Mother May I…

My mother, grandmother and my niece.

I originally posted this back in December of 2011. But I think it’s much more fitting now. Happy Mother’s Day, Ma!

My mother wants me to have a baby. Am I married? No. But that seems to be a minor detail at this point. I think she would be totally fine if I stole a baby from the hospital as long as she had something cute to spoil. We fight about this at least once a month.

“I want to have grandchildren. From you,” she says as she pokes me in the belly. ”When are you going to start thinking about it?”

“I don’t want children right now. I’m only twenty-six. I haven’t even been to Europe yet!”

“You’ve got it wrong. It’s only eighteen. It’s not only twenty-six. You’re getting old.”

Then my brother chimes in. “You know she’s never going to have a baby, mom. She’s too mean.”

Another one says, “I’ll give you lots of grandkids, ma. When do you want me to start?”

We all look at him in horror, knowing that he should not procreate anytime soon.

“But seriously, Jamie. What about that guy you were dating? He had a good job and you two would make such cute fat babies.”

“But, he was an arrogant jerk and he was weirdly close to his mother.”

She shrugs and says, “That’s small potatoes. We need to think of the big picture here.”

My mother is clearly insane.

She cusses like a truck driver, is thinner than me and always takes every opportunity to embarrass me by dancing in public but I love her. And one day I plan to capture of her crazy awesomeness in writing.

I like writing about mothers and will often model my fictional ones after real people in my life. (Thank goodness I don’t know too many normal people.) I feel like moms are some of the hardest characters to develop because just like in real life their personality shapes the way their children behave and the choices they make.

So here are a few of my favorite fictional mothers.

1. Claire Huxtable… She was a lawyer. She had five children, dealt with her wacky husband and kept that brownstone in Brooklyn spotless. She was like wonder woman or wonder mother.

2. Roseanne… Her house was a little more realistic. She was loud and brash and working class. But mostly importantly she was funny and I have to respect that.

3.  Joan Crawford… Okay, so she was a real person. But that movie Mommie Dearest made her seem other worldly and till this day I screech, “No wire hangers,” whenever I see one.

4. Amy Duncan… This dancing, singing, scene stealing Disney Channel mother cracks me up. She reminds me of my own mother. Amy never takes a backseat to her husband and I love that.

5. Colleen Donaghy (30 Rock) … She demanding, slightly evil, mean and I love her.

As for books I really like Posey’s mother, in Kristan Higgins Until There Was You. Who wouldn’t like a fluffy German mother who tried to fatten you up with comforting food. Sophie from Sophie’s Choice ( it was a book before it was a movie). Could you imagine making that choice?  And Cealie from The Color Purple. She put up with a lot of crap but still came out on top in the end.

Your turn! Like your mother? Hate her?  What’s she like? Got a favorite fictional mother? Tell us about her. Any and all comments are welcome.

 

The Beauty of the .99 cent Price Point

Welcome to another Tuesday edition of the Writing Secrets of 7 Scribes. PJ Sharon here with today’s unlocked secret. I’d like to talk about e-book prices. Specifically, ways to use the .99 cent price point strategy to boost sales, gain exposure, and get your books listed on the hottest advertising sites around.

First off, if you are traditionally published, changing the price of your e-books is likely beyond your control. Additionally, publisher prices of e-books in most cases will set you and your books outside the realm of “discounted” or “cheap” reads since all of those folks in the middle (agents, editors, etc.) need to take a piece of your pie. The average traditionally published e-book is priced anywhere from $7.99-$15.99–not exactly an impulse buy kind of price. Being that there are no print costs, storage rates, or delivery fees to pay, I’m not sure what these prices reflect– other than the publishers trying to make up for a declining print book industry. These prices may not discourage rabid fans of Stephen King, Nora Roberts, or James Patterson, but if you are a new author trying to gain a readership, your publisher may be pricing you out of the market. There is simply too much free and reduced price product available to readers. As such, higher priced e-books are likely going to to have difficulty finding an audience as time goes on. Then again, I could be wrong. The benefits of having a publisher with access to a publicist who is willing to help you get exposure through pre-orders and reviews might just balance out the playing field. (I’d love to hear some comments from trad pubbed authors about this topic.)

