It’s been a long time, shouldn’t have left you…

So yes, I realize I’ve been MIA for a minute. About a year to be exact. As 2011 drew to a close, I found my life had been completely taken over by other people’s projects. I was editing nonstop and helping others launch their books, but I wasn’t doing nearly enough to take care of myself. And straight up — I burned the hell out. I like to think I have Superwoman powers and can do it all without breaking a sweat, but in reality, I am just a girl with good intentions and very real human limitations. I literally reached the end of my rope.

After the hustle heavy 2010 (The Year of TPC) and an exhausting 2011 (The Year of the Other), I was ready to anoint 2012 the Year of ME. And that’s exactly what I did. I took an editing sabbatical and turned away paying clients so I could work on my own novel. I withdrew from the time suck that is social media. I informed my partners that I was on hiatus from TPC business, and that they were going to need to promote and market ONE BLOOD without my assistance. I also scaled way back on my personal commitments and obligations, in an attempt to slow things down and bring my life back into balance. These are all things I felt I needed to do in order to find my joy again. It had gotten to a point where I couldn’t enjoy any of the success that I, my clients, or TPC were achieving because I was just too damn tired.

I think you’ll agree, that’s no way to live.

So in 2012, I dramatically reordered my priorities. Fun and leisure were back at the top of my list, and anything that even remotely felt like an “obligation” was relegated to the back burner. I started writing again, and got ⅔ of the way through my new novel, THE SPACE BETWEEN, which I hope to complete in the next couple of months. This has been such a fun novel for me to write, as I’d missed my characters, and truly delight in the random journeys they take me on.

The absolute highlight of 2012 was the trip I took to Europe. A large portion of this new novel is set in Europe, and I felt it was my duty, in order to write authentically about this setting, for me to actually travel there for research. So in September 2012, that’s exactly what I did — jetted off to Europe solo diva style for 11 days of adventure. It was an incredible experience, and my novel is so much better because of it.

The most surprising thing to me about 2012 is that even though I spent very little time promoting WHEN LOVE ISN’T ENOUGH (or myself for that matter), folks were still finding, buying and reading my book. A week doesn’t go by that I don’t receive some really sweet note from a fan, or another glowing review on amazon. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who took the time to read my book and for their patience in waiting for this long-awaited sequel. But it’s coming, and for fans of these characters, I truly believe it will be worth the wait.

Expect to hear a lot more from me in 2013… I’m baaaack!

Wow, 2013. Crazy. And to think we’re not supposed to even be here! Ya know … with the whole Mayan calendar thingy and all. Whatever.

Anyway…

If 2013 will be anything close to 2012 in terms of e-book sales, exposure, and just all around awesomeness, I predict 2013 will be the breakout year for not only me, but the TPC3 as a whole. Some cool ish went down in 2012, and the way I see it, it’s only going to get better. Here’s a quick recap of that “ish” :

1. After dropping my book A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND to $0.99 at the end of 2011–a common practice of ours–the first quarter of 2012 started off with the most ridiculous sales bump I’d ever seen. We accomplished two things with one book never done before in our short time as a publishing company: eclipsed 1,000 copies in sales three months in a row and sold over 2,000 copies in one month alone (Feb 2012). Total Amazon HARD MAN e-book sales for the first quarter was 4,764. Crazy!

I attribute this phenomenon to dropping the price during the holiday season, great reviews, word of mouth, strategic advertising, and the millions of new tablets and e-readers as Christmas presents. It appears people went nuts downloading gazillions of e-books the first few months—and that’s fine with me! In contrast, we kept SELLOUT at $2.99 and it sold about 175 copies in the same time span.

2. KDP Select, KDP Select, yada, yada. I’d heard a lot about Amazon’s revolutionary program, where authors reported record sales after offering their books for free. Only problem: You had to sell your e-book exclusively on Amazon for 90 days. That meant removing the book from other online retailers, including my own website. That kinda sucks. Still, since I had a few short stories, I wanted to experiment, so I gave KDP Select a shot.

