Can you please explain this to me? Can you please sit me down in a chair, one that doesn’t face the window, because I’m obviously easily distracted, and use small words, because clearly I’m a bit dim in the “I get it” department, and tell me what is going on?
Continue reading “About Yes And”Tag: self publishing
On Going Big or Going Home
When you were a little kid, remember how exciting it was to think about Christmas morning? All the commotion, the gifts, the noise, the screaming parents. Well, maybe not that one, or the barfing dog, but you understand what I’m saying – the anticipation. Oh, how great it was gonna be…
Continue reading “On Going Big or Going Home”Hey, Fred!
You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You create, create, create, and some of it’s pretty good.
I got this new idea. Actually, my wife got the idea, and I’m going along with it. Actually, I got the idea quite some time ago, and she shot it down, rediscovered the idea on her own, and, well, I’m going along with it.
Continue reading “Hey, Fred!”No Errands for Fools
This is a very simple post. Not because we are simple people, my writer friend (although there is an argument in my household about my side of that equation), but because what you and I do is NOT simple. Not by any stretch of the imagination. As they say in France, it’s very difficult.
Continue reading “No Errands for Fools”Smelling Like a Duck
If it looks like a duck, and floats like a duck, but doesn’t smell like a duck, is it a duck? Or is it a decoy? A fake duck? Perhaps a wannabe duck.
You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You pour your heart and soul into your work, you polish every single word, and then you launch it out into the world. But… how?
Once I was in a restaurant and the waitress asked me what I wanted. I told her I’d been thinking about the turkey sandwich, to which she replied “and what did you decide?”
I used to think that the difference between writers and folks who thought they’d like to take a stab at writing is that writers write. I still believe that to be true, but perhaps not as thoroughly true as I once thought.
Suppose you wrote your brains out, but shoved all your work into the furnace and sent it up in flames? If no one reads it, did it have meaning?
Obviously it did to you, but only to you. You’re a writer – you have a story to tell. If you don’t tell it, or if you tell it only to yourself, well, are you a writer?
It’s a long way to get to the point that we must publish. My books are at Smashwords – yes, that was a shameless plug, but it illustrates a point.
Once upon a time we would hawk our words to agents who would hawk our words to publishers who would bring our words to the world at large. In Shakespeare’s time, Will had to hawk his words to his publisher – there was no agent – and together they hawked his words to the world.
I’m thinking that Mr. Shakespeare’s paradigm has returned, now that the writer’s world has turned into a Wild West of Self Publishing.
I found this great website, run by Joanna Penn, called the Creative Penn. Her site is full of good ideas and great tools and is generally a lot of fun to wander about. While I don’t know Ms. Penn, and only recently discovered her site, I believe there is a lesson there for us all.
You, my writer friend, and I, unless we are to be mistaken for decoys, or wannabe ducks, must actively, and intensely, pursue the task of hawking our words to the world. It’s up to you and me.
Unless we do that, I believe that we are deceiving ourselves into thinking that we are somehow successful authors for having published ourselves. While that is truth, it an incomplete and rather shallow truth.
You, my friend, and I, must embrace the fact that if we do not actively market our work, we do not, in fact, smell like a duck.
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#writersofinstagram #bookworm #bookstagram #writing #booklover
Crows are Smarter than People, but don’t Sizzle
I have proof! It’s true! They are way smarter than I am!
See, I’d seen an ad during the Super Bowl, like, four times, for the McDonald’s Cheesy Bacon Fries, and each time I thought to myself “dang, that’s cool!”
Now, my darling, wonderful wife is out of town, and I find myself with a day off (please don’t tell my wife I did this – she’ll have the I-told-you-so of a lifetime, and I’ve already given her so, so many. It’s safe to post this, because she never reads my stuff. If you don’t tell her, we’re cool).
So, It’s a lovely day at the harbor here in Ventura, and there’s a McDonald’s just a few blocks away. I don’t feel all that hot from an abusive weekend in Las Vegas (being volleyball parents isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be), and, hey, I mean, it’s McDonald’s, right?
The first challenge is that the Cheesy Bacon Fries come in a box with a knife and spork. Uh oh, the gullet says. This could be danger. Then I crack open the box.
So, when we were in Montreal, we discovered a Canadian dish called poutine – fries, cheese curds, brown gravy, and meat, all piled onto a plate. It is heaven on a cold day.
Ronald’s version doesn’t have the brown gravy, but it’s the same thing.
The first taste is really great – man, warm salt and fat. Kind of bacony, a little bit potatoey, and a strong dose of cheesy. Even as I chew it, I’m thinking this is not a very good idea. Kinda of like eating the cake that’s been out on the counter for a couple of days. It might be okay. Might.
So, about the crow. He flies up and takes station on the lamppost, right above my car. He looks at me with that look that crows have – inscrutable, but intriguing. He wants a fry. He’s scared away all the pigeons, and the seagulls haven’t spotted the McD bag yet.
I make sure he sees me waggle a bacon-encrusted cheesy fry out the window, and give it a toss onto the grass. He dives on it the second it’s down.
Now, seagulls are smart. Once, my daughter and I played fetch with one. We had found a golf ball on the beach, and tossed it into the sand down next to the waves. A gull swept down, scooped it up, and dropped in right in front of us. I threw the ball again, and the bird brought it right back. We played like this for maybe 15 throws, until he dropped the ball way out in the water and flew away. Huh. Game over.