If however, you have self-published titles that aren’t selling well, or you have a series that you would like to promote, the ability to give your readers a deep discount can open some new doors. For one thing, there are several advertising sites that focus mainly on selling discounted e-books. Kindle Nation Daily, Book Bub and Kindle Fire Department just to name a few. All of these sites can give your discounted e-books the excellent exposure they need to get them into the hands of lots of new readers. The caveat is that because there are so many authors trying to get their books in front of the world, advertisers have the advantage of picking and choosing which books they will feature. Requirements are becoming more stringent. Some expect as many as 18+ reviews with an average 4.5 star rating. To further narrow the field, the books may not be accepted if they have been offered for free within the past few months, causing some issues for authors who have participated in the KDP Select program with Amazon.

Lest you feel you are “giving away the shop” with this .99 cent price point, think of how large retail stores encourage consumers to try a new product. They will often give away samples or significantly reduced price items in order to introduce customers to a new product or product line. It’s known in the industry as a loss leader. Even if you normally price your e-books at the $2.99-$4.99 sweet spot for impulse buyers, a drop to .99 cents can expose you to a whole new readership who ONLY buys .99 cent books or downloads freebies. You might take a cut in royalties (from 70% down to 35%) but if it leads readers to other books in a series or gains you a new following, the increased volume of sales and the boost to your rankings can be a sacrifice well worth making.

Now, there are a few tricks you can try to employ to keep 70% of your dollar. By changing the price of your e-book on Smashwords and BN, for instance, and then waiting for Amazon to price match. If they choose to change the price, they won’t change your royalty rates, but as the TOS (terms of service) agreement states, authors are not supposed to offer the book at a lower price on any other distribution channels,so it may ruffle their feathers. It could also take several days or even weeks before Amazon catches up with the new price (a process that can sometimes be sped up by having friends “report” the lower price), and there is always the risk that they could call you out on the contract breach. So far, Amazon has been amenable to price matching strategies that self-published authors are using. One of the silly benefits of allowing Amazon to match the lower price of their own volition is the neat little slash they put through the old price so that customers know they are getting a deal.(See here for example)

If you decide to try a .99 cent sale on one or more of your books, it can help to boost your exposure if you join with other authors who are doing the same thing. Readers will often look for these “group sales” so that they can stock up on “cheap” reads all at once for their summer reading. Indie Romance Ink, a yahoo group for independently published authors has just such a sale coming up this week from May 1-3, called the Book Lovers Buffet, Bouquet of Books, offering over 150 e-book titles across multiple genres, all priced at a very affordable .99 cents each! There are books for every reader available all in the same place and we have a staggering number of authors promoting the sale. We’ve lined up dozens of book bloggers, FB pages, and advertisers all promoting with us. Hopefully we’ll have a good turn out. Check out our landing page by clicking the icon below, but wait until tomorrow if you want to enter to win great prizes. If you stop by today, you can browse through the books, but the prize page won’t be active until tomorrow and there are no price guarantees until the sale starts. Be sure to spread the word to family and friends. Hope you find exactly what you’re looking for!

As for me, both WANING MOON and HEAVEN IS FOR HEROES will be available for .99 cents during the sale. I’ll also be giving away a $25 Amazon Gift card at my http://www.pjsharonyawriter.blogspot.com site to one lucky vistor who drops by and leaves a comment with a valid e-mail address (not to be used for any other promotions).

Contest ends at midnight on May 3rd. Winners to be announced Sunday, May 5th. Thanks to everyone who organized the sale (Clover Autrey…you know who you are), and a big thanks to everyone for passing along the word on FB, twitter, and Goodreads.

What do you all think about e-book prices and the .99 cent price point strategy?

Happy Hopping

PJ Sharon here. Thank you for joining me at the Secrets of 7 Scribes group blog. I’ll give you today’s Unlocked Secret right up front. Writing is a tough job. Try to have a good time along the way. Fun may be defined differently for all of us, but a few of my favorite parts of this writing life (aside from writing!)are great conferences and group promotional events. I’m looking forward to RWA Nationals in Atlanta this July, and Fiction Fest this fall with my CTRWA pals. In the meantime, I have several group promotional events coming up.

Tis the season of Blog Hops and Book Lovers Buffets!

I’m currently participating with sixty-one other authors in the annual Authors in Bloom Blog Hop. Since Dianne Venetta and friends organized the whole event, I didn’t have to do much accept prepare my blog and promote the heck out of it this week. The hop runs from April 10-19th and offers a Grand prize of a Nook or Kindle Fire and a $25 gift card to your favorite e-retailer.

