Promotion, for a writer, is the seventh ring of hell. By nature we are quiet types who like to sit at home in our PJās, eating things like cereal and wine out of boxes and inventing people to talk to. (Yes, Iām aware thatās also the description of crazy people, but I donāt think we need to point that out at this juncture ā thank you very much.) So promoting the book, being out in the public, is a terrible fate. Only slightly less awful is talking about promotions in front of other authors. (Oh God, oh God, oh God, what if Iāve been doing it wrong? Theyāre all going to know Iām a fraud!) But since my other job is a graphic designer, Iām privy to a great marketing secret: you canāt do it wrong because none of it works. Or all of it works depending on your point of view.
Legend has it that when Google presented all their brand new ways of tracking online digital ads to Viacom President and one-time ad man Mel Karmazin, he blurted out, āYouāre fucking with the magic!ā But the paradigm of ads and marketing being more art than science is still more true than anyone would like to admit, even in this age where digital data practically streams from our ears. Digital tracking will accurately tell you when and where a sale was made, but it never fully encompasses why a sale was made. But at the end of the day, one thing is still true, the only sure fire way to make a sale is to tell someone that you have a product for sale. Marketing is just selecting how youāre going to tell someone about your product.
Iām not a marketing expert, but I know enough to get myself in trouble. So Iāve tried a variety of promotional vehicles that break down into three basic categories: on-line, print, and person to person. By far and away the most successful vehicles are person to person. People telling other people, or the author telling someone to go buy their book works better than just about anything else. (I once sold a book to my state representative when she came doorbelling for votes.) But in the end, you canāt reach everyone you might want to reach in person.
My print experience has been minimal and I think we can all agree that newspapers are dying, so Iāll just skip straight to on-line. Iāve tried Facebook ads & boosts, newsletter ads, and google ads, just to name a few. And in my experience, very few of these things work optimally alone. I get the best results when I do multiple things at once ā run a sale and an ad, and then boost the sale on Facebook. This shotgun approach makes it hard to track the mythical beautiful data of click-throughs, but it is very clear when I take one channel away that sales dip. The hard part comes at the end, when I must assess the ROI (Return on Investment) and whether or the sales justify the expense of a particular marketing channel.
Each author must find what works for them. My only real words of advice are to keep trying. Keep talking. And keep writing. And by the way, have I mentioned that I have a book on sale? An Unseen Current ā a great late summer read for only $4.99.
https://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/hell.jpeg194259Bethany Maineshttps://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.pngBethany Maines2015-08-25 16:30:192015-08-25 16:30:19Welcome to Hell
Originally published on The Stiletto Gang 07.22.15
Dear Brain,
While I appreciate your many efforts and strong creative solutions, I would very much appreciate it if you could focus on the problems at hand. Thanks so much.
Sincerely,
Self
I have a writing calendar that tells me what Iām supposed to be working on. Outlining, editing, actually writing, itās all scheduled out. Since the release of High-Caliber Concealer, third book in the Carrie Mae Mystery series is right around the corner (November 17!), that means I should be busy working on draft one of book 4 ā Glossed Cause. That also means that last month I should have finished an outline of said fourth book. Do you know what I have not completed? Yes, thatās right ā the outline. I had completedĀ about 75% it and stopped becauseā¦ Well, I donāt hate it, but I donāt love it either. And then last week I realized what was wrong with it. Not that I know how to fix it, but at least I know why Iām not excited about it. So Iāve been twiddling my thumbs, enjoying the summer, pretending that I have all the time in the world, and hoping that inspiration would hit.
Then last night it did hit. I woke up with a fantastic idea.
For a different book.
I came up with a great idea for the sequel to my recent release ā An Unseen Current. I even have a great name for it, which practically never happens. Itās really, really exciting and not at all what I need. But if Iāve learned anything about creativity itās that if you fight it sometimes it stops all together. What do you think? Should I work on this new idea for a bit and see if inspiration strikes for Glossed Cause or should I set the new idea aside and focus, focus, focus
When I was younger, I wrote strictly to entertain myself and I preferred action-oriented fantasies with an amazing heroine. I loved to read those books, so thatās what I set out to write. And if I pictured myself writing a novel it was going to be the next Lord of the Rings, but with a way higher estrogen factor. Which, although I love LoTR, would not be hard to do considering that it has a total chick quantity of four (Samās Girlfriend, Eowyn, Galadriel and Arwen aka Striderās Girlfriend). Anyway, thatās what I thought Iād write: fantasyās where chick’s in chain mail prod buttock and take nomenclature.
You know what I write now? Mysteries.