I won’t rehash the details since I wrote three blogs on my experience (you can read it here). It started off with a bang, then crashed and burned. However, if you only have one book and want to build a fan base, the program may be for you.

3. As I mentioned, I had a few short stories in my tool box, but this is the first year I sold them with professional covers and wider distribution. I originally just used Smashwords for my short stories, but figured why not sell them on Amazon and expand to premium distribution through Smashwords online retailers?

Short story sales have been slow, averaging about 5 per month for each story with little promotion. However, I discovered a new tactic that I like: Whenever I make a short story free on another channel (like B&N), Amazon eventually matches the price and “sells” it for free, too. As a result, I have a couple of free stories on Amazon without using KDP Select (which is the only other way to make a book free). THE CUT UP has had around 2,000 downloads since I made it free on Smashwords a few months ago. It has also consistently ranked in the Top 20 for the “Dysfunctional Relationships” category.

I launched four short stories in 2012, and they’ve helped lead to sales for my other works: OPEN HOUSE, WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS, PREMATURE ERADICATION, and BLACK PEOPLE CAN’T BE REPUBLICAN. If you look on Amazon for the THE CUT UP, SELLOUT is under the Customers Who Bought This Also Bought section. Having multiple works on rotation definitely helps with sales.

Note: I tried to include OPEN HOUSE on KDP Select, but Amazon rejected it. Why? Because I had an excerpt on an old website page of mine, a page I no longer used and completely forgot about. Amazon is crazy serious about that exclusivity rule, so watch out!

4. I was already active on social media, but I’d been neglecting the fan pages for A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND and SELLOUT. I had over 1600 “likes” between them, but I finally realized I was wasting opportunities to engage my audience more with new content, so I now post relevant links and content often (for example, I may post an article on interracial dating for the SELLOUT fan page). But I didn’t stop there. I not only created two more fan pages—one for SLOW YOUR PROSE: 25 TIPS ON HOW NEW WRITERS CAN IMPROVE THEIR CRAFT and BLACK PEOPLE CAN’T BE REPUBLICAN—I had Facebook ads for each one, setting a daily dollar limit. Facebook ads are very effective in attracting new “likes.” I started Slow Your Prose in late November. It’s a pretty active group, with over 1100 members.

5. For some reason that I’ve yet to figure out, my UK sales for SELLOUT jumped last November. As of this writing, my Amazon UK sales are outpacing my US sales. Yes, I’ve had UK exposure, with interviews and even a feature in a UK magazine, but one feature was in the summer and the other was over a year ago. Why the jump now? Beats me, but hey, I’m not complaining! I’m definitely going to figure out how to capitalize on it, though! Matter of fact, I recently contacted a London freelance writer to see if she will review SELLOUT.

Other noble J-Dub achievements in 2012:

- SELLOUT and A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND are on pace to reach 10,000 copies sold each. Can’t wait to write the blog about that one!

- Book trailer for SELLOUT went over 2,000 hits

- Went over 4,000 friends on Facebook. Approaching the magic 5,000!

And onto 2013. My new book TANGLED WEB should hit the streets Fall 2013. J-Willy can’t wait…

After 3 books successfully launched into the publishing pantheon, in November 2011, it was finally my turn. I had a lot of best practices under my belt and 2 years of learning how to build an audience and get my book found a reader at a time. I had a very clear vision for how it was going to go – but as the saying goes, “man plans, God laughs.” I came into 2012 ready to make a name for myself and my little book, One Blood. By the end of the year, I had exceeded even my most audacious expectations.

One Blood started off with a bang, garnering 5 star review after five star review from casual readers, bloggers, friends, and family. The sales were much slower to follow, but they steadily increased as the year matured.  In February, The Kirkus Book Review, known as some of the toughest book critics around, named One Blood as a novel of remarkable merit – awarding it the glorious Kirkus star. In March and April, One Blood officially became a bestseller, making the AALBC Best Sellers list twice in that period.

