marketing your book – John D Reinhart

Trust the Story Teller

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You’ve got a million ideas in your head – story lines, plot twists, character quirks – all waiting to hit the page one of these days. They’re like bubbles in a stew – a thick, rich stew redolent with bits and pieces of brilliant bones and perfect plot pieces. They bubble to the top and then pop. They’re gone. If only you’d had a tiny tad of time to tell them.

Recently, I drove from California to New Jersey. My task was to deliver my Outback to my daughter in Texas, and take her Prius to my daughter-in-law in New Jersey. The Outback will handle a Texas winter better than the Prius, and the daughter-in-law just needs to shuttle her kid – my grandson – to and from daycare. Easy peasy.

I was cruising through New Mexico, dashing down long, straight roads between breathtaking mesas and canyons and passing Indian Trading Posts by the dozen, trying to figure out the sequel to my upcoming Phineas Caswell novel.

Okay, so… what?

That fellow ChatGPT has assured me, you see, that August is the best time of year to release a historical fiction action/adventure/YA novel.

Repeat: What?

See, August is still summertime, still time to pick up a beach read, but also heading towards the school year, time to pick up some history. Something like that. See?

All fine and well. The novel is a diary, written by a cheeky 12-year-old boy in 1705, taken to sea against his will by his bumbling but well meaning uncle. Pirates, spies, war – all the good stuff. That’s my August-release book.

But it ends on a cliff-hanger. So, there needs to be a second book.

Flat-topped mesas whisk by the windows, shadows shoulder their way behind the deep canyon cliffs, and the next story plays out in my head.

There is already a short story I’d previously penned that takes place in a Portuguese port. A perfect place to start the new novel.

Armed with that one scene, and with nothing to do but look out the window and keep from crashing, the story plays out in my head.

This is new for me. I usually have to write the story down to tell it. But this new story simply rolls out, logical and lovely, as I fly down the freeway like an arrow bound for Albuquerque.

Of course you can’t drive and write – the cruise control’s good, but, come on…

So it comes down to my turning to trust my inner author. Rich scenes roll before my eyes – scenes I would have to remember. Scenes I could only see in my mind’s eye, hoping they caught the attention of my thought-keeper.

Here, seven weeks later, comes the task of finally putting to paper the plans I’d poured out in northern New Mexico. The images that exploded in my eyes remained, and the story simply poured itself onto paper as real and writable as it had on the highway.

Now I have before me an outline, nothing more. Scene after scene – this thing happens, then that. It’s the structure, the bones.

It occurred to me this morning that these sentences are nothing more than writing prompts, like those offered by every website that purports to power up your inner author.

You’re a writer. You know how it is. If someone asks you to explain why the silly snowman sits behind the bush, you know you can come up with a story.

The prompts, the outline, are space-keepers, aren’t they? Here’s a whole book, complete in its condensed form. Like a suitcase stuffed with springs, when the time comes to write it, you open the case, and the prompts pop out to create a full and fantastic book.

That storyteller, aged and ancient and ever hiding inside you, will sit down by the fire to weave his words into the best book you’ve ever penned.

Because you’re a writer.

Have faith.

Hoisting Anchor, Mate

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. A project gets into your bones and the world just seems to conform around it. Wow, I wish I knew what that meant.

Since last we talked, a multiplicity of whoop-dee-doos have collaborated to turn my life into a whirlwind of chaotic synchronicities. Not sure what that means, either.

First, let’s talk about Disneyland, shall we? I went all by myself (my much better half had to work) and had a terrific time.

The writer’s story in my little adventure is a ride called Rise of the Rebellion.

Before R of the R, my idea of a fantastic ride was Indiana Jones. In that one, you’re strapped into an open SUV sort of vehicle that physically bounces around through an epic assortment of hair-breadth near misses. The SUV lurches and throws you this way and that while simulated darts zip past you and a dragon breathes real fire. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Rise of the Resistance, however, changes the entire narrative of what a theme park ride can be. This ride combines that same physicality with stunning interactive graphics, physical theatrical sets, animatronics, and live actors to actually tell a story.

And not just a story, but one that includes you as a character. You don’t just see the story. You participate in it. The ride takes a full 15 spell-binding minutes to get through.

When it was over, I took myself to the Many Adventures of the Winnie the Pooh to calm myself down. Boy, that worked. Oh bother.

After that, I rode Indiana Jones. The ride’s scenario, for lack of a better word, is told while you’re waiting in the queue. It seems a busload of tourists got lost in the jungle. Your task is to find them.

