Being a Social Magnet

Thanks so much Scribes for having me guest blog today.  It’s so much fun to get a chance to speak to your audience and talk about the newest in my Market or Die series, “How to use the Power of your Brand.”

However, there’s one thing I DIDN’T write about in my book because I saved this little nugget just for the Scribes and their fans.  What is it?  Social Magnetism.

There’s a lot of talk in the marketing world about brands who are dubbed, “social magnets.” What this means, by definition, is that followers or readers gravitate to your brand, the way metal is attracted to a magnet.

You’re smart. You know what I’m talking about; the way people will go out of their way to be associated with your brand.  So, how do you know if you’re a social magnet?  Let’s see if you answer “yes” to any of these questions:

1.)    Does the general public wear your brand’s logo on their clothing?

2.)    Does the general public put a bumper sticker on their car with your brand on it?

3.)    Does the general public wear hats or carry bags with your brand name on it?

No?  Well, welcome to the club.  Becoming a social magnet in the mind of the general public usually costs millions of advertising dollars, think Nike, Coca-Cola or GE.  However, there’s ways, as authors, you and I can become social magnets in our own little place in writing world and it’s actually easier than you think.

Acquire new readers – work vigilantly and band together with other writers to increases awareness about your brand and your work.  Sometimes having others promote you is more credible that you promoting yourself, and a ton easier, too.

Make existing readers aware that it’s time to buy again – I’m not talking about a Facebook posting that says, “buy my book.” I’m talking about treating your readers like they’re part of your inner circle and letting them know about a new release ahead of time.  Anyone who reads the MOD blog at www.marketordie.net is treated like they’re part of an inside club, whom I’ve dubbed the MOD trubies, and because they visit my blog on a regular basis they receive information from me first.

Be kind. Pay it forward and spread the wealth.  People are attracted to those who help them and they will help you in return!

Jennifer Fusco is the Creative and Brand Manager for the General Electric Company, North America and the author of the Amazon.com bestselling series, MARKET OR DIE, marketing books for writers.

True Confession: I Write Smut In Public

Hey – Vivienne here.  I haven’t talked much about my slightly stalled Work In Progress.  It’s a very adult story tentatively entitled The Good Ship Lollipop.  I will likely have to change the title to avoid a lawsuit by Shirley Temple’s family, but I’ll let the eventual publisher worry about that.

TGSL is an erotic novel, set on a cruise ship where college kids (over 21!) and other folks get up to all kinds of hijinks that aren’t suitable for detail on this G-rated blog.  But what I wanted to blog about today is the fact that I’ve written this steamy story while out in public.  And to make matters worse, I had to do some research on various…items…through Google Images while in public.

Why, you ask?  The answer is pretty easy – that’s where I happened to be when inspiration struck.  I started writing TGSL during Nanowrimo to boost my word count.  I was working on a different story which had a complicated plot and I was struggling to pull the story out of my head.   My word count was suffering. 

For the uninitiated, Nanowrimo is a contest/writing exercise where you write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.  To stay on track, you need to write 1667 words per day.  I was agonizing my way to 1000 words a day on the more complicated story, so I boosted my word count by writing this more straightforward story.  Sure, I might have been technically cheating, but I like to think of it as creative winning.  The prize is the satisfaction of having accomplished something so crazy, so I wasn’t cheating anybody else. 

Anyway, I found the act of writing smut in public to be quite freeing.  I had previously been too embarrassed to write those kinds of words down, let alone put a story like that together.  Sure, I did my share of strategic laptop placement, and if anyone walked behind me, I was very quick to change the image on my screen to something more appropriate.  And I probably blushed a lot, but I didn’t get caught even once! 

Today’s Secret: Sometimes you might get further if you leave your comfort zone behind.  Write something different or do it in a different place to jump-start the creative juices.

Today’s Question: What is the silliest place you go to write?

Learning from the Experts

Hey ~ V here.  Happy Wednesday to you and yours.  We are starting to do something new here at the scribes.  We are doing some author interviews.  You probably already saw Sandra Orchard‘s interview on 9-11-11, Jo Ramsey‘s interview yesterday, and we’ve got a bunch more in the hopper over the next few months. 

