A path through the wilderness of literary publication

Blake Kimzey felt a strange sense of homecoming when he addressed this month’s meeting of the Dallas chapter of Mystery Writers of America on “Writing Out of the Wilderness: Surviving Rejection & Forging a Path to Publication.” Yes, he was a writer speaking to other writers, but the feeling also stemmed from the meeting’s location – an Olive Garden restaurant – a Texas twin of the one in Iowa where he honed his writing skills while working as a waiter.

“I would write stories in the wait station,” he told his audience, while observing his customers.

He came to know the regulars, in many cases, “well, there’s not really a nice way to say this – meth heads –” while dishing out their favorite order, minestrone soup, “because it was all they could afford and all many of them could eat,” given the toll their drug habits had taken on their teeth.

Some of them would inspire his stories.

Sure, Kimzey would go on to take creative writing classes, earn an MFA, see scores of his short stories published, and founded Writing Workshops Dallas  – among other literary accomplishments. But he was standing in front of a group of writers and would-be writers to tell us that if he could practice writing as a chain-restaurant worker, we too could find our way through the writing wilderness. 

 “I think there’s far too much pessimism when it comes to writing and publication,” he said, attempting to demystify the process of publication with “practical steps you can take in the face of insurmountable rejection.” 

image: pixabay

Yes, rejections will come, but the good news is there’s a way through them, and “you can start this journey sitting in the chairs you’re in right now!”

How? Just as when we write, our characters must have both an overall goal and lower-order goals, so must we as writers. 

“It’s a mystifying process to go from dreaming about being in Barnes & Noble to actually getting there, but that was my goal when I realized I wanted to be a writer,” Kimzey said. (And admitted, “I’m still trying to get there.”)

So, the overall goal is being published in a major brick and mortar bookstore, but the lower-order goals are simpler:

·       Read diversely

“Reading out of your genre shows you so many ways to do it.” (Although Kimzey recommends “more novels and less how-to books, for examples of craft he teaches Benjamin Percy's volume Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction.)

·       Write regularly

His daily goal is a modest 250 words – approximately one page. “By the time I get there, I can blow past that!”

·       Study the process

“Who is your favorite author? What publisher would be best for your work? Check your favorite authors websites, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages What replicable steps have you identified? Apply them before you’re ready for publication.” Make yourself “findable” via your own website and social media accounts. “Twitter is a living resume. If you’re not using it that way, you doing it wrong.”

·       Reach out to other people trying to do the same thing

And, oh yeah:

·       Welcome rejection

“Rejection slips are your receipts,” proof that you’re trying. “Everybody’s goal should be to get 100 rejections over a year.”

And how to collect those rejection receipts (as well as some acceptance receipts)? 

Check out the possibilities, he advised. Publications such as New Pages and The Review Review, which can review stories you do manage to publish, as well as Duotrope  and agent listings in Publishers Marketplace and Poets & Writers. 

***

As always when I post about wonderful writing seminars and workshops, this is only the barest dip into Kimzey’s discussion. For more, consider signing up for some of the many workshops he directs at Writing Workshops Dallas. Or ask your writing group’s program leader to bring him onboard for smaller group presentations.

Social media marketing that won’t take over your life

What single thing did Fred Campos, the motivational speaker at this month’s meeting of Dallas Mystery Writers, utter that convinced me to try social media marketing? “You don’t have to be 100 percent better – you only have to be a little better. The difference between first place and second place at the Kentucky Derby is a fraction of a second. A year later, the difference is $10 million.”

Well, that and that social media sites are now search engines. Once upon a time, we went to specialized search engines – Yahoo, Bing, Google – to look for information. Now we search for it on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Youtube. 

image: pixabay

If you’re looking for a plumber, do you search Youtube? The answer, surprising though it may be, is often – yes.

“Make a video no matter what you do,” Campos said. “There needs to be a video about every single book you write. . . A smart phone is your recording studio. Add a little humor to it if you can.” (Maybe I could do videos about my short story publications?)

As anybody who has searched Youtube has found, those videos don’t have to be of Oscar-contender quality. But for more inspiration and suggestions for topics, check out the tips I gleaned from teen BookTube book reviewers at the North Texas Teen Book Festival. My favorite: a TV screen tuned to a cartoon channel (because of the bright colors) and paused. Consider changing background as appropriate!

Although I’ve recently completed a book-length thriller manuscript, I feel a little silly thinking about marketing for a book that hasn’t even been agented, much less sold to a publisher. 