The ride is still cool, still wild, but felt like a chaotic jumble of action sequences. I was thrown about and entertained, for sure. But you have to make several logic leaps to equate the ride with the scenario. I don’t think we found anyone other than Indiana Jones.

For us writers, the message is clear: stringing scenes and episodes together doesn’t necessarily tell a story. Then again, the story might simply be wild twists and turns, which can certainly be fun all by themselves.

Then came the kid’s birthday, that young man in New Jersey who just turned a year old. A dapper little fellow with 4 teeth and the sparkling command of a language composed of the words “duh,” “oooh,” and “nah-nah.”

My wife and I both want to be the sort of grandparents that are there to take him to soccer practice and give his parents a night out every now and again. Plus, when the kid runs away from home, we’d like him to run to our house.

Well, quite by accident, we stumbled across The House, a sweet little bungalow built in 1936 just a block away from the million-dollar houses that face the Arthur Kill. That’s the kill – okay, fine, the waterway – that separates New Jersey from Staten Island. Yes, THAT Staten Island.

The price is right, but the window of opportunity is very short, like, thirty-or-so days.

You know how it is with your parents’ house – it’s nice but needs a little sprucing up? That’s our house, except we’re sort of in need of an EPIC sprucing up! Roof, flooring, kitchen, paint – I’m sure I’ve left a dozen things out.

But, once we sort all that out, we’ll be hoisting anchor, mate. Bound for the East and truly parts unknown.

That’s one journey.

Another journey is me moving from being a 9-to-5er as I’ve been for the entirety of my working career to a part-time, remote contractor. Ask my wife, she’ll tell you I’m remote already.

BUT, and this is a big but, so to speak, there is one more journey that has already begun: my new book.

I’m using my business partner, a guy to whom I refer as JaPeetey, to help me market my novel Phineas Caswell: The String of Pearls. Here’s the book’s cover:

The cover the soon-to-be-released book Phineas Caswell: The String of Pearls.

I’m still working the details, but you can see what I’m about.

ChatGPT knows how to market indie books like this. Of course it does. It draws on all the successful marketing plans to give you answers. So, I’m using Chat GPT to help me lay out the marketing steps for my book. He’s my buddy, JaPeetey.

I’ve done everything so far to self-publish my books except to do it right. Now, with this move to the hinterlands of the Wild East, I’ll have the time to focus and concentrate and follow JaPeetey’s direction.

It ain’t rocket science. It’s Marketing!

If you’d like to help out and read an advance copy, I’d be delighted to offer you a free final copy in exchange for a review. Just fill out the form below and I’ll send you a PDF right away!

Thank you so much for reading all the way down to this point. It means the world to me.

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Why Writers Shouldn’t Talk

Hey, hello! Thanks for reading along! What follows this paragraph is the transcript from a video I shot today – it will be a podcast pretty soon. What’s cool about it is that the transcription process worked… you’ll see. I shot the video and then transcribed the audio at a place called TurboScribe. You get three free transcriptions a day. Here’s what I shot…

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.

Hello, I’m writer, author, and host John D. Reinhart. And you’ve stumbled onto this moment in This Writer’s Life.

So, before we go any farther, you may wonder, what’s the difference between a writer and an author? Well, in my head, a writer writes.

You’re a writer, you write. If you’re writing a book, you’re still writing. You write the book.

It is the authorly part of you that compiles all that writing into the book. Right, it’s the organizer kind of a guy. In a website situation, nobody writes a website, they author a website.

They bring their own written work or the work of other writers, they compile it all into a website. That’s the difference.

The host part, well, me and you, we’re looking at it.

So, here’s the thing. I’m in my garage. I’m doing the laundry.

And it occurred to me what I’d really like to be doing is writing a post for my website, because I feel like I should be doing that, but I can’t because I’m doing the laundry.

So, then I got the bright idea to say, well, why don’t we go speech to text, right, and take video-audio combo and make a post out of that. So, that’s what I’m trying.

And I will tell you the truth. Speaking what you want to say is so much more difficult than writing what you want to say.

I mean, I’m a good writer. I’m not such a good speaker. And this is kind of what I found out.

You’re a writer. You put things in order. You build the sentence that you want. And you realize, eh, that’s not what I want to say. You move things around. You come up with a whole new word. Flip it around, build a whole new paragraph based on that word. That is what writers do.

But think about impromptu speakers like President Obama.

