Finish the year with a pen name...

This post will be the last one for the year.

Yes, 2009 is drawing to a close and there is no way that I will have time to write a post on Christmas eve or through January...what with all the travelling we are doing...Auckland, Whangarei, Dargaville, Hamilton. (contact me in sidebar if you want to catch up.)

Looking back at this year it has been packed, eventful and interesting on the Fiction front. I wish that I could have got more writing done...but the learning I have done around blogs, conferences, marketing...have generated lots of interesting side trips...and some ideas to follow up in 2010.

Over summer I hope to get reacquainted with the characters I have abandoned and finish their story. There are a few other stories pushing to get out too.

I hope to get a handle on social media and organise my time/life better as well. (news years resolution...vain hope, as I never keep them...)

And I have a pile of Christmas reading...especially all the books I have bought for the family before I wrap them...(well you have to check they are suitable, heeheeheehee.)

Over Summer if you are looking for some extra reading. Check out Procrastinating Writer. She has published a list (43) of the best articles of 2009 and there are some great posts in there.

And if you want to have some fun thinking up pen names check out Nathan Bransfords blog he has a great discussion going on the pros and cons of pen names...take your middle name and the street you grew up on...

Merry Christmas

Ann Statehiwaytwo

pic is from http://www.123greetings.com/events/christmas_world_day/summer_christmas/summer17.html

Branding with coffee and gin...

This week’s blog post looks at some of the latest comments on branding being talked about in the fiction writing world.

Jane at Dear Author has been looking at book branding. She has posted an interesting article on publisher brands and author brands....with a host of spot the difference visuals...She asks the question

With an increasing number of books on the market, the biggest challenge a reader has is finding a good book to read. Do you rely on Author branding? Do you look to see who the publisher is? Does it matter to you? How long does it take you to associate something (either negative or positive) to a book brand, whether it be author or publisher (i.e., 1 book, 2 books, etc.)?

And the comments came thick and fast...there is much food for thought in our own sphere of children’s books. I know authors who grab each new Gecko Press book released by Julia Marshall. We don’t know the authors but the expectation that the standard will be high is the pick up factor. Great publisher branding!

Guy LeCharles Gozalez of Loudpoet predicts that the publishers are going to increase their publisher brands...i.e. become more visual on the cover (think orange and white penguin classics)

Guy has an interesting discussion going after his post about book publishing being a business decision verses an artistic decision.

Something I’m sure all authors must mull over...Am I an arteest or am I in it for the money?

If you are in it for the money(ha.ha.), Coree Silvera has a post on her blog - marketlikeachick on marketing yourself as your main product...this post has been tweeted all over the place....(ahhh new verbs... )

Personal branding is now more important than ever in communities. People are buying you. If I don’t like you, I’m not only NOT going to from you, but I am blocking you and telling all my friends what I think of you too. (Hmmph!) That’s the power of social networking. We all talk and word of mouth can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

Editorial Ass (aka Moonrat) has done a fabulous series of posts on The Perfect Author, the Dream Editor and she has just finished up with the Absolute Agent. Moonrat is ‘a tell it like it is’ writer. Her blog is one of the gems out there.

I love her description of herself in the About Me sidebar....coffee and gin survivalist...that’s me going into the last week of school...various end of year shows to get kids to rehearsals and performances, Christmas present angst and my heart is sinking just thinking about Christmas music practice...I might locate my spouse by Christmas...I think he lives here? (Year End projects mean he works late... leaves early...hopes his washing is done and there is food in the fridge...)

Yup... what I want for Christmas is a wife!

maureen

pic is called Bombay Gin!

A trailer of Christmas presents...

Now we are in December, with the countdown to the end of school, I feel it is now time to look towards the Christmas busy season.

After all it is December...I was annoyed when I saw some shops putting up Christmas decorations in October....surely they could have waited or was the recession recovery (?) spurring them on to wring the dollars out of cash strapped pockets....

So Christmas....what does the busy author need at Christmas?

More time to write, Someone to look after the kids....food you don’t have to spend ages to prepare.... a holiday...A book contract or even two.....

As this is supposed to be an author marketing blog I will make you a present of a few links that have interested me this week.

Alan Rinzler has posted a great article on 9 tips for successful author readings. He covers tips and tricks to do a presentation successfully ...as ever, I love reading peoples responses to the posts because they can add so much more to the discussion...one commenter said she had a great response to her reading by putting a sign up in the mall carpark! Another said giving away chocolate always helps....

Staying with Alan, he recently examined the book trailer in an insightful post on their use in marketing books.

