Writerland » Social Media

Does Publicity Sell Books? The Debate Continues

Meghan Ward — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:00:18 +0000

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “If Publicity Doesn’t Sell Books, What Does?” in which numerous published authors offered insider tips on how they publicized and marketed theirs books, and numerous writers responded. This week, Paul J. Krupin, a publicist who blogs at Direct Contact PR, offers his perspective on the publicity debate. Paul’s post will make you want to jump out of your chair and join Toastmaster’s. Welcome, Paul!

Response to Publicity Doesn’t Sell Books
By Paul J. Krupin

Quite a number of authors express great frustration and anguish over the fact that the publicity they received didn’t result in lots of book sales.

In fact several of them conclude that publicity doesn’t work.

Their experience with media may be due to a lot of things. But to me what appears to have happened is that whatever the media published certainly didn’t result in them “turning their people on.” I don’t see that as a reason to conclude that “Publicity Doesn’t Work.” I see that a failure to make effective use of any number of golden media opportunities.

In the middle of February, one of my clients, JJ Smith, did one interview on The Steve Harris Morning Show, and sold over 6,000 books and made it to the top of Amazon’s best seller list ahead of The Hunger Games trilogy. Sure, it was only for 24 hours or so, but it was a single talk show interview that did it.

One of my favorite authors, Vince Flynn, did an interview with USA Today on Feb 6. He’s a best selling author of 13 books. He was asked three questions, and he spent one to two minutes more or less, answering each question. I was tickled to see how he handled the last question from the USA Today interviewer, one that he apparently had never been asked before: “What is it about your stories that brings the reader in?” BTW, it worked since I ran to the local bookstore and bought a copy.

For those of you who have worked with me, I challenge you with this very same question: “What do you do that turns people on?” Whenever we seek get media coverage whether it is for a review, a feature story, or an interview.

Think about what happens—just for example, when was the last time you read the newspaper or a magazine or watched TV and grabbed your credit card?

It probably doesn’t happen very often., does it? In today’s world, it may actually happen more often if you read something on a trusted blog or on a friend’s Facebook and they say, “This is cool. You gotta have it.”

Think carefully about the times that it does happen. How did you feel? Weren’t you amazed, galvanized, and stunned? Wasn’t your attention riveted?

Well, if you want publicity or any other marcom (marketing communications) that you create to do that, then you’d better figure out what is happening when it happens to you first. Then you have to learn what you can say and do to make it happen to others.

Realize that if you want to be a successful author, you not only have to write a really good book, but when you get in front of media you need to turn your audience on. You have to learn how to do that or else people won’t respond the way you want them to.

Now I’ll share with you something I’ve learned doing publicity for a few tens of years.

I believe that you can learn to do this anywhere. I call this the miracle of the microcosm because I’ve found from working with real people, from all over the country, that it really doesn’t matter where you are. You can learn what to say that turns people on one person at a time. Yes you can.

You just have to keep talking to people and pay attention to what you said when it happens!

You can ask people at a speaking engagement to tell you. You can have a partner watch the audience and take notes while you are speaking. You can record your talks and track sales or how many people raise their hand or come up to you after your talk. You’ll find hints in your reviewer comments and testimonials where people tell you why they love what you do.

The miracle is that once you learn the magic words that produce the action you want, you can then you can use all the media and other marcom technologies as a force multiplier to repeat the message and keep reproducing the effect.

In a nation with 330 million people, you have very good reason to focus on that message. Even if you are successful in reaching and converting an itsy bitsy tiny percent, you can be phenomenally successful.

Before you think that doing publicity or any other marcom technology is going to help you, you really need to learn what you can say and do that turns your people on. You need to develop a script that produces action.

Can you stand in front of 50 people and talk for three minutes so that half the people come flying out of their chairs and hand you money? That is what you need to be able to do. You need to hit their hot buttons by being the very best you can be. You need to give people a transcendental emotionally engaging experience. Learn how to do this in a small audience and then place that script into your interviews and feature story proposals.

The same is true by the way with social media. The real promise of social media is only achieved when what you’ve done is so good people rave about it to all their friends. If it’s not good enough, it’s just panned.

If you learn how to turn people on, and then use that in your targeted communications so that you help the people you can help the most, you’ll see your success with the media hit maximum levels. This isn’t easy to do. But if you are strategic and test, improve, and prove your communications systematically, it can be done.

Make sure that the content you offer is like candy. Create a recipe that tastes so good that people just can’t get enough of it. and they want the whole bag.

BTW, I’ve created a five minute, self-serve Prezi that describes how to do this process in a highly entertaining and visual way. Here’s the link.

Enjoy.

Paul J. Krupin, Publicist
blog.directcontactpr.com www.directcontactpr.com
Comments welcome. Send them to me anytime paul@directcontactpr.com

If Publicity Doesn’t Sell Books, What Does?

Meghan Ward — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:13:10 +0000

UPDATE: The winner of The Edge of Maybe contest is …

KRISTAN!

It was a tough decision for Ericka, so she took her top six choices and randomized them. Kristan, please email me your latest address, so I can forward it to Ericka. And everyone else, if you’re in the Bay Area, don’t miss Ericka’s book launch tonight: A Night On The Edge. I’ll be there!

