author publicity – The Writers in Residence

Social Media and Me

by Linda O. Johnston

Leprokhan. klee-4163741_640

First off: Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone, and the best of luck to you!

Now, into my topic of today: social media and me. And I have to admit I’m far from being an expert. But does that keep me away from some of the sites? No!

I’m always on my computer, or nearly so. Yes, I spend most of that time writing and editing and pondering the fiction I’m writing.

But then there’s social media and me. I spend too much time on Facebook, though I admit I’m not good at it. I look at other people’s posts and comment on them. On my own home page I’m likely to post stuff about anything special about the day, especially if there’s something going on about animals, particularly dogs. Most recently it was National K9 Veterans Day. Why? Because I’m a full-time dog lover.

I belong to Facebook groups, too. Some involving writing, of course, but that’s not all. Can you guess the topic in which I’ve joined the most groups? Well, what if I told you there are lots of Facebook groups featuring Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, the dog breed I’m addicted to? Right!

I do have my own website: www.LindaOJohnston.com And one of these days I’ll add an author page to Facebook. I hope.

I also get on social media to help promote my published novels. Yes, I do that on Facebook, especially when there’s something new coming out. This year, I’ll have two new Harlequin Romantic Suspense books published, one in August and one in October. You can bet I’ll let the world know via Facebook then.

And then there’s Writerspace. I subscribe to the site, which calls itself Communities for Writers and Readers. They do a lot of promotion for me. There’s a monthly Author News newsletter that I always participate in. I can do blogs there, and have new books featured, and participate in their monthly contest.

You can figure out, since I’m here, that I like to blog. A couple of the sites where I used to blog regularly have shut down, such as Killer Characters. I still blog on Killer Hobbies each Wednesday, but now there are only two of us posting there. I also blogged on the InkSpot blog fairly regularly, but that was one helping to promote books published by Midnight Ink, one of my former mystery publishers–that now has gone out of business.

What about other social media sites? I haven’t really gotten into them. I have a Twitter account but never use it except to read others’ posts. I also have a Goodreads account but am seldom there. I don’t do Instagram–or really much of anything else.

I admire people who do more than me in social media. And I’m generally open to trying something different as long as I don’t have to spend much time learning to do it.

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So–What do you think of Social Media? What’s your favorite site and why? What do you like to post? How often? And do you think it helps your writing and selling?

The Long and Short of Why I Write Short Stories in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series

by M. Louisa Locke

MPdandydetectsforweb In the spring of 2010, just six months after I published Maids of Misfortune, the first novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, I published a short story in that series called Dandy Detects. Besides the fact that I wanted to give a character from the first book, a young Boston Terrier named Dandy, the chance to star, my primary reason for writing the story at that time was for marketing purposes.

It is hard to imagine, but in 2010, the indie author movement was in its infancy, there were only a few indie authors achieving much visible success, and selling books at 99 cents was the new—and very controversial— strategy that these authors recommended. Their logic, which has proven quite valid, was that a reader would be more likely to take a chance on an unknown author if the price of the book was low enough. Then, if the person enjoyed the book, they would be more likely to buy the author’s other books at full price.

However, with only one book out, which I didn’t want to discount, writing a short story seemed the most sensible alternative. Dandy Detects became my loss leader and did its job more successfully than I could have imagined. After it was featured in Kindle Nation Daily, one of the first ebook promotional sites, enough people went on to buy Maids of Misfortune at full price to place it on Amazon’s historical fiction best seller list, where it remained for the next year. Dandy Detects also continued to do well, selling over 30,000 copies since it was published.

In time, I no longer had to rely on a short story as my primary marketing tool. With more books in my series, I started to take advantage of promotional sites like BookBub where I could temporarily discount my full-length books to attract new readers to the series. Next, I made Maids of Misfortune, as the first in my series, free, and it now acts as my permanent loss leader.

That doesn’t mean I have stopped writing shorter-form stories. It just means I am writing these stories because it gives me a good deal of pleasure to have a medium where I can develop stories for the minor characters in the series. As of this date, I now have seven short stories and three novellas in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series (compared to seven full-length novels.)

As a reader, one of the reasons I have always enjoyed mystery series, for example Louise Penny’s series set in Three Pines, is the continuing cast of characters that are introduced along the way. Whether these characters are family members, neighbors, co-workers, or local officials, they make the stories richer as they introduce humor, conflict, and even romance into the basic mystery plot.