The way it works is that you “hop” to each author’s blog where readers can collect gardening tips and awesome recipes (you must check out my super easy and scrumptious recipe for Sunny Delight Pie), and a prize will be offered just for showing up and leaving a comment. You can find the links to participating author sites on both my blog and the AIB landing page noted above. Prizes range from swag baskets to free books, signed copies to gift cards, and much more. On my blog site, all commenters who leave a valid e-mail address (not to be used for any other promotion), will be given a FREE short story called SOUL REDEMPTION, the prequel to WANING MOON, and will be entered to win an audio book copy of HEAVEN IS FOR HEROES.

I’m so excited to be able to offer the audio book as a prize. I’ve been listening to it at home and LOVING my narrator, Erin Mallon, who has totally brought Jordie and Alex’s story to life. Hearing the story is very different from reading it, and the experience is a bit surreal for me as the author. The audio book will be available for purchase in May! Also in May, the 1st-3rd to be exact, be on the lookout for the Book Lover’s Buffet, where you can pick up a ton of fabulous books for only .99 cents!

Whenever I start feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of being a published author these days, I try to focus on the “fun” stuff. Blog hops, audio books, contest wins, and conferences are at the top of my list. I truly do enjoy opportunities to hang out with amazing like-minded people and learn exciting new ways to write great books and connect to readers. I am honored to be a part of such a hard-working and innovative community. You guys rock!

So what keeps you going when you get overwhelmed? Do you have a favorite (“fun”) part of being a writer that makes the hard parts easier to endure?

My Experience With Writing Contests

I’m not normally a huge fan of contests. For myself that is. Some people swear by them. Entering dozens upon dozens of them. Spending hundreds of dollars. I entered exactly two contests. Which both left me feeling luke warm about the process. Why? I didn’t get the feedback that I expected or I got no feedback at all. It’s very frustrating to be a new writer, desperate to learn the craft, wanting to be published so bad you can taste it. We enter these contests to learn from our mistakes, to get better and hopefully to get our work in front of editor and agents. We don’t shell out our hard earned cash for nothing.

I felt like I got nothing. One set of pretty good scores, the others just middle of the road or low with no explanation. I knew I had something. I just needed a little hint to steer me into the right direction. So when I judged my chapter’s contest  this year I wanted to make sure other writers didn’t have the experience that I had.

There was one entry I hated. HATED. I hated the characters, the premise. But besides those personal taste things, the writing technically wasn’t good. The pacing was slow, there was no discernible plot,too many POV switches, and head hopping (Very few authors can get away with head hopping. Very, very few.) I had to give low scores. I felt uncomfortable doing it, but I had to. I also explained in detail what I thought the author could fix, but I knew that when he or she opened those scores they were going to have a hard time coming to terms with them.

Then I read two really good entries. One of them was AMAZING. I was glued to every word.  I felt like I knew the characters. I felt like I was in the room with them and when it was over I found myself disappointed because I would never know how it would end. I gave that one high scores. 9s and 10s. I raved about this author’s entry in my comments and when the scores came out she sent me an email to thank me. We exchanged a few emails and through the process I learned that she received a really low score. I was floored. How could somebody dislike what I thought was so brilliant.

I learned some lessons that I would like to share with you.

Take scores from contests with a grain of salt. What one might hate, somebody else might love. 

Don’t let one bad score discourage you from doing what you love.

Take what you can from the feedback and move on.

And most importantly keep on trucking.

What have you learned from contests?

The Thing About Backstory…

What is backstory? Authors use backstory, or a characters past to explain a character’s motivation. I love a good backstory and if you want to see backstory done right, check out any of Jennifer Ashley’s Mackenzie series. I would recommend starting with the beginning  with THE MADNESS OF LORD IAN MACKENZIE. And while backstory is entertaining and informative it can also kill a story.

I’m in the middle of judging entries for my local RWA chapter’s contest and I can see that there a lot of talented writers out there and I genuinely enjoy reading others work, but the thing that really hurts a story for me is poor pacing. A slow start.

 It’s the author’s job to grab the reader by the throat and never let them go until the book is finished. The way to do that is to start the story off with a bang. But some authors make the rookie mistake of wanting to throw up all the information in the first chapter. I know this from experience. I used to do this. But that drags the story down and when you get to the middle you find that you’ve got no place to go.

We don’t need to know everything about your hero or heroine in the first five pages. Readers like a little mystery. They like things to unfold. They want to savor the words. 

