Learn to Blog in 90 Minutes!

Courtesy of yours truly and Writer's Digest. I'll be teaching a webinar about all the essentials and best practices for author blogs, including shedding some light on how agents use the blog to troll for potential clients. Then, I'll take a look at your own blog to tell you how to optimize for the most traffic, getting readers to come back and, of course, how to tailor the blog to help you get noticed by an agent.

Check it: http://bit.ly/x5MvJs

I've got my talking points, but I wonder: what are the most pressing questions for you? You can get as specific as you'd like.

Let me know in the comments! And, of course, you should also sign up for the webinar to learn the answers!!

Why Janet Reid Is My Idol and Should Be Yours

This post, right here, on platform.

Also, I'm at the BACKSPACE CONFERENCE OF AMAZING today and tomorrow.

MUST READ Online Marketing Post from Nancy Coffey Literary and Media Representation

It's sometimes hard to talk about online marketing because every book and every campaign is so different. The strategy changes 100% with each new project. It's easier to talk about what not to do, but that'll only get you so far.

Case studies, man. Case studies is where it's at.

Here's a great one from Joanna Stampfel-Volpe's client Boy Sees Hearts.

Online Author Marketing: Your Book Is Pubbing!

You're living the dream, man. An agent, a book deal...now your book is about to come out!

This is going to be AWESOME.

Publishers dedicate marketing and publicity staff to your book, with their biggest push focused around the launch. It's called "event marketing" in the industry.

What that means is that there's one big push, but no long term marketing strategy for the book...and this is where most authors (and some agents) get really grouchy. ("They're not doing anything anymore!")

But before we start Publisher bashing, as is so en vogue these days, consider that just as your book had some launch-time marketing (galleys printed, an ad somewhere, etc.) the next book on that publicist's list has to get the same attention. The publisher has to move on.

Which means that, at this stage, your own marketing efforts have to get more aggressive and your strategy more sophisticated. In post one, we talked about building the foundation of your online presence. On Tuesday, about focusing your online strategy. At this stage, you should focus on marrying your marketing foundation (blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) with specific marketing strategy.

This means getting creative. Your goal should be to keep your book(s) on people's minds in the online space, where attention spans are notoriously short.

This is not done by "selling" your book.

As you've no doubt heard before, broadcasting "BUY MY BOOK" is a quick way to get ignored. Create value for your audience--by being funny, like Maureen Johnson, finding interesting images on Flickr, or marrying your writing interests with something broader, as Sarah Fine does with psychology and YA literature.

Keep them coming back for your digital content and persona (separate from your book) and they'll get your book news (new releases, discounted ebooks, etc.) too. Organically piqued interest has a much greater chance of generating sales and word-of-mouth advertising.

Yes, this "online stuff" takes time. Or money (you can certainly pay some very talented professionals to do this for you). The online space has become a hugely important marketing and sales environment. If you choose to ignore that online space, you risk dooming your book to the "Launch and Fizzle" pattern so many books fall into.

Online Author Marketing: Agented!

You may have been an unagented writer before, just trying to build a basic online brand (see yesterday's post) but now...

YOU DID IT!

You landed an agent. Nice work! You've got a blog with a few followers and you've done some guest posts here and there for other bloggers who've even returned the favor. You may have figured out The Twitter. The two platforms, through cross-linking, support one another.

Things feel a lot more concrete than they did when you were just hammering away at different projects. You've got one to really focus on, with some in the wings (your agent hopes).

Now that you have something specific to promote, whether sold or unsold, you should reevaluate your online strategy and perhaps expand into new platforms. Hopefully your agent can help you. For instance:

• Are you writing nonfiction as an expert in some area? You could join Quora and start answering questions there--it's a great way to build platform.
• Facebook. This is more complicated because everyone thinks they know how to do The Facebook. Most people have a Facebook page of some sort, but few have one that's really effective in building an online brand, (see here for some details). Think of a strategy for Facebook: what are you promoting? A single title? A series? You as an author?
• Flickr. If you're an artist or illustrator, Flickr is a great place to showcase your work and build stories--supplemental, perhaps, to your book--in a new way.

There are many more ways to build an online brand; your agent can and should help you with this strategy, although you shouldn't expect them to do it for you. If you're too busy for social media, see here. Apply to all social media platforms.

A word on oversharing: you're going on submission now. It's a nervewracking experience for all involved and it can be really frustrating. Don't blog about it. Don't tweet it. Don't write angsty poetry about it and post it to your Tumblr. Don't.

So in the agented stage you get an online presence with a little more flair, guided by your agent. You've also got a more focused message, since you'll have a project to promote. Go get 'em!