Let me tell you why these interviews are so exciting.  We’ve recently developed a standard list of questions to ask our interviewees.  Now, not every author will answer all the questions, so there will be some great variety, but we wanted to get a sense of how these authors got to where they are, how their writing developed and who they are beyond the blurb on the back of their books.  I think it’s going to be really fun and will give us all great ideas about how to develop our own writing and careers as authors.

I can’t tell you who we’ve got lined up yet, but believe me, we’ve got some doozies coming!  I’m so excited ~ I want to tell…no, let’s let it be a surprise. 

Today’s Secret: There is a lot we can learn from other authors.  Both what to do and what not to do.

Today’s Question: Are there authors out there that you’d be especially interested in hearing from?  Maybe we can make some magic!

Water for Elephants – Why I Was Surprised That I Liked It.

Hey ~ V here.  I wanted to write a short review of a book I read, recently, on Casey Wyatt’s recommendation: Water for Elephants.  I was leery of reading this book because it seemed to me (from the cover and title only – I hadn’t bothered to do so much as read the jacket before my opinion was set!) that it was a bit of literary fiction or a drama kind of thing.  Maybe even an Oprah book.  It’s been my experience that Oprah and I don’t like the same kind of book.  At all.  In fact, if Oprah recommends a book, I stay far away.  I find those kinds of books too heavy, too full of reality.  That’s not how I want to spend my precious reading time.  I live reality, I don’t want to read about it.

Generally speaking, I read historical romance, historical non-fiction (I like history) ‘tween adventures, beginning readers and picture books (I have kids), magazines {Time and National Geographic – but I only read it for the pictures }, a few mysteries, some erotica and the competition (meaning whatever I’m planning to write, I read stuff like it). 

But since I was on vacation with nothing to read (see last week’s post to find out why) and  Water for Elephants happened to be on the bookshelf in the cottage we’d rented, I thought I’d give it a try.  It was enchanting!

It’s a romance of a sort and much of the story is told by the hero as he’s withering away in a rest home at age 90.  Or 93, he’s not sure.  He’s remembering the very beginning of his adulthood.  There is a lot of fun circus stuff and depression-era history stuff built into the story.  It’s very visual and at the same time very sweet.  I can see why they made it a movie (which I am now more likely to see!)  But all in all, it was a lovely book.  If you haven’t read it yet, give it a try.

Today’s secret: we should all re-learn that adage about not judging books by their cover.

Today’s question: what book have you read lately that surprised you?

 

Make your Hero and Heroine Likeable. Please!

Hey ~ V here.  Happy Wednesday to you!  I was at the beach a couple of weeks ago and I brought a few books with me.  Three.  Given that I was traveling with my parents and my children, I assumed that would be plenty.  If it was just my hubby and me, I’d have brought the Kindle, fully loaded.  Kids at the beach and Kindle just don’t mix in my mind.  But I thought that the three books I had along would be plenty.  I finished the last 20 pages of Another Change to Dream by Lynn Kurland on the first day.  It’s an oldie but a goodie, if you have the chance to pick it up. 

Then I moved on to the next one in the pile, a mystery with knitting/cooking extras tacked to the end, like Susannah talked about a bit ago.  Click here to re-read her post.  I didn’t make it past the 5th page.  The heroine spent those pages talking about how she’d never felt that feminist urge to get a job.  Hmmm.  That’s not really my idea of feminism.   That was a major turn off for me and I just couldn’t force myself to care about this heroine enough to bother reading the rest of the book. 

This put-it-down-immediately phenomenon doesn’t happen to me often.  I’ve got a pretty hearty willingness to suspend my disbelief and I’m the type who reads the ingredients in the cereal box at breakfast just ’cause it’s on the table.  But after dropping the I-hate-women mystery (OK, that might be a bit of a stretch), I moved on to the 3rd book.  It was a romance by a top romance writer whose stuff I’ve been wanting to become more familiar with.