But seagulls will eat just about anything. You can make them explode with Alka Seltzer tablets – but please, please don’t. I can’t think of a more awful way to die.
This crow however, perhaps ponders a more awful demise in eating the cheesy bacon fry. He holds it in his beak and stares at me with disdain, his black eye asking “how could you?” He hops onto the back of a bench, the fry firmly held in his beak, and looks thoughtfully out to sea.
The arrival of a flock of seagulls startles him, and he bolts out over the harbor in a stunning show of aerial mastery. He swings over me, the cheesy bacon fry wagging in his mouth, and then out over the water.
With every sign of intention and purpose, he drops the cheesy bacon fry into the bubbling waves, and off he goes.
What does this story have to do with writing books? Everything, my friend, everything and more.
If you , like me, publish your own work (my books are at Smashwords) there’s a huuuuuuuuge lesson here:
I bought the McDonald’s Cheesy Bacon Fries, knowing full well that it was just a box of salt, fat, and a strange orange semi-liquid cheese. No, I couldn’t eat them, because, well, ick. But I gave McD’s my money for the experience. It was all sizzle, and surely no steak.
It’s the sizzle. It has to be the sizzle – sizzle so alluring that it makes you buy a product you really know you shouldn’t have, just because, well, because there’s so much sizzle!
On the health side, I’ll fly with the crows.
But on the marketing side, I’ll take a page from McDonald’s!
Please don’t tell my wife.
Hashtags of sizzle:
#McDonald’s #authorsoninstagram #droppington place #marigolds end
Five Years to Independence: Year Two – The Year of Confidence
If you’re just tuning in, this series of posts is about a self-improvement (ick, I hate that term) a self-developmental program that I’ve put myself through twice (yes, twice) which I call Five Years to Independence. If you follow the steps, yes it takes a long time, and no, no harm will come to you, and, in the end, you’ll feel better about your talents, and will find yourself accomplished in your field.
This plan works for you if you are not currently using your chosen talent to support yourself. If, for example, you are a fine painter, but you spend your days checking tax returns for a living, this plan is for you. I myself spent half of my life trapped in a succession of customer service positions before I figured this out.
Year One was all about not looking back, about honoring the road you’ve chosen so far in life. Although it hasn’t led you to success in using your talents, it has led you here.
And here is where we begin Year Two – The Year of Confidence.
Although this year is about self-confidence, it’s not the point. The point is that this year you express, believe, and totally embrace confidence in your talent. Whatever it is.
If you dance, this year you are a dancer. If you write, this year you are a writer. If you act… and so on and so forth.
This is the year in which you give yourself permission to be who you really are. You stop making excuses as to why you’re not that person: you be that person.
It takes a lot of courage to stop thinking of your talent as “well, you know, I dabble in watercolor,” and to instead refer to yourself as a painter. But that’s what this year is all about: courage.
One of the key parts of last year, the Year of No Regrets, was that, while you stopped kicking yourself for never having trusted your talent, you also worked in your art. You wrote, danced, sang, built a resume, even if only you saw it, which says Yes, I Am That Artist.
So, in fact, you are that artist. You write/dance/sing/act/paint. Whether anyone has seen it or not is immaterial. There is now artwork in the world, which you created. Artwork, by its very definition, is created by an artist. And that’s you.
Now, if you skipped the working part of the first year, it’s okay. Start working now. Now. Don’t put it off, or you’re wasting your time.
So, yes, that is who you are, but it does take some courage to admit it. You don’t have to go get new business cards. You need to tell your heart of hearts every single moment of every single day that you are a practicing artist. If you doubt yourself, look at the work you’ve accomplished.
If you are a performance artist, your road is both more difficult and more rewarding. A painter’s painting is a forever thing, but that moment when you catch the audience’s heart – that is fleeting. If you’ve ever done it, you feel it in your soul. For you to practice your art, you need to put yourself in front of an audience so you can pursue and perfect those moments. It’s harder, because you need to be cast in role – I recommend acting classes, either in workshops or for college credit, or both. Community Theater is always a very useful option. But it is so rewarding, because those little moments are such emotional highs. I know, spoken like a true actor. Funnily enough, I chose writing instead.
So, do you now what to do here in Year Two? Be it. Live it. Stop dreaming of it and become it.
So, here is my caveat about the Five Years to Independence: you have to define success. You don’t quite see my name on billboards, or find my novels at Barnes and Noble (yet).
Here’s how the plan has worked for me: I spent literally twenty-eight years in the customer service industry. Starting as a simple rep, I worked my way up through the ranks until I was a corporate director. When that company was sold, I moved on to become a partner in a service business, where my primary function was customer service. All the while, I dabbled in acting, in voice-over, in writing. The Great Recession crashed my business, and I found myself working part time at Bank of America helping people negotiate their failed mortgages.
It was then that I started this program, having built it as I went, and figured out who I really was, and what I wanted to be. I wrote my brains out in the Year of No Regrets, and sold my work for pennies to a number of online publishing sites. In that year, I became a writer.
In the next year, I decided to focus on a practical use for my writing, and learned how to be a technical writer. In the summer of that year, I got myself hired as a full time technical writer.
That, to me, is a huge success. I make my living, pay my bills, support my family, through my art as a writer. I no longer say that I dabble in writing – I do it every single day. It’s not prose or poetry, but it’s my art. And I love it.
To be sure, there’s much more to come – I have two novels, Droppington Place and Marigold’s End, that I’m marketing right now (for you marketers out there, did you notice how I slyly built two links right into this post? I know, I know, brilliance at it’s best).