Yet, as an author, I discovered that minor characters can slow down the plot too much if I give them free reign. It’s difficult to balance writing a well-plotted mystery, with well-developed main characters, within a rich historical setting, and my historical mysteries are already fairly long for this sub-genre—coming in at between 100,000 and 140,000 words. This means I really can’t afford to develop my minor characters as much as I want to within these novels, particularly since there are so many of them! My main protagonists, Annie and her husband Nate, run the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse, which currently has three servants and nine boarders. And these twelve minor characters also have family and friends, who often appear as minor characters as well.

My solution has been to give some of these characters their own published stories.

MPMoffetsforweb For example, in Maids of Misfortune, I had created two elderly dressmakers who lived in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse. One of these sisters talked all the time, the other never said a word. And that was about all a reader learned of them in that first book. But I had developed a whole history for them and I wanted my readers to learn that backstory. So, in my second short story, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, I gave them a minor mystery to solve that helped reveal a good deal about their past as well as their current occupation.

This desire to expand upon a minor character has also been behind my novellas—which in truth each started as a short story that just sort of grew. In Violet Vanquishes a Villain, I was curious about why Annie and Nate’s sister-in-law, Violet, was so hostile to the idea of women having a career. In my second novella, Kathleen Catches a Killer, it was the tension between Kathleen Hennessey, the young Irish boardinghouse maid, and her beau, the police officer, Patrick McGee, that I wanted to explore.

Thankfully, fans of the series seem to get as much enjoyment out of reading about these characters as I do in writing about them. In fact, a number of the reviews of the sixth book in my series, which was set mostly on the University of California Berkeley campus, complained that they had missed hearing about boardinghouse residents and what they were up to back across the Bay.

That’s why I wrote one of my latest short stories, Beatrice Bests the Burglar. Beatrice O’Rourke is the boardinghouse cook, and a great favorite of series fans. In this story, as she spends the day reminiscing, I was able to feature what I consider a major character in the series, the boardinghouse itself.

MPrsz_omalley_cover_1600x2560 Finally, I write these stories so I can explore historical themes in more detail. In Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, I addressed the anti-Chinese movement in the city, and in Dandy Delivers, I looked at the plight of the city’s newsboys. My most recent short story, Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery, let me portray the difficulties a poor widowed woman in 1880s San Francisco would have faced, trying to raise children in a crowded two-room apartment––difficulties that seemed all too real as I wrote this story in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In each of these cases, if I had gone off in this kind of detail on these subjects in one of the full-length novels, I might very well have lost a reader’s attention or weakened the effectiveness of the mystery plot. Instead, I get to give readers something inexpensive to read while they patiently wait for my next full-length novel and to make a little money for myself in the process.

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mlouiselocke_crm_small Louisa Locke, a retired professor of U.S. and Women’s History, is the author of the USA Today best-selling cozy Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. This series features Annie, a young boardinghouse keeper, and Nate Dawson, a local San Francisco lawyer, as they investigate crimes with the help of their friends and family in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse. Not content with just exploring the past, Locke also helped create an open source, multi-author science fiction series called the Paradisi Chronicles. You can find out more about Locke’s books from both of these series at https://mlouisalocke.com.

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This article was posted for M. Louisa Locke by Jackie Houchin (Photojaq)

A Fish out of Water

By Jackie Houchin

A journalist among published book authors…what am I doing here?

I’m a “Writer In Residence” in a book emporium with only a pencil and pad and a rampant curiosity about everyone and everything around me – all of them possible subjects and mysteries to write about for the weekly (daily) news readers.

My newspaper articles (back in the day) were flashes in the night. Written fast, submitted, run through processors onto newsprint, placed in supermarket stands, picked up by semi-disinterested shoppers for a quarter, a buck, or even for free. And then gone; in the trash can, recycle bin, as puppy papers or to line a bird cage. (Does anyone have birds in cages anymore? Hmmm…. I must research and interview someone and write about that!!)

fish-octo — I have a tentacle in a hundred things!

Today, my daily (hourly?) posts are on Facebook – yes, I know, that gobbler-of-time social media outlet that most people have a love/hate relationship with. I love it. I enjoy posting a variety of things on my “timeline page.” I share tips (how to make cookies either crisp or chewy) & fun facts (12 million adult coloring books were sold in 2015). I talk about people who do marvelous things (like my fellow writers), post upcoming events (Baskin & Robbins 31st-of-the-month discounted ice cream), and tell my friends and family what I am doing that is ho-hum or adventuresome.

And if you know me well, you also know I post a lot of things that I learn in my Bible study reading. And photos…. whoa, do I post photos. (Throwbacks from my photographer and photo-journalist days.)