But again, before I hit page 20, I found that I just didn’t like the hero and heroine enough to give them my time.  Apparently, they were already married and now they are separated, but one is looking to divorce the other because of shoddy treatment.   I guess the story was about them getting back together.   I couldn’t read it, too similar to reality for me.  It will go back to the library this week unread.

Of course the writer must tell us about the “before the story” characters so that we can appreciate their growth through the story, but you’ve got to make them likeable people.  I  recently read Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase.  Chase set the hero up as a total jerk, but spent the first chapter telling us about his childhood and why he became a total jerk.  I liked him, felt badly for him and was rooting for him, even as I wondered how on earth she’d write her way out of the mess she put him in with the heroine.  And it was a lovely story. 

Today’s secret: If you want people to read your book, your characters have to be likeable and relatable. 

Today’s question: What have you read lately that was good?

The Richness of English

Hey ~ V here.  At this very moment (11:11am on Monday) I’ve been trying to come up with a topic for this week’s post.  As I sent my son outside to play for the 20th time this morning, I noticed what a beautiful blue sky we have right now.  And boom!  A topic was born.

English is a wonderfully rich language and I’m proud and pleased to write in it.  I’ve heard that some languages have only one word for all shades of red, or in this case, blue but English has 35 names for blue according to this website.  Sapphire, cobalt, cerulean, indigo, denim, midnight, ultramarine, periwinkle.  I’m sure there are tons more.  Just open a J Crew catalog.  Do they still make J Crew catalogs?  Oh excuse me, my 1980′s-ness is showing. 

At any rate, the robustness of English comes from its history, which I talked about back on July 6th.  Click here to re-read it.  Lots of different languages came together to create English as we know it and they all left something to remember them by.  Ever wonder why we call animals one name and the food we eat from that same animal by another?  Cow/Beef.  Deer/Venison.  Pig/pork.  Bird/Fowl.  Sheep/nasty.  OK, that last one is just my personal opinion.  But Cow has a nice Anglo Saxon/Celtic sound to it and ‘beef’ sounds an awful lot like Boeuf – the french word.  Pig is Old English, pork is French.  Interestingly, the term “pig-out” only dates back to 1979…OK, perhaps I’ve now spent enough time on Dictionary.com looking at etymology.

When I taught writing in the business world, I talked about the word “heat map”.  This is where you choose a word that brings with it additional meaning.   When someone asks you, “How are you today?” your answer falls somewhere on the heat map. 

Fabulous   Fine   Good   Okay   Eh   Iffy   Bad   Terrible   Disastrous

The gray and black are fairly neutral, the cool colors are varying shades of happy and the hot colors are varying shades of bad.  It’s a heat map. 

Here’s today’s secret: when you find that your writing is heavy on the adverbs and adjectives, try to think of words that you can use that come with meaning already embedded in them to convey how someone said something, or what something looked like.  Take advantage of English’s robustness.  Not all blues are alike and many deserve their own word.

Here’s today’s question: what’s your favorite color?  Mine is blue – in all of her glorious shades, but especially Sapphire.

Writing is Like a Trip to the Beach

Hey V here.   I’m at the beach with my family and it has occurred to me that being at the beach is a lot like writing.  “Whaaaaaaat?!” you ask.  Let me explain.

1 – When you get to the beach you look around and pick out the spot you like.  Some areas might be crowded, others might be sea-weedy, but you get to decide where to set your stuff down.  You can’t begin a story without a setting.  You might not know all the details about your setting yet (like how far you’d have to dig to hit water or if the sand is wet enough to support your castle), but you have to pick some place to start.

2 – The sand is your canvas.  It’s blank and you can make anything you want.  You can build a castle, or a giant 3D dolphin, or a six-foot tall birthday cake with driftwood candles and sea glass decorations.  When you write, you are only limited by your imagination, at least if you write fiction.

3 – When boredom sets in you can do something new.  You can dig in the sand, swim in the water, fly a kite, play on the swings, jump off the lifeguard chair, chase seagulls.  Switch things up.  Are your characters happily ensconced in a beer at local watering hole?  Move them around.  Perhaps the tap runs dry or the proprietor closes up and kicks them out, or lightning strikes the bar at the exact moment your heroine blasphemes. 