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog post:

One of the advantages of working out of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto is all the wonderful conversations—about writing, about publishing, and about marketing—that take place over lunch and on our listserv. Last month, a blog post by Joe Konrath titled “The Value of Publicity” and another by Michael Ellsberg, titled “The Tim Ferriss Effect”, sparked an e-mail thread about what sells books. According to Konrath, the publicity he got in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the LA Times, etc. did nothing to increase his book sales. According to Ellsberg, a spot on prime-time CNN and an editorial he wrote for the New York Times did little to increase his book sales. So, if publicity doesn’t sell books, what does?

According to Konrath, good writing, an extensive backlist and proper positioning on Amazon are the keys to his success: “[M]y fame and my past have little to do with my current success. … The majority of my sales come from Amazon and my ability to use the tools they provide.”

According to Ellsberg, coverage on a popular single-author blog with a wide sphere of influence is what put his book on the map. (By the way, there is a distinction between publicity and marketing. Publicity means spots on radio and television shows, advertising, and articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines. While publicity is short-lived—the biggest push done within the first month that a book is out—marketing is an ongoing effort that can last months, even years.)

Grotto writers chimed in with their own thoughts about what sells books and, with their permission, I’ve reprinted their comments here:

Zoe Fitzgerald Carter, author of Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Life and Death, agrees with Konrath and Ellsberg: “I certainly found that mentions in The New York Times, excerpts in O magazine, and getting reviewed in People did almost nothing in terms of my sales. And all that endless social media? Not so much …”

Heather Donahue, author of Growgirl: How My Life After the Blair Witch Project Went to Pot emphasizes the importance of “knowing your core audience, knowing that books are a niche business, and having a laser focus on the top 500 individual readers. Finding them. Knowing your tribe and building from there.”

“Having pieces in Slate, The Awl, and The Nervous Breakdown worked every bit as good as being on The View because you want to sell books to people who read them,” Donahue said in an interview. In addition to a Q&A in The Awl/The Hairpin, which The Rumpus cross-posted, and 21 Questions in The Nervous Breakdown, Donahue had an interview in Bust, two pages in Entertainment Weekly, and a healthy response from Facebook, where she has 1286 friends and 549 likes on her professional page. Donahue says that because her book came out quickly, she didn’t have time to build a large following on Twitter, but she thinks the cumulative effect of the marketing she did was every bit as important as the publicity garnered by her publicists—both the in-house publicist her publisher assigned her and the one she hired on her own. Would she still hire a publicist next time? Yes, if she goes with a traditional publisher next time. Donahue spent so much time marketing her book that she would liked to have seen a larger cut of the profits. “I’d rather find a middle ground partner. Someone who could handle some of the design stuff and do more of a 50/50 split on royalties, to share some of the outgoing publication costs but also share on the incoming profits.”

Janis Cooke Newman, author of The Russian Word for Snow: A True Story of Adoption and Mary, a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln, agrees that knowing your tribe is key. “While we like to think that everybody is going to find our books fascinating, the truth is that it is a niche business. One email blast to an online chat group of people interested in adopting from Eastern Europe put my memoir at number 200 on Amazon—at least for a couple of hours—and practically sold out the admittedly meager first printing. And at a recent appearance at a Civil War literary conference, the local bookseller ran out of my novel. National TV is cool, but finding your niche readers and making it easy for them to buy your book—even years after publication—seems to be the best way to keep those royalty checks coming.”

Constance Hale, author of Sin and Syntax and the forthcoming Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, echoes Donahue and Newman’s sentiments. “Have a really sharp, really defined sense of who your reader is (emphasis on the “read”) and/or who would buy your book and then think really hard about how to get to that person, how to let that person know your book is out there. … Being in The New Yorker is highly cool, but again, does it put your name on the radar or does it sell books? Are New Yorker readers the ones who will BUY your book and READ your book and then TELL their friends to buy your book?”

Hale cautions, however, that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to zeroing in on your audience. “Every book is different. My readers are writers who want to write better, so I have taught anywhere that gets the title of the book on a course catalog (reaching tens of thousands of people), I have led countless workshops at countless writers conferences, I have given workshops in bookstores, I have worked on tags and SEO on my Web site, I’ve built modest but loyal FB and Twitter and mailing-list followings, and I give out teachers lessons plans for free. I put my book title in every bio I write. I accept all offers for any kind of publicity: I get up for drive-time radio, I write articles for free if I know it gets to my readers. I work closely with the publisher’s publicity people and I hire my own publicist to help me strategize. Not strategize how to get famous. Strategize about how to reach my readers/buyers.

“It’s a one-two punch. Publicity gets your name and your book on the radar,
maybe helps you build cred. … Marketing identifies your
market/tribe/reader/buyer and focuses aggressively to let those people know
about the book and to make them want to buy it. Publicity lasts for a month. Sometimes you strike gold right away and get an instant bestseller. Marketing
continues for years and can build slowly.”

Speaking from the perspective of a self-proclaimed “readaholic,” Jason Roberts, author of A Sense of The World, says the problem with some publicity is that it breeds familiarity with a book, not intrigue. You know those movie trailers that make you feel like you’ve already seen the movie? That happens with books, too. “Sometimes, a book has fallen off my To Buy list because of one article, one interview, one TV appearance too many. … If I had my druthers, I’d prefer a PR campaign that focused not so much on the book as a quantum of content, but as an experience. How will it surprise me, enlighten me, draw me in? Will it subvert my expectations, shed light on mysteries, go behind the scenes or between the lines? Is it, simply put, not only a book but a story? … Sell the experience, not just the facts. (And don’t sit around waiting for reviewers to tell you what that experience is; decide for yourself, and market accordingly).”