Campos had an answer for that, a client who planned to self-publish, but what he described as a “pre-marketing campaign” a year in advance of release, using the time to search for potential readers. In her case, she did that by searching on Twitter for people who followed other media on her topic. (See last Tuesday’s post, title link, about doing this.)

The rest of his suggested pre-marketing campaign (segueing into actual marketing) includes, per quarter, on either Twitter or Facebook:

• 20-30 editorial messages, about characters, books, stories, etc.
• 10-15 pictures (see also my tips on copyright-free images)
• 2-3 press releases
• 1-2 videos

Wait. Press releases? For what press outlets? 

“Everybody can write a press release about anything,” Campos assured his audience. “These are where search engines go to get information. You should have a press release about every book, every book signing.”

For tips on how to write press releases, see my post, "Writers: prepare for our closeups!"

Once a book is available, every release should end with a call to action – buy the book!  

And make social media presence ongoing. The issue, as with the racehorse imagery at the beginning of this post, isn’t to knock ‘em dead once. It’s to run consistently, one race at a time. It can be an hour a day or 10 minutes a day. Consider scheduling your messages and tweets in advance (he uses Hootsuite, which has both free and for-pay versions). Make it about spending some time rather than money. 

All of this barely scratches the surface of what Campos spent more than an hour telling the group at our Dallas Mystery Writers’ meeting, and I could barely take notes and screenshots of his slides fast enough to keep up. For more, I heartily recommend suggesting him as a speaker to your own group or club. 

But oh, you don’t have a group? Then one last public service announcement: writing groups and writers and information will throng WORDfest next Saturday (March 24). It’s free, but the organizers would love to know how many name badges to print, sandwiches to prepare, parking spaces to reserve. Please come, but also please register via Ticketleap by this coming Monday (March 19). See you there!

Spreading our writer's marketing wings with Twitter

Last Tuesday, and still full of revivalist fervor following a pep talk from Fred Campos, who could sell sand in the Sahara, I posted about doing more with social media. Specifically, with Twitter.

Right. Because, obviously I already blog. (Although blogging may or may not be a bit dated, but it’s gotten me free passage into literary events I otherwise might have been outclassed at. Plus, it’s actually kind of fun.) I’m also on Facebook and even Pinterest, because I LOVE pictures! 

So why have I resisted Twitter so long? I remember attending a sci-fi convention years ago at which a speaker said sniffily that Twitter was doomed because the average age of its users was 40. Vultures were practically circling our corpses – an excuse for the cute v-birds image on this post. 

Although to misquote the ever-quotable Mark Twain, reports of death by Twitter were obviously exaggerated, my qualms were not assuaged by news reports about how fast lies travel on the T. Or by the disdain of my younger family members, whose classmates break up with each other (and possibly even date each other) on Snapchat.

image: pixabay

Still, and with trembling, I dipped my toe – or pen -- into the Twitter waters. It wasn’t bad. It even seemed like a good way to connect with people (#1 on Campos’s list of reasons to commit to social media). Maybe even a way to learn from other people (the second of Campos’s reasons to commit). But ultimately (to quote both Campos and my family members) was it a way to market? 

Remember, dear readers and writers, social media is only a tool, not an end in itself. (Except perhaps for the terminally sociable.) It’s a way to get your message across. Like the beer guy at a football game, whose message of cold beer for sale is ignored by sports fans until – they down the last drop of their cup of cold beverage.

And readers won’t know we’ve got something to assuage their thirst until they have a thirst that needs quenching. So, here’s Campos’s plan: first, pre-market to let people know you’re a person they can trust to provide that quencher. Then, let ‘em know you’ve got the goods they thirst for.

Still not convinced Twitter is the medium for your message?

That’s OK. “Just pick one piece of social media and do it regularly,” Campos assured his audience at the local Mystery Writers of America meeting.

Treat each medium as a search engine. Even sometimes-despised Facebook is now a search engine, Campos noted. “Stephen King promotes his books only on his writing fan page.” (Full disclosure: I have not verified that statement. But hey, it sounds cool, right?)

Do the pre-marketing stuff first, allowing if possible up to a year before gearing up to a full marketing campaign. Humans have such limited attention spans we don’t want to ask people to commit to something until we actually have the goods, i.e., books, to offer. It’s no use telling people we’ll have a book for them to read in two years. Who will remember that?

Who to market to? “The demographics are your potential buyers,” Campos said. “Not your fellow writers.”

