One Lovely Thank You Note a Day: This is What Carolyn See May Have Meant

In one of her books on writing, Carolyn See advises authors to write one lovely thank you note a day, the emphasis on "lovely." Lots of authors are good at writing thank you notes, especially since e-mail has made it so easy. But "lovely?"  We are all pressed for time.

Still, I have one reader who has sent me several that are examples of the kind of letter I think See would have approved of. Her name is Marlan Warren and she gave me permission to reprint her letter if I thought it would help other writers do something similar--or at least to nudge them to write their letters.  I mean, a note like this can make an author so happy! And the words from a smart publicist are an added bonus!

Dear Carolyn:

I really enjoyed your interview with Maxine Thompson on the Artist First Radio Network last night. I felt privileged to hear you and Maxine discuss literature, writers, writing, and your own great how-to knowledge (I’m a huge fan of your How to Do It Frugally series and now a fan of Maxine's show). You are two Old School pros who know better than anyone that being a great writer or editor means more than having been at the top of your class in English.

I especially liked your tip to "Promote the Promotion." This is what I try to explain to my PR/Marketing clients, but it is hard for them to grasp. Most think it's enough to post a "Hey! Buy my book!" on social media and leave it at that.

Your discussion with Maxine about editing was spot on. Didn't she say something about refusing to promote a book that is not ready? I do the same thing. You explained today’s indie author marketing environment perfectly: the Internet has provided new venues for people who want to get their writing "out there," but it has also opened the floodgates for sloppy writing and presentations.

I recently received a book from a small press, and the first thing I noticed was a typo on the back cover. Newbie authors often think this is no big deal, not realizing the book will never be opened by a media host if they spot such an error.

Many inexperienced writers/authors I meet confess to feeling bored with the book after they’ve published it: "Never mind about promoting Book No. 1...I've started writing Book No. 2!"

Gives a whole new image to the phrase “pleasuring oneself,” doesn’t it?

Thanks again, Carolyn and Maxine!

Keep on truckin'!

Marlan Warren

ABOUT THE LETTER-WRITER (-: 

Marlan Warren offers PR/Marketing services for authors (Book Publicity by Marlan) and the rest (Roadmap Communications). She reviews for The Midwest Book Review, and is the author of the novel, Roadmaps for the Sexually Challenged: All’s Not Fair in Love or War. The last book she edited is the upcoming The First Practical Handbook for Crazy People by Shelly and Sherry Glaser. A seasoned journalist, Marlan is also a contributor to No Depression Magazine.

E-Mail: memoircity@gmail.com
Twitter: @marlanwarren

Roadmap Girl's Book Buzz: http://roadmapgirlsbookbuzz.blogspot.com/
Web site: http://bookpublicitybymarlan.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookpublicitybymarlan/

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 Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The multi award-winning second edition of The Frugal Editor; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor .

What To Do to Jumpstart Book Sales!

Book Sales Getting Musty?

Adapted from the multi award-winning Frugal Book Promoter (www.budurl.com/FrugalBkPromo) Aslo available on Kindle

 

In the world of publishing as in life, persistence counts. Of course, there is no way to keep a book at the top of the charts forever, but if you keep reviving it, you might hold a classic in your hands. Or your marketing efforts for one book may propel your next one to greater heights.

 

I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen authors who measure their success by book sales give up on their book (and sometimes on writing) just about the time their careers are about ready to take off. I tell my students and clients to fight the it’s-too-late-urge.

 

Publicity is like the little waves you make when you toss pebbles into a lake. The waves travel, travel, travel and eventually come back to you. If you stop lobbing little stones, you lose momentum. It’s never too late and it’s never too early to promote. Rearrange your thinking. Marketing isn’t about a single book. It’s about building a career. And new books can build on the momentum created by an earlier book, if you keep the faith. Review the marketing ideas in this book, rearrange your schedule and priorities a bit, and keep at it.

 

Here are a few keep-at-it ideas from the second edition of The Frugal Book Promoter:

• Run a contest on your Web site, on Twitter, or in your newsletter. Use your books for prizes or get cross-promotion benefits by asking other authors for books; many will donate one to you in trade for the exposure. Watch the 99 Cent Stores for suitable favors to go with them.

 

Hint: Any promotion you do including a contest is more powerful when you call on your friends to tell their blog visitors or Facebook pals about it.