But again… flashes in the night. Sure, you can scroll down to see former Facebook posts, but any more, about 10 days is all you can see without major effort.

My fellow fish in the sea of writing, Writers In Residence in particular, have finished products that are enduring; books bound in soft or hard covers, given as gifts, re-read, treasured, shared among friends, and at the very least, end up on Friends of Library book shelves or even at yard sales at discounted prices to be bought and re-read again.

Flashes in the night versus beloved tomes held erect by sturdy bookends. (Sigh) But we are all valuable, as I discovered recently.

Our Writers In Residence (formerly Wednesday Women Writers), had a brainstorming lunch-meeting about our blog. (I was taking notes, figuring in the back of my mind what kind of articles could come from it.) The others were discussing how to promote their books, encourage reading in general, and inspire others to write and write well. And entertain. We all want to entertain in some way – to inspire, enlighten, and make readers ponder… or laugh.

Hey… did you hear the one about why the French like to eat snails? It’s because they hate fast food! Get it? FAST food, SLOW snails?*

Or… How many cars does it take to fill a mall with shoppers? Why, a whole lot, of course!

Yeah….
About being the odd man (woman) out…I actually feel comfortable among my book writing and selling sisters. And if I can promote them, inspire them, write about them or their books, I will. (Look forward in the next months for some blog posts in which I feature these WWWs, or WIRs – you know, the talented, passionate, fun, interesting friends in our little lake of scribes.)

Well, if you will pardon this stream of consciousness post, I promise to do better next time. Meanwhile….

1) Check out my fellow writers (here and on their websites)

2) Buy and read their books (Amazon or other places)

3) Write reviews about their books (Amazon or Goodreads, etc.)

4) Tell your friends about them and this blog

5) Link our posts to your Facebook or Twitter page

6) And comment, oh please comment, on our posts (it’s how we know you are out there!). And it will delight us so much!

Okay, time for a swim among all the other amazing and eclectic fishes in the sea. SPLASH! Notice that we are all swimming in the same direction.

(Can you find me? Color me different, but blended in.)

*Joke submitted by Richard Pool.

(PS: If you don’t see a comments box, or an icon to Facebook or Twitter or a “like” and “follow” us button, GO TO THE TOP OF THIS PAGE (or any of the posts), click on the title (it will change to blue for a fraction of a second), and then………… Voila! All those possibilities are right here below.

Publicity Responsibilities versus Author Payment

An interesting article appeared in the January 2010 issue of The Writer. Author M.J. Rose suggested that book authors should be compensated for publicity duties. Since the marketing effort is no longer born by the publisher, revenues should be more equitably split.

Read what the WinRs have to say and then let us know what you think!

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Jacqueline Vick self-published her children’s book, Logical Larry. She has several mystery manuscripts making the rounds.

I hadn’t really considered this issue before, assuming that advances were destined to be spent on marketing, but Ms. Rose’s comments made me wonder if I’d been going with an outdated assumption.

Her two suggestions in the article were to allow authors to subtract marketing expenses from their book advance so they could collect royalties sooner and to give athors a highter royalty rate.

I’m a big fan of “buy in”, and if authors saw a benefit to spending those hard earned dollars on marketing (other than possible increased sales) then more authors might be effective at selling more books–a benefit to publishers.

Why not a tiered royalty system to give writers something to work for? This system has been used to incentify sales people for decades.

Would this system keep publishers from purchasing as many manuscripts? I don’t see why. There would be more opportunities to earn revenue.

That being said, publishers are in control unless an author self-publishes. If the current business plan says that authors have to cover publicity costs out of their own pocket, then those serious about a writing career will do it. I think that’s what defines a successful person–she jumps in and does the stuff that most people complain about and avoid.

Another interesting note from the WD article (paraphrased): If you run into a musician and they’ve hired a studio and musicians and put together their own CD, you don’t automatically thinks it’s sub-par, that if it was good, he’d have signed with a label. Why is it that we assume self-published books are “unworthy?

Some of my favorite books and CD’s have been put together by the artist. I’m smart enough to flip through a book to see if I like the writing style before I buy it, and I’ve bought plenty of traditionally published books that I’ve hated. I’d rather run into a grammar error in a fabulous story than have a perfectly edited book that’s a stinker. I also don’t sneer at hand-crafted goods that aren’t mass produced and sold at department stores. I actually hold them in higher esteem.

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Jackie Houchin is a photojournalist and a book and theater critic. She has written several manuscripts, so she can give us the perspective of one who isn’t actively seeking publication but may do it in the future.