4 – New characters and activities might suddenly appear out of nowhere, like the ice cream man.  He drives up unexpectedly and offers treats at a reasonable price.  (My mother says the Ice Cream Man’s prices are practically extortion).  Maybe in your story, he kidnaps the heroine and offers her as the treat…or something less nefarious.

5 – Peril is to be found hiding just out of sight around every corner.   Sharks feed in the early evening and people have been attacked in three feet of water (not at my beach, of course).  One could drown – although that’s a bit lacking in creativity on my part.  Oooooh, one could almost drown and be rescued by a vixen of a lifeguard, leading to the first meeting between the hero and heroine.  Naturally, it would be the hero who would nearly drown.  And don’t even get me started on the dangers of hole digging on the beach.  Seriously, does my husband NEVER watch the Discovery channel?

6 – Suddenly, unexpectedly, it can all go terribly awry!  A beautiful day with a nice breeze can lead to terrible sunburn if you forget to reapply your sunblock.  Similarly, a lovely story with everything going for it can suddenly fall apart if you lose track of the plot.

7 – And the best thing about both writing and going to the beach is this: tomorrow you can start all over again.  Your beach is smooth, you can pick a new spot, make something new, have a different flavor if ice cream, avoid new perils and remember the darned sunblock!

So what’s your favorite aspect of writing?  Or beach going, for that matter?

A Writing Career is a Lot Like Farm Frenzy

Hey ~ V here.  I was wasting time on the computer, thinking about what topic I wanted to blog about when it hit me: Building a Successful Writing Career as an Indie Pub’d Author is a Lot Like Level 60 in Farm Frenzy 3.  (Yes, I was playing Farm Frenzy when this “eureka!” happened). 

“How?” you might ask.  Or, “V, have you gone completely off your rocker?!”  Either way, let me explain.

For those who’ve never donated hours of their valuable time to the writing-time-sucker that is Farm Frenzy (1, 2 or 3) this is a fun little time management game where you have small goals like buy a turkey and collect 3 eggs and a short amount of time for each level, 3 – 6 minutes depending on how hard the level is.  Then you get to the last level (or in FF3, level 60) where you have 45 minutes to buy a robot ($50,000).  You start off with nothing and $0.

The first 10 minutes are painfully slow going.  You have to wait for bears to arrive, catch them and then sell them at the market in your tiny, wicked slow truck that only carries two at a time.  Eventually, you can buy one $100 turkey and begin to collect eggs, but you have to buy all the different processing plants to make cakes from your eggs.  Cakes sell for $200. 

After a while, you can afford to buy some sheep and make jackets that sell for $1300 and maybe dress some of the bears in those jackets and sell ‘em for big bucks ($7000 – do you get the sense that I’ve played this game a lot?)  Now you’re starting to have some money and you can upgrade your wicked slow truck to a much faster 18-wheeler.

Then suddenly you can get a cow and make cheese which sells for a pretty penny.  Next thing you know, you’ve got $50,000 and are your way to buying that robot!

I think this is the perfect allegory for creating a writing career as an Indie Published writer.   You’ve got this insane goal of building a big audience and you are starting with nothing and $0.  The beginning is slow going.  You’ve got a product but the distribution vehicle is wicked slow.  You’ve got to get in front of people, get the word out.  Again and again and again.  You’ve got to find reviewers, speaking engagements, sales opportunities.  Every time you earn a little money, you’ve got something new to upgrade.  A new trailer for your book, marketing material to buy, pay a lawyer or accountant or illustrator.  You might need office supplies, copies of your books to sell or gas to get to your speaking engagement. 

And you know they say time is money.  Well, it’s certainly true that like money, I don’t have enough time!  Time to write, research marketing techniques, reviewers, sales opportunities.  (Yes, perhaps if I spent less time playing games…)

But, in Farm Frenzy, things start slow and then begin to build until they finally take off.  My writing career might be going slow now, but what about when I have several books out there and people start hearing about me?  A new customer who likes one book is apt to buy the whole lot if they are priced correctly.  And I have time on my side.  Maybe it’ll be ten years before I get that robot, that huge readership, but then I’ll have 15-20 books out and movie deals and maybe even a theme park!  OK, that might be a bit much, but who’s to say?

