Well, Stacey Cochran Books officially has its first author under contract, and so it’s time to announce our launch. Over the next twelve months I am going to be signing on a lot of new authors at the press, and I’m excited to see where the year leads me. I am especially interested in self-published authors who already have a POD version of their book available at Amazon with positive reviews.
A Word or Two about Stacey Cochran Books
We are an eBook publisher. I can afford a very modest advance for authors I want to work with, and I pay a 25% royalty rate on net profits of sales of eBooks. Royalty payments are made on a six-month basis. We currently distribute eBooks primarily through Amazon’s Kindle Store to: 1) Kindle eReaders, 2) iPhones, 3) BlackBerry, 4) personal home computers and laptops, and 5) other digital reading devices.
I think the business model will work because of our zero production cost budget. That is, it costs nothing to produce an eBook other than the time spent formatting and coding everything for upload. Thus I have no overhead, and once a book is selling (even just 100 copies) everything is profit.
I am actively seeking self-published authors. Particularly authors who are fluent in POD publishing through Lulu, CreateSpace, etc., and want a partner for the launch of their eBooks. In the next couple of months, I plan to be setting up a Blog Tour to announce the launch of the press and our first author(s) under contract. If you’ve got a blog and want to help out with the Blog Tour by hosting me for a day on your site, let me know.
A Word or Two about Craft…. and then Online Marketing
Over the years, I’ve done a lot of in-person bookstore and library events. Like somewhere between 300-400. And so I’ve met a lot of aspiring writers. Literally thousands. Additionally I’ve done a lot of podcast panel interviews and in-studio interviews and print interviews, and if there’s one topic that always comes up, it’s the question of how to market your book.
How to make people aware of your book? How to sell copies?
The biggest difference between an aspiring author who has never published and the gritty folks who are 2 or 3 books into their careers is the realization that book marketing may be the single most important aspect of the professional life of a writer aside from the writing itself.
I think the most important thing is to write the best novel. The mastery of craft (character, plot, setting, style, and theme) is totally within an author’s control. It sometimes takes a decade or more to truly master it, but it’s a skill like any other. If you’re 3 or 4 (or 10) novels into your career and haven’t hit the bestseller list, there’s a good chance that one (or more) of these craft issues (character, plot, setting, style, and theme) are not being fully realized.
Character may be the hardest to learn. Theme and style might be the most overlooked. But if you break down the stories we love — that is, the most successful stories of all time — they nail each of these five components to the wall.
If there’s another GrandMaster-class weakness I see repeated over and over in aspiring writers it is the attitude of “I already know all this. Tell me how to market my book.” The realization I’ve come to though is that people who respond this way don’t know it. They don’t truly, purely understand the five fundamental elements of craft.
I don’t know these elements well, and I’ve been writing make-believe stories since I was six years old. I can use the five elements as a tool to analyze other folks’ work (people like Dennis Lehane, Stephen King, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Ron Rash, Cormac McCarthy, Shakespeare, etc.), and I’ve got a rather crude sense of how to put the five elements together on the page. But I’m far from mastering it.
And again, I’ve been writing fictional stories in one form or another for pretty much my entire life.
The single greatest service you can do for yourself for your writing career is to master the elements of craft: character, plot, setting, style, and theme. The trouble with character is that it can’t be faked. There is no shortcut. It must come from honest hard work and from life experience. It comes from an understanding of what we value in one another as human beings, and the ability to realize those very values in your own life first… and then be able to put them into words.
And that is why it’s so hard.
All this talk about Book Marketing is merely calisthenics. It’s exercise to help shape your mind. That said, it’s an important part of your writing routine. But it should never come to dominate craft. If it does, your craft will suffer. Your writing will be weaker than it can be, and you will struggle to find your audience with your work.
So, keeping that in mind, here’s what I’ve learned about Book Marketing
1) What sells a book better than anything else is an exhibition of mastery of the elements of craft (see above).
2) Cover Design. It is the first glimpse readers have of your work. And like a kickass TV commercial, it should be memorable.
3) Price Point. If your book is priced too high, readers will not buy it. Book pricing is a skill that must be learned by trial and error.
4) Book Description. Just as good haiku is a skill, the ability to condense an 80,000-word novel into a 50-word description that makes a reader want to read more is a valueable skill. You can learn this skill by reading hundreds of other book descriptions (in a variety of genres) and mimicking the form with your own work.
5) Positive reviews. Once you get about ten positive reviews on Amazon.com, for instance, that alone makes people want to give your book a look. Start by soliciting reviews from folks you know and trust. Maybe even giving away copies in exchange for reviews. Major publishers do this for practically every author they publish. Why shouldn’t you?
6) Word-of-Mouth. In 2010, a savvy internet-enlightened author can very inexpensively create word of mouth. How?
- Start with a website or blog, and have something interesting (or worth listening to) to say.
- Invest yourself in online communities. Again, Amazon has such a strong and robust community of bloggers, readers, fans, enthusiasts, these are the folks worth reading and understanding. Interview them and make friends. Invest yourself in learning from what your peers have to say.
- Once you know an online community well, consider launching a Blog Tour
A Word or Two about a Blog Tour
A Blog Tour is a pre-arranged set of dates that you, as an author, establish with other bloggers. You could easily be doing this year-round, but you might start by shooting for 4-8 weeks. Something manageable and achievable.
To set up a blog tour, contact blog owners and ask if you can visit their blog on a specific date with a blog post on a clear topic for a clear purpose. If the blog owner says “Yes,” then you’re in. Your goal is to get at least 30 blog owners to say “Yes,” and then to deliver on your tour by actually sending these folks your content.
For “content” you could write about your book, your writing process, book marketing, craft, theories on book reviews, or whatever you like provided you clear it with the blog owner first. Your guest blog post topic should be something to which the blog’s regular readership will respond positively.
Again, you’ve got to study this stuff. Learn it. Invest yourself.
In Conclusion
I would like to conclude with an interview I did with New York Times bestselling crime fiction author Robert Crais a few weeks ago. Bob was kind enough to answer my questions on my TV show The Artist’s Craft.
Anybody could do a TV show like this. It just takes time to learn how. It costs nothing but time, and each of us are granted (blessed/cursed) with exactly that on this earth. Time.
I’ve turned a little community access TV show into a Master Class for fiction and have interviewed numerous NYT bestselling authors: Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, John Hart, Margaret Maron, JA Jance, Mary Kay Andrews, Jill McCorkle, Bart Ehrman, etc. On March 26, I’ll be interviewing Harlan Coben.
I learn a tremendous amount personally by doing these interviews. Things like how to be on camera, how develop multi-media skills, how to work with major publicists at the biggest publishers in the world, how each of these writers’ careers came together, what they value, how they write, etc.
But most importantly I do it out of a sense of community service; a genuine belief (delusion perhaps?) that I’m helping to invigorate a discussion about the Literary Arts in our community. This belief has been the driving force for the show for three years and some 60 episodes.
The thing that stands out to me about the Robert Crais interview is the long path he took to become a novelist and the bold path he took in his early twenties to get into TV writing. I was especially interested in his fundamental motivations to become a writer in the first place.
I learned a lot.