The caveat, then, is that you must define your success. Getting to where you want to be requires mapping a road. Now that you are confident as an artist, you need to start thinking about where you can ply your trade.
That comes next, in the Year of Accomplishment!
Keeping Chin-ups
Remember when you were a kid, and you had to do chin-ups at school? OMG, that was the worst thing ever! I always cheated and took a little jump up, so I always got a count of at least one. That second one was murder. And the third? Forget it. Same with push-ups. To this day, when I think of push-ups, I see the unmoving gym floor swim before my eyes…
And so it is with marketing your own novel, as I am marketing mine. Which novel(s) do we speak of? Why, Droppington Place and Marigold’s End, of course. You’re a writer. You know how it goes.
Marketing is all about getting people to pay attention to you. You could make YouTube videos – tried that. You could make your own website – mine is right here: PhineasCaswell.com. You could make podcasts or something.
Whatever you do, you have to somehow drive traffic to it. That’s the key, the thing, the line over which you must cross to become the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.
So, I’ve been posting oodles of posts about the famous pirate Blackbeard on my site (see the shameless marketing plug above). In particular, I’ve focused on his most notorious ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge. Beyond that cool name, there’s just not much information available about her, which I take as a personal challenge. Why?
Okay, sit down – you’re not gonna believe this. My next novel deeply involves Blackbeard. Whoa! Huh? Did not see that coming, right? Blackbeard was born in 1680. My character Phineas Caswell, hero of Marigold’s End, a Phineas Caswell Adventure, was born in 1694. Both were sailing around the Caribbean at the same time, 1706… See? Those gears are a’turnin’,right? Blackbeard was 26 – in command of privateers or something, right? And Phineas… well, I leave it to your imagination to link those guys together. Or, actually, to MY imagination…
Anyway, I just ran a Google search on the phrase Queen Anne’s Revenge. My website didn’t show up on the first page, or the third, or the seventh. I gave up on Page 15, certain that I’m just not out there in the world. In fact, my site would appear, if I could find it, after “great snacks for the kiddos” and “cool dog names.”
Sigh.
Just like in middle school, in gym class, it’s all a question of keeping one’s chin up. Someday. Someday I’ll cross some magical line and come up on the first page of a Google search. And then the angels will sing, and the heavens will open up, and somebody will click through, visit my site, and buy my books.
Or, I could win the Powerball. The odds seem to be about the same.
NOW We’re Getting Somewhere!
You’re a writer, you know how it is. You write your book. You push it to agents. Nobody wants to represent it because, well, maybe it’s not that good of a book. Maybe it IS good, but not marketable. That’s what Disney told me.
I had an agent tell me “you should publish this yourself.”
Did so. Well, published this book instead: Droppington Place. But then I sat down and rewrote the book in question, which I have yet to push out to the agently world. That book is this book: Marigold’s End.
Boom – did you see how I did that, there? You notice that here, in the top quarter of my post, I’ve already pitched two products. Boom. Huh? You, my friend, have already been marketed to. Zimzam, what was that? What did it take?
That’s Gorilla Marketing at its best.
Okay, so, contrary to the Gorilla Marketing tenet of “do no work,” I did a little bit of work, and now have something to show you: PhineasCaswell.com.
“Wha… what’s happening?” you exclaim, your mind a whirl of sudden marketing impact. Boom, two books, zimzam, a website, just like that. Whoa. Sit down, my friend, lest you explode or something.
All right, all seriousness aside, if you have a minute, click on the PhineasCaswell.com link – there it is again. Open it in a new window so that you don’t miss any of my glorious words here.
Why is this a big deal? Because, if you publish your own book, you are responsible for marketing it. You need a website to give yourself some bottom – make yourself available for your readers. And, unless you yourself are a web designer, this can be a challenge.
I gave up trying to be a web designer as well as a marketer, an author, a technical writer/illustrator, a videographer, all in addition to being a loving husband and father.
First was Open Element, which gives you free, open-source web design software, with templates that seem to be “responsive” – you know, works well on cell phones as well as desktops. But the software is so so so so so very hard to navigate, and the stuff it seems like you really need? Well, that’s in French, you see…
Next came, Serif, a British company that makes a terrific web design suite. It’s quite inexpensive, but not yet quite up to the challenge of responsive web design.
Then came Google Web Design, which worked for a minute, but I couldn’t figure out the language to navigate their templates… OMG, my website looked ghastly! Like a commercial for Google!
However, GoDaddy, who carries my hosting, has a nifty WordPress plug-in. As above, boom, zimzam, etc, now PhineasCaswell.com is a nice, responsive website, looking equally cool on desktops, tablets and phones (marketers take note: that was yet another link).
Brag about the site though I should, I’m passing on to you, my valued reader, that WordPress seems to be really good at making a responsive website. That means that you don’t have to be.
One little nasty surprise does seem to come with a WordPress plug-in: the SSL certificate. If you haven’t got one of these, your WordPress site actually scares viewers away with a big warning that your site is not safe. I paid $75 to get my certificate. If you don’t pay the $75, you appear to the world as a creepy underworld scum, out to steal passwords. Seems as if there’s a piratical side to fighting pirates that just might be worse…
But you, my marketing self-publishing writer friend, that’s the big news for you, should you be looking for an easy way to build a backend for your authorial effort.