Gerard Jones, author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, reminds writers that although book sales are nice, they are not the only way for authors to make money. “I’ve gotten a lot of paying gigs talking to colleges and other institutions, and those can keep rolling in long after the shelf-life of the book. … In terms of perceptible Amazon up-ticks, the only broadcast media that ever helped were NPR interviews where I got to talk about the content of the book at some length (Fresh Air helped, but the biggest jump was after Talk of the Nation). Mass-audience radio never did squat, not even Howard Stern in his pre-satellite days, nor did TV. But a speaking agency picked me up and landed me a series of public debates after I appeared on the Today Show, which in turn led to other stuff. I also had a university events programmer tell me he was already interested in bringing me in but didn’t really decide until he saw that I’d been on Bill O’Reilly’s show.  I’ve also picked up quite a few article- and editorial-writing gigs off my books, at least some of which were helped along by publicity. A BBC appearance got me an offer from the Guardian to write something, and I think that may be why the Times of London asked me for something soon after. I think it just looks better in the pitch if you can list a bunch of high-profile appearances too. I’ve found that initial sales usually don’t matter that much; publication is usually the beginning of a long trudge. But the rewards of the trudge can be a lot more rewarding than you think they might be while you’re still processing the realization that you’re not going to soar onto the NYT bestseller list. … And the publicity that seems not to be doing a damned bit of good in the moment can pay off down that road.”

Although there are a number of authors who have launched bestsellers after strategically and methodically (as Hale puts it) building an online presence like Rebecca Skloot , author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, and Ferriss himself, T.J. Stiles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, cautions that no one really knows what makes a book successful. “When a book DOES succeed, publicity is usually an element,” Stiles says. “What makes a book succeed? If anyone could figure out a formula for that, then publishers wouldn’t lose money (or just break even) on 70% of the books they release. Only about 30% make money. Everyone’s in the dark—not when it comes to what makes a good book, but what makes a commercially successful one. So many great books don’t make money. … as William Goldman said about Hollywood, ‘Nobody knows anything.’”

RIP Google Friend Connect

Meghan Ward — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:18:07 +0000

If you have a WordPress blog, you probably know by now that Google will be retiring Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger blogs on March 1, 2012. I’m thrilled about this because I’ve always hated Google Friend Connect but have never had the cahones to delete it from my blog. I just did, and it felt great. Now, in its place, is a Google+ badge. I have only recently begun using Google+, but I love it and would be thrilled if you added me to one of your circles. Google and Facebook are vying for the most popular social network, and by the end of 2012 we will have a better idea who is going to win that race. For now, I use both, so feel free to follow me on both, and I will do my best to follow you back.

If you have a WordPress blog and use Google Friend Connect, click on the notice on the box in your sidebar for instructions on how to keep in touch with your followers.

Valentine for a Writer

Meghan Ward — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:34:25 +0000

To all my writer friends and followers out there, here’s a valentine for you:

You’ve spent days, weeks, months, and years
Gallantly confronting your writerly fears
The blinking cursor, like the blank page
Is daunting to writers at every stage
But you never give up, you keep trudging on
You’re the hero of your journey, you’re a paragon
Of persistence, determination, and commitment to your art
But stave off the hubris before you start
To get published because even then,
You’ll never have time to put down your pen
Once you’ve outlined, written, revised and queried
The agent call comes but now you’re hurried
To edit and market, to Facebook and Twitter
This social media stuff is making you bitter
You don’t have time to read, write, or eat
You look like a zombie, you sleep on your feet
But soon all your efforts will pay off in spades
And you’ll no longer need all those anti-sleep aids
Your book will come out, your dream will come true
The world will look rose and no longer blue
But don’t wait for that day to take a break
To go for a walk, maybe bake a cake
Because what you need is some R+R
To celebrate the brightest star
In your life—no, it’s not me; it’s you
And all of the wonderful things that you do
It’s Valentine’s Day, so celebrate
Because you’re fantastic, stupendous, and great!
Eat some chocolate, drink some wine
Then ask yourself, “Would you be mine?”
I bet (s)he will answer “yes” “ya” or “oui”
Or perhaps “hai”—that’s Japanese for “si”
And now it is time for this poem to end
It’s finished now; it has been penned
I just have one last thing to say
And that is, “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

Is Self-Publishing the Way to Go?

Meghan Ward — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:27:24 +0000

Today I have a wonderful post from Sarah Baker, a former editor for Viking/Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York, via Constance Hale over at Sin and Syntax. If you haven’t visited Sin and Syntax yet, go check out the Salon. It’s full of great articles about writing and publishing like Gianmaria Fanchini’s post on sliding book advances, which follows up on my Author Advance Survey Results, and Constance Hale’s post on breaking into the publishing world. And now …

Is Self-Publishing the Way to Go?

With a sidebar on what you need to know to do it yourself.