Alan has linked to The Book Trailer Blog which specialises in the nuts and bolts of book trailers....If you dare... scroll down and view the Sense and Sensibility and Sea monsters book trailer from the same person who brought you Jane Austen and Zombies...or skip it to see what Neil Gaiman is doing with book trailers...he is coming to the New Zealand International Arts Festival. I must must get my ticket for his event!

Zombies are everywhere...... Recently I was on the judging team for the Jack Lasenby Writing Award that we founded when I was convenor of the Wellington Children’s Book Association. (judges report on the blog.)
We had our biggest group to date this year with 149 entries ... and so many of them featured Zombies. However the winner didn’t. I had the pleasure of attending with Jack Lasenby and Louise Davies, our current convenor, the prize giving ceremony at Scots College, where we presented Raphael Kidman with his award and if you think the name is familiar you are right! Dame Fiona was there to witness her grandson’s success. We had five highly commended and two of these also received their certificates from Jack at Scots.

Tonight is the Wellington Children’s Book Association Christmas Quiz. We hold it at the Southern Cross pub in Wellington in the back room...If you are in Wellington tonight come along and test your knowledge of children’s books in a fun evening.

Yesterday I grabbed the NZ Listener for the big review on the must read children’s books of 2009 and wished that David Larsen had picked a few more Kiwi books...however almost all of Gecko Press' list made it into the top 50 and Maria Gill (Spinning Gold alumni) also made it with her super book on Rangitoto.

The judges for the New Zealand Post Children’s Book awards have been announced and they are Rosemary Tisdale, Trevor Agnew, and Ruth McIntyre....lots of Christmas reading for them all.

For those of you on Facebook the following video is for you.

Happy Advent
maureen

pic is from a book trailer website

Vanity Fair?

This week the big news in publishing is Harlequin. If you are a Harlequin author or know one then the amount of emails in your inbox this week about the future of publishing, Harlequin style, will probably have topped 500.

Every major blogger in the industry has commented on the situation and every one of them has had record comments wading into the fray. (Read Jane Friedman for an objective overview)

Harlequin is a HUGE publishing company. Last week it launched an e-publishing arm Carina Press.

One of the first of the big publishers to do so...showing they were forward thinking etc etc (Harlequin have always been innovative and the Romance authors are amongst the most business savvy writers you will ever meet.)

This week however Harlequin stuffed up. They launched Harlequin Horizons...their vanity publishing arm.

So if we are looking at purely business, they have the staff, they have the resources, why should they select the best manuscripts...why not just charge the writers fees to publish their book and split the royalties....

The backlash from the authors and writers associations has been huge with Harlequin changing their Harlequin Horizons website hourly and today abandoning it altogether for a different name. They are definitely trying to distance themselves from their vanity publishing mistake...unfortunately...the mud is sticking.

If your manuscript gets rejected by Harlequins regular imprint you have the chance to still get published provided you pay for everything up front.

Now if you self publish you are in total control of the whole process. You own everything.

If you vanity publish, someone else takes control over the process because you don’t have the time or the will to do it yourself. You pay all the bills but you don’t fully own the finished product as the publisher takes a cut of the royalties.

So if your book takes off (a rare thing with vanity publishing as the publisher has no incentive to market your book because they have already been paid their fee upfront, so it’s all down to author marketing making the difference) the vanity publisher then takes the credit and a chunk of the royalties...and you paid all the bills....

You have to go into this with your eyes wide open and that is the Harlequin authors concern, along with the devaluing of the Harlequin brand. (After all they have standards don’t they?)

The authors (and agents) are right to be mad...(actually mad is rather mild for what is happening out there.)

At the beginning of this week Harlequins new imprint Horizons was promising that the books would look the same and be bought everywhere that you could buy a Harlequin book. There would be no difference... now they are trying to drop Harlequin altogether from the imprint...aware that they have blundered.

And while everyone is feeling sorry for the Harlequin writers out there...the Christian writers got caught as well in the same sort of horror story....who will be next?

maureen

pic is a pair of vanity shoes......you could kick with them, throw them, see if they fit, choose one over the other...lots of associations with the post...

Researching... the good bits

Tony Eldridge has a book marketing blog which has a loyal following. He has posted an article which is all about creating an army of people to go out there and market your book.

This message is something that John McIntyre of The Children’s Bookshop in Kilbirnie always says to the guests at a Book Launch. Go out there and promote your friends book!

So in the spirit of friendship... I have just finished Banquo’s Son which I bought for New Zealand Book Month and was holding as a present for finishing the CNZ report...which I haven’t finished and it is all Tania’s fault. I opened THE BOOK.

