Wordcraft -- Raising your book above the crowd

The bad news, Dallas Morning News writer Joy Tipping told this month’s meeting of the local Mystery Writers of America, is that a writer’s chances of getting publicity for her novel through reviews is vanishingly small.

The good news is that there is a far better method than reviews for raising awareness about our books. Last week I wrote about the many ways of getting reviews. This week it’s how to get the word out without reviews. And it doesn’t require bundles of bucks for full page ads in the New York Times Review of Books.

In preparation for the day my Great American Novel (currently in version about 4.0) gets published, heaven only knows how many books, blogs, websites, you name its, I’ve read or had recommended to me about how to promote a book. I hate them. I hate the gimmicks. Just reading about them makes me tired.

Gimmicks, in Tipping’s opinion, aren’t the point. The way of attracting readers to our books is through simple word of mouth, the most ancient form of networking.

Last Monday I wrote that Tipping told writers not to pin their hopes on getting reviewed in big newspapers. Today I’ll tell you she says, “don’t pin your hopes on reviews in any publication.” Instead, get the word out about your writing in social media. “I want you to get rid of the word ‘reviews’. . . Get people to comment on Facebook posts. Or ask them to write min-reviews on Facebook. It really is all about knowing people.”

And if socializing by introverts sounds contradictory, the answer, thanks to the Internet is that it doesn’t have to be.

“In high school I was really shy,” Tipping says. “If you’d told me my career would be
networking with people, I’d have crawled under the table.” (She says she’s now gotten over her shyness.)

“Social media is where it’s at,” Tipping says. “I send two to three hours of every day blogging, on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and so on.” (She also uses Google + and Pinterest). “It’s so important that you have those accounts--that’s your platform.”

Don’t have a book to offer yet? “Start putting your opinions on Twitter when you start writing your novel, and when you finish your book, you can tweet about it.”

For those of us still feeing too private to put opinions out on the Internet for the whole world to see, let me just say I’m always amazed by the number of writers who show up in workshops proclaiming themselves too shy to divulge their writing to outsiders. Yet they yearn to become bestselling authors. It’s as if we don’t understand that selling books means displaying our opinions for the whole world.

Oh, and give back. In her discussion of reviews (yes, I know you’re still interested in them), she told us one of the best ways to get reviewed was to write reviews of others. The same degree of support for others, I believe, applies to networking. I see more
“likes” on Facebook for writer friends who promote other friends’ writings than for those who only promote themselves.

Although Tipping advocates treating social media as our personal cable channel, she cautions that we need to treat it as we would a broadcast.  "Don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t want to see on the CNN news crawl.”

And no matter what your Facebook privacy settings are, there is nothing, she warns, that her twenty-something year old son couldn’t hack in minutes. “There is nothing on social media that is private.”

She also cautions users to consider the differences between various social media audiences. “Don’t set your Facebook settings to send everything to Twitter. They’re completely different platforms, completely different readers.”

And for more about Tipping, her books (yes, she’s written travel books), and opinions, see twitter.com/JoyTipping/.

Wordcraft -- When nobody knows you

I got an email from ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas, http://armadillocon.com/, asking which potential writing workshop leaders I was interested in. I recognized several names on the list but when I looked up the rest, for some of them, there was no information available.

Actually, in the case of one poor guy, Google listed his name as belonging to a Confederate soldier in the U.S. Civil War. Which would make him, at a minimum, well over 150 years old. Maybe it was a reference to his couple of times great-grandfather. But intriguing though the possibility was, a nineteenth century Civil War veteran seemed unlikely to be writing science fiction in the twenty-first century.

The point of this, besides to caution you against naming your kids for distant ancestors, is that if you’re writing -- writing seriously enough to be thought able to tell others how to write -- you need to get your name on the Internet.

I know, I know, everybody in your writing group knows what you write. Your instructors and mentors know. Maybe even everybody who’s anybody in literature in Austin, Texas, knows. But can they tell the world what genre you write in? What stories you’ve had published, and when and where to find writing samples? And is the information accessible to somebody who doesn’t know you from, say, a 150-year-old man?