By Sarah Baker

Go to any panel on book publishing these days, and you’ll hear the hoopla over self-publishing. Easy to do! More control! A bigger cut of the profits! At a time when advances aren’t exactly advancing, editors are often too over-worked, and publicists are spending the house’s dimes on blockbusters, self-publishing sure sounds tempting. Add to this the allure of royalty rates of 70 percent or higher instead of the 15 percent (at most) from traditional publishers, and it’s no wonder all writers aren’t going indie.

But, wait. Self-publishing might be the word on everyone’s lips, but is it right for you?

“You have to decide what your goals are,” said thriller-writer and self-publishing guru Barry Eisler at a lecture in November 2011 at the Park Plaza hotel in Boston. For him, it seemed like a no-brainer. He had already published three books with a traditional, or what he calls “legacy,” publisher. He has a following, developed when he pounded the pavement one summer, visited 500 bookstores, and called on 1,200 bookstores in 40 states. Other things in his favor: His wife is a literary agent, so he has access to publishing professionals.

As if his platform weren’t enough already, the press from his decision to turn down $500,000 from St. Martin’s and go indie practically made him a household name. The mighty-marketing-machine Amazon is his publisher. He likes control. He likes business. He’s clearly very good at it.

But not everyone has built what Eisler has. For first-time authors, like Boston Globe reporter Billy Baker, who is armed with a literary agent and a nonfiction book idea, an advance from a traditional publisher is necessary for him to take time off from work to report and write. “I don’t have 50 grand in the bank,” he said.

Other authors make the point that they want the strong winds of a trusted publisher in their authorial sails. Pagan Kennedy, author of ten books including Spinsters and Black Livingstone, doubts she would ever go indie. “If you can live with 1,000 readers and not making any money, then fine. But, if you want an audience of 20,000 for your book—how do you get that?” she said.

So what should a writer weigh when considering self-publishing?

“Self-publishing had a stigma,” said Eve Bridburg, literary agent and founder of Grub Street, Inc., an independent literary-arts center in Boston. But she points out some critical new factors: increasingly sophisticated self-publishing tools are available; you can distribute via the Internet (and not just via the back of a station wagon); Twitter and Facebook can help to spread the word. Then there is the payoff: higher royalty rates. So many more serious writers are self-publishing, she added, that Grub is now offering workshops not only in the craft of writing but in marketing and publishing, as well.

Many people are taking the plunge. An article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the Wall Street Journal cites an estimate by R. R. Bowker, which tracks the publishing business: the number of self-published titles exploded 160 percent from 2006 to 2010 (that is, from 51,237 to 133,036.)

Some recent success stories—Amanda Hocking and John Locke, in addition to Barry Eisler—have helped fuel the movement. And let’s not forget that some historic bestsellers (What Color is Your Parachute and The Elements of Style, for example) started out as do-it-yourselfers (DIY), the old-school name for the self-published. They were acquired by traditional houses after they were already successful.

Sales figures for self-published books are difficult to track, and hard to interpret, since people choose this route for all sorts of reasons. Many are printing 10 copies of a memoir for the family or 100 for the business. Amazon.com doesn’t share overall sales figures of books, according to Brittany Turner of their public relations department. But, in an email she was willing to say that “John Locke and Amanda Hocking have both sold more than 1 million books using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), 12 KDP authors have sold more than 200,000 books and 30 KDP authors have sold more than 100,000.” Over at Amazon’s self-publishing service site, CreateSpace, she added, former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin self-published his memoir Katrina’s Secrets, which hit the Top 100 Best Sellers in Books on Amazon the week of its release.

(If you’ve seen anyone report on the other end of the spectrum—that is, the number of self-published authors who never surpass their break-even point—please post links in the comments section! The more solid information we all have, the better.)

Even traditional publishers are capitalizing on the popularity. Book Country is Penguin Books new foray into the do-it-yourself world. It’s a place for genre fiction writers to circulate their work, get feedback, and buy self-publishing services. “Self-publishing is a trend that isn’t going away,” said Book Country president Molly Barton to Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

But all of this takes time and ingenuity. Martha McPhee, author of Dear Money and three other novels, said self-publishing would be like pushing a boulder up a mountain, and she wouldn’t know where to begin. Claire Messud, New York Times-bestselling author of The Emperor’s Children, equates self-publishing with home schooling.

Would you consider home schooling?

SIDEBAR: Should you self-publish?

If you want a professional-looking book with a chance of success you’ll need four things: Time, Money, Connections, and Gumption. Traditional publishers have been in the business for a long time and a book contract, despite that many authors accuse them of everything from neglect to abandonment, guarantees a professional process. You’ll have a well-oiled machine behind you so that you can focus on writing and promotion. If you want to replace them you’ll need to:

1. Hire a load of people if you aren’t a jack-of-all-trades: Editor, copyeditor, jacket designer, interior designer, publicist, marketer, rights salesperson (for foreign and first serial), Web site designer, printer, and distributor (for print books). If you’re publishing nonfiction you might need a lawyer to check for libel and an indexer to create an index. But buyer beware—these people work for you, so make sure they tell you what you need to hear and not what you want to hear.

2. Verify your account balance and uncap your pen—you’ll be writing a lot of checks.

3. Buy a Starbucks Card or a Nespresso machine. With the amount of work this will involve, you’ll need your caffeine. Self-publishing is akin to starting your own business.