I love researching, writing the books are hard but the researching is fun. I have and still have a fascination for Mars and I hope that when I finish writing the current novel the fascination for the research will come through the story the way that Tania (T K Roxborogh)has managed to put eleventh century Scotland into her tale of love and loyalty.

It is the little touches that show through, the way a character refers to a home county which led me to figure out the clan system. Useful to know when your clan is McKenzie...and that you could be in deep trouble if you met a Highlander...Yup. The Highland Martial arts with claymore and dirk also get a look in, as do wolves and why they survived so long up in Scotland.(ick but understandable.)

So I hope that I can weave some interesting facts into my story about Mars and exploration...the hardest part of writing a story set in the near future...well in 50 years... is the speed of technology now. I took a break from Mars to work on the conference and assorted other things and that meant that I took a break from the research so diving back into it this week and getting back up to speed with new inventions etc I discover that I will have to tweak the story yet again to take into account new discoveries.

Sometimes I wonder if I have set myself too hard a project and then I find another bit of juicy information...

I think it is fascinating that all the things we take for granted now, cell phones and the morphing of these... computers and the morphing of these into interactive devices, were all born from the Apollo Space Programme.

So what will we get from the Constellation Space Programme?

Just as I think I have it figured out they invent it...touch screen technology has gone virtual and you don’t need to wear funny glasses to use it... With SixthSense now anything can be a computer interface, your fridge... your newspaper...your cereal packet...just aim the little laser projector at any flat surface and push those virtual buttons... and now the developers are working with Samsung to put it into a phone...dang...back to the inspiration board.

How interests can run away with you...

Back to the topic in hand...being November...it is Nanowrimo - National Novel Writing Month.

My international board has gone very quiet as everyone disappears to write that novel...that means that in the next two months publishers are going to be swamped with all those manuscripts...so while everyone gets excited about pulling all nighters to write their daily 10,000 words you could spend this time in applying for grants....

I have just stumbled upon a reference to Mira’s List...and it is worldwide...yippee for us in the southern hemisphere.

Alexis Grant wrote this about Mira and then went on to interview her.

I recently discovered a fabulous blog, Mira’s List, which helps writers, artists and other creative thinkers find grants, fellowships, residencies and more resources. Who’s the woman, I wondered, who compiled this valuable information for free and shared it with everyone lucky enough to stumble across her site?

Alexis gives us a great insight into this interesting woman, who is quietly going about the business of changing the artists and writers world for better,

And finally I heard through the grapevine that ASB were most impressed with the entries into their WordBank competition and that over 3000 letters were received for over 100 Kiwi children’s authors and illustrators.

Good on yer mates!

maureen

four views of the planet....

Being Social...the latest trend...

This week I have been mulling over trends. As the mailbox begins to fill up with junk mail advertising pre Christmas sales and this years hot trends for presents. To live a fulfilled life...it’s all about having the latest gadget...I was interviewing children this week about Christmas and they basically quoted their want list from the Dick Smith catalogue, starting with a new laptop and cell phone...these were 9yr olds!

I remember thinking at nine that a holiday would be fantastic and maybe a new book...

This week Publishers Weekly came out with a very comprehensive survey on What Teens Want based on a surveyTeenreads.com took with over 3000 teens. There is some surprising information in this report and some very valuable information to authors- for instance this little quote

We asked teens how they like to interact with their favorite authors. More than eight out of 10 (85%) visit the Web sites of their favorite authors for information about upcoming titles, and 65% would like to interact with an author at an in-store event. Other choices: library events (55%), book festivals (54%), in-school events (44%) and blogs (32%); and book and reader blogs (31%). Social networking sites like Facebook, Good Reads and My Space come in at 19%, lower than we expected

The kind of information that this article is stuffed full of should be passed around among all the children’s lit authors. It is invaluable.

So if you were wondering about whether you need to up your game in the online world the answer is Yes because generally where the teens lead the mid grade follow...after they get over the interactive fairy and pony web games.

You do need a website and some sort of interactive presence. Social media sites? Maybe a presence there, but not an all consuming live my life daily there presence, according to how I am interpreting the report.

Here in New Zealand we are lucky in that we do have time to mull over what we might do, and or how to approach this social media online public lifestyle. Our teens generally follow on a bit later from North American teens.

The speed of change means that we need to be giving some serious thought to our online presence.