So how do you get information about your writing to the public, especially if you have few or no publication credits? Well, you’re looking at one way -- blogging. It’s cheap, free even, although it takes a lot of links posted on the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn to persuade search engines to pick up your URL. (Here’s where you call in favors from all those writing group friends.)

Or you can set up a website, which costs, but not as much as you probably fear, especially if you’re willing to use off the rack templates. I used www.godaddy.com/ and its Website Tonight option. I’m a born and bred technophobe, so the result wasn’t pretty. But it’s out there. Or maybe you have a friend who’s good at stuff like that.

Even if you haven’t published yet, writing on your website or blog -- even on social media, which doesn’t cost anything either -- can tell people what you write and how you write, so they’ll have some clue whether they’d want to be in a writing workshop with you. And of course, if you’re published, share your blog or website address in your biography.

You may say you don’t want to appear on the Internet because you value your privacy. Are you kidding? You hope to share your writing someday with thousands, maybe millions of readers, right, but you’re worried about privacy?

It’s okay to allow your family their privacy. It’s okay to create decent passwords to keep your accounts from getting hacked. But remember that with every word you write, like it or not, you reveal yourself. And that’s great, because we read to learn what other human beings -- what we ourselves -- are like.

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Conference update -- Last day to get a 20 percent discount on registration for the Houston Writers’ Guild’s October conference is this Saturday, June 30. See
www.houstonwritersguild.com for details. YA author Nikki Loftin is a featured speaker, and I can attest from hearing her this past spring that she is dynamic.

Wordcraft -- Why do stories get rejected?

I check in often with other bloggers to see what they’re writing about and lately there’s been a lot about what kinds of stories get accepted and what don’t.  British writer Deborah Walker (http://deborahwalkersbibliography.blogspot.com ) noted that she was thinking about horror writing lately.  (Could it have anything to do with THE WEDDING?) but also shared a link to the late Marion Zimmer Bradley’s discussion (www.mzbworks.com/why.htm ) of what really makes editors buy a story.  “The first sad truth about marketing fiction of any kind,” MZB confided, “is this, and you are just going to have to deal with it:  editors do not buy stories because they are well written.”

On MZB’s site, that was capitalized in boldface print, so I think she really meant it.  After a few doses of smelling salts, I recovered enough to read further.  It’s not that editors actively seek out badly written stories.  It’s that they’re more interested in salable stories.  Salable as in, primarily, stories that will give their readers a satisfying reading experience of the kind their magazines were intended to provide.  The italics here are mine.  And MZB has a few more pages of things to say about that satisfying reading experience, but I’ll let you read her words for yourself at www.mzbworks.com/why.htm/.  For now I’ll focus on the “of the kind their magazines were intended to provide.”  In other words, what genre readers would expect from the magazine.

One of my writing friends recently confided that she did not initially know what genre she wrote in.  Which brings me to the discussion by social media maven Kristen Lamb (http://warriorwriters.wordpress.org/ ) about the distinguishing characteristics of genre fiction.  Why? she asks.  Because, among other things, “each genre has its own set of general rules and expectations.”  A writer who writes a story beginning with a murder (often signaling the mystery genre), will have a hard time marketing her story as a romance if the murder victim is the protagonist’s love interest.  (Unless he comes back as a ghost, but that’s really another subgenre.)  Kristen does a thorough and thoroughly funny job of explaining genre characteristics, including the dreaded one of literary fiction which is not, she assures us, just anything that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Does following genre rules mean your stories have to sound the same as everybody else’s, as some writers fear?  No, says middle grade writer and hockey mom Kris Yankee (http://adventuresthatscore.blogspot.com ).  Kris has been brave enough to blog her way through the alphabet this month, and this week’s “U” entry is for “unique.”  “I’ve read that there are no new stories, just different (unique) takes on the same one,” she says.

I’ll add that there are limits to how unique unique should be.  Cycling back to MZB’s focus on “a satisfying reading experience of the kind their magazines were intended to provide,” let me add her caveat to read the magazine’s submissions guidelines.  And the magazine, if possible.  Read it even if not possible.  After all, a lot of on-line subscriptions are free and instantly accessible, so we’re running out of excuses.  And take the stories to heart.  They provide the kind of reading experience – satisfying and unique – their readers expect.