Angela Benedetti

Christina Phillips asked her readers about promo, what we like and dislike, what we do, and what we think works. Since I’m me, my answer got way long, so I’m posting it here instead.

I enjoy some promo activities and dislike others. I generally don’t do the ones I dislike.

I like blogging, but I post only when I have something to say. I don’t appreciate it when other people post lame whatever just to fill a slot on their schedule, and I won’t blather about what I had for lunch just to get something up on a Monday. I know people who can come up with interesting, useful posts on a regular schedule — and envy them bitterly [rueful smile] — but I’m not one of them and I’m not going to waste readers’ time if I have nothing significant to say.

I have a LiveJournal under my pseud because my publisher has an LJ community and encourages us to sign up for days to play host. I’ll grab a day when I have something new coming out, but don’t try to appear regularly otherwise. I don’t have a gift for entertaining a bunch of people online all day long unless I have something specific to talk about and a relevant theme, and if I haven’t had anything new out recently, well, that sort of leaves me with tap-dancing and birdcalls, neither of which I’m good at. A lot of the other writers do stunt writing, where they call for prompt words from readers by a certain time, and commit to having one or more ficlets posted using the prompts by the end of the day. I’ve done that once or twice, but I suck at it and would usually rather do something else. [hides under keyboard]

I like doing raffles, and have found that an effective way of keeping a decent number of people showing up in comments all day is to give a ticket in the hat for each post a reader participates in. So if someone answers three trivia questions, tells me who their favorite historical pirate is, and posts a cookie recipe (or whatever I’ve asked for that day) they get five tickets in the hat. That draws much more traffic than just saying that each person who participates in some way that day will get a ticket.

And about raffles and other give-aways, if you’re giving away a copy of your new book, people who are participating won’t buy your book until after the contest is over, because they’re hoping to win a free copy. After it’s all over, disappointment can nullify the excitement and anticipation built up by your promo activities, and cause them to put the book on their wish list and maybe buy a copy whenever, rather than running right out after the contest is over. Giving away something else encourages people to sign up to win something from your backlist, or a gift certificate, or whatever swag you’re offering, and possibly also buy your new book, which you’re promoing the heck out of.

And giving away a gift certificate, even five dollars’ worth will let someone buy several of my stories, so it’s a nice prize but not a huge expense to me. And someone who’s a dedicated fan and already has my whole backlist can participate and use the gift cert. to buy someone else’s stories; I don’t mind at all extending the benefits to someone who supports me so much that they already have everything I’ve published, and if they buy someone else’s books with the prize, that just spreads the good fortune around.

I don’t do MySpace or FaceBook; I’ve heard too many bad things about them, and I don’t need an iffy timesink.

I don’t Twitter — major timesink.

I have an author’s topic over on The Phade, in their Manhole area, which is dedicated to m/m fiction. It’s a fun place to hang out, with people who really love the kind of stories I write, but it’s not so busy that it’s a huge timesink. A number of reviewers hang out there, and I’ve gotten several reviews from Phade people since I signed up there, which is way cool.

Being a Romancing the Blog columnist drove a surprising amount of traffic to my blog, considering that RTB is mostly het and I’m an m/m writer, but that was a nice gig, even overlooking the fact that I just love being able to blather on about whatever. ;D RTB is on hiatus right now, but I’m hoping the new owners do fire it up again soon, and decide to keep me on. [crossed fingers] Note that I have no idea how much of that traffic actually resulted in sales, but even just blog traffic is nice to see.

I have a set of GLBT Bookshelf pages and I get some blog traffic from that site. There are buy links from my story pages to my publishers’ buy pages, but I can’t tell how much purchasing traffic originates there. Building my pages also forced me to expand my HTML skills; I got a good book on the subject and did some experimenting to get my pages looking decent, and learned a few things.