His suggestion was, if using Twitter, to search for the genre we write in. Since I write thrillers, I obligingly typed “Thrillers” in my Twitter search, only to get a list of people who write thrillers. And who wanted me to buy their books. Not that I’m immune to buying other writers’ books, but then there were things like the poor writer tweeted that she was only allowed to pitch her book every three days. It was depressing. (A word that makes serious inroads on my 270-character tweeting allowance.)

The search term “who reads thrillers” turned up scads of book bloggers and reviewers. Better. These people actually read. I followed several. (Campos’s rule: “About 20-30 percent of these will follow you back. . . but do it in little bitty pieces.” If you’re not getting significant return following, back off until your percentage of followers picks up.)

I’ll also add, follow the social media etiquette rules of commenting, liking, and sharing (in Twitter parlance, “retweeting”) If somebody isn’t posting stuff you’re proud to retweet, consider whether you really want to follow that person.

So say, you’re hooked. Ready to get serious? Next up, I’ll post the nitty-gritty specifics about Campos’s pre-marketing as well as his grab-‘em by the throat marking campaigns. What to post. How often to do it. And how to do it. In the meantime, keep writing! Because nobody can market a book that hasn’t been written.

Social media: so much fun an introvert can do it

I tend to shudder slightly when somebody says, really, you need to be on social media more. It’s a time suck, I’ll say, excusing myself. But deep down in my heart of hearts, the reason I’m not out there more on social media is because I’m – afraid. As in scared witless. What if I’m attacked by goons? Tied up by Twitter werewolves and forced to post videos of cats? Worst of all, what if I (gulp) misspell a word? (Hey, we introverted writerly types worry about stuff like that.)

That was before I heard Fred Campos speak at this month’s meeting of the Dallas chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Formerly of Fun City Social Media, and now DFW Website Designers, winner of Toastmasters “Humorous Public Speaking” contests, Campos could rock the audience at a mortuary science convention. (Get him to tell you the one about the client who died shortly after his Twitter campaign was launched – but whose tweets lived on. Oops!)

In all seriousness, as soon as I finish laughing I’ll pass on some of Campos’s tips to you, dear readers. This post will be short and sweet, because I hope to hook you first and follow up with the heavier how-to stuff by the end of this week. And being serious, there’s the “why do it at all?” issue to overcome. If we just want fun, why not go to a monster truck rally instead?

Fred Campos

“As writers, we tend to focus on the craft. But unfortunately, we also need to market,” Campos said, his Mickey Mouse tie positively quivering with glee as he clicked through inspirational slides with titles such as “Facebook is the biggest population in the world – followed by China.” 

And, “more people own mobile devices than toothbrushes.” (Do their dentists know? I’m picturing a demographic of toothless people poring over their phone screens here. Probably not one I want to connect with.)

Even Campos claims he once feared to enter such a world until he got his own Twitter account the year his wife asked him to put the Thanksgiving turkey in the oven. Wanting to sleep in, she left him a Post-It note reminder: 375. That was probably the temperature, he figured. But the oven had two settings: bake and broil. Which to use?

Figuring that waking his wife to ask wouldn’t win him any husband of the year awards, Campos posted the dilemma to his Twitter followers. Within seconds, he got 20 responses telling him to bake, not broil. “Well,” he confided, “18 telling me to bake and two with a lot of concern about my cooking ability.” Result – a turkey baked to perfection and a man sold on the potential of social media to change lives (and stave off house fires, not to mention divorces). 

For those who customarily write rather than bake turkeys, Campos offered three reasons to commit to social media:

• To connect with people
• To learn from people (i.e., turkey cookers)
• To market to particular demographics

This last group is the one writers hope will follow our particular feeds, “and one day, buy (our) books.”

In the meantime, there are a number of factors competing with books for people’s attention. It may be as simple as not having a specific product (i.e., book) come to mind when they experience a wish for information or entertainment.

Writers, sensitive creatures that we are, fear that continually broadcasting our message will turn people off, but, Campos said, “social media is like the beer guy at a football game. Everybody tunes out his message until – they get to the bottom of their cup of cold beverage. He’s yelling out the product, and the moment they are interested, they get it.

He’s not offended by the majority of people in the football stadium who aren’t currently in the market for beer. He’s only interested in the comparative few, the thirsty few, who want to buy.

The beer guy’s message is that he has beer to sell. “What,” Campos asked, “is our message?”

But, we ask, still shying away from the prospect, doesn’t using social media for promotion mean we won’t have time to do our real job, which is writing?

