was another one who took time to cut through all the classroom-taught traditions and nonsense.

In his SAVE THE CAT book Blake pointed out that it’s patently stupid to call FATAL ATTRACTION a domestic drama and ALIEN a sci-fi movie and JAWS a horror flick, because they are all the same basic, primal story: there’s a monster in the house.

I bought Blake’s book, but I won’t summarize it here and give away all its secrets. Even though it’s ostensibly about screenwriting, if you’re a fiction writer of any kind I would suggest you get the book and read it. It’s that good.

Tags:award-winning writing, Blake Snyder, book marketing, indie writers, self-publishing
Posted in Award-Winning Fiction, Book Promotion, Book Review, Storytelling | Leave a Comment »

The First Three Hundred Words

May 18, 2013

Dawn on the River

Feeling Productive
On my last post I spoke about the need to get back to my writing, and for the past 18 days I’ve been true to my plans. I’ve completed six chapters of my Reichold Street sequel, and even got started on another story. It’s been a productive time.

I’m pretty comfortable with where the sequel is going, but the other one … the new one … has me in a quandary. I originally wanted to write a suspense story, a la Dean Koontz or Stephen King but, like most of my stories, it seems to have developed a mind of its own.

Conventional wisdom says you have to hook your reader within the first three hundred words, or you’ll never get them to turn the page, yet alone finish reading.

Part of me believes that to be true … not because “conventional wisdom” says so, but because I often decide on a book purchase myself after scanning the first couple of pages.

I’ve actually got several thousand words down already, but none of them seem quite right as the start of the story. So, it’s the second story I need some feedback about, and I decided to put the (current) beginning of it here:

————
Untitled

The sky was somewhere between indigo and black when the motley family crew we had assembled set out for the lake. Uncle Luther always insisted on an early start. As he rousted me out of my comfortable dreams with a chuckle and a resounding thwack on the soles of my bare feet, he had conveniently beaten the sunrise by a good hour, as if that was the way such days were always supposed to begin.

“Get your city-boy ass outta bed, Roy, or all the fish gonna be napping under the brush line by the time we get to the water.” Luther was smiling as he clumped around the bedroom in his thick work boots gathering up the clothes I had strewn over the bedpost the night before.

“Here’s your duds,” he laughed, “Bacon and eggs will be ready in five.” He tossed my loafers at me with a look of distaste. “These the best shoes you brought?”

“They’re the only ones I brought,” I said, as I wiped the sleep out of the corners of my eyes.

“Gonna need new ones to go home in then,” he snickered. “They’s gonna be soaked and coated in shit before we get the boat launched. So’s your feet.” He lifted his leg to show me his mud covered Timberlands, laced halfway to his knee.

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

Luther smiled and winked as he went back out the door. “I already got the gear in the truck,” he said. “All you gotta do is dress and eat. Piss if you want to.”

“Lovely.”

“Don’t take too long city-boy or I’ll eat your breakfast, too,” he shouted down the hall. “It’s a mighty long time to lunch. You get hungry you might have to munch on the bait.”

The birds hadn’t yet begun to sing their herald to the returning morning but as I dressed the air was already hot with the promise of a sticky, damp kind of day. A day with the air so miserably thick it seemed to suck all the ambition out of a man just to inhale.

© Ron Herron

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What Do You Think?
Is this something likely to grab your interest and make you want to know what happens next? Leave a comment.

Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I once sold encyclopedias door-to-door. What can you possibly say to me I haven’t already heard?