I’ve heard different advice of how to correctly write backstory, including don’t add any in for the first hundred pages. I wouldn’t follow that advice. You have to write the story that works for you. I would use this analogy. Write like you would use seasoning on your food. You wouldn’t dump an entire shaker of salt on your chicken before you had your first bite. Right? Then don’t dump an entire novel’s worth of backstory in the the first chapter. Trust me it will only bore readers.

Here are some tips that I like to look at from time to time from Story Sensei, Camy Tang, who says it way better than I ever could .

Some rules for backstory:

You want to make the reader WANT to know the past.

a–Keep it short. Cut ruthlessly. Include it only if you’re absolutely certain the reader would be completely lost without the information.

b–Dole out the information in bits and pieces, not all at once in one scene. Create mystery that motivates your reader to keep reading to find out what happened.

For example, mention a clue in chapter one, then another piece of the past in chapter five, another in chapter seven and finally write a sentence in chapter twelve that helps all the clues make sense and complete the picture.

c–Make a character absolutely need the information for some reason. Their desperate goal will keep the reader interested.

d–Make that person have to fight to get the information. Create conflict that tries to prevent the character from finding out what they need to know. Let the witness be slippery or reluctant. Make obstacles for the character, and the reader will be drawn into his fight to find out the information.

e–Tie the information to some type of action going on. For example, if I see a young girl killing two boys, speaking a haunting incantation, and demanding they tell her where her doll is, then I’m more likely to want to know why she’s doing this.

f–Create situations where another character needs to know the information. If the girl saying the incantation accidentally summons a genie, the genie is naturally going to want to understand what’s going on.

g–Give the backstory from the deep point of view of the character affected by it the most. For example, an omniscient narrator explaining the girl’s lost doll isn’t going to have as much impact as the psycho-chick reminiscing about how she stayed awake nights, longing for her Raggedy Ann.

h–Make sure it’s realistic. Don’t let someone talk about something they wouldn’t normally talk about. For example, most normal people don’t spill the town’s darkest secrets to strangers at the diner. Even a crazy girl isn’t going to confess to the police officer that she’s going to kill the Hardy Boys that night.
So what do you think? How do you like your backstory?

Inspirational Fiction Authors: Enter the IRCA or the TBL!

Hello, Katy Lee here with a contest opportunity for all you Inspy Authors. Perhaps, though you wonder why you should enter your book. Well, because the Inspirational Reader’s Choice Award is a unique contest. The judges for the IRCA are readers of Christian fiction, but are not involved in the publishing industry. They are readers ONLY.

Chip MacGregor of MacGegor Literary Agency interviewed Nancy J. Farrier, the contest coordinator this week. (For the complete interview, check out Mr. MacGregor’s Blog here.) But here are a few reasons Nancy says the IRCA can help you as an author.

“The past thirteen years I have coordinated the IRCA. I read many comments from the judges. Comments that we promised to keep private, but are often so exciting I want to send them to the author as encouragement. I’ll share a few of those comments anonymously below:

Tremendously wonderful read!…I had to have [the author’s] other books, so I ran out and bought them.

…I would definitely recommend this book and will be looking into other books by the author…

New author for me to read, but I will look for more of her books.

As a published author, think of the possibilities for reaching new readers if you entered the Inspirational Reader’s Choice Award. Fans this excited would love telling everyone else about your book.”

Thanks, Nancy! And those are great reasons to enter!

Now, maybe you’re not published yet. Not to worry! The RWA Faith, Hope, and Love Chapter also offers the Touched by Love contest, open to unpublished writers. Check it out here.

And to enter the IRCA click here.

Don’t wait though. Deadline is March 1, 2013!

The Unlocked Secret: Contests can give a writer the boost they need to reach a wider audience, whether it be an editor for an unpubbed writer, or a new reader for an author. It will be worth your time and money to enter. So even if the TBL or IRCA isn’t for you, search out the contests that match your genre. Find the contest that will get your work into the desired hands that will increase your audience. You can’t go wrong! And good luck!

 

Winnah, Winnah, Chocolate Dinnah!

Hi, all. Suze here. We have a winner in last week’s Valentine’s Day Giveaway: Gail Ingis! Gail, I’ll contact you to make arrangements to get you your prize.

