Book marketing tips, anyone?

The release of my next novel, Radio Hope, is coming up on February 1 and I've been busy building up a virtual book tour. A big "thank you" to all who have offered to help me out!

By a bit of good timing, there was a blogfest on Monday called the Online Marketing Symposium. Lots of different writers gave their two cents about what works and what doesn't. Although I knew some of these tips already (like Goodreads ads being worthless while being a part of Goodreads itself is valuable) these dedicated bloggers gave me much food for thought.

Roland Yeomans made the good point that you have to identify your audience and target them. Not only does this make for more efficient marketing, but it gives you insights into what your audience wants. I've been hanging around on various post-apocalyptic reading groups, both on Goodreads and other places, and I've noticed there's a hunger for PA books that don't involve zombies or aliens. That might stand me in good stead because in Radio Hope, the survivors are dealing with very human mistakes and consequences.

Master blogger Alex Cavanaugh has some good tips about virtual book tours. He's said it all before, but good advice bears repeating.

Sandra Almazan has an interesting post on price pulsing--temporarily lowering the price of your book and advertising the hell out of it. Her post is well worth reading in its entirety.
The Insecure Writers Support Group was one of the few blogs to mention conventions. In this Internet marketing age many writers forget how valuable face-to-face marketing can be. Luckily for me, Worldcon is in London this year so I'm attending! I'll be on some panels and will be sure to have plenty of my books on hand.


Another important piece of advice that most bloggers gave--write the next novel! If your readers like one of your books, make sure there's something else of yours for them to read.

So, my blogging friends, what do you think I should do to market Radio Hope? I'm participating in a bunch of post-apocalyptic boards, doing a virtual book tour, will do the usual Twitter/Facebook/rally-my-friends stuff, and am busy writing the next in the Toxic World series. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated!

Indie Life: Keeping it Real

As indie writers we're all looking for attention, we're all looking to set ourselves apart from the pack.

There are good ways and bad ways to do this. Good ways include writing amazing novels like Hugh Howey's Wool, which I'm absorbed in right now. You can also be a blogging powerhouse like Alex Cavanaugh, or write engaging series for niche readerships like Jack Badelaire.

Sadly, there are more wrong ways than right ways. Review inflation, misleading advertising, spamming, all end up hurting the writer more than helping.

One old trick that I bumped into yesterday is the "Pulitzer Prize nominee". Someone on my Facebook feed was bragging that a certain erotica book had been nominated for the 2014 Pulitzer in fiction.

Um, no. "Pulitzer nominee" is an old scam. Since people can send in their own stuff, they are essentially nominating themselves. Not everything that's submitted counts as a nominee, only the finalists, and there's no finalist list for the 2014 Pulitzer Award for Fiction, as the deadline for submissions only passed on the first of this month.

Claiming to be a "Pulitzer nominee" is a tired old trick that writers have been using for years. The author and publisher are doing themselves no favors by claiming this, no media outlet is going to pick this up (journalists all know this con), and the idea of the stuffy old Pulitzer committee nominating an erotica novel for the fiction award is downright ludicrous.

The Pulitzer Prize's own website says:

"Nominated Finalists are selected by the Nominating Juries for each category as finalists in the competition. The Pulitzer Prize Board generally selects the Pulitzer Prize Winners from the three nominated finalists in each category. The names of nominated finalists have been announced only since 1980. Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. No information on entrants is provided.

"Since 1980, when we began to announce nominated finalists, we have used the term "nominee" for entrants who became finalists. We discourage someone saying he or she was "nominated" for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us."

This sort of thing only hurts the reputation of indie publishers, and I doubt it leads to many sales. I mean, have you ever bought an erotica novel because it was "nominated" for a Pulitzer?

Keep it real, friends. It will help us all out in the long run.

Civil War Horror tops 100,000 hits!

My hit counter told me yesterday that I've gone past 100,000 hits! Thanks for reading, everyone!