Spring melted into summer and then the awards came. Readers, industry big wigs, and authors in attendance at The Book Expo America Conference in June, heard my name called at the Jacob Javits Center in conjunction with the Indie Reader Discovery Awards, where One Blood not only won it’s category, but was judged as the 2nd best fiction novel overall! I got to hobknob with other authors at the Plaza hotel in New York for the Next Generation Indie Book Award’s ceremony. I picked up 2 International Book awards in July, and a global eBook Award in August.

By this time, thousands of readers had clicked the buy link on Amazon.com. It was all happening so fast, yet I was still unsatisfied. I wanted to go bigger. So I started reaching out to literary agents in the hope that I could enter into a hybrid deal with them around One Blood where they would own the print rights to the book and TPC would retain the digital rights. Due to the success of the book, the agents were very amenable to receiving a copy. Then the rejections started pouring back in just when I thought I was done with rejection. Guess not.

The fall was a busy time for me personally, as I accepted a job that would take me out of NY and fling me halfway around the world to Istanbul, Turkey in the beginning of December. By this time, One Blood had already been downloaded over 10,000 times on Amazon and my stock was still rising. I partnered with Wattpad in October and received another 440,000 reads of One Blood as a result. And then Kirkus came calling again, this time to let me know that One Blood had made their prestigious Best of List for 2012!

I have to thank all the readers, bloggers, book reviewers, interviewers, award committees, and fans for all the love and support they showed me in 2012. It was amazing interacting with so many diverse and interesting folks.

A few other highlights for me from 2012 were launching my author website, qwantuamaru.com, crossing the 2,000 fan mark on my One Blood Facebook fan page, speaking to 70 or so 6th graders about writing in October, and launching my book marketing site, AuthorDiscovery.com. I ended the year making the AALBC 2012 Bestsellers list (#11 and #18 e-book/print book respectively), as well as the MosaicBooks.com bestsellers list (#6)!

In 2013, I expect to continue doing well with One Blood, even as I step back to complete my 2nd novel, The Uneasy Sleep of Giants. As for TPC, it’s time to get back to marketing. We have a new book coming out by the end of March, From Authors to Entrepreneurs – FATE, Stephanie Casher’s 2nd novel – The Space Between, and maybe even a book on our success formula called The Independent Publishing Plan.

We are going to be blogging regularly again, so make sure you keep checking in with us! Our light is only shining brighter these days. You might want to get your shades:)

The last few months have been biz-eeee! A mix of everything “new”–new jobs, new locations, new semesters, new schedules–kept TPC blogs on the backburner. Hell, even this blog won’t meet the usual 400-word minimum (barely 40). It’s more or less a check-in to let you know Stephanie, James, and Omar are still TPC strong and hustling books 24-7. But we have big “thangs” lined up for 2013, including new books and possibly a _____. 

Gotta stick around to find out, so stay tuned!

This week, I attended the Discoverability and Marketing Conference, graciously organized by the good folks over at Digital Book World. Notably, this conference was established with the lofty objective of teaching  publishing industry professionals how to “make the leap from serendipity to discoverability”, by creating interactive, social, and reader-generated marketing that offers solid, measurable returns on their investments. The event promised to help attendees increase their discoverability, learn can’t miss audience development strategies, convert website visitors to customers, and discover the customer retention tactics that really work.

Upon evaluating the list of speakers I became intrigued. The dais was loaded with heavy hitters, from Kelly Gallagher, VP, Publishing Services, R.R. Bowker to Jon Fine, Director of Author & Publisher Relationships, Amazon; with plenty of great speakers in-between and beyond. Here is a full list of speakers and topics covered. So, I registered, paid my $415 and prepared for an information download!

It’s been a minute since I attended a live industry event, although I did go to Steve Harrison’s Publicity Workshop in July, and it was good to be among publishing influencers again. As always, it’s a great opportunity to benchmark where TPC is in our book marketing/social media engagement efforts and get a sense for where things might be headed.