If I ever did anything with the kids’ stories (or the women’s novel) I wrote, I would DEFINITELY self publish, no if’s, and’s, or but’s, about it. That way, I would not have to deal with sharing any of my advance with the publisher over marketing strategies and profits. (Of course, I wouldn’t be getting any advance – ha-ha). Instead, I’d be able to decide just how much effort I wanted to put into the project. I definitely wouldn’t be doing it “for the money”.

Since being in the SinC and MWA organizations, I’ve heard countless authors bemoan the facts of publication:

—that it is very hard to get an agent or publisher even interested in your work…

—that it takes years to publication even after one agrees to look at your work…

—that you don’t get any money to speak of…

—that you are supposed to market yourself or at least come to them with a huge “platform” so they don’t have to do much but reap the benefits…

—that you may not get a contract for another book…

—that you may be dropped if you don’t sell as much as they like…

—that your publisher may go out of business.

It makes me wonder why anyone would want try to break into the fiction industry right now.

All this sounds depressing, I know, but that’s the reason I would go FIRST to a self publishing and/or POD method.

Of course another factor for me might also be that I’ve always worked for myself (in photography and reviewing) and could pretty well set my own parameters.
As for your original questions, I don’t think authors have much say in what publishers do at this point. They may feel a larger advance is warranted or that they should be able to deduct marketing expenses from their advances – but that is really up to the publishers. I do feel that marketing should be a tax-deductible item…but, isn’t it already for the serious writer?

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Bonnie Schroeder has finished her first novel manuscript and is shopping it to agents.

First off, from everything I’ve read and heard, nobody earns a living off their books – except for a lucky handful of writers. My biggest gripe is the lack of attention given to new authors, but the reading public has to share the blame. Few people seem willing to invest their time and money in an unknown author not sanctioned by Oprah. Publishers make their money off superstars like King and Evanovich, and it appears from the sidelines like these writers don’t even need much marketing beyond an announcement of their next new blockbuster. It doesn’t seem fair (the “F word” in business) that these writers get free publicity that they don’t even need.

So, if I did get past all the gatekeepers and obstacles and finally sold a book and then if had to pay for my own marketing and publicity, my first question would be, what the heck is the publisher even doing for me besides (maybe) strong-arming the local Barnes & Noble into stocking a few copies of my book? I’m still looking for an answer.

However, since I guess I understand the realities of the marketplace, and since I’ve chosen to play this little game, I’d swallow my resentment and do whatever I could afford to do, to show the world what a great book I’ve written. It would then make sense that if I do a good job and work up enough interest to generate sales, that after a certain threshold (and I have NO IDEA what that would be), I’d get reimbursed for my expenses and that the publicity for the second/ third, etc. book would be covered by the publisher.

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GB Pool is the author of several short stories which have appeared in Anthologies and penned the novel Media Justice.

The End of the Buggy Whip

Fair? Who said life was fair? Or for that matter, the publishing business.

Publishing came to America around 1800. Many famous publishing houses started back then. By the end of the 19th Century there were hundreds of publishers and a smattering of writers. The vast majority of Americans worked on farms or in factories with no time to write. Today there are five major publishers still in existence, most owned by foreign enterprises, with a smattering of small publishers picking up the slack. Farms have mechanized, factories have moved to China, but now there are thousands and thousands of writers.

What used to be a hard back book business changed into a paperback and trade paperback enterprise. It’s cheaper to make those paperbacks. Then came discount stores and Amazon. Now there is Kindle and the other downloadable reading devices that don’t require paper at all. And don’t forget the self-published author. Even the few name publishing companies provide POD (print-on-demand) books.

As the changes in the publishing business hit, the revenues shifted. No longer are people buying those expensive hard cover books. The trade paperback sometimes comes out six months after the hard cover version. And the downloadable book will soon follow.

As the revenue shifted, so did the perks. Editors disappeared. Book tours and publishing house publicity vanished. (They got rid of the buggy whip, too. Want to go back to the horse and buggy?)

Publishers aren’t making the money they used to, even with the outrageous cost of those hard cover books. Most of the old publishing companies don’t exist. If you are lucky enough to get one to publish your book, show them you will go all out to help sell that book of yours. Your effort will not only help to sell more books, but your publisher will see you as a go-getter and they might be more eager to take on your second book.

With the tremendous number of would-be writers clamoring for their books to get noticed and eventually be published, it will be the writer with the skill and nerve to face those audiences and sell their book themselves who will succeed.

Welcome to the new normal.