Forgiveness and Group Branding

I am guilty.

I am guilty of not having a set routine, of not setting goals to check off, of procrastination...which is why this blog post is late.

Forgive me.

So what have I found to get you thinking for the next week.

The Author as Publisher...this thought was revolving around my head as I hung up the washing on the first sunny day here in two weeks. The Wall Street Journal has a good overview of what is happening with Amazon moving into the publishing market. They use several author experiences as case studies. In particular the royalty amount Amazon is paying (70%) which makes it worthwhile to look at what they are offering to authors and how this changes the publishing landscape.

With all these possibilities in mind Tony Eldridge retweeted a blog post from October last year on marketing plans with a multiple pronged attack. This is a handy list and as he says you don’t have to do all of it. One of his bullet points is joint ventures. Tony had already posted an excellent article on the synergy of working with other authors on a joint venture. Each week as I research my blog post I am finding more of these author collective initiatives. They are a very good idea.

Create a Group Presence

If you are finding the whole author online presence very daunting, get together with a few friends and create a group presence. This divides up the work each author has to do online. It promotes collective branding as a group. It can give you wider exposure.

A while ago I talked with Stacy Nyikos about the class of 2k8 and how that was set up and how it operates. It is such a good idea that it has morphed branding on its own with 2k9, and 2k10....

In a collective author venture everybody has input into the brand. The brand promotes itself collectively and individually. The brand provides speakers to events, a fan club to promote them, a built in author blog tour....

You can be as big a presence as you want and can cope with, from Readergirlz with their video TV channel to PBJunkies, writers with its focus on parent events.

(Note: As I was loading up the links to the blog I found this one for dystopian writers, courtesy of P J Hoover of Spectacle writers....)

In Facebook land I am part of a collective of writers experimenting with writing a group book. We are still developing the story but alongside we are brainstorming ways that we can bring children along for the ride online. We are going to have to think seriously about collective and individual branding the project. This all seems like adult work...when at the moment the collective energy and camaderie has us feeling like the kids at the back of the class having a secret plan and executing it while the teacher (publisher) is not looking. When we grow up and put the whole project on a more serious footing, it is still going to be fun given the personalities involved....

So having confessed I spend too much time researching social networking...Chip McGregor of McGregor Literary has a timely reminder with a guest post by Rob Eagar of what an author should be doing with the 10 plus hours they spend online.

Following on from this is a good post by Mike Duran on routine and how this can benefit an author’s career. He makes the point that he never understood why his agents asked him how fast he wrote a novel...and why that fact is important to know.

This month is SoCNoC. (Southern Cross Novel Challenge)Yes, here in the Southern Hemisphere we have our own NaNoWrMo (National Novel Writing Month) in a winter month. Kiwiwriters.org are organising it and people from all around the world are taking part which goes to show that authors like a goal and need a whip cracking challenge to apply butt in chair.

I attended Ruth Paul’s Two Little Pirates Book launch last night, at The Children’s Bookshop. The publishers representative commented in her speech that so proud are they of this book they had ordered 19,000 copies to be printed and distributed in Australia and Canada as well as here in New Zealand. This is a well deserved accolade for one of our best writer illustrators. Two Little Pirates is gorgeous!

Over on Craicerplus (my amplify page)

Marketing Tips for Authors 10 Tips on Preparing A Speech

The Number One Habit of Highly Creative People

The Three Best Takeaways from Book Expo America (this is a must read on copyright and royalty changes)

Author Marketing Experts inc.Free Toys and Downloads for Authors

Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize longlist...great lit for under 10s

Enjoy

maureen

Pic is the cover of Two Little Pirates

And the theme this week is....

This week I want to take some time to explore theme weeks as it pertains to author marketing. (finally getting back to reason I blog every week)

In particular I want to introduce you to Readergirlz and the YALSA theme week.

Readergirlz are a group of young adult authors who were looking for a way to connect with their readers..thinking teenage girls, where they could talk about writing...books....inspiration and reaching out to others in the community. The Readergirls Divas the five host authors have fourteen books between them and are active bloggers and social media players as they do a superb job at connecting with their audience. Check out their website and have a look at their support crew...

This week the Readergirls have got behind YALSA the Young Adult Library Services Association Teen Read Week. The theme is Read Beyond Reality and the Divas are hosting live chats throughout the week. They are also hosting Justine Labalestier on the blog and they have an author in residence on their website.

Take some time to see how this group of authors have used all sorts of ways to market to their audience and promote others and themselves in side by side marketing....and making it cool to be a Readergirl...there are also spin off groups affiliated with them.

Here is their promo trailer for the live chat sessions.

By having a theme week or getting behind and promoting a theme week for someone else...there is a win win situation set up for marketing. The bang is bigger for the bucks and it is spread further and wider than just one persons blog post saying ‘and I really support this worthy cause.’ Of course like Readergirlz you can have a whale of a good time promoting the cause and yourself along with it.

The other interview of note is on Shelli Johannes Market My Words blog with Michael Stearns of Upstart Crow Literary.

Upstart Crow has been in business Ten Weeks! In that time they have doubled their agent staff and sold six big deals. Shelli interviewed Michael about the three things every author should and must do to promote themselves and their books.

This was interesting as first up Michael said a web presence and yes he googles potential author clients to see how web savvy they are. One of the best things he has seen is groups of debut authors like The Class of 2K8 and 2K9 which I have talked about before and Readergirlz getting together to promote themselves.

As Michael says

Seriously, in web searches I look to see what I can learn about the author—crazy as a soup sandwich? (as Harlan Ellison might say); secret author of porn?; star of her own reality television series? It’s all part of the research to see who I am dealing with. As for “platforms,” If the core audience for your platform is 500 people who read your blog, that’s great but hardly something that will sell a books. If your core audience is, however, five million, then that’s something else entirely.

Finally here is a link to the New Yorker who currently has a sharply humorous piece on author marketing just to keep it all in perspective.

have a themed week...(CNZ report theme for me)

maureen

I know I said I’d never...

Post more than once a week and here I am with another post BUT
I thought that I would share this as it relates in a way to the last two posts and the mini marketing series I am doing for authors....

Readergirlz are a group of YA (Young Adult) writers who have got together to share a website and market their books on MySpace etc. They host on line chats, do school visits...all the things that the average YA author in the states has to do to get noticed. Scary stuff for us down under but it will come...They are hosting an online chat series for a week as part of their promotion and TeenRead Week.

So here is a YouTube video promoting their online author chat series...


Now I am posting this to show what is currently happening in promotion and marketing YA books by the authors themselves.

I dropped into Brian Falkner’s website this morning. Such a cool web site and now that Brian’s latest book ‘The Tomorrow Code’ is being released in the states...I wonder if he is going to have to ramp up his already cool website for a US audience.
Congratulations Brian, on the great Kirkus review.

maureen