4. Do the hustle. Work your friends on Facebook, your followers on Twitter, your old colleagues in the media, your local librarian, and your buddies in the bookstores to spread the word and buy the book.

Good luck.

{Formerly a book editor at Viking/Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York City, Sarah Baker is now a freelance writer and an independent radio producer. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.}

Thanks Sarah and Constance for a great post! What about you? Have you self-published? What has your experience been?

5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Online Presence

Meghan Ward — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:05:46 +0000

1. Get over your fear of self-promotion.
Just do it. Now. Done? Good. I get an email newsletter from professional coach Martha Borst every week. It has her photo at the top and an image of her book cover on the side. I don’t see that and think, “Oh God, there goes Martha promoting herself again.” I think, “Damn. Martha is so good at staying in touch with her audience. I wish I were that organized and professional.”

2. Use your name as your brand.
Did you know you can change your Twitter user name without losing your followers? So if you chose “@hotchica6” and now you have 3000 Twitter followers, it’s not too late to change it to “@HilaryHiggenbottom.” On your Facebook page, once you have 25 likes, you can choose a customized URL (and you can change that URL until you have 100 likes, at which time it’s locked in.) Go out there now and change all your IDs to Hilary Higgenbottom, or whatever your real name is, hotchica6.

3. Post your contact info.
It doesn’t have to be your personal e-mail address, but create SOME way for people to get in touch with you, and post that on your website. (Post it like this to avoid spammers: Hilary (at) Higgenbottom (dot) com.) There’s nothing more irritating than spending half an hour searching someone’s site in vain for a way to contact him. It’s not only frustrating, it makes the author appear aloof and unaccessible. Someone may want to ask you for an interview or compliment you on your latest article in the New York Times, and they may not want to do that in a public forum.

4. Get a professional photo taken of yourself.
You will post your picture everywhere—on your website, on your blog, and on the profiles of all your social media networks, and you don’t want that to be a blurry full-length photo of you and your dog. Wear something simple that isn’t black or white or patterned, put some make-up on, do your hair, and fork out $300 to have a professional photographer take your picture (make sure that includes the digital copies of the photos.) Better yet, have multiple pictures taken of yourself in a variety of settings (at your computer, doing a reading, etc.) Mary Robinette Kowal and Michael Hyatt do this well. Every time you refresh a page on their websites, their photo changes.

5. Interact with your audience.
Whether it’s through a blog, a professional Facebook page (where anyone can “like” you), or a Twitter account, make yourself accessible. Gone are the days of J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. Readers not only want to know about you, they want to talk to you. And they want you to respond. You don’t have to spend all day on social media, but take a couple hours out of every week to connect with your audience. Your efforts will pay off in increased work (Editor Alan Rinzler credits his steady editing work to his blog) and book sales.

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your online presence through blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I have a Social Media Madness class beginning this Thursday, Feb. 2 at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and there’s room for a couple more students. Also check out Lorraine Sanders’ one-day Journalism Basics for Bloggers as well as the full roster of winter classes.

And now what about you? What is one of your favorite social media tips?

How to Manage Your Online Afterlife

Meghan Ward — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:22:41 +0000

The week before Christmas, I looked at my birthday notifications on Facebook and saw that it was my friend Chris’s birthday. Facebook has this new feature that allows you to wish your friends happy birthday without even visiting their walls. But because I know some people post fake birthdays to protect their privacy, if I don’t actually know someone’s birthday, I check his wall to see if other people have wished him happy birthday, hoping that if 20 others have, it may actually be his birthday. I had FB messaged Chris a few months earlier and hadn’t heard back, so I wanted to visit his wall to see what he was up to anyway.

He was dead.

I was so shocked to receive a birthday notification for a friend who had died seven months earlier that I expressed my frustration in a Facebook status update. I suggested that Facebook should have a way of notifying friends when someone dies, some kind of “tribute” function. (Of course, then there would be that chance that someone would post a tribute for someone who wasn’t dead, whom they wish were dead. That could be problematic.) It just seemed WRONG that I was receiving notifications to “Wish Chris Happy Birthday!”

I was surprised by the responses to my status update. One friend said, “I’m sorry abt ur friend…but I think finding out if our friends are alive is kind of up to us more than FB.” and another: “I think the bigger problem here is: how come you don’t know he is dead if he is a real friend …”

These comments left me feeling like, “If you really cared about your friend, you would know if he was alive or dead.” But Chris wasn’t a close friend. He was someone I went on a few dates with more than a decade ago, someone who convinced me that if I wanted to learn the craft of writing, I should become a reporter (I wanted to write for women’s magazines at the time). He was a journalist himself, and I took his advice and got a job as a newspaper reporter and stuck with that for the following three years. So he had a big impact on my life and my writing career. After I left LA and moved to the Bay Area, we talked or e-mailed a couple of times a year, then not at all for a while, until he joined Facebook. A few months after he friended me, I messaged him, mentioning how sad it was that the wife of someone we once knew in common had died of cancer. I had no idea that Chris himself had died—soon after he had joined Facebook. We knew just one person in common, and I was no longer in touch with her. (I am now; I found her on Facebook.)