Online Author Marketing: Pre-Agent

On Friday, I participated in an amazing interactive interview on Krista Van Dolzer's Mother. Write. (Repeat.) Blog. One of the questions asked, concerning author online marketing, was too complex to discuss in the comments section:

How can a writer get the most out of the Internet at each stage of the writing journey (pre-agent, post-agent, pre-book release, post-book release)?

Since we couldn't talk about it on Friday, it'll be the subject of a series on the blog this week.

First, we'll cover pre-agent online marketing and platform-building tactics.

Since your online presence is the foundation for your online marketing in the future, you should have a strategy before you just jump on Blogger. What brand are you trying to build? What other people are already talking about what you want to? How can you possibly collaborate with them? Unfortunately, blogging about "your writing process" or "your publishing journey" is not going to cut it if you really want to build a following--too many are already doing it. For tips on blog topics, check out this post here (and the surrounding posts).

I suggest a blog and a twitter account as a good online foundation for an aspiring writer.

You don't have to be super active on Twitter as soon as you sign up. Go ahead and find 20 or 30 people to follow--a mix of writers you admire, agents, editors, and non-publishing people--and just lurk. Listen to conversations, jump in where you feel like you have something to say. As you get more comfortable with the platform, you can tweet more. A fully active account should be tweeting no fewer than three times a day.

The hashtags #askagent and #yalitchat are examples of ways to find others interested in the things you're writing about: both agents/editors and beta writers. You can search those terms on Twitter and read the transcripts of the chats, which are always full of great info.

A blog is another good way to get started building an online presence. As you'll see as you get your feet wet with Twitter, the writerly blogosphere is incredibly interconnected. Bloggers guest post, start series together, and share thoughts on books they loved (And hated). But here more than anywhere else you have to worry about oversharing.

Many writers serialize their work on their blogs. I cannot encourage you strongly enough to avoid that. Authors nearly always list "getting an agent" as the reason they put "teasers" on their blogs. But there is already a mechanism for showing your work to agents: the query. Trust that process; it is highly unlikely that an agent will just stumble on your blog. They usually find it by clicking links in a query. So why put it on the blog?

If you choose to do so anyway you may put yourself breach of the warranties and indemnities clause of the publishing contract that you haven't even signed yet. I like Krista's strategy: she has a widget on her sidebar that lists a logline for her book. That's interesting without crossing any lines. Kathleen Ortiz has a great author website post here that lists website elements you should focus on.

You should try to post about twice a week on your blog--a link with a caption is still a post, but try to make a habit of producing real content--between 100 and 400 words.

So what do you think? Any questions? Tomorrow we'll talk about changes you should make once you're an agented writer.

Oh, all right. I'll bite.

So, there's this blog post over here that was pretty incendiary re: Agents and their "money grabs" with authors who are self-publishing and using the agency to do so.

It was a...something...enough blog post to make a bunch of agents really mad in a "NU UH!" Sort of way. Like in a way that just makes one shake one's head and think "you just. don't. get it."

One thing she said struck me as particularly "not getting it," here:

But they don’t know the right answers in self-publishing. There isn’t an agent out there that has the savvy that Bella Andre, Joe Konrath, and Amanda Hocking have in self-publishing. Not a one.

This woman points out that authors are talking about agents and "what they're doing." I wish authors would stop talking about their agents and start talking to them (just in general, actually)--ask questions about how things will be done and ask the agent to explain commission break-downs if there are increases. If nothing else, you have a good resource on this blog (here, here, here, here, and here on this topic, among others).

You have no excuse to not have intelligent questions on this process--ask them of your agent. And if you're feeling squeamish and, by god, if you feel like the agent you're talking to is a sleaze or a moron, go elsewhere. Or publish online yourself; we're lucky to exist in a world where that is totally possible.

BUT.

Know also that knowledge of the self-publishing process is NOT step one. It's like Step .75. You get your book online and then what?

Amanda Hocking sold books by marketing books, and she researched marketing on Agent and Publishing Industry sites (and, by the way, is agented with a traditional book deal). All the moguls of self-publishing that people hold up as leaders of the MOVEMENT self-published and then spent thousands of hours, if not dollars, marketing the books.

If marketing is overlooked, whether you self-publish or you're going through an agency or ePublisher, there had better be marketing in place or all the "self-publishing savvy" in the world isn't going to get that book sold.

Agents know marketing. Just as many as are setting up publishing arms are setting up marketing initiatives to compliment them. And that is worth 15% just in and of itself.

It's an agent's full time job to deal with their clients' books, and it's not most author's full time jobs. It's a huge sacrifice that may never pay off, something, incidentally, that agents know well,

since we don't get paid until you do.