I have lots going on this week so I thought it would be fun to let you know what I’m reading right now. Yes, I tend to flit from book to book and usually have several going at once. How do I choose which one to read? It largely depends on (1) where I set the book down last, and if I can find it again (sometimes not for days/weeks/months later!); (2) whether my Nook is charged; and (3) whether I can get the iPad away from the teenaged Crown Prince so I can use the Kindle App. Here’s what I finished this week:

Buried in a Bog by Sheila Connolly. (Ebook, Nook) This is a wonderful little cozy mystery that just hit the NYT Bestseller list and is the first in a new series. It’s about an American woman who travels to Ireland to learn about her heritage, and ends up finding a home. It’s a little bit darker, a little bit slower paced (and slower paced is not always a bad thing!), and a lot more introspective than most cozies. Loved it!

Nameless Cowboy/Cowgirl Romance by unnamed author. (Mass Market Paperback) Honestly, I did not love this book. In fact, I didn’t love it enough that I’m not going to tell you what it was about or who wrote it (nobody I know personally, BTW!). I will say that this is by a prolific author, and lots of other people apparently don’t agree with me because it has sold lots and lots of copies. So, to each his own! But I’ll be giving this one back to the person who lent it to me, with no regrets.

Manuscript Written by a Friend. (Word doc, on computer) One of the things we writers do for each other is read and critique each other’s manuscripts. I finished one this week–with just a little bit of polish, this is ready to go out into the world. It’s a romantic suspense, fresh with a fun premise, and with a great heroine and a sexy Portuguese hero. I predict a sale this year!

Now that I’ve told you what I finished this week, here’s what I have in progress:

Penelope (A Madcap Regency Romance), by Anya Wylde. (iPad, Kindle app) I’ve fallen a bit in love with this indie-pubbed Irish author (just a coincidence, btw, all the Irish stuff in this post!) since I read her previous book, The Wicked Wager (A Regency Murder Mystery & Romance). These books are great fun, a bit offbeat, and only 99 cents each–so I recommend picking them both up if you like historicals/regencies. In fact, everybody go buy them, read them, and report back here with questions/comments in a few weeks, when I’ll be interviewing Anya!

Wedding Day Murder, by Leslie Meier. (Mass Market Paperback) This is another cozy mystery by a veteran author. I can’t get enough of Lucy Stone and the inhabitants of Tinker’s Cove, Maine. I’m reading this series out of order–but the author does such a good job of making each a standalone, I can easily keep the stories straight.

Portrait of a Dead Guy, by Larissa Reinhart. (Ebook, Nook) Just getting started on this mystery, but how can you not love this first line? “In a small town, there is a thin gray line between personal freedom and public ruin.” Can’t wait to dig into this one.

How about you? What are you reading these days? Are you a one-at-a-time reader, or do you have several books going at once?

All You Need to Know About Valentine’s Day — With a Giveaway!

Happy Valentine’s Day, my lovelies! I hope this day, no matter how you celebrate or who you celebrate with, is wonderful. Read through to the end, because there will be a special gift for one lucky commenter.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret (we just love those things around here!). Everything you need to know about Valentine’s Day — or love in general — can be learned from a box of Sweethearts (f/k/a Tiny Conversation Hearts). As far as candy goes, these are pretty bland, even a bit chalky. And they have a sad and conspicuous lack of chocolate.

But they come in pretty pastel colors, and each has a pithy little motto: Be Mine. Hot Stuff. True Love. Hug Me. Kiss Me. Even Boogie. Now that you mention it, I do feel like dancing.Thanks! The Necco candy people clearly understand romance and the art of keeping it simple. What more do we really need?

Leave me a comment about Valentine’s Day, love, conversation hearts, keeping it simple, the new Bridget Jones book coming out in the fall, Joe Manganiello, or anything else that strikes your fancy, and you’ll be entered in a random drawing for a fabulous prize package: a hardcover copy of Pride and Prejudice, a lovely Celtic Heart bookmark, a box of Sweethearts, and a dark chocolate raspberry Godiva chocolate bar. Contest ends at midnight Sunday, February 17th, and I’ll announce the winner next Thursday. Good luck, and Game On!

Is it really all about the numbers?

PJ Sharon here, coming to you from the hills, and enjoying country life. As many of you spent Superbowl Sunday watching football, laughing at commercials, and being entertained by Beyonce, I was out ringing in the spring. For me, the beginning of February marks a turn toward warmer weather and longer days. I know there will likely be plenty more cold and wintery weeks ahead, but I figure there are less ahead then there are behind. It’s also my birthday month—time to reflect on where I’ve been and where I’m going.