This isn't the only place I can be found on the Internet. I'd love to connect with you beyond this blog. We can talk books on Goodreads, follow each other on Twitter, and you can see all of my news and online articles on my Facebook fan page. If you want to chat privately, feel free to email me at the address on the sidebar.

And if you're looking for help promoting your work, check out the How Can I Help You? page on this blog.

Tsarist coastal artillery in Estonia and Jesse James in Italy

While I was away on my writing retreat in Tangier I popped up on the Web a couple of times. The organizers of the èStoria Festival, who hosted me for the release of the Italian edition of my Jesse James book, have posted this video of my panel on the outlaw. Everyone's speaking Italian except for yours truly, so I'll forgive you if you don't watch it.

I also did a guest post for the Osprey Publishing blog on a shore battery in Estonia dating to the Tsarist era. It’s located near the village of Suurupi, overlooking the Gulf of Finland. It's an interesting bit of military history and nearly gave us a nasty surprise!

My book launch in Italy

I'm baaaack!

As I mentioned before, I was in Gorizia, Italy, for the ninth annual èStoria Festival. This history/book fair is hosted by my Italian publisher, who recently came out with these Italian-language editions of two of my books. For three days, a park in Gorizia was filled with tents. Several book dealers set up shop and the other tents were given over for talks and panels.

The theme this year was Bandits, and I was on a panel about Jesse James. I was the only non-Italian in the room but luckily they provided me with a translator. This guy was amazing. He grew up speaking four languages and went on to learn a dozen more. He gave a simultaneous translation so seamless it almost felt like the other panelists were speaking two languages at the same time.

My fellow panelists were a historian, a journalist, and a philosopher, and so we were an eclectic bunch. I gave a talk on "Jesse James, Inc.", on how the James legend was commodified even in his own lifetime.

The others put him in the context of the greater theme of banditry, and compared him with some of the famous bandits of southern Italy. Italian unification in the 19th century was mostly led by northern Italians, and while the southern Italians went along with it, there was some grumbling over the loss of independence. Some bandits took advantage of this by branding themselves rebels as well as thieves. Hmmm. . .sounds familiar.

I managed to slip away to do some sightseeing as well. Hit the link above about Gorizia to learn about this interesting town on the border with Slovenia. I also went to visit the Isonzo World War One battlefield.

I had a great time and hope to go back some other year. After the festival I headed over to Slovenia for a week. I'll be starting a series on Gadling this week about that.

Indie Life: How I use social media in my writing career

Today I'm participating in the Indelibles Indie Life blog hop. On the second Wednesday of every month we talk about various aspects of being an indie author, and luckily the A to Z blogfest is dedicated to the letter I today.

Social media is part of my life as a writer. I blog, both here and for Gadling, the leading travel blog on the web. I also have a Twitter feed and a public Facebook page.

I do set up certain limits to my social media presence, however, because I recognize that it can only do so much for my career and can easily become a waste of time. If you look at my feeds you'll notice that I don't use them as often as some people, and have fewer followers than most.

The main reason for this is that I don't play the "follow me and I'll follow you" game. I don't see a point to that. I want followers who are actually interested in my writing, and I only follow feeds that I'm genuinely interested in. Even then I don't read them on a daily basis. I simply don't have the time. And even when I do read them I only comment when I have something to add to the conversation.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm trying to get beyond the indie author's echo chamber. While I love my fellow indies, our community runs the danger of being a closed one. That's one of the reasons I'm also getting more into Goodreads. I like the conversations on there and I think it offers a great way to connect with readers.

You might also want to look at my post on Twitter for writers.

China has taken over my domain name!

A couple of months ago I let my subscription for the domain name seanmclachlan (dot) com lapse. I wasn't getting nearly as many hits on that website as I do on this one, plus I was dissatisfied with my hosting service, who could never get the graphics-light website to load at a decent speed.