I never thought Iād write mysteries. Sure, I read lots of them growing up, but at the end of the day, all that business with clues and alibis and clever methods of death, well, it seemed like a lot of work for the writer. And it turns out, that it is in fact a lot of work. Admittedly, my heroines still apply foot to backsides on a regular basis. And my most popular series the Carrie Mae Mysteries have an element of fantasy (What if door-to-door make-up sales ladies were also top notch spies?), but usually my plots run along to the lines of āSomeoneās been murdered! We need to find out who killed them and stop them from doing it again!ā Which isā¦ a mystery.
A few years ago, I decided to return to my fantasy roots and self-published a collection ofĀ short stories under the heading of Tales from the City of Destiny. These paranormal tales featured vampires, a dragon, werewolves, the devil a Native American shaman, and a half-faerie heroine. Canāt get much more fantasy than that, right? Except my shaman was also a police detective and my half-faerie heroine was your pretty typical private citizen investigatorĀ and the rest of the stories are populated by lawyers, strippers, college students, and a 15-year old runaway.Ā Apparently, I canāt leave mysteries behind even when I try.
So at long last, I have decided to embrace my inner mystery writer. My most recent release, An Unseen Current, is a straight mystery with a cantankerous ex-CIA agent and his granddaughter solving crime in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. (Digital edition on sale for $1.99 through 7/8!) This book was a joy to write, mostly because I simply HAD to research the location, which meant driving around Orcas Island and eating really good food. The lesson here? Maybe writing a mystery isnāt so bad after all.
https://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.png00Bethany Maineshttps://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.pngBethany Maines2015-07-06 04:54:022015-07-06 04:54:02This Mystery Needs More Unicorns
Remember in school when the teacher would say those dreaded five words? āThis is a group project.ā Your mind races into overdrive as you scan the class room, searching for the few students who will hit trifecta of smart enough, pulls their own weight, and doesnāt have BO. Select outside of those parameters are a host of problems – too smart, too lazy, too socially active, too socially impaired Ā and the group will flounder and fail. A group project is always a dual assignment: how well can you do the work and how well can you work together? And we all think, āI cannot wait to get out of school, so I never have to do another group project.ā
Except, of course, that the joke is on us. Every job, with the possible exception of Ranger Gord of the Canadian forest service, requires that you have contact with someone to get the job done. Ranger Gord, in case you havenāt watched the Canadian comedy show Red Green, is a Forest Service Ranger who has been staring at the trees so long that he now believes they talk to him and that some are possibly out to get him. You would think that a writer and Ranger Gord would have about the same amount of human contact, but the more I write the more I realize that writing truly is a group project. Admittedly, I do the majority of the work and then I pass it out to several people just so they can point out problems with my beautiful manuscript. But those beta readers, agents, and editors do not have an easy task. For one thing they have to deal with someone who thinks those beech trees look suspicious and that her villain is attempting a coup to take over the book, but beyond that they have to think critically about questions that a casual reader can simply take for granted. For the end reader, the questions have been answered, the decisions made, but the beta reader has to ask all the difficult questions about when characters know something, does the timeline actually work out, do the actions taken make sense, and the all important question: āWhy do you keep using that word? I do not think it means, what you think it means.ā
And so, as I round out the final edits on my next book (High-CaliberConcealer out in November 2015), I must thank all my readers, editors, and my oh, so persnickety copyeditor who corrects my egregious use of their, there, and theyāre. Thank you all!
It’s that time again. The editing time. Ā The time when I get back all the stupidy stupidy line edits and have to go through and approve them. That’s the worst part. Ā I have to approve them. Ā OK, I don’t absolutely HAVE to, but the truth is about 8 out of every 10 line edits are the correct decision. Of the other two, one is probably a matter of preference and the other is absolutely right the way it was the first time. Why don’t you understand my genius you piddling moron who is merely paid to sift through the words and divine my sheer awesomeness?
It’s possible that the last sentence there was a bit of an overstatement.
But my secret internal Mugatu doesn’t think it was.
Mugatu, for those who haven’t watched the hilariously improbable Zoolander, is the fashion designer / evil genius, played by Will Ferrell, who is attempting kill the prime minister of Malaysia by brainwashing male model Derek Zoolander. Many writers, myself included, seem to yo-yo between the states of modesty (I write pretty well), ego (I’m a genius!!), and self-hatred (why would anyone read the crap I produce?). I picture modesty as the quiet saintly type ā a Buddhist nun (who secretly knows kung fu) and self-hatred as the goggly-eyed guy from the Maltese Falcon who says the worst things in the sweetest voice.