Facebook: Profile vs Page

In the comments section of the How-to-Social-Media yesterday, I saw someone reference "scrolling down to see vacation pics." They were talking about a Facebook profile page--where people can request and be approved to be your friend. But if we're talking about building your online brand, we're not talking about a Profile page.

Most people have a Profile page to connect with friends and family. It is NOT the type of page you want to set up as your "author" or public page.

If you're setting up any sort of public page: for your book, for you as an author, or any other sort of professional type thing, you want to set up a Facebook Fan Page. The differences:

• People just click "Like" to gain access to a page; they don't have to be approved the way you would a friend request on your Profile page.
• Your content should be related, although it doesn't have to strictly revolve around, the product or service you set the page up to promote. This means no personal pictures, no vacation uploads from your phone after your third mai-tai.

And Fan Pages, like a Profile Page, have some of the same tools to make your life easier:

• You can import a personal blog, so that when the blog updates so does your Facebook.
• All the same types of content is supported--you can add photos of, say, your book cover or a video of a reading or signing.
• You can link out to your website or to a buy link for whatever you're promoting.
• There is a "Wall" section where you and your followers can interact publicly, as well as messages where you can communicate privately.

Go here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to create your Facebook Fan Page--BUT WAIT.

Make sure you're doing so at the right time. If you don't have a book out in the next year (similar timeframe for other products: if you're not launching within a year, don't jump the gun), you probably don't want to start promoting it now--potential buyers will get fatigued. Twitter is a better, lower-commitment place to start if you're a couple of years out (we'll get to more on that).

Over the next few posts, we'll be talking more about Facebook, how to use it, and what its future looks like for commercial use. Stay tuned!!

Like?

There's been a lot of talk recently about the New Yorker's "shockingly successful" Facebook "Like" experiment in the last week or so.

The experiment was meant to test audience engagement: how much will your audience go through to get to your content? Because let's face it everything online is low-investment. In an environment where your audience is just casually browsing for perhaps a few minutes at a time, even expecting them to stop long enough to click a link or a Like is asking a lot. It's why people are so skeptical of paywalls like those put up by the Times (which has an awesome ad campaign, by the way).


So the New Yorker put a story written by Jonathan Franzen about David Foster Wallace up on their Facebook fan page (which has about 220,000 fans). It gained about 17,000 "likes" while it was up. Impressive! Very!

Until you consider that's (and I'm rounding up here) 8% of their fans. And these were the big guns. The names are huge, appeal to their audience, and DFW's new novel just came out. This was the perfect storm for "likes."

We say that 10% engagement of one's audience indicates a successful online presence (measured by action taken--"like" clicked, retweets, comments left). And one of the most famous brands in the world got 8%. What does this mean?

I think it means, first and foremost, that 10% is not as attainable a figure as it might at first appear. It also means that any audience engagement is impressive.

Most importantly, it means that you have to be really specific in your goals. What do you want your audience to do? You have literally one shot: the vast majority of The New Yorker's fans would click "like" once (to become a fan) but not twice, no matter the prize.

So get specific about your goals. If it's just to make friends, that's totally OK! That's the building stage. Later, you can mobilize those fans who've grown to trust you for more specific goals.

The Stuff That Really Doesn't Go On Ze Blog

Some things are just not interwebz material.

People may debate excerpts on ze blog. I'll reiterate here what I said in yesterday's comments: excerpts are usually part of a sales strategy. This assumes the book is for SALE (or orderable), whether via traditional or self publishing. If it's not pushing people to buy (NOW) or preorder, your excerpt is wasted. In my opinion and many others'.

But barring your copyrighted content, anything is blog fodder! Blog your LIFE! Your PASSIONS!! Right?!?!

YES. Well, no. Almost.

Just because you're blogging about "your life/passions" doesn't mean you don't have to filter. Someone likened blogging to "reality TV" and "car crashes" in the comments, because it's raw and emotional and you can't look away. Eh...not really.

"Feelings" don't belong on your blog. OK, half of them do. The "YAY This awesome thing!!" or "How cool is this?!" feelings are great for blogging. But the feelings that I most associate with car crashes and Reality TV (regret, sadness, anger, etc.) should never make their way onto the internet--anywhere.

Back to the brand. While no one is happy/professional all the time, your blog/Twitter/Facebook should read like you are. Moments when you're down are moments when you need your friends around you, yes. You just need to TAWLK. But your Twitter followers and blog readers are not your friends (barring the ones that were friends first). They're your Twitter followers and your blog readers.

You love them, but it's, like, meta-love. It's binary code love. Not suitable for heavy emotional stuff--too much is lost in translation. Just think about all those text messages that have come across wrong at one time or another. Do you really want that happening on an interwebz scale?? No.