The only question is, did they deliver the goods?

Well, yes and no. There were plenty of juicy tips and tricks of book marketing doled out. Two highlights were the presentation on FB’s Edgerank algorithm by Dennis Yu, CEO, BlitzMetrics and the prezi by Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit. Still, as an experienced book marketing professional who has grown up in this new digital book world, I attended this event to get a glimpse of the future of discoverability and marketing, not the present. What I took away was that the tactics TPC and many indies have been applying to get found, grab readers’ attention, close the deal, and keep them coming back for more (e-mail marketing, Amazon page optimization, social media engagement, reading community interaction, online advertising, and customer insight mining) are finally being cosigned by the industry experts.

Unfortunately, the conference was largely focused on information that has been written about on many publishing blogs, books, and author websites for the better part of the past two years. There was little new or groundbreaking for those of us out in front trailblazing. But don’t take my word for it, here is the day 1 recap.

So, was attending this conference a waste of time and money? Not hardly. Strategic validation is always important. It verifies that past instinct was correct which means that future decisions have a good probability of success.

There were some cool new ideas that are just underway. From Ativist to Small Demons to ToGather, there are folks out there on the bleeding edge of marketing in 2012. It was refreshing to learn more of these innovative approaches to content and engagement. I have to thank DBW for giving them some air time as well.

I also had a great time tweetcasting on day 2. Search on twitter, #DBWDM, to see the conversation as it unfolded over the course of the conference. I made some new friends, earned some heavyweight followers, and even got a RT from @WritersDigest!

Now, if I were to make predictions on the future of discoverability and marketing (as depicted by this conference) it would read:

• Ereader growth is still forecasted in the double digits for the next 3-5 years, so good enhanced/engaging content in ebooks and on ereaders is key
• Offering high quality free content will continue to be key in helping you get found
• Good e-mail marketing will remain relevant as long as the moving target of the social media newstream/feed exists
• Mobile will become increasingly important in discoverability. Apps, mobile advertising, and mobile e-mail marketing are keys to consider in any book marketing strategy
• Pinterest will be a valuable discoverability tool because “pins” are not moving targets and visual content gets much more engagement than text across the web
• Unless FB changes it’s Edge Rank Algorithm (not likely), you are going to have to pay to play and get your content seen
• Search engine relevance (Google) may be supplanted by better search/engagement tools being rolled out  by online retailers (Amazon/BN.com/Apple)
• As Search Engine relevance declines for books, so does the importance of SEO unless google becomes a major online retailer
• Amazon plans to add even more resources for authors like integration with FB and enhanced customer service which could boost discoverability
• Curated customer reviews (like those found on sites like goodreads and LibraryThing) can and will supplant editorial reviews as the go to sources for what readers should be buying/discovering
• Traditional Publishers will have to do a better job to understand customer buying habits, collect valuable customer contact information, and create their own platforms to attract readers for their authors
• As more publishing professionals figure this discoverability stuff out, it will become that much harder to get found via these methods, so new innovations/approaches will be needed to give an edge to the early adopters
• Ultimately, books will continue to compete with all other forms of media so enhancements/advancements to “the book” will be important to keep books and reading relevant

If you were hoping for a solution or ray of light that would change the way we market and get found in 2012, it wasn’t on display at this conference. So for the foreseeable future, the forecast for discoverability and marketing in the digital age is cloudy with a chance of rain. Knowledge and hard work will remain the umbrellas for those of us toiling to, in the words of Day 1 keynote speaker Rick Joyce, Chief Marketing Officer, Perseus Book Group, “Connect, collect, assist, compete, accrue, share, get recognized and give bargains.”

Those of you who attended the conference, what did you think?

You can follow me @bookmarketing33 on twitter.

Do you like stories? Well here you go…

Once upon a time, in a land much like our own, there was an entire industry devoted to publishing, manufacturing, distributing, selling, reviewing, and critiquing books.