And nowhere are those states of being more quickly cycled through than the editing rounds. Each tweak of the text from the editor is like some sort of judgement from on high that can send me off into a Mugatu-esque rage or goggly-eyed shame spiral. Ā It’s up the the Kung Fu nun to bring balance and harmony. Although, admittedly sometimes the nun needs a little help from a glass of wine and a jog around the block.
https://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Mugatu.jpg215236Bethany Maineshttps://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.pngBethany Maines2015-06-10 20:59:382015-06-10 21:04:41That Editing… So Hot Right now
Welcome to Hell
/in An Unseen Current, General Writing, Girlfriends Book Club, Graphic DesignPromotion, for a writer, is the seventh ring of hell. By nature we are quiet types who like to sit at home in our PJās, eating things like cereal and wine out of boxes and inventing people to talk to. (Yes, Iām aware thatās also the description of crazy people, but I donāt think we need to point that out at this juncture ā thank you very much.) So promoting the book, being out in the public, is a terrible fate. Only slightly less awful is talking about promotions in front of other authors. (Oh God, oh God, oh God, what if Iāve been doing it wrong? Theyāre all going to know Iām a fraud!) But since my other job is a graphic designer, Iām privy to a great marketing secret: you canāt do it wrong because none of it works. Or all of it works depending on your point of view.
Legend has it that when Google presented all their brand new ways of tracking online digital ads to Viacom President and one-time ad man Mel Karmazin, he blurted out, āYouāre fucking with the magic!ā But the paradigm of ads and marketing being more art than science is still more true than anyone would like to admit, even in this age where digital data practically streams from our ears. Digital tracking will accurately tell you when and where a sale was made, but it never fully encompasses why a sale was made. But at the end of the day, one thing is still true, the only sure fire way to make a sale is to tell someone that you have a product for sale. Marketing is just selecting how youāre going to tell someone about your product.
Iām not a marketing expert, but I know enough to get myself in trouble. So Iāve tried a variety of promotional vehicles that break down into three basic categories: on-line, print, and person to person. By far and away the most successful vehicles are person to person. People telling other people, or the author telling someone to go buy their book works better than just about anything else. (I once sold a book to my state representative when she came doorbelling for votes.) But in the end, you canāt reach everyone you might want to reach in person.
My print experience has been minimal and I think we can all agree that newspapers are dying, so Iāll just skip straight to on-line. Iāve tried Facebook ads & boosts, newsletter ads, and google ads, just to name a few. And in my experience, very few of these things work optimally alone. I get the best results when I do multiple things at once ā run a sale and an ad, and then boost the sale on Facebook. This shotgun approach makes it hard to track the mythical beautiful data of click-throughs, but it is very clear when I take one channel away that sales dip. The hard part comes at the end, when I must assess the ROI (Return on Investment) and whether or the sales justify the expense of a particular marketing channel.
Dear Brain…
/in An Unseen Current, Carrie Mae, Life, The Stiletto GangOriginally published on The Stiletto Gang 07.22.15
Dear Brain,
While I appreciate your many efforts and strong creative solutions, I would very much appreciate it if you could focus on the problems at hand. Thanks so much.
Sincerely,
Self
I have a writing calendar that tells me what Iām supposed to be working on. Outlining, editing, actually writing, itās all scheduled out. Since the release of High-Caliber Concealer, third book in the Carrie Mae Mystery series is right around the corner (November 17!), that means I should be busy working on draft one of book 4 ā Glossed Cause. That also means that last month I should have finished an outline of said fourth book. Do you know what I have not completed? Yes, thatās right ā the outline. I had completedĀ about 75% it and stopped becauseā¦ Well, I donāt hate it, but I donāt love it either. And then last week I realized what was wrong with it. Not that I know how to fix it, but at least I know why Iām not excited about it. So Iāve been twiddling my thumbs, enjoying the summer, pretending that I have all the time in the world, and hoping that inspiration would hit.
Then last night it did hit. I woke up with a fantastic idea.
For a different book.
I came up with a great idea for the sequel to my recent release ā An Unseen Current. I even have a great name for it, which practically never happens. Itās really, really exciting and not at all what I need. But if Iāve learned anything about creativity itās that if you fight it sometimes it stops all together. What do you think? Should I work on this new idea for a bit and see if inspiration strikes for Glossed Cause or should I set the new idea aside and focus, focus, focus
This Mystery Needs More Unicorns
/in An Unseen Current, General Writing, Girlfriends Book ClubWhen I was younger, I wrote strictly to entertain myself and I preferred action-oriented fantasies with an amazing heroine. I loved to read those books, so thatās what I set out to write. And if I pictured myself writing a novel it was going to be the next Lord of the Rings, but with a way higher estrogen factor. Which, although I love LoTR, would not be hard to do considering that it has a total chick quantity of four (Samās Girlfriend, Eowyn, Galadriel and Arwen aka Striderās Girlfriend). Anyway, thatās what I thought Iād write: fantasyās where chick’s in chain mail prod buttock and take nomenclature.