 

• Barter your books or your services for exposure on other authors’ Web sites.
• Post your flier, brochure, or business card on bulletin boards everywhere: In grocery stores, coffee shops, Laundromats, car washes, and bookstores.
• Offer classes in writing to your local high school, college, or library system. Publicizing them is easy and free. When appropriate, use your own book as suggested reading. The organization you are helping will pitch in by promoting your class. The network you build with them and your students is invaluable. Use this experience in your media kit to show you have teaching and presentation skills.
• Slip automailers into each book you sell or give away for publicity. Automailers are envelopes that are pre-stamped, ready to go. Your auto mailer asks the recipient to recommend your book to someone else. Your mailer includes a brief synopsis of your book, a picture of the cover of your book, your book’s ISBN, ordering information, a couple of your most powerful blurbs, and a space for the reader to add her handwritten, personal recommendation. Make it clear in the directions that the reader should fill out the form, address the envelope, and mail it to a friend. You may offer a free gift for helping out, but don’t make getting the freebie too tough. Proof-of-purchase type schemes discourage your audience from participating.
• Send notes to your friends and readers asking them to recommend your book to others. Or offer them a perk like free shipping, gift wrap, or small gift if they purchase your book for a friend. That’s an ideal way to use those contact lists you’ve been building.
• While you’re working on the suggestion above, put on your thinking cap. What directories have you neglected to incorporate into your contact list? Have you joined any new groups since your book was published? Did you ask your grown children for lists of their friends? Did you include lists of old classmates?
• Though it may be a bit more expensive than some ideas in The Frugal Book Promoter, learn more about Google’s AdWords and AdSense and Facebook's ad program. Many authors of niche nonfiction or fiction that can be identified with often-searched-for keywords find this advertising program effective.
• Check out ad programs like Amazon’s Vine review service. You agree to provide a certain number of books to Amazon and pay them a fee for the service. Amazon arranges the reviews for you. It’s expensive, but it gets your book exposed to Amazon’s select cadre of reviewers who not only write reviews for your Amazon sales page but also may start (or restart!) a buzz about your book.
• Some of your reviews (both others’ reviews of your book and reviews you’ve written about others’ books) have begun to age from disuse. Start posting them (with permission from the reviewer) on Web sites that allow you to do so. Check the guidelines for my free review service blog at TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com.
• Connect and reconnect. Start reading blogs and newsletters you once subscribed to again. Subscribe to a new one. Join a writers’ group or organization related to the subject of your book.
• Record a playful message about your book on your answering machine.
• When you ship signed copies of your book, include a coupon for the purchase of another copy for a friend—signed and dedicated—or for one of your other books. Some distributors insert fliers or coupons into your books when they ship them for a fee.
• Adjust the idea above to a cross-promotional effort with a friend who writes in the same genre as you. He puts a coupon for your book in his shipments; you do the same for him in yours.
• Win an award (win, place or show!) and promote it like crazy--promote it everywhere!
• Use the fun little QR codes on your business cards and other promotional material.
• Explore the opportunities for speaking on cruise ships. Many have cut back on the number of speakers they use, but your area of expertise may be perfect for one of them. I tried it, but found ship politics a drawback. Still many authors like Allyn Evans who holds top honors in Toastmasters and Erica Miner have used these venues successfully. For help with the application process from beginning to end, contact Daniel Hall at speakerscruisefree.com.

 

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

CNN, Dominoes, Tweeting, and Damage Control

Everyone is getting into the tweeting act.

On its business page Monday (Apr 20), the LA Times reports "Tweets Are an Ally in Crisis PR" and goes on to talk about the likes of Dominoe's Pizza, CNN and Amazon. And about how knowing Twitter can make or break any one's PR department's ability to avert a crisis. Including theirs.

It also makes clear how an agile tweeter can sell more product simply by doing what people generally like to do and that's relate genuinely to other people.

So, when Amazon has trouble with their image because they don't get Twitter (remember the "glitch" excuse for removing the ratings from gay literature?) and when CNN realizes they'd better have some control over their own branding by handling their tweets from under their own umbrella, isn't it time more authors understood Twitter and got involved?

The answer is yes. But it's more than that. It's also understanding how to use it, not just spinning out your little 140 character tweets. There is a knack of it and I'm happy to consult with you on that. But I want to go deeper with this blog, too.

That is, you can manage social networking much better if you know what is going on in the social network universe. And you can't do that without help. It used to be that a good friend was all you needed to tell you when someone was maligning your name. But now you really need an automated friend. So let's jump from Twitter (or Facebook or any of the other groups like iFogo or Ning or . . . you get the idea!) to alerts.

Very simply put, authors need alerts. They need Google Alerts and they need Twitter Tweets Alert Digest from Tweetlate.com. These online entities will let you know when your name is mentioned for good or for bad. You tell them what you want them to find for you and they do it.

So, as an example, I let it find all my titles for me, in part and in whole. And my name. And my twitter moniker (@frugalbookpromo), and my series' name (HowToDoItFrugally). I use alerts in lots of other ways but this article is about damage control and sales so we'll leave it at that.

So, once you've got an alert, what do you do with it?

You react to it. One of the first rules of great PR is to react and to do it immediately.