I have a web site which I swear I’ll do something with some day soon. [hides under keyboard again] Doing the GLBT Bookshelf pages means I’m that much closer to being able to do something with my web site besides having a mirror blog sitting on it, in all my spare time.

Part of my problem, though, is that so far I’ve only published short stories (and one novelette) and I like writing different characters and even genres so I don’t have a built-up body of information for any individual set of characters or fictional setting. I don’t have any major works which lend themselves to the kind of “bonus material” people like seeing on web sites. I have free sequels available to three of my stories, but they do perfectly well as pages on my WordPress blog. There are some things I want to pull out of the blog pages and put on the web site, like my list of publications, and the freebies, probably add to my bio, that sort of thing, but mostly I want to be able to give people cool bonus material. I have a novel in process with my publisher at the moment, and some more stories in the works set in the same universe; once that’s up and running, there’s other info I’ll be able to give — character bios, info on how the magic system works, background on the fey and various other beings the boys run into, that sort of thing. At this point, though, I feel like so long as I can manage with just the WordPress and its pages, I should keep it at that level, rather than expanding to a full web site (which would be skimpy anyway) just to have a full web site.

I haven’t done any swag because I don’t have anything to put on that kind of item. Again, all I have out so far are short pieces, none of which had an individual cover. Cover art is a primary focus of swag items, especially the cheap ones like bookmarks; I’m hoping my novel will have a great cover which will lend itself to that. [crossed fingers]

And recently (just yesterday, in fact) I signed up with Goodreads as an author. Still trying to figure out how that works — if you’re there, come say hi! I’m not sure what the noticeable effect will be (any comments from other writers who actively participate there?) but there are folks on Goodreads who’ve already put my work up and have done some rating and reviewing and such, so I’ll find out whether it helps to have an active presence there, however much time I can give it.

Wow, looking at all this written down, it seems like a lot. [blinkblink] I guess it sort of creeps up on you, a bit at a time. And some things require regular tending — like being an active presence in the blogosphere — while others are very intermittent, like my RTB gig, or maintaining my GLBT Bookshelf pages. That’s another factor when deciding whether to do a certain type of promo: can you invest the time to set it up and then mostly leave it, with just periodic attention, or is it something you’ll have to carve out a regular block of time for?

Honestly, though, I think the best promo when you get down to it is good word-of-mouth, and a lot of it. If you count that in, it seems promo will eventually start feeding itself, as though there’s some critical mass of talkative fans which, if you can achieve that level, will ensure that you’re going to expand from a decent audience to a really good one. The trick is getting to that critical mass, and making sure that your fans, however many or few there might be at any point, have stuff to talk about. Which comes back to writing great fiction, and ensuring that you have a fairly steady supply of it appearing. Awesome writing is what it’s really all about; with it, you’ll have other people promoing for you once some target number have tripped over your work, and without it, all the frantic promo a single writer can do won’t help.

It’s all about how you invest your resources, whether time (to do things yourself) or money (to hire people to do things for you.) I think we can all control money spent, because it’s money and there are bills to pay and that number at the bottom of the check book. Time can get away from you, though, if you don’t watch it just as carefully. There might be all kinds of promo activities you enjoy, and they all might even be productive, but if you take up all your time doing promo at the expense of your writing time, the wheels are going to grind to a halt eventually. Finding a good balance here is key, and any uncertainty should be awarded to your writing time.

Angie, still trying to find a good balance

Sarah Zettel over at Bookview Cafe has the best summary I’ve run into of the Harlequin Horizons blow-up. Briefly, for anyone who hasn’t heard, Harlequin has partnered up with Author Solutions to form “Harlequin Horizons,” a self-publishing imprint. This has gone over like the proverbial lead balloon, resulting in RWA, SFWA and MWA scratching Harlequin off their list of approved publishers. Sarah summarizes the issues wonderfully well.

Angie

PS — I’m leaving tomorrow to spend the week with my Mom for Thanksgiving. I also have a novel due by then. [flail] If I’m not around much in the next week or so, that’s why. Everyone have a great holiday!