To those who were paying attention, I dropped Phineas Caswell as my nom de plume, and have published both novels under my own name. Not such a big deal for you, but a whopper for me!
Let the Marketers Market
You’re washing your face in the bathroom sink. The warm water makes a pleasant gurgle as it swirls down the drain. It’s California, so you don’t run the water too long.
Suddenly, the water reverses course, and comes up out of the drain. Thinking quickly, you shut off the tap. No good. The water is gray and malicious, and soon the sink is full. It stops filling before the water spills over the edge, but just barely.
So? What do you do? The sink is full, which means the pipes under the sink are full. Are you a plumber?
In my household, I would attempt to fix it, would flood the bathroom, and never hear the end of it from my wife and teenaged daughter.
“Why don’t you just call a plumber?”
“I can fix it, honey! See, it’s just a… oh.”
Slosh, gush. Gaglub, gaglub, gaglub.
“Nice going, Dad.”
You’re a writer. You know how it is. We write, you and I. Unless you’re a marketing writer, the whole business of promotion and publicity is outside our bailiwick.
So, here we are in the world of self-publishing. I did all the work – I wrote Droppington Place, I edited it, had it read and ignored by family and friends, I published it, I created a Facebook page for Phineas Caswell, I opened a website, PhineasCaswell, and I even bought a book about Dummies marketing on Facebook.
So far, I’ve sold 4 copies of the book – three to people I know and one that might actually be legit.
By day, I’m a technical writer/illustrator. I do what I do because I enjoy it, and am good at it. I’m not a plumber, although I do get my hands wet upon occasion. But, I am a miserable excuse for a plumber.
So, my writer friend, must it be true with marketing. Here we are in the most freewheeling, enabled, and unshackled time in history for writers – dude, anyone could read your book right now! – but are fettered at the gate of success by a lack of time and marketing knowhow.
The answer is to let the plumbers plumb and the marketers market. The answer is the same as it always was: do what you do best. If you need the help of a specialist, for goodness sake, hire the specialist! Unless you can do your own dentistry.
As for me, I’ve got to fix this sink before my wife gets home… it’ll all be done and she won’t even know I did it myself until I tell her!
Crack. Gaglu, gaglug, gaglug…
“Magic,” She Gasped.
“Magic,” she gasped.
Say it again: “Magic,” she gasped.
Tell your friends to say it: “Magic,” she gasped.
It’s a mantra, unless that’s the bat-shaped fish. Whisper it in your sleep.
“Magic,” she gasped.
What is it? What does it mean? Why should you care?
What makes a Subaru a Subaru? Actually, Subaru puts a comma in their statement – a comma with which I have never agreed. Love, it’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru. What does that second comma do? It makes a clause out of “it’s what makes a Subaru,” which isn’t a clause at all. It equally makes a clause out of “Love a Subaru,” which is a clause, but is so widely separated by the non-clause that you have to remove the non-clause to see it, by which time you’ve simply beaten the whole darned thing to death…and doesn’t make me what to buy the car because they have trouble with punctuation.
“Magic,” she gasped. It’s a mantra, or manta. Or Banta if you’re into Star Wars.
I was trying to come up with a way to sell my book, and the only catchphrase I could think of was “buy my book.”
Hmmm, lacks a little something.
Hailey, one of the characters in my novel, Droppington Place, has a fascination with magic – just to point out that there, right in that sentence, is the proper use of commas to separate a clause – which causes her to utter the mantra/manta/banta phrase. Several times throughout the story she gasps the word “magic,” in what I sincerely hope is a running joke.
So, you see, sometimes your characters can give you a hint on what’s special in your work.
But, here’s the dealio, the thing, the bomb, the cat’s pajamas: What happens if you Google search “murder, she gasped”? Well, probably nothing yet, because I just loaded the tags.
But eventually, my impatient friend, you’ll go to either Phineas Caswell’s home page at PhineasCaswell.com, or to his Smashwords Droppington Place page.
If you simply Google Phineas Caswell, whose name appears beneath the logo, brings you all manner of Droppington Placey options.
Is this marketing genius? Does Procter and Gamble sell soap?
Or is it simply some degree of self-delusion that I’m making progress in marketing my book? Self-delusional like a fox!!!
Already, the pieces are falling into place…bwahahahahah.
You, because you’re a friend, can actually skip all the marketing hype and get Droppington Place by simply clicking HERE. When you get there, type in this Coupon Code: NJ38D, and you can get the book for free!!!
Why, that seems almost like…
“Magic,” she gasped.
You are the One – Bring Your Wallet
In the writing business… that is, the business end of the writer’s business, although the writer’s business isn’t business at all, but art – this gets so confusing – not the business of writing art, the business of selling the art, which is a business unto itself, but we’re not talking about that. Actually we are, sort of… you’re a writer, you know how it is…
Restart.
If you are a writer, and you don’t have an agent, you need one. Yes, you can self-publish your novel, but who is going to sell your book for you? You? You’re a writer. You need an agent.
Finding an agent, well that’s the business end of writing. But agents don’t seem to drop out of trees, even if you’re absolutely, fantastically talented. I know this from personal experience. That dog don’t hunt. That ship has sailed. You can’t handle the truth.
So, you advertise, in a million different ways. You blog. You join writer’s circles and clubs and chats, and comment your brains out on other people’s stuff. You work like a monkey to get your name at the top of an agent’s mystical list, the agent’s short list, the who’s who of writers in the agent’s Rolodex. Rolodex – boy, that’s a piece of history, huh? Raise your hand if you know what a Rolodex is… uh huh, as I thought. Paltry, paltry.