Shortly after my domain name became available it returned, this time with different graphics and entirely in Chinese! Google Translate shows it to be a real estate website. It's not very well done and I think they're just squatting on the domain hoping to sell it later on.

Who's behind this? I'm thinking it's the People's Liberation Army, who have been accused of lots of cybercrimes lately. That's too bad, because I really like their propaganda posters, like this one from World War Two. Whoever is behind it, Chinese domain squatters are on the rise.

Luckily my old domain name has been going down in the Google Ranks. Search for "Sean McLachlan" and it used to come up first. It's now in the middle of the first page.

This blog, however, doesn't show up until page 5. I've added my name to the header and the metadata, something I should have done from the start, and I'm adding my name to the tags for each post.

I could still use some help. If you have the time, share this story on your own blog, using my name, Sean McLachlan, as the hyperlink back to this blog. Let's get my blog to be the first thing that shows up when you search for me, or at least on the first page!


Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

How can I help you?

I like helping out fellow creatives, probably because I've received so little help of my own and so I know how hard this life is. If you're a follower of this blog, I'd be happy to have you as a guest blogger.

I've had several guest posts in the past and they generally get a large readership. I'm getting an average of 300 hits a day now and I announce every post on Facebook and Twitter. This blog is focused on the Civil War and the Wild West, with occasional posts about travel and history in general. If you have something you think might fit, I'd be happy to host you. If your book doesn't fit, I'm happy to take posts on writing as well, although I don't want to do too many of those since I want this blog to be outside the Indie Authors' Echo Chamber.

You don't even need to be a writer! Have you visited an interesting historic site and want to write it up? Are you are photographer? Wargamer? Reenactor? As long as it's related to the focus of this blog, I'm listening.

If you just want to make an announcement, drop me a line at the email in the lefthand column and I'll include it in my semiregular Reader News posts. I'm working on one for early next week if you have anything you'd like to share. It can be about writing, history, archaeology, adventure travel, etc.Book announcements are most welcome, but don't limit yourself to just those!

Is Twitter useful for writers?

I've had my Twitter account since January 2010. After my first week of tweeting I blogged about the uses of Twitter for writers. You might be interested in reading that post before this one.

Back? Good. Now after two-and-a-half years tweeting I can say that Twitter can be a useful tool for writers, and also has some serious limitations.

First off, it's a great way to get readers. I tweet everything I write for this blog, my guest posts on other blogs, and my travel writing on Gadling. I also retweet interesting stuff from other writers, historians, etc. These tweets, with their generous use of hashtags to bring in a wider readership, really up my hits. Blogspot allows me to see the source and timing of hits and I see a spike every time I tweet.

It's also a great way to keep abreast of current events and trending stories. I've found a fair amout of material for travel blogging thanks to Twitter.

But what every writer wants to know is, can Twitter sell books? It seems not. I do tweet about my books but I've seen no evidence that it translates to sales. I don't hard sell on Twitter, and don't follow anyone who does, but about one in ten tweets is related to my books. Too many writers nowadays seem to be on Twitter for the sole reason hawking their wares. Judging from their Amazon rankings, it doesn't seem to be doing much good. Twitter users want content, links to cool stuff, not sales pitches.

Fellow blogger and indie author Alex Cavanaugh told me about a Twitter app called WhoUnfollowedMe. I've found two trends from this useful app. The first is that some people, so far entirely indie writers, will follow you so you follow them back, and then unfollow you. When I catch a person doing this, I unfollow them. I don't like being used. Also, some people follow me and then unfollow me after a few days when I don't follow them back.

Sorry, folks, but I only follow Twitter feeds that I find interesting. If I like your stuff, I'll follow you (unless you pull a fast one). If I don't like you're stuff, don't leave in a huff. Chances are I wasn't going to buy your book anyway. It's not like I expect everyone who I follow to follow me back. I'm pretty tickled that Clive Barker follows me, though.