Whether we’re talking about football scores, rising temperatures, or adding another year to my age, life seems to be all about the numbers these days. It certainly is when it comes to the book promoting business. Sales figures, rankings, budget—all very important to pay attention to when seeing what’s working and designing any future marketing plans. One of the benefits (or curses) about Indie publishing is that you have immediate access to your numbers. You can follow your rankings and sales to determine if your current promotion is working or if you need to change tactics the next time around.

I’ve done a few FREE promotions through Amazon’s KDP Select Program so I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at them. Whether they are as effective as they once were, or if all of these FREE books are killing the publishing industry are topics for another day. For today, I’m happy to share the all-important numbers of an Indie-published author trying to make a dent in this tough book economy. Last week, I had my second Contemporary YA novel, ON THIN ICE, available for FREE for three days. I thought you’d be interested in seeing how one of these FREE runs is done, and decide for yourself if it’s worth the work and expense.

Pre-FREE
January 1-25th 20 copies sold (2 borrows) (I won’t include all the foreign sales, but this title does tend to sell well in the UK)
Amazon Ranking: #75,623 in Kindle Store

FREE Run January 26-28th
Saturday, Jan 26th
7,984 downloads
Amazon Ranking: #64 in Kindle Free Store
#2 in Kindle store>Kindle e-books>Teens>Romance

Sunday, Jan. 27th
4,171 additional downloads
#19 in Kindle Free Store (highest ranking achieved in Free Store)
#2 Kindle store>Kindle e-books>teen>romance

Monday, Jan. 28th
3,791 additional downloads
#1 in the Teen Romance category…woohoo! Not bad for a book that has been on the “shelf” for a year.

Also notable were the foreign downloads. It’s always so cool to imagine people overseas reading my books!
UK=143; de (Germany)=24; France=5; Spain=2; Italy=1 (crazy Italians!); Japan=3; and Canada=15

Now, realize that when the book went back on sale in the paid store, no one had actually purchased it in three days so the ranking dropped to about 245,250th in the Amazon Paid store (yikes!), but once post-promotion sales started, the rankings jumped back up and hovered between 11,000th to 15,000th all week. I got a slight bump from pre-promo sales of 1-3 books a day to about 10 a day. That’s already beginning to fall back down to about 5 a day with total sales since coming off the FREE promo adding up to 50 copies of that one title sold in the past week. That’s more than double what I sold in the first three weeks of January. I’ve seen a slight boost in sales of my other titles as well. There have also been 24 borrows (as good as sales at $1.81 per borrow), and I’ve gotten a few positive reviews for ON THIN ICE.
Not the results I’d hoped for, but worth the effort? Sure. So here’s how I advertised the sale.

I gave myself a $100 budget figuring I would make up the cost with a post-promo sales bump of about 50 books. I’ve broken even on the promo after one week. Running the promotion on a Sat.-Mon. made it easier for me to be there to monitor results and landed at the end of the US Figure Skating Championships, which I wanted to honor by giving the book for FREE that week and getting it into skater’s hands.

I contacted the following sites several weeks (a month ahead of time in most cases):

Book Bub-It cost me $30 to advertise my FREE run but they are the current “premier” advertising site. It costs more for other genres, but most people are saying it’s worth the ad cost, especially if you’re offering a discounted book.( .99-2.99)
Story Finds-$20
Authors on the Cheap-$25
Book Goodies-$15 for 3 day ad.
Bargain e-book Hunter-$5
Orangeberry Book Tours-$10

The following sites were free to advertise with:
(ENT)E-reader News Today (they book up months in advance and sometimes aren’t open for scheduling), Indie Book of the Day, Pixel of Ink, Awesome Gang, E-reader Café, Free Book Dude, Ask David, Books on the Knob, Free Booksy, The Kindle Book Review, E-books Habit, YA Promo Central, Book Blast (Kindle Fire Department), and I did a post on the Readers Guide to E-Publishing (RG2E) on Saturday.
You’ll find many of these sites and their links listed on Kindle Book Promos at Kindle Book Promos and Media Bistro/Galley Cat.

The day of the sale, I also posted to Snicklist, Addicted to e-books, Free Kindle Fiction, Good Reads (Free Romance Books group), Google+, World Literary Café (WLC), and as many FaceBook pages as possible that had to do with Figure Skating and the US Championships—(Stop back next week when I’ll be talking about niche markets).