When you react you don’t just to say you're innocent and can do no wrong. You examine the accusation to see what part you played in it and own up to that. Only then can you dismiss any untrue part of the statement. Remember, this has to be done fast but not so fast that you don't formulate your admission (or apology). Don't get vague like Amazon did and say "Oh, it was just a glitch." Do what Hugh Grant did when he was caught with a prostitute. He said, "Yes, I made mistake. I'm sorry. My following deserves better than that." And the problem went away. For everyone but me. I remember PR coups like an elephant with a 100 year memory. But I did forgive Grant. He's only human (and adorable.).

And what if you get alerted that someone said something nice?

Well, you've heard it here before. You thank them. Preferably publicly where others will see that someone said something nice. But genuinely. You can't buy advertising as good as this kind of PR.

So, tweet anyone?

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books for writers, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. Her FRUGAL book for retailers is A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog.

Carolyn Rants on Review Copies And Plain Old Manners

I am cranky this morning. That’s not the best way to start a blog post or a Sunday morning but it comes with a very important tip so you or your publisher or your press won’t rile up the editors/reviewers/authors/ you send your books to.

I am reprinting the note I just fired off to a press. You’ll see what I mean:

Dear Publisher:

I received a copy of XX yesterday. Lovely book but no note, no review copy label, nothing. What to do with it? Endorsement? Review? A mention in my newsletter (is the author a subscriber?) Is it for me to decide? There wasn’t even an e-mail or site for the author. That means I have to research my mail before I even begin to schedule my week’s work.

Sorry to be grumpy, but this is one of the reasons that reviewers get a bad name and why authors get called “snooty” because we don’t answer our mail. We (authors, editors, freelance writers) often wear many hats--and we also have very short memories!

I'm only mentioning this so that you might fix your system. Perhaps you could include a little postcard in your mailings? It could include author contact information and/or mentions the purpose for which it is being sent.


I realize that, as authors, we often don’t have control over what our publisher or the press that may send out our copies, so that leads me to another tip:

I remember agent Michael Larsen mentioning this at one of the first writer’s conferences I attended. He said, "Follow up!" If I receive an e-mail in couple days asking if I received the review copy (or whatever it was!), that would be a help, not a hindrance. We authors are in business, after all. And good business communication is essential for good business!

By the way, I didn't mention plain old manners in my letter. (I guess I wasn't in such a bad mood after all!) I mean, what would it have hurt to include a thank you? But you all know I am a mother who insisted my kids write their thank yous and, in The Frugal Book Promoter, nagged my readers to send their thank yous. So what can you do with a mother/editor/author/freelancer like that? Smile and take her advice?

AAhhhh! Glad I got that off my chest. I feel better already.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog.

You, Your Thank You Notes and Google

Your mother would have insisted you use Google Alerts if they'd been around when you were a kid. Why? Because they are you first line of defense for writing thank you notes.

And you all know how important I think thank you notes are! You use them to keep in touch with your valuable readers and to keep networks with your editors and fellow authors alive. Yes, you also continue to send them to your great grandmother who sends you a $1 bill in your birthday card, too!

Alerts is a tool that notifies you when something you need to know about appears on line. It knows what you want to know because you tell it.
That makes it an excellent research tool, too.

Here's how you use Alerts for both thanks yous and research:

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts to create a Google Alert for the subject you are interested in. It might be your name or your book title or some of the keywords for your next book. Be sure to use quotation marks around the full phrase you want. Example: Google searches for "This Is the Place" for me because that's the title of my novel. I don't want it to notify me every time the word "place" comes up. Or, yikes! You can imagine! Or the single word "This."

Google then scans stories, blogs, websites, videos and user groups -- everywhere! -- to find information related to "This Is the Place" and then e-mails me when they find it.

This saves me time because:

~I don't have to do that "self-Googling" thing one really should do occasionally.
~I don't miss anything or don't miss much.
~I can learn when things that relate to "This Is the Place" are appearing so I can pitch feature editors, radio producers, etc. (Google gets news on things like polygamy, women's issues, etc. to me fast!

By the way, when you get a link from Google--even one that doesn't seem directly related to your book--pay attention! It can give you lots more information that you might notice at first. Things like the name of a staff writer interested in your area of expertise, or a blogger or niche magazine you didn't know about.

Put on you Alert hat and be Alert! Let Google help you do it!


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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author THIS IS THE PLACE; HARKENING: A COLLECTION OF STORIES REMEMBERED; TRACINGS, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books, THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T; and THE FRUGAL EDITOR: PUT YOUR BEST BOOK FORWARD TO AVOID HUMILIATION AND ENSURE SUCCESS.
Her other blogs include TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com and AuthorsCoalition.blogspot.com, a blog that helps writers and publishers turn a ho-hum book fair booth into a sizzler.