At the end of the day, you have to face it: you’re marketing – advertising – in the hopes of getting an agent to look at you and say “wow, now THERE’s a talent!”
In the world of Gorilla Marketing, all this effort, all this subtle, almost not work at all, is aimed at just one person. Millions of readers, or in my case, half-dozens of readers, see your blog and comments, read your name… and move on to something else.
It’s like being a daisy in the middle of the tall grass – oh please, Ms. Cow, pick me, pick me! You stand up tall, doing your flowery best to grab a little bit of bovine attention… oh, puleeze…. Of course, nobody wins in the cow analogy. Literary agents are insulted, and you get eaten if you win. But, you get the point.
The point is that if Toyota gets you to run down to your local dealership and buy a car because you saw a good ad on TV, it doesn’t matter if they wasted the time of 30 million other viewers, so long as you buy the car. No, you don’t suffer from incontinence, but some poor sap does, and those commercials might just be the ticket… say, I didn’t know they made underpants like that!
The point is this: you market your keester off, in the hope that one, just one, single set of eyeballs, sees your stuff and says a quiet “bingo.” And when that one sees your stuff and mutters and magic phrase, all your Gorilla Marketing effort pays off, and the future is yours to pave.
Well, here’s to you, my marketing friend. May you hear a whispered “bingo” soon!
Now, if you’re an agent, you can find the first two chapters of my book here: PhineasCaswell.com.
Thank you.
The Internet as Closed Door
Marketing and publishing your book in this new, connected age is rather like convincing yourself that you’re a genius – no one will dispute it because no one is really listening. No one really cares.
Now, don’t get all huffy and think ol’ Johnny’s getting crabby and bitter. I’ve always been crabby. And bitter? That’s just the flavor to the stew!
But the answer to your publishing and marketing puzzles cannot be found on the WWW. Go ahead, Google “Answers to my marketing puzzles” and you’ll see what I mean. Not there. Never has been.
No one is going to give you the answer. No one is listening.
It’s because you’re asking too darned big of a question. The answer to marketing your book cannot be found on the I’net because you haven’t asked a valid question. It’s like Googling “how to make food.” It can’t be answered.
So you, my writer friend, have to do the hard work of figuring out how you want to market your writing – are you going to publish it yourself, or shoot for the agent/publisher combo? Are you going to purchase advertising or use social media?
Even as you ask yourself these questions, plans start to form in the mind. Plans, plots, machinations. Maybe you’ll do this, with a twist of that..Ah HAH! They’ll never see it coming!
For me, the hardest part is the waiting. My beautiful editor may have read the first couple of pages, but that’s it. Gosh, I sent the corrected version on Christmas Eve…what gives? Could she possibly have anything better to do?
In the mean time, I’ve been foolishly posing my marketing questions to Google, and have reached the conclusion that folks online mostly want to sell me stuff. Perhaps the WWW stands for the Worldwide Wearing down of the Wallet, although I suppose that would be the WWDW, which sounds like we should be carrying guns and calling each other “bro
“.
The point is that, while the Internet is a fantastic resource, it’s not the answer. If you check out a book on marketing from the library, your product is still not marketed. The book doesn’t care about you, either.
At the end of the day, you and I must do our homework, make our tough marketing decisions, get off our protruding duffs, and do something other than hope the Internet will tell us what to do. I’m talking you, mister, or perhaps just to me. Rats. I hate it when that happens!
Until those decisions are made, I’m sorry, but the Internet is closed.
De-Energizing Anti-Inertia
Time rolls like a jelly-roll, right down the hill with the biological waste-matter, for we all know poop rolls down hill. That’s why your boss can give you dreadful assignments with such cheerful abandon, because poop lands on the desks of bosses with the express goal of rolling down the hill to your desk. If you are a boss, good on ya, mate, because you can roll your poop to the next level below. But I digress.
Time and energy are inextricably intertwined. Don’t think so? Why don’t you drive at 85 mph down the interstate when you’ve got six hours to get there…unless you are one of THOSE, who can’t drive 55… was that Sammy Hagar? Wasn’t he horrible? Or was that Hagar the Horrible, who drove too fast in the… but I digress.
What stands between you and your finished work – and by finished I don’t mean lookee there, Slim, I rot me a boook! – I mean a finished and produced piece that, if not published, is well down that road. In fact, let’s take it a half-mile farther down the road and say your work is not finished until it is published, and easily accessible by the world at large.
Wow. That’s a big goal. You took the time and heart and effort to write your book, didn’t you? Good on ya, mate! That’s your heart and your art, and, even though we tell our friends and admiring toadies that it was tons of work, you know in your artistic heart that it was fun. Go ahead, admit it. We probably won’t tell.
There was so much inertia to get the book done – day after tedious day (wink) of writing to tell the story, get those characters’ voices out there- be free, my creepy inner friends – with a single goal in mind: The End.
Publishing it. We-heh-heh-heh-ell, now, that’s just a whole new kettle of friskies, in’it? How do you do it? My proofreader moved on before he finished my book – well worth the nothing I was paying him, I say. An editor? An EDITOR? Those cost around a thousand bucks, my ramen-eating friend. And then, say we finally get the thing proofed and plop down half of the house payment and get it edited: crickets.