A friend of mine said to me last week that she thought it was nice that some people use the Facebook profiles of friends who have died to write tributes to them. Maybe for people close to that person it is nice—like when my siblings and I thought it was nice to keep the recording of my mother’s voice on my dad’s voicemail for thirteen years after she died. Other people thought it was creepy. And I find it a little creepy (and so heartbreaking!) to visit Chris’s page and see that his relationship status is “engaged,” to see who is “current” employer is, to be reminded where he “lives” and when his birthday is. It’s as if he weren’t dead but frozen in time.

So what can you do about this? You can create an online will. You can either do it through a paid service like Legacy Locker, who, for $30/year will manage your online afterlife, or you can do it yourself—by entrusting someone close to you with the logins and passwords to your various accounts. If you choose the latter, make sure you store this will with your other will and living trust (You people with kids have a living trust, right?) and include in it information about all your online accounts: your website, your blog, your photo archive, your online backup service, Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, etc. Also include instructions on how you want each account dealt with. Deleted? Made inactive? Or would you prefer that your friend/spouse/child/parent use your page to notify friends about your death and funeral arrangements? Or maintain a tribute page? Whatever you do, tell him/her to STOP THE BIRTHDAY NOTIFICATIONS.

You probably don’t think you’re going to die anytime soon, but neither did Chris. He died suddenly of a heart attack. So don’t delay. Draw up a plan for managing your online afterlife NOW. This article on Time.com explains what companies like Facebook and Google require to access a deceased loved one’s accounts, and here is
a list of online services to help you manage your online life after death.

What about you? Do you have a plan for your online afterlife? Do you plan to make one? Do you know people who have died who still have websites and blogs and Facebook pages intact?

25 Ways to Build Your Author Platform Before Your Book is Published

Meghan Ward — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:10:11 +0000

If you’re a writer, you’ve had the importance of building your “author platform” drilled into your head like the multiplication tables were in fourth grade. Most people associate building an author platform with Facebook and a blog, but there are many ways to create a following. Here are 25:

1. Blog
Not every writer needs to or should blog, but blogs are a fantastic way to connect with potential readers without spending much money. I recommend paying for hosting, so you can use your own domain name (blog.yourname.com or www.yourname.com/blog).

2. Tumblr
If you don’t have time to write 300-800-word blog posts, but you have photos, links, and insights you want to share, consider setting up a Tumblr account. Tumblr is for microblogging.

3. Twitter
Twitter is a great way to connect with a LOT of people without spending a lot of time online. Granted, those who do spend a lot of time on Twitter have higher Klout scores, but then again, who cares about Klout?

4. Facebook
Wait! I thought the point of this post was that building your author platform did NOT have to involve social media! Facebook is THE social network! Yes, yes. But Facebook DOES matter. Publishers want to know how many Facebook friends and/or likes you have. They want you to customize your Facebook Page. They want it to look awesome. Don’t want until your book launch. Start right now.

5. YouTube
You can build a subscriber base through your YouTube account. Here’s an example: This guy has instructional videos on how to make origami things. I watched this video to learn how to make cranes over the weekend. And more than 2 million other people have watched it, too. Think about what useful information you could impart through videos. Make 20 of them and link to them on your blog, your Facebook account, your Twitter account, and Linked In.

6. LinkedIn
Use it! Some marketing Guru once said to me, “Linked In is my business card; Facebook is my greeting card.” LinkedIn is a valuable resource if you’re looking for a job, looking to hire someone, looking for an expert in a particular field, etc.

7. Google+
For all you writers who rely on Google Friend Connect to advertise how many blog followers you have, I have news for you. Google Friend Connect is going to disappear for all but Blogger bloggers, and the rest of us will be left with Google+. So get on it. Start adding people to your circles and post a Google+ button on your blog.

8. Teaching
I went to a reading by an MFA teacher friend a few years ago, and the bookstore was PACKED with her students. Teaching is a great way to build loyal fans. Just promise them As if they give your book a 5-star review on Amazon. Kidding!

9. Speaking Engagements
Some authors make a living giving speeches and seminars. They get paid a lot of money by corporations to tell people how to get off their “buts” and think outside of the box. At the same time, they’re selling themselves to the audience. If they have a book out, they may sell it at the seminar (this is a great way for self-published authors to find an audience). Or they may simply have “George Trottinet, author of ‘Where’s my Camembert?” written at the bottom of all their handouts. It’s a great way to build your author platform.

10. Mixers
There’s no better way to connect with people than in person. Attend workshops, conferences, conventions, and networking events—and talk to people. Be sure to update your business card before you go, and don’t be shy about handing it out. That way people can reconnect with you after the alcohol has worn off and they’ve forgotten your name.

11. Podcasts
Visit Dane Golden of Hey.com for an example of how to podcast. Dane does live video interviews with his subjects via Skype like a real news anchor. Very cool. Other options are recorded video podcasts or audio podcasts. Dane’s secret? Keep ‘em short.

12. Get Published
I don’t mean get your book published. I mean get book reviews, short stories, and articles published in newspapers, magazines and literary journals—whether in print or online. You’ll build up your resume and get your name out there. Best of all, you’ll give readers a sample of your writing. Be sure to include your website, blog, or Twitter ID at the bottom.

13. Win Awards
When you win a big award, it will be announced in newspapers and on blogs. People will Tweet about it and share it on Facebook: “Congratulations, Susie Q, on winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction!” Even small awards are a fantastic way to build your platform.

14. Get Famous
Celebrities have the biggest platforms of all, so if you have the chance to marry a prince, star in a film, or have octuplets—go for it!