Continuing his sports analogies, Campos pointed out the difference between winning and losing can be a fraction of a second. “You don’t have to be 100 percent better. You only have to be a little better,” to receive a payoff in the end.

After hearing him, I began to understand why sales people listen to so many pep talks. And after testing some of Campos's tips, I'll fill you in on the next steps -- the pre-campaign and the full-meal deal social media blitz itself!

Wordcraft – Blogging: easy as a message in a bottle

Recently a friend asked me, as friends do from time to time, how to go about writing a blog. The best thing I can tell them is that blogging is like sending messages in a bottle. Don’t send one and stop, waiting for the ship to find you. Don’t send one, hoping you’ll get rich and famous overnight. Keep the messages coming.

I only started writing a blog because the instructor of a writing class I went to told us that all writers must participate in social media. She refused to consider the excuses -- that writers are the most introverted and socially awkward of so-called professionals, a claim backed by extensive research (which I’m making up as I go along) indicating that as a group, we rank lower in interpersonal skills than sociopathic basement-dwelling computer hackers. I started with Facebook; went on to build my own website, now mercifully demolished, from a box. Then I tried blogging.

There are lots of websites that support blogging, but why not start with a free site like this one at Blogger or Wordpress, which may be more popular with writers, at least writers I follow.

It was so easy, no worse than setting up a Facebook account. Of course, I was doing everything completely and totally wrong. I learned this the first time I typed in my own URL and Google told me it couldn’t find it.

Fortunately, a few months later the DFW Writers’Conference  included a class on blogging, taught by Kristen Lamb, a tiny blonde, martial-arts chopping dynamo out to prove to writers that we can overcome the weaknesses of our blogs. Which she knew because she had been there. 

In general, it’s safest to let Kristen speak for herself through her blog, which she will, even if I could manage to slap zip ties on her wrists and gag her with duct tape, because that’s the kind of woman she is. But I’ll mention her first rule: forget the natural writerly tendency to try to fade into the background, hiding behind some blog title that’s supposed to sound cute but actually is just stupid, like mine, which has required years of therapy and massive doses of mind-altering drugs to overcome. Kristen admitted, like a motivational speaker at a 12-step program, that she had done this herself, but had overcome by relentlessly rebranding her blog as (gasp!) Kristen Lamb’s Blog. Google it. It works.

Kristen’s second rule of blogging is to rip any thought of ourselves as “aspiring writers” right out of our frontal cortexes. Ouch! (But don’t you feel better now?) “Aspiring” is for sissies. We’re writers. So we write, and we feed our blogs by writing. Often. Writing regularly and often in itself puts little bread crumb trails on the Internet that lets search engines like Google’s find us. In the meantime, we should link, link, link like crazy to our blog’s URL. Google’s bloodhounds are out there sniffing.

Somewhere along the line I heard that the simple act of writing regularly helps us write better. It’s true, although it helps if we write intentionally and with no more than moderate amounts of the above-mentioned mind-altering drugs.

We also need a theme for our posts, indeed, for our entire blog, maybe for our entire lives. (Theme being something I learned even more about from another amazing DFW Conference speaker this year, Disney Jr. channel’s photo mom, Me Ra Koh.)

I can’t remember whether Kristen ordered us to include images with our blog posts or whether I learned that on my own, but do it. Any image, even the craziest, immediately draws more attention from web surfers. Internet guru James Gaskin, who I met at another writers’ group confessed that he got a cat just so he could post cute cat pictures with his blog.

Like James, I take most of my own pictures or download them free from sites such as Wikimedia . There are sources of clip art pictures, some of which you have to pay for. Remember to play right with copyright rules or you may find FBI agents knocking on your door. And they’re way less good looking in person than in the movies.

Wordcraft – How to tame the social media circus

Last week, Wordcraft reported on the social media strategies of Me Ra Koh, “photo mom” host of Disney Jr.’s “Capture Your Story”, as well as author of bestselling how-to books on photography of kids and family. Strenuous feats of blogging helped build her artistic career. Then came the Facebook monster, stealing her blog followers, or so she thought, before she built a new following on Facebook with posts that have reached hundreds of thousands of viewers.

So what does she have to say to authors about taming the circus of Facebook and other social media outlets?

The number one secret, as mentioned last Tuesday, is for authors (and other artists) to “know what you’re about beyond the book you’re working on. This is critical. I see people post things on social media, but there’s no heart.” Just as characters in a novel need a theme, authors need to recognize the theme of their own lives.