I came of age in the business world – you probably did, too. We know how to get things done, you and I. Mimeograph this, would you? Did you order more ribbons for the Selectric? Can you smell the ditto machine? Publishing… oy, now, that’s going to use our business acumen, and other parts of the egg.
All the inertia is lost. A wide set of skid marks veer off the shoulder and into the bushes on the other side of the ditch. Maybe it’s off the road, or maybe it’s running down some hidden lane only the driver knows. Whichever way it’s going, it aint towards success.
The hardest part of this book-writing exercise is the now, right here. The thing is done, but there is nowhere to go with it. I’ll let you know if I get out of the bushes.
Vile Betrayer Marketing Guru
Back in the good old days, before color TV, rulers declared themselves despots, and tossed out anybody who didn’t agree with them. Those disagreers were labeled “vile betrayer”, and, boom, off they went to the desert on good days, off went their heads on bad.
“Be gone, vile betrayer,” was a pretty common phrase, back in the good old nasty despot days, so I’m told.
In marketing your book, you get to be a despot – a marketing despot. It’s a cool title, like those honorary doctorate degrees that colleges hand out to folks who chip in a bunch of money to build a new teacher’s lounge with a gymnasium attached. Except that this title has power to it.
For one thing, you can brand as vile betrayers those people who tell you that you should be writing with crayons. Be gone, vile betrayer. Or those who tell you they’ve read better material on the artificial butter tub. Be gone, vile betrayer. Or those who just simply tick you off – you there, with the white socks and Birkenstocks – you are worse than a vile betrayer. Be oh so gone.
As the marketing despot of your book, you have to have an iron will – or an iron George if Will isn’t around – to keep the success of your book foremost in your mind, in front of the windmills. You must cast out as non-believers those who don’t believe in your success, because, well, shucks, they’re non-believers – I guess that just sort of follows.
Why must you be so iron-willed (or Georged) despotic? Two answers:
- You must be iron willed because you, and only you, are the champion of your book. If not you, whom?
- You must be iron willed because faith is a tentative and fragile thing. And, really, all you have is faith that your book is marketable, is fantastic, and is something truly special. That it is your gift to the world.
The marketing guru chosen for MARIGOLD’S END turned out to be a vile betrayer. A non-believer. A nay-sayer. A neer-do-well-cad. A nervous Nellie. Be gone, vile betrayer, and take your encyclopedia-selling mindset with you. Be thankful you’re not banished to… to… well, banished! Be gone!
This is your chance to be the ruler you’ve always known you should be. YOU can take your book to stellar heights. YOU can build a literary empire. YOU could RULE the WORLD!!!
Or, maybe you should just concentrate on selling your book.
Yeah. Probably that.
Hissy-Fit Marketing
Nothing beats a good hissy-fit. You know the kind, where you pull your hair and stomp your feet and get so red in the face people think you’re a thermometer? That’s a really effective way to scare off bears and stray pussycats. I tried it at the office… not so effective there. I guess I can sort of kiss that raise goodbye.
But a wild hissy-fit might just be the thing that puts your book over the top. What would happen if, like, you started getting into the world’s grille about something – racism, climate change, dirty diapers, you get the drift – and made some sort of a big hissy-fit. Your fit gets on YouTube, you go viral, and, oh, hey, you also wrote a novel that now we all have to read because, goodness, what a vibrant person you are!
It could work.
Sadly, if you threw a hissy-fit over something really nice, like the West African success against ebola, you wouldn’t get any coverage at all because the world doesn’t work that way.
Sadly, if you threw a hissy-fit over the nastygram items listed above, you might get branded as a tantrummy sort of bozo, because that is the way the world works. Seriously, who wants to read a book written by a bozo, unless you are the REAL Bozo, and then, hey, that might be kind of cool. A book on clowns by the master clown himself – you could make it really scary…
Step One in the Gorilla Marketing Plan is to avoid Hissy-Fit Marketing (HFM), because it only garners negative attention. I get enough of that at work.
Step Two is to make things big, which is sort of a parallel to HFM. Make things big – broadcast yourself. Spread yourself out. Do LOTS of stuff, and tie it all together. Yes, it takes a little effort, which is anti-gorilla, but it simply has to pay off.
You are publishing your book online, right? What’s the magic word there? Nope, not bozo. It’s online, bozo. Search engines and crawlers and robots troll the WWW every single second, making links between this and that, him and her, it and, well, it. The more connections you have, the bigger you are.
You don’t stop dancing with the 600 pound gorilla when you’re tired – you stop when he’s tired. Dolly Parton wears those outrageous wigs to make her short little self not so much. Say what you will about the other parts of her, at least the wigs make her look taller.
So, no on the hissy-fit, yes on the broadcasting yourself all over the WWW.
If that doesn’t work, well, then, ding-dang it! What THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE??? WHATSA MATTER WITH THE DING-DANG STINKING WORLD…
Stick a Fork in Me
Done like a ton of finished, like a taco casserole in a thousand degree oven I am done, done as the day is long, done. Finito. Wrapped it up. Did the deal, finished across the line with a big ol’ smile across my face. DONE!
72,584 words of pathos, humor, and history all wrapped up in a nice little package featuring my friend Phineas, who gives up, gets angry, blows his top, cries, and finds his father, all the while fighting a running battle with the sea. Phin, my boy, carped at by the ship’s sailing master, driven to near distraction by the French king’s granddaughter, and called every harsh, rude, hurtful name in the book, tries to find his way, figure out how he got thrown into the seagoing gulag that is the Kathryn B.