Some of the sites have restrictions (many won’t publicize erotica-not that I’m writing that, but some of you are), and some have some gate-keeping systems in place. Digital Book Today requires 18 reviews with an average 4.0 star rating before you can advertise with them. It took some time to weed through all of these sites, but now that I have my list and links, it only takes me a few hours to set up a really comprehensive and relatively inexpensive promotional blitz. Of course I also schedule my tweets to go out three to four times a day, ask my network peeps to spread the word, and spend some time promoting on Face Book throughout the three days.

I know it sounds like a lot of work. That’s because it is. I haven’t found an easy way to reach this many new readers so quickly, or give my sales a boost in any other way that doesn’t require an equal amount of effort or money. I try to do one big promotional event per month. February’s event will be a three day FREE run with HEAVEN IS FOR HEROES right after Valentine’s Day, hoping to hit those new Kindle owners whose thoughtful men bought them an e-reader. After that, these two titles come off of the Select program and will be available once again on BN and Smashwords. I also plan to upload them to I-Tunes and Kobo this go around so that they are available on as many distribution channels as possible. Then I’ll leave the kids alone to see how they fend for themselves while I focus my efforts on gearing up for the release of book two in The Chronicles of Lily Carmichael, WESTERN DESERT, due out in June. It’s going to be a busy spring!

As far as other promotions, there are always the .99 cent sales, blog hops, blog tours, Good Reads giveaways, and contests. Each requires effort and planning and will yield different results depending upon the genre you write in, whether it’s your first or fifth book, and how the wind is blowing on any given day. All we can do is keep writing, add quality material to our cyber shelves, and hope our sails (and our sales) catch the wind when it blows our way.

Today’s Unlocked Secret: Don’t get too hung up on the numbers. Like age, the number doesn’t define us. How we navigate the rough seas tells us who we are. Happy sales!

Any questions?

Blessings,

PJ

So What’s Your Story? by Katy Lee

You have one, you know. A story. We all do. But so few are willing to share, or if you’re anything like me, maybe you have to learn how to “tell” your story.

I’ll be the first to admit that telling my story can end up sounding like a broken record. I find myself repeating the same sentence to people twice—or more, because I’m not sure of what to say or how to get from Point A to Point B.

Speaking is so much harder than writing for me, where I can take all the time in the world to choose my words carefully and perfect their impact through rewrites. Or in other words, practice. But as my daughter says, not just practice. Perfect practice. (You have to know what you’re doing, so you’re not practicing it wrong. Unlearning something is harder than learning the correct way from the beginning. And it saves you a lot of time.)

So let me give you the formula so you can get started practicing your story the right way the first time. It you’re a writer then it’s really nothing you haven’t heard before. In fact, the formula for telling a story follows the same rules you would follow when writing a story.

•What’s the conflict?

•Who’s the hero?

•Where is the suspense?

•How will the conflict resolve?

•What’s the point?

•Why does it matter to me?

Just think of how people would hang on your every word if you introduced your story in this format instead of stuttering your way through, or as in my case, repeating whole sentences. If it doesn’t look as though you have a point to make because you’ve been droning on for 20 minutes with no point in sight, then you’ve lost your listener.

And that could be bad.

Perhaps you are on a job interview and you’re asked to describe a past experience and how you handled it. If you know your formula for telling a good story, you just might get that job. Especially if you can convey that all seemed lost before you saved the day.

Regardless of who you are speaking with, people want to know how your life experiences have shaped you. They want to know if they can relate to you and are looking for areas to try to connect. Plus, you never know where telling your story can help another person deal with something similar going on in their life. Not getting your story out well could mean a lost opportunity to help another person.

Holding back your story could also mean hindering healing in your own life.

The Unlocked Secret: Telling your story helps you make sense of your life — why certain events happened the way they did. You can examine what has happened to and through you. It will help you make sense of who you are and can lead to a greater confidence and understanding of self.

So take the time to learn your story. Be ready to share for when someone asks you, “So what’s your story?”

Question: Can you tell your story in three sentences or less? Practice it, and feel free to share. I really want to hear it. Really I do.

Amazing Opportunity: Women of Faith holds a writing contest every year. They want to know your story. The winner gets a publishing contract. Check it out here.

And thank you for your TWEETS and Shares!