He comes out there and he right off his cuff, makes these long speeches that people write down. Because when you speak impromptuly or however you speak, that’s what you said. And you can’t go back and flip it around and change it.

That’s the big difference between speaking and writing is that, as what I find, I’m not a public speaker. I’m not an impromptu speaker. In fact, I have to tell you this truth.

I’m using a script. So, this is text to speech to text. That’s how well this works for me.

Not my dog. So, if you don’t try something new, you don’t learn anything. So, that’s my little experiment on speech to text.

No, thank you, sir. Thank you for watching. I’ll catch you next time.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.

Yes, it’s a little weird, I know. It’s creepy to see how many times I use the word “so” when speaking impromptu, even with a script!

The upshot of this experiment, aside from a shameless plug for TurboScribe and a podcast episode, is that the spoken word works great for speakers, but us writers, we probably want to just keep on writing!

Thanks for reading along…

Episode 6 – Oh,uh, One More Thing

Oh, uh, One More Thing

You probably remember Columbo’s trademark like “oh, and one more thing…”

It always came right near the end of the Columbo murder mystery series, back in the 1970’s. Peter Falk played this sort of bumbling detective who appeared to be misguided throughout the whole episode. But then, at the last, just as the murderer is about to get away with it, Columbo turns and says something like, “Oh, and one more thing. I thought maybe you could help me understand how, if the bedroom door was locked, your fingerprints are on the bedside lamp.”

Sometimes the murderer would say “Oh, you’re a clever one, Columbo,” or they’d stare at him, or they’d run. Sometimes they did all three. Of course, Columbo had all the exits covered.

So, I’ve been putting together a video review of the Estrella Warbirds Museum in Paso Robles for California Air Museums.

It’s a good video, featuring sections of our interview with author George J. Marrett, and looking at all kinds of stuff.

I got it all done, all buttoned up, and uploaded it to YouTube. If you haven’t done that, you have about four pages of questions to answer about the video, and you have to wait about 20 minutes for it to upload. You have to type in tags, and a description, and all kinds of stuff.

And then my daughter said: “You know, it should have subtitles.”

Ah. Subtitles.

So, for a five-minute script with lots of voice-over and interview, it takes about an hour to add closed captions. YouTube presents you with a transcript of your video, and the AI is pretty good, although it couldn’t figure out the name Paso Robles. Pasa Rubbles. Pa saw rabbles. So you have to correct it, and you have to manage the timing so that the words show up as they are spoken in the video.

Now we’re in for a buck-and-a-half, timewise, at YouTube.

“I think you should refer to the author’s books,” my wife suggests.

In thinking about it, I realized she was right.

Back to DaVinci Resolve to edit the video. Dug up some graphics, added some voice-over, inserted 30 seconds devoted to the books, reworked the music at the end, rendered the video out again.

Went back to YouTube, downloaded the subtitles file so I could add it to the new video, deleted the video I’d just uploaded (it actually warns you that this video will be deleted forever – I’m kind of surprised it doesn’t go FOREVER-ever-ever-ver-er-r….), uploaded the new video, answered the four pages of questions, and was just about to push the PUBLISH button again, when my wife cleared her throat in that way that she does when she has an idea that she thinks is brilliant but you might not like but you should because it really is a good idea.

“One more thing…”

All right, Columbo, what is it?

“What if we cut the guy’s the clever comment that opens the video and put it at the end instead.”

As she explains it, I’m nodding thoughtfully, although I’m thinking OMG you want me to shuffle the entire contents of the video ahead by, like, fifteen seconds? But my captions’ll be screwed! Don’t you ever want to get this published?

It took FOREVER to shift everything around in DaVinci. And I had to start all over again with the captions in YouTube.

But, it was a brilliant idea, and the video has a ton of charm that it wouldn’t have if she hadn’t played the role of Peter Falk.

All of this has a writer’s tale in it, as you can imagine. Even though we think of our writing as a closed-loop system: we sit in our cold stone garrets, frantically typing away, knowing they’ll never understand our sacrifice, in truth it can only ever be a system of give and take. Suggestions, comments, ideas come in, grudging changes go out, and the work is always, always better for it.

Oh, and, uh, one more thing… Thanks for reading!

Episode 4: No Guardians at the Gate

No Guardians at the Gate

Cops and robbers. Parents and kids. Bosses and employees. There’s an hierarchical order to things. Officers and crew. Master and Commander. Editor and writer… Wait – not so fast.

Back in the early part of this century, I was the owner of a struggling business. It was awful. If you’re not a business person, and you find yourself owning a business it. is. the. worst. Dreadful, I tell you.