Not a spoiler alert, not here – you’ll have to read for yourself how this one turns out.
In fact, my next step is to find a reader. Someone who can be honest with me, but someone who knows a thing or two or three about the Young Adult Fiction business, what they’re looking for, what will float, what will sink like a stinking stone.
Really, my next stop is on the publishing wagon. Get this monster read by someone with brains, rework it to their thoughts, and then Wordsmash it or Yahoo it or Amazon it or something.
Really, the next step, which starts tomorrow, is to think about marketing. Building the old platformaroony that will carry this book into the bazillion dollar sales range.
You, my friend, need not worry. I will not try to sell you a book. You are my only reader, and I thank you for sticking with me. Stay with me, sail with me over the horizon of the publishing adventure. I promise to tell you everything. The rewards could be great.
For now, the goal is to simply enjoy 72,584 words of doneness. Finitoness. Ah, sweet victory, thy name is Phineas.
Get Uber-Rich Overnight by Writing Online
Writing online is tough. Not wrestling with a live python in your underwear tough, or figuring out how a python got in your underwear in the first place tough, but pretty difficult just the same. You write some wonderful, brilliant, exquisite piece that could not possibly be more perfect, you send it off to the publishing site, and you wait. And you wait.
If the site was Associated Content, you knew that a board of editors, or some guy sitting in his pajamas horking down a tuna fish sandwich, or a piece of software that simulated same, scrutinized your work to see if it was worth a nickel in SEO. Son of a cricket, that could take a week! At the end of that agonizing, just-beat-me-in-the-head-with-a-frozen-pizza wait, you got an offer, maybe $1.06, maybe some amazing amount, like $14.23. Martha, we’re buying a boat!
If the site was Triond, dude, you could be published within, like ten minutes. The money was not an issue – gee, son, those are pretty small wages… it’s okay, Dad. I’m gonna publish a gazillion of ‘em! – but you were right out there in the big old world, and there was always the possibility you, or your work, could go viral.
In those days, which seem like maybe twenty years ago but was in fact just last year – old school is so, like, last week – that was how you did it. But the year went by, the rock-out died, Susie went and left me for some other guy, and writing online got tougher. How can this be, you ask… didn’t Al Gore invent the Internet with a capital I to make life easier?
Scratchin’ for online work, I hooked up with Writers Access, which is pretty cool. Real, live editors look at the stuff they challenge you to write – here, describe a filing cabinet in 150 words, be chatty, professional, and make it sound interesting. Oh, and don’t use the word “filing” – nobody does that anymore – and we’ll toss some shekels into your PayPal. Some of their challenges are quite that – we’d like you to create a web page devoted to offroad motorcycling – and they’ll pay you $50 to do it. I go there every now and again.
But, for the creative soul, the Internet with a capital I should be a place where you can set your work free, just like Free Willy and Butterflies are Free, and Schindler’s List… you get the idea. So you start your own site.
Crickets.
Dude, you need content. So you write your brains out and publish it yourself – yeah, that looks pretty good – and you buy your own URL and get a hosting plan. Here I am!
Crickets.
Maybe, and this is huge maybe to which I am not willing to commit, maybe the days of schlock are over. Maybe you can’t just pen what you want and push it out to the greedy masses who are waiting to devour it, because maybe the masses never really did that in the first place.
Maybe your work has to be good. Maybe it has to be better than good – downright the best work you’ve ever done. And maybe you submit it to legitimate sites, and there are dozens, that pride themselves on publishing excellent, well-wrought work.
Fade out crickets, fade in the sound of thoughtful, interested people that select a very narrow band of input, reading your work and thinking, yes, thinking about it.
Wow. That’s even better than $14.23 upfront.
I think I’m discovering that there is no overnight, get uber-rich uber-quick, slick Willy scheme to make a fortune as a writer. The secret is good work, excellent, hard work.
Rats.
Make Yourself A Movie Trailer
Imagine that your novel is a major motion picture…it’s not that hard, is it? This movie has fantastic actors, a brilliant script, breathtaking cinematography: it’s a stunner.
Now imagine the movie trailer…you’re sitting in the theater trying to ignore that kid three seats away that keeps bellowing “mmmwaaa” like a drunk lamb (it turns out that they like beer…who knew?), and alternately slipping on spilled soda and sticking on some tacky substance that releases a regular waft of tutti-frutti. The theater darkens…the room falls silent.
“Mmmmwaaaaa!”
Except for that.
An image flickers on the screen. You gasp, dude, it’s your trailer…
“In a world gone mad…one man…one woman…one deli sandwich (extra pickle-lily no on the jalapenos)…from the people that brought you…”
The theater goes silent in anticipation.
“Mmmmwaaaaaa!”
Except for that.
That’s what your book is like if your are not…don’t have a…haven’t written a…
It probably never happened in history that some writer just sorta wrapped up a manuscript and dropped it off at a publisher’s house and went to bed to wake up the next day to find that he was a phenom and the Daily Enquirer had already saved column 1, page 1 for him. Of course not…the Enquirer is a tabloid.
All that to say that, mega publisher or no, don’t force your first book to stand on its own. Start today, right now…good heavens, you mean you haven’t started yet?!?…to build a name for yourself, make a coherent framework in your career into which the book will fit. It doesn’t have to be a huge name…the book will do that if it’s good…but it should enough oomph to fill out the dust jacket.