Instead of blogging five times as week as she did previously, she told her audience at the recent DFW Writers Conference, she now blogs only once or twice a week. The majority of her social media time is spent on Facebook. To work around the 5,000 followers limit set by Facebook for a personal page, she set up a professional Facebook page. This is as easy to do as a personal page. From the multitude of do-it-yourself options I found on Google, I liked the brief tutorial at Standout Books.

Ultimately, “It’s not how many people are following (you) as it’s how many people are being reached. The biggest mistake I was making was, I was only posting about myself. If Facebook sees that you never share anyone else’s content, they will never let more people see yours. I started posting four times a day, (finding) content I could share that was related to my theme.”

Posting four times daily? The secret is to schedule, Again, there’s plenty of advice out there about how to schedule posts, including DIY tips I found at the blog Constant Contact.

“I schedule a whole week’s work of posts in four hours during my least creative time of the day,” Koh said.

She also had advice about another demon of authors – Amazon – and how to attract readers who want to know about the writer as well as her book.

Of course, if you have a book, you’ll have an Amazon author page, right? Koh’s next must-dos include an author photo. Well, she is a photographer. But I’ve been surprised when visiting the Amazon pages of authors I admire to find several of them totally without photos. It’s not about being supermodel gorgeous; it’s about letting readers know what kind of person you are. Ditto for author biographies. And then, Koh said, you must have videos, “if only to have someone holding a smart phone in front of you and letting you talk.” In fact, Koh, whose mantra is “be the reckless beginner,” believes a homemade looking video imparts more credibility than a professional one.

Finally, we’re sitting there on Amazon with our book, but no reviews. Before her books were released, Koh said, “I told people on my blog and at every email address I had that I’m going to give away autographed books to the first 40 people who write reviews for me. Send me a screen capture of your review and who you want it personalized to. When a book already has 40 reviewers, people want to review it more. If you only have a handful of reviews, it’s hard to get more.”

Wordcraft – The photo mom’s take: social media for writers

I thought I liked to take pictures, but for Me Ra Koh, the “photo mom” host of “Capture Your Story” at Disney Junior, photography was her salvation. And the bouncy real life mom, wildly waving hair only slightly restrained with a glittering headband, was onstage at this year’s DFW Writers Convention to spread the gospel of community through photos.

She knew she was born to be an artist, but her first book took 10 years, a recovery memoir, took 10 years to write, finally being birthed the same year as her daughter. Unfortunately, the joy of book launch and beautiful baby girl was soon overshadowed by the loss in pregnancy of a second beloved baby. And during the year of grief that followed, “I quit writing,” she said.

The loss, however, convinced her of the importance of capturing every moment with the child she still had. “I went to Costco and bought my first camera.” Her husband caught her love of photography, the couple started a business photographing weddings, she found photography reinspiring her inner writer. “Photography parallels writing and storytelling.”

With the advent of social media, she started blogging about photography, posting five times weekly. It took seven years of this grueling schedule, but she accumulated a following of 50,000 unique readers.

Then she received “this random email from Random House,” asking if she’d be interested in writing a book on the subject. The result, Your Baby in Pictures, became the first of a trilogy of photo how-to books, which led to guest blogging stints at Disney and travel site Condé Nast and then “why don’t we pitch about traveling?" It was an inspiration that eventually had her family circumnavigating the globe.

Then came Facebook. She hated it. “Facebook was stealing my blogging audience! I was so annoyed.” But she came to embrace it, relieved at how much Facebook eased the pressure of her previous blogging schedule. “Blogging should not be our career. Our career is writing books.”

Her not-so-secret secret of success with social media: “know what you’re about, beyond the book you’re working on. Just like your characters need a theme in your book, what is your theme? If you only get on social media to talk about your book, you will get sick of talking about your book. But knowing what your theme is: now you’ll know what to blog or post about.”

Not sure of your theme? She passed out lists of possibilities – themes for literature and life – including “compassion as heroic,” “the struggle for self-definition,” “there are no random acts in life,” and a popular one among her audience of writers, “the power of storytelling.”

“I’m amazed at how many people want to know what kind of person I am before they buy my book.”

Her suggestions for personalizing themes include "sharing bits about a personal story” (although she emphasizes only doing this once the writer has worked through an issue for herself), “extras – all the things that don’t make it into the book,” who and what inspires the writers, “anything I can teach – can I include a photo tip?”, and our personal creative process. And of course, always include a photo.

(Next Tuesday, Me Ra Koh’s tips for taming the social media circus)