You know what I write now? Mysteries.
I never thought Iād write mysteries. Sure, I read lots of them growing up, but at the end of the day, all that business with clues and alibis and clever methods of death, well, it seemed like a lot of work for the writer. And it turns out, that it is in fact a lot of work. Admittedly, my heroines still apply foot to backsides on a regular basis. And my most popular series the Carrie Mae Mysteries have an element of fantasy (What if door-to-door make-up sales ladies were also top notch spies?), but usually my plots run along to the lines of āSomeoneās been murdered! We need to find out who killed them and stop them from doing it again!ā Which isā¦ a mystery.
A few years ago, I decided to return to my fantasy roots and self-published a collection ofĀ short stories under the heading of Tales from the City of Destiny. These paranormal tales featured vampires, a dragon, werewolves, the devil a Native American shaman, and a half-faerie heroine. Canāt get much more fantasy than that, right? Except my shaman was also a police detective and my half-faerie heroine was your pretty typical private citizen investigatorĀ and the rest of the stories are populated by lawyers, strippers, college students, and a 15-year old runaway.Ā Apparently, I canāt leave mysteries behind even when I try.
Group Projects
/in Carrie Mae, General WritingRemember in school when the teacher would say those dreaded five words? āThis is a group project.ā Your mind races into overdrive as you scan the class room, searching for the few students who will hit trifecta of smart enough, pulls their own weight, and doesnāt have BO. Select outside of those parameters are a host of problems – too smart, too lazy, too socially active, too socially impaired Ā and the group will flounder and fail. A group project is always a dual assignment: how well can you do the work and how well can you work together? And we all think, āI cannot wait to get out of school, so I never have to do another group project.ā
Except, of course, that the joke is on us. Every job, with the possible exception of Ranger Gord of the Canadian forest service, requires that you have contact with someone to get the job done. Ranger Gord, in case you havenāt watched the Canadian comedy show Red Green, is a Forest Service Ranger who has been staring at the trees so long that he now believes they talk to him and that some are possibly out to get him. You would think that a writer and Ranger Gord would have about the same amount of human contact, but the more I write the more I realize that writing truly is a group project. Admittedly, I do the majority of the work and then I pass it out to several people just so they can point out problems with my beautiful manuscript. But those beta readers, agents, and editors do not have an easy task. For one thing they have to deal with someone who thinks those beech trees look suspicious and that her villain is attempting a coup to take over the book, but beyond that they have to think critically about questions that a casual reader can simply take for granted. For the end reader, the questions have been answered, the decisions made, but the beta reader has to ask all the difficult questions about when characters know something, does the timeline actually work out, do the actions taken make sense, and the all important question: āWhy do you keep using that word? I do not think it means, what you think it means.ā
And so, as I round out the final edits on my next book (High-CaliberConcealer out in November 2015), I must thank all my readers, editors, and my oh, so persnickety copyeditor who corrects my egregious use of their, there, and theyāre. Thank you all!
That Editing… So Hot Right now
/in General Writing, Life, The Stiletto GangIt’s that time again. The editing time. Ā The time when I get back all the stupidy stupidy line edits and have to go through and approve them. That’s the worst part. Ā I have to approve them. Ā OK, I don’t absolutely HAVE to, but the truth is about 8 out of every 10 line edits are the correct decision. Of the other two, one is probably a matter of preference and the other is absolutely right the way it was the first time. Why don’t you understand my genius you piddling moron who is merely paid to sift through the words and divine my sheer awesomeness?
It’s possible that the last sentence there was a bit of an overstatement.
But my secret internal Mugatu doesn’t think it was.
Mugatu, for those who haven’t watched the hilariously improbable Zoolander, is the fashion designer
/ evil genius, played by Will Ferrell, who is attempting kill the prime minister of Malaysia by brainwashing male model Derek Zoolander. Many writers, myself included, seem to yo-yo between the states of modesty (I write pretty well), ego (I’m a genius!!), and self-hatred (why would anyone read the crap I produce?). I picture modesty as the quiet saintly type ā a Buddhist nun (who secretly knows 
kung fu) and self-hatred as the goggly-eyed guy from the Maltese Falcon who says the worst things in the sweetest voice.
And nowhere are those states of being more quickly cycled through than the editing rounds. Each tweak of the text from the editor is like some sort of judgement from on high that can send me off into a Mugatu-esque rage or goggly-eyed shame spiral. Ā It’s up the the Kung Fu nun to bring balance and harmony. Although, admittedly sometimes the nun needs a little help from a glass of wine and a jog around the block.