Colleen Coble, multi published author, wrote a guest post on Michael Hyatts blog about using Social media to build the author brand. She has an interesting list of things that she is doing with social media and how it is impacting her visibility in the world. She has some good advice which is worth taking the time to think about. And the following video shows the speed of change that we have to be aware of....

In another trend, yesterday, Random House announced that they had bought Longacre Press.

I saw the press release on Beatties BookBlog...No one saw that coming a month ago.

It does change the shape of children’s publishing here in New Zealand, with only one independent left.

Much food for thought this week...

maureen

pic is the cover of my business card...blurry sorry...it is the barred spiral nebula.

The five reasons to do it....

Today I had lunch out, without a child chaperone, with two author friends. It was wonderful just briefly feeling like a human being - able to enjoy lunch in a cafe without that nagging guilt...is my child going to throw up... be impossibly demanding... hog the conversation...spill something across the table.... Of course the other authors are mothers too but they weren’t bringing their kids along for a working lunch in a cafe...and neither today was I. Yippee.

So at the end of the working lunch, one author leans over and says...” Pippa you have another book coming out... you need a website...” (the famous words that Fifi said to me 18 months ago)

“I’ve been thinking about it,” came the reply. This started the discussion of author websites.

“I blog every Thursday,” I said

“Its Thursday today, what are you going to blog about today?”

“I have no idea,” I replied, but the conversation started me thinking...

Over the last year of learning about marketing for authors these are my five essential points to putting together an author website...and how you go about it...

1. Research.

Have a look at what other authors are doing, especially in your genre. Decide what you like and what you don’t... Make a list. Some things you will need straight away...some you can work up to...

Have a look at my link list on the right. In the cool websites lists... there are a range of authors who are doing a superb job with their websites. Take a tour...

2. Who is the website for? Children? Adults? Other writers? Potential publishers and agents?

As Pippa is a children’s author... the content and language of the website matters as children researching her and her work will be ‘googling’ her name first. This is not the place to be showing pictures of your holidays at the Sunshine ‘au natural’ park.

3. Have a budget. It could be zero or thousands.

If it is zero...look at the biggest impact you yourself can do...learn techniques on free blogs. Blogging software is simple to use, it’s drag and drop technology. You don’t need to know any computer languages. You can play in private while you get the skills to put a website together...or play in public which is what I do...(coz I like learning)

If you have money, talk to a website designer about what you want...but be careful. A site that has lots of flash and whizzy stuff can take ages to download. Studies show that people are prepared to wait only about 7 seconds for a site to download...and many not even that....If you need a degree in website design to upload new content on your site it probably isn’t for you. Clean (uncluttered) easy to navigate around works every time.

3. Authors must have...names of their books, what they are about, where to buy them and some way of being contacted.

Remember that this is your public brochure to the world. If you are waiting to be published then find some other point of difference which will be of interest to a potential publisher who might be ‘googling’ you after they see your manuscript.

If you write for the Young Adult market consider having a myspace page as well. This is all part of your marketing. I recently heard of a YA author who was turned down by a publisher because they had no ‘social media’ presence. If myspace is where your readers are... that is where you should be.

A free email address can be the difference between getting a paying workshop job or making a manuscript sale.

4. When looking for a dot com name...look around for the best deals available.

You can set up a free blog and change the domain name to a dot com for very little money. There are deals out there for ten years for around $10 US...and with the exchange rate at the moment that’s almost $1.20 NZ a year (worth thinking about) If you invest some time in a free website and get a domain name, It doesn’t look any different from one that has been designed costing lots of bucks...Check out Ribbonwood designs (http://ribbonwooddesigns.com/) to see what I mean. (hi trish...love your site)

5. Be committed to updating your site regularly.

Old, out of date information is a real turn off. It shows your readers that you don’t care that much about them.

Tell them where they can buy your latest book...have competitions or extra content just for them or recipes...songs...etc that inspired the book...talk about the hidden meanings in chapter 5... Make your site fun, interactive and interesting. Not only does this show the reader that your books might be just great to buy... it keeps the search engines noticing that your site is updated, which moves your page up the rankings on a general search....Would you rather be on page 1, of the google search on your name, or page 20?

Here endeth the lesson

On another note - The Spinning Gold team are very excited for three people who in the last week have had their manuscripts accepted for publication as a result of the Pitch Slam at the conference.

We are toasting you all...

maureen

pic...the seedling...because it's the beginning of a new life...(online life)

P.S. Jon from CBICLUBHOUSE put together this video on how easy it was to get started yesterday... great minds think alike... so take it away Jon....(and to think that when I started blogging 18 months ago posting video was so out there......)