15. Start a newsletter
Some people abhor newsletters, but they are a great way to connect with potential readers. And e-mail marketing can be cool, too.

16. Join a writers’ group
Writers’ groups are a great way to build a support network with other writers. You can all Tweet and blog and share each other’s work, attend each others’ readings, and buy each other’s books. Plus, it’s a great way to make friends!

17. Read Your Work
Every city has monthly or weekly author readings. In San Francisco, we have Porchlight, the Monthly Rumpus, Inside Story Time, Litquake, and many many more. Read! It’s a fantastic way to: 1) Let others hear and fall in love with your work 2) Get experience reading in front of strangers. You’ll be doing plenty of that when your book comes out, and you won’t want it to be your first time.

18. Get Involved
Run for the school board. Volunteer. Get active in a writers’ or journalists’ association. All of these are ways of making your name more public and expanding your network.

19. Sell merchandise
I saw a bumper sticker the other day for Story something-or-other (dot) org. If I’d had a pen I would have written it down. If I’d had an iPhone, I would have typed in the link. The point being, it caught my attention. You can use T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, book marks, and more to advertise your brand. (Okay, I’m not going to get T-shirts made that say, “Meghan Ward, author” across the chest, but I may get ones that say “Writerland.com” on the back. Why not?

20. Blimps, skywriting, and billboards
I’m kidding. Kind of. When I lived in LA, there was this woman, Angelyne, on billboards all over the city. She wasn’t famous for anything other than being ON THE BILLBOARDS. She was blond, of course, and had abnormally large breasts. Someone said she was the girlfriend of the owner of the billboards. Whoever she was, all of LA knew her and her pink Corvette. A more realistic equivalent may be posting flyers around your neighborhood or taking out Google and Facebook ads advertising your services (in my case, editing). Eventually, people will recognize your name when they see it, and hopefully that will be on the cover of a book.

21. Website
You need a website! In addition to Twitter and Facebook and your blog, make sure you have a hub where people can contact you, sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your YouTube channel, read your bio and a list of your writing credits, etc. This is the number one most important step in building your author platform.

22. Guest blog
Don’t just blog on your own site. Land a gig blogging for an established publication, guest blog regularly—or just once in a while—for other bloggers. And have other bloggers guest blog for you. Their readers will visit your blog, and your readers will visit their blog. Everyone wins.

23. Make a viral video
Easier said than done, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to try. The best ones aren’t planned as viral videos, but if you’re clever enough, you can do it. There was one video a friend sent me that was very sweet, frame after frame of mothers holding up signs with suggestions on how to improve the world (or something like that; I forget exactly). But it was all too perfect, the writing on each sign too similar. And then I saw it at the end of the video, the name of a bra brand. It was a VERY clever advertisement. I think it was created by Scott Stratten’s Unmarketing. If you haven’t checked his site out, do. Right now. Then create your own Unmarketing Plan to build your Author UnBrand.

24. SEO
Read Inbound Marketing to learn more about SEO and how to improve yours. You want your blog or website to come up high in Google searches, so when someone does a search for “awesome fiction writers,” your name comes up first. The best way to do this is to have your blog ON your website, and update your blog frequently. But there’s more you can do with tags and metatags and things that are beyond me, so read Inbound Marketing and get some techie person to help you implement their suggestions.

25. Know your local booksellers
What a better way to get people talking about your book than to know them personally? Talk to the booksellers at ALL your local bookstores. Get to know them, so when your book comes out you won’t wish you had.

Can you think of other creative ways to build your author platform?

Are you blogging to the wrong audience?

Meghan Ward — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:00:22 +0000

It’s been my intention for some time now to expand this blog to write about other topics, and to post more frequently. I haven’t done that because, frankly, I don’t have the time. Blogging once a week has been perfect for me. It’s manageable, and with two- and three-year-old children, I need something manageable in my life (something more manageable than, “I don’t want a spooooon! I want a forrrrrrrk! I can’t eat eggs with a spoooooon!”) But there are two reasons I want to post more often. One is to expand my readership beyond other writers. Social media queen Kristen Lamb has written some great posts on this topic. One titled Solid Platform, Wrong Audience is my favorite and has links to her previous posts. My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan. My current WIP is a collection of humorous parenting essays. And my next project is something different altogether. As much as I love blogging about writing and social media, it’s time for me to expand to also write about parenting and fashion and modeling and all the other topics I’m interested in, like rock climbing and geo-caching and Settlers of Catan. I can’t promise I’ll blog every week. I’m not ready for a two-post-per-week commitment just yet (and I may never be), but I will attempt to post about a topic of my choosing (picture me rubbing my hands together) most Thursdays (and that means Fridays or Saturdays when I’m running late). Meanwhile, Tuesdays will remain writing/publishing/social media days as they have been for some time.

Now, here’s an exercise to determine whether you are blogging to the wrong audience:

Profile your audience. Make a list of the different groups of people you imagine buying your book. Who are they? Are they teen girls? Middle-aged women? Men who like to read thrillers? How old are they? What do they do for a living? How do they spend their free time? What products do they buy? Make lists. Then, once you’ve got that down, think about what topics those people are interested in reading about. What concerns them? What are their thoughts preoccupied with? (Boys? Sex? Making money? Finding God? Decluttering their homes?) Make another list.