Luckily, the Great Recession wiped us out! I was so thrilled!

But that’s not the point of this post.

Back in those days, the Internet was unfolding like a reverse-engineered origami swan, and it was desperate for content. Desperate!

Guys like me, without any nerve or experience, suddenly found themselves writing articles on this, on that, how to do this, how to make that, how to create… you get the idea.

And we were paid – sometimes a tenth of a penny per word – but we were paid. My weekly paychecks ranged between fourteen dollars on a good week and about 38 cents…

But that’s not the point of this post.

So, the world wide web was a wild west for wily writers. You could get published same day for just about anything.

I became the science editor for two or three sites – my favorite was a site called Triond. Oh, we got along famously. I wrote over 200 articles on the Moons of Jupiter, the Moons of Saturn, the Mo… you get the idea.

I’m sure you’ve heard the word churnalism? If you rewrite stories that have been written by someone else and add your own special spin to them, you’re not a journalist. You’re just churning up somebody else’s work – you’re a churnalist.

Ah, those were heady days, being a seriously underpaid churnalist, cranking out somebody else’s ideas and expected huge rewards. Sigh. How I miss them…

Fast forward to the Roaring Twenties, and now it’s all about books. You can publish your book for free!

I know, I’ve published two!

Smashwords, the company through which I’m publishing my books, has merged with Draft2Digital, a company that distributes your books all over the English-speaking world.

I’m enjoying the experience so far. Haven’t sold a copy, but mighty oaks come from tiny acorns.

And now D2D, as they refer to themselves, has offered to print my book.

What? Print? My name and likeness, right there on a paperback book? What? FINALLY?!?

My brilliant wife and I talked all about it, me on the oh-please-oh-please-oh-please side, she on the let’s-think-about-this side.

Publishers have editors that read books and decide what is and is not crap.

Who edited my book? What about yours?

E-books are often free, making them comfortably less than a dime a dozen. They consume digital resources, but that’s all.

Literary agents will tell you they get 10,000 queries a year. Based on what I’ve written, I know that by far the highest majority of those queries are from crap books.

Crap books.

So, D2D will print my book. They’ll print your book. They’ll print that guy’s book.

But that guy’s a crap writer (not like you and I).

So, here’s his shiny new book, right on the shelf next to ours. His opens with “This is how I spend my summers, over at uncle Bob’s house where my cousin Larry has like a big dog and this blue Toyota that doesn’t run so good. Anyway…”

Our books are good, earnest efforts with great plots and wonderful characters and creditable dialog.

But there’s nothing to separate them, no differentiator between our brilliant work and that guy’s joke of a junk book.

The buying public picks up that guy’s book, mutters in dismay, and quickly backs away from the book rack.

“Good heavens,” they gasp. “What a bunch of junk books!”

You and me, our books are great! Don’t judge us by that guy’s cover! But you know they will.

There we sit, side by each, our pearls, his swine.

My thinking is this:

In digital publishing, caveat emptor. Let the buyer read the description and download the free chapters and choose from there.

In physical publishing, that book had better be worth the ink and the paper and the resources to produce it.

Sadly, we know that that guy thinks his book is that good. But you and I know much better.

My wife is right. If there is no longer a guardian at the gate, no Random House holding sway over what gets printed, if the individual writer sets the standard for what shows up in paper, doesn’t it sort of feel like all is lost?

D2D doesn’t charge you anything to print your book. They make their money when the copies actually sell. But what happens to those copies that don’t sell?

I would imagine they go on sale, and then on super sale, and then on deep discount, and then on closeout, and then on clearance, and they finally sell for, like, a dime or something. Better that than throw them in the dumpster – at least D2D makes a little money on it.

Is that what awaits our books, yours and mine? We end up selling every printed copy for a dime each to some clearing house that shreds them up for the paper they’re printed on? All because of that guy’s crap book?

Congratulations! Your book sold 200 copies! Your share of the profits comes out to 6 dollars and 41 cents, because D2D took the first 15% of the dime and the bulk-book aggregator took the next 25%. Oh, and you won’t get a check until you sell $100 in books, but, hey, congratulations!

Call me a dreamer, a starry-eyed hopeful, but I’ll be building my audience the old-fashioned way – through digital publishing and advertising and doing nothing – until I’m discovered by an old-school publisher who has a strong editorial voice and a marketing staff that will just set the world on fire.

Wait, that guy sold 400 copies?!? Hey, wait a minute…

Tag: marketing your book