Here’s today’s secret: It’s OK for your career to take time to build.  We aren’t all JK Rowling or Stephenie Meyer who became insanely popular writers right away.  Julia Quinn and Lynn Kurland have been in the game for 15 years or more to get where they are.  It takes time and that’s OK. 

What are your writing career goals and how are you working to get there?  Are they short term or long term goals?

Good Writing

Hey V here.  Like most writers, I read.  A lot.  Really a big lot.  Even with twin preschoolers, I read for fun everyday.  I’ve studied Literature; I’ve read a huge variety of things.  I’m confident that I can identify an author I like, one I consider to be a Good Writer.  Of course, Good Writing is a subjective thing.  Someone I think is a Good Writer might be considered absolute rubbish by another person.

But I like to find Good Writers for another reason, too, beyond enjoying the fruits of their labor.  Here’s today’s secret right up front: I like to figure out what it is about the writing that I think  is good, and hopefully emulate it.   To that end, I have hit a career goal this week. 

I made myself cry over a passage I wrote.

Now, many people who know me will think, duh, she cries at Hallmark commercials!  And those coffee commercials around the holidays where the college son comes home unexpectedly…I cry every time I watch Gone With The Wind, read Knuffle Bunny Free to my kids or hear a certain Christmas Carole about a cat who freezes to death warming a mouse on Christmas Eve.  Seriously, I have to skip it on the CD, can’t handle it at all.

My husband will attest that I cry at the most ridiculous movies, Wall-E, GI Jane, Return of the Jedi.  He actually keeps a box of tissues in the man-cave in case I need one watching something on the fancy TV.  And I cry reading books ALL THE TIME, usually late at night while lying in bed so that my nose stuffs up and dribbles attractively.  I often determine how much I like a book by its effect on me.  If I laugh out loud or cry, then it’s a good book.  If I do both, it’s a great book.

But I’d never made myself cry over something I wrote before.  I even went back and re-read the passage a few paragraphs later to see if it was a fluke and I squeaked out another tear.   I was so proud. 

How do you know that your writing is good stuff?

Just Write – Goal Setting

Hey – V here.  I want to talk about an important part of writing – or really achieving anything.  Goal Setting.  Now, now, don’t whine.  I know a lot of people think about goal setting as that ridiculous thing you do in the corporate world where you have to think about new, measurable ways to get through a year that is likely to be just like the last several years (if you’re lucky!)  And it’s got to sound fancy – ugh!  Nobody likes writing those goals.

That’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about real goals, both short-term goals and long-term goals to help keep you motivated and positive.   Anybody who writes knows that it’s a lonely job.  It’s just you and your imagination, after all.  You start talking about your stories to family and friends and more times than not their eyes glaze over.

Not only is writing lonely, but it’s hard to stay focused.  There are so many other demands on your time and it can feel like an indulgence to just sit and create.  And it’s hard!  So we find 1 billion reasons to procrastinate.  I’m as guilty as the next writer.  Can you say email, Facebook, computer games, reading?

Goal Setting can help you stay on track.  Especially if you write realistic goals.  Unrealistic goals can derail you wicked fast!  How demotivating would it be for me to have the goal of being a NY Times Bestselling Author by the end of the summer?  Vivienne doesn’t even have a book out yet!  I would fail and then feel bad about it, eat an unhealthy amount of ice cream and play Hotel Dash for six hours.  Bad goal, BAD.

But a good goal is a measurable, achievable goal that you have written down somewhere.  Writing it down is a very important part of goal setting.  It’s so rewarding to cross things off your list!  Also, I find that when I feel successful, I’m motivated to be more successful. 

Secret Unlocked: Decide what you want to accomplish.  Set a reasonable, measurable goal.  Word toward achieving that goal.  I want to finish my Work In Progress.  My goal is to write 1000 words today.  I know that I can do that.  I know that I will be successful.