And finally, ask yourself: Are you blogging about the topics on that last list? Why or why not?

By the way, there is some value in attracting other bloggers to your blog for the simple reason that they are more likely to blog about you and your work than non-bloggers. But you need both. You need to reach as many potential readers as possible, and there are many ways to do that.

Now, you tell me. Are you blogging to the RIGHT audience? Are you blogging to your potential readers, or are you only blogging to other writers? What’s stopping you from making that leap?

Dear Klout: It’s Not Me, It’s You

Meghan Ward — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 08:00:06 +0000

I was a Klout junkie. The first thing I did when I woke up in the morning was reach for my iPad and check my Klout score to see if it had gone up a point since the previous night (scores apparently change in the middle of the night). I’m a casual gamer (Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride), and Klout was a game for me. I traded retweets and @replies like I was trading wheat and sheep for brick and wood. I worked my way up to a 54, then took a month off from social media while on vacation over the summer, during which time my score dropped to 42. I’d been hiking and paddle boarding and rafting and camping and swimming—all well worth the social media sacrifice.

I worked it back up to 55, and it held steady for a while. I had come up with a “system” to maximize my ROI without working too hard, and I was happy. Then the sky fell when Klout changed its algorithm on October 26. My score plummeted to 46 overnight. And then, through some bug, it bottomed out at 10 (then popped back up to 46 the following day.) I wasn’t alone. Thousands of Klout users were incensed that their scores had dropped 10 to 20 points in one day (most of those with high scores saw a drop while those with low scores benefited from an increase.) To soothe my bruised ego, @missuku sent me this great xtranormal video about the inanity of Klout. And in response to one commenter’s lament that he had spent months getting his Klout score into the 70s only to see it drop back into the 50s, TechCrunch published an article titled Nobody Gives a Damn About Your Klout Score.

Back in April, when I wrote this blog post about Klout, that was true. When I interviewed agents and editors in the publishing industry, none of them had ever heard of Klout. They definitely weren’t checking writers’ Klout scores before deciding whether to take them on.

But all that has changed. Since April, Klout has expanded to include not only Twitter, but Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare, WordPress.com, Blogger, and more (I can’t check their site for the complete list because I refuse to look at my Klout score), and now literary agents and social media gurus are telling us that the size of one’s Klout score DOES matter. In fact, in this blog post, literary agent Rachelle Gardner says you should include your Klout score IN YOUR BOOK PROPOSAL along with your number of Twitter followers and page views on your blog. Kristen Lamb, author of We Are Not Alone, a social media guide for writers, responded in a post titled The Dark Side of Metrics—Writer Friend or Ticket to Crazy Town?. For me, Klout was a ticket to crazy town.

When I first started using it, I watched other Tweeters to see what raised their Klout scores. I noticed that getting any kind of mention helped, so I @replied and retweeted people each night hoping they would @reply and retweet me back. It worked. But it felt like a waste of my extremely valuable time to spend half an hour (sometimes up to an hour) on the Internet each night writing tweets like, “Hey, how are you?” or “I loved that movie, too!” in order to raise my Klout score. There were some aspects I liked about it. I was connecting more with people and we all know social networking is about being social. I worked harder at writing tweets that would get retweeted. I tweeted more frequently and more regularly, instead of 10 times one day and none the next. I was happy with my progress. 55 was a good score, and 60 was on the horizon.

What frustrated me most about Klout’s new algorithm is that I couldn’t figure it out. I no longer knew what to do (get my Twitter followers, get more FB likes, get more retweets) to increase my score. Whereas before, my “True Reach” was a transparent number—my number of Twitter followers plus my Facebook likes, suddenly my True Reach was a mysterious 700 while a friend, who has a fourth my Twitter followers and no Facebook page, had a True Reach of 3000. And another friend, who doesn’t have a Twitter account or a blog or a Facebook page (only a personal Facebook profile), suddenly had a Klout score of 43—just three points behind mine. And she HATES social media. How was this possible? My husband found the answer in this article. According to Annie, and I think she’s right, what matters is the percentage of your followers who are actively engaged with you. In other words, you’re better off with 50 friends who retweet everything you say than 10,000 followers of which only 500 retweet everything you say. The algorithm is clearly flawed. And it’s not the only one.

I’ve been to Grader.com to score my website and my blog. My blog gets penalized for having infrequent posts that are long (the highest scores go to blogs with frequent, short posts) and for not having links to Twitter and Facebook. Uh, sorry Grader.com, but I have not one but TWO links each to both Twitter and Facebook on my blog. In other words, these scoring websites make mistakes. Big mistakes. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

So I’m taking a break. That’s not to say I’ll never check my Klout score again, but for the month of November, while all your Nanowrimo writers are cranking out 1666.66 words a day, I will be assessing my social media influence the old-fashioned way—by instinct. And until Klout reveals what exactly goes into its cockamamy (I always thought it was “cockamany” but Dictionary.com disagrees with me) algorithm, I won’t take my score too seriously. I’d rather spend my late-night hours playing games the old-fashioned way—sitting around my dining room table with friends, producing coffee and tobacco, and laying track between Palermo and Moskva.

What about you? Do you care about your Klout score? How was it affected by the algorithm change? Do you care? And have you found the secret to increasing your “new Klout” score?