I remember some discussion a year or so ago about whether entering contests was worthwhile from a sales point of view. I can’t say anything about the general experience, but I now have a data point.

My novelette, “A Spirit of Vengeance” made the finals in the 2009 EPPIEs competition. This isn’t a huge contest; hardly anyone outside of e-publishing has ever heard about it, and even within that area of the business, it gets variable amounts of respect. Note also that my story didn’t win — it only finalled, making it past the first round of judging.

Finalists were announced in early December of 2008, with lists of finalists posted in quite a few places around the net, and published in some newspapers. The winners were announced in early March of 2009.

Looking at my royalty statements, if we take my third quarter sales for 2008 as the baseline, fourth quarter (which includes less than a month of sales post-announcement) was 125% of that, a modest increase. First quarter 2009 sales were 450% of the baseline, and second quarter 2009 sales were just a bit over 200% of the baseline.

It would’ve been interesting to see whether second quarter would’ve been significantly higher if I’d won (aside from the fact that it just would’ve been nice to win ) but it’s pretty clear that first quarter of ‘09, at least, showed a very significant increase in sales. The story had been up for sale on my publisher’s web site for over a year by that point, and it’d been up on third-party distributor sites for almost as long; the initial flurry of sales for each of those venues is clear in my records, and both had died down before third quarter of ‘08.

In my case at least, being an EPPIE finalist did seem to impact my sales, and very nicely too. I have no idea what anyone else experiences, but there seems to be a clear cause-and-effect in my case between making the EPPIE finals and a spike in my sales.

Angie

Here’s something different I ran across the other day. AnthologyBuilder is a new twist on POD service where writers offer their reprint stories (and they only take reprints, from paying books or anthologies) to the AnthologyBuilder archive — which also contains public domain stories — and customers can browse through and choose exactly which stories they want to have in their personalized anthology. They can choose up to 350 pages of fiction, give the book their own title and choose cover art, then pay $14.95 and have the book produced and mailed to them. Authors get paid pro rata royalties whenever one of their stories is chosen for an anthology. Their guidelines are here, and their author contract is here.

I have no idea how well this works, what kinds of sales numbers the site has, or whether it’d be a smart use of reprint rights, but it’s an interesting idea so I thought I’d toss it out there for you all to take a look at.

Angie

Well, I haven’t been doing much writing over the last few days, but I have a chunk of a wiki now. (And I know a lot more HTML than I did a week ago.)

In response to April’s Amazonfail, Mel Keegan started the GLBT Bookshelf, a community for writers, publishers, artists, editors, reviewers and readers of GLBT fiction based on a wiki. It’s a communal project, and as soon as it’s a bit more fleshed out, we’ll start advertising to draw more traffic. Members are encourage to post buy-links to their fiction, and the idea is to be a central location where readers can come to find and buy GLBT books. You know, in case Amazon or anyone else eventually comes up with a way of actually getting away with turning us all invisible to the readers and customers.

It’s a pretty cool project. The home page ishere and my main author’s page is here. I have a page for each of my stories, with summaries, good-size excerpts, buy-links, and links to my free stories. I’m on the writer’s list and my stories are on the alphabetical book list and on my publisher’s page. I still need to link each story up to the relevant category (genre, theme, etc.) pages, but my brain started frying in code about six hours ago so I’ll finish up later.

This is a neat idea and it’s something any group of writers could do. If you’re a writer I urge you to come over and poke around, even if you don’t write GLBT. One of the primary benefits of this project, even assuming none of the major retailers ever tries to erase us again, is that we can do group marketing; with even one or two hundred people you can do a lot of high-quality advertising for just a buck or two per person. With more people you can start looking at advertising that’s usually available only to the medium to large publishers. Any group of writers from any genre or non-fiction subject area could benefit from this sort of set-up.

Angie