“Author John Reinhart lives in Ventura, CA with three dogs, four cats, five rabbits, and the ocasional sheep. He has a nifty collection of rubber bands and really likes padded socks. This is is his first novel.”
In the trailer, “from the author of nothing prior to this” just doesn’t fly. “From the publisher of Hairball dot com…” now that has something going for it.
In the good old days of Harcourt Brace, they took the nifty picture of you at the typewriter smoking a cigarette and looking authorly, and did all that behind-the-scenes Madmen stuff because they had invested a bunch of money in you.
The money’s gone, which means you, my dear, must do the Madmen stuff yourself.
“In a world gone mad…one man…one woman…one clever backstory to get you to buy my book…”
“Mmmmmwaaaaaa!”
Beating the Biscuits out of the Bears
What are you supposed to do when you’re hiking along a trail, happy as a lark in a predator-free environment, when, son of a biscuit, there’s a bear, like, right there, growling and frothing and pawing the ground like a bull, although he’s only seen those on TV because we know that bulls and bears only get together in the stock market, ready to have you, yes you, for lunch?
You don’t run, right? Run, and, bango, the bear’s looking for bread because he’s ready for a you-sandwich. No, no, no. You make yourself look much bigger than you really are, right? You need to suddenly grow six inches and six sizes and froth at your mouth and shake your head like, dude, there is something really wrong with you. If you do that, chances are pretty good that the bear will remember that he’s on one of those low-carb diets, and really, you look a little fluffy, like maybe you’re stuffed with mayonnaise, and well, gee, maybe he left the kids on the stove and, maybe some other time, huh?
In the world of online writing, the bear is the vast void of the Internet, the inescapable sea of voices, writers just like you, well, almost a lot like you, sort of, that yell dude, it’s me! Read my stuff! Just like the frothing fellow on the trail, this bear eats you – well, your work – and away it goes, and you find yourself looking down the path wondering how come you worked so hard but got nothing but bear-bite marks on your keester. And, just like the trail-growler’s lunch, you die, because, as writers, we all die when our work goes nowhere.
So, you gotta be big…bigger than big. You have to be a phenom. And maybe you’re just a tiny little phenom, like not so big a phenom that we read about you in the tabloids at the supermarket – really? Are you the batchild? – but big enough to have your voice heard over the moaning, bad-writing multitudes mewling for attention. Because you’re a better writer than that.
Bears live in creepy caves that most often have a boatload of icky spiderwebs. While the world wide web has nothing to do with bears, although, of course you and I know that it does, it, too, hangs out on servers, which are like creepy, sort of icky boxes of hot metal and plastic. But I digress. Don’t let that keep you from climbing across the world wide web like a thousand-legged spider, because that’s how it really, really works: all of the silken webs tie together, and you can use ‘em to catch more than just flies.
When you write for a publisher, look for ways to get the same piece published at other sites. Start your own site. Start your own blog. Publish the same piece in as many places as you can think of. Spread everything you write just as far as your imagination can take you. Each piece you write then becomes a web, and you become the spider at the middle.
The robots that look for similarities across the web see you, yes, you. Your name rises in the search rankings. Eventually, and this is no joke, you become someone. Yours is not the mewling voice, not the blather of the multitudes. Yours is the voice of authority.
Are you famous? Well, somewhat.
Because yours is the voice that beat the biscuits out of the bear.
A New Cover for Phineas
The world of book publishing has changed with the advent of online publishers like Amazon and Smashwords. Those of us reared in the old school of agent/publisher/bookstore have to rethink our method of distribution.
Part of the online distribution involves attracting potential customers with an attractive, alluring book cover. Traditional book publishers have teams of artists that know what will sell, what will appeal to which audience.
When you shift the publishing burden onto your own shoulders, YOU are that team of artists.
A few caveats: first, and most important – I have every intention of getting this book published through traditional means. My sincerest hope is that one of the Big Five will like it and pick it up and one of these days I’ll be in a Barnes and Noble, and, hey, that’s ME!
Another caveat: I am no graphic artist. I’m a pretty good technical illustrator, but fine art and I are distant cousins at best.
Final caveat: this is not the final cover.
All that being said, the reason I’m presenting this cover here is to show you what can be done cheaply and on the slick. The ship is a 1/72 scale model, The Black Swan, by a Russian company called Zvezda. It’s not quite done yet. In fact, she’s the same ship as in the masthead of this site.
I lifted the ocean from a painting of an American frigate – I don’t think it was in the public domain, but I’m using so little of the painting I think the artist, who is probably long dead, would be able to identify his fine, fine artwork.
Phineas, here with longer hair than in the story, is actually my daughter. The image was lifted out of a shot of her and her mom at the Mission San Gabriel two years ago. I thought the pose was right, and, well, at ten years old, she didn’t have a female shape yet, so she could pass for a boy.
The pieces were all assembled in GIMP, a free image manipulation program available at GIMP.Org. Once I got the image blended to where I liked it, I exported it as a JPG file. Then I opened the JPG with my old Illustrator 2.o, added the titles (which are in a font called Lithos Pro) and exported the completed file as a PNG. I remember someone telling me that size is important in graphics, so I sized the PNG at 8 inches tall and 6 inches wide.
So, it’s not the final cover art, but it’s a good first shot. I’m hoping I won’t have to use it or its cousins because a major publisher and their team of artists will take over all of that.
Still, it’s amazing what you can do with a few easy graphic pieces, some software, and a couple of hours.