The publishing was done by a handful of large elite companies who determined what and who could be published. They employed the services of literary agents to help their editors determine the best books to publish. Both the agents and editors were very successful at identifying and harnessing the talent of the writers, most of whom never made enough money off their books to quit their day jobs. There were many more writers left out in the cold, their dreams of seeing their work in print dashed to pieces.

The publishers also manufactured the books, employing the services of copy editors, cover designers, typesetters, and printers. Due to this large infrastructure, they justified paying their writers next to nothing to keep “the machine” running. The writers were told to keep writing and to learn how to market themselves by building a platform; it wasn’t the publisher’s job to market them. Before the books were printed, advanced copies would be sent out to newspaper reviewers, literary critics, other established authors, and even bookstore representatives to build buzz for the book; thus, creating a secondary market for these services. In many instances, the large publishers were also spending millions on advertising with the newspapers and literary journals and in return usually received glowing reviews.

Distributors interacted with the publisher’s large sales forces to move the books from the publisher’s warehouses to their own and then on to the bookstores, libraries, and other outlets dependent on the revenues from selling books to stay in business. Because of constant sales pressure, the shelf life of books dwindled dramatically over time, adding even more burden to an already tense system. Bookstores started demanding more sure things from publishers who began demanding more guaranteed successes from their editors who then gave the literary agents their marching orders. The result was less creativity, choice, and more writers left on the outside looking in than ever before.

Then, seemingly overnight, everything changed. A company called Amazon, with a brash, bold leader and even more audacious vision, launched a device called the Kindle that would enable readers to download electronic books in seconds. The traditional publishing establishment laughed it off. “Readers would never prefer digital books over paper books,” they said. Unfortunately, they hadn’t learned the lesson of the music industry, still reeling from the introduction of digital content vs. the traditional format. Amazon, like iTunes before them, had an ace in the hole. They knew that in order to make their Kindles valuable they needed content. They didn’t really care where it came from or how good it was, so they introduced a method for authors to directly publish with them. All of a sudden the traditional publishing  hierarchy was usurped.

Writers could hire their own editors, cover designers, and typesetters. They could upload the books to Amazon in minutes. They could use their own websites, social media and reader communities to find their readers and direct them to Amazon to buy their books. And most surprisingly, some of them could actually write good books! Kindles started selling like hot cakes and these indie books were selling right along with them. Some of these authorpreneurs even began outselling their traditionally published counterparts and showing up on bestseller lists. One of them even sold over 2 million e-books!

Needless to say, the large publishers weren’t going to take this lying down, and began meeting in secret with Apple to establish a pricing model that would allow them to stay in business. They needed to do this because their large  bookstore partners were closing by the thousands and Amazon was not allowing them control over their own prices. When the government found out, a Department of Justice  investigation was initiated and many of the big publishers and Apple were named as defendants, having to justify their actions to force consumers to pay more for products that cost significantly less to produce.

Meanwhile, the indie author community was growing by leaps and bounds as authors, left out in the cold for years, capitalized on the opportunity to establish a follower-ship of readers. Unfortunately, many of the books were rush jobs with shoddy covers, poor-to-no editing, and plain sloppy writing. And there were other companies called vanity publishers preying on the ignorance of authors, by taking their money and offering little to no service in return. Still, readers were far more forgiving to these authors than the literary agents and editors had ever been. Maybe they connected with the entrepreneurial spirit of these intrepid authors. Besides, if they didn’t like the book, a full refund was a click away, a privilege never afforded them by bookstores.

The large publishers realized that e-books were not going away and in fact were outselling their print counterparts, so they began a smear campaign to lambaste indie authors and their primary steward, Amazon. They found a man who had been quite successful for a time selling 5 star reviews for a price. When they discovered that the #1 Indie author had actually used this service to obtain 300 such reviews, they went on an all out initiative. Book critics, traditionally published authors, literary agents, and newspaper journalists fired away on the credibility of Amazon and Indie authors in article after article.

The traditional establishment rejoiced as indie authors began to turn on each other. Until the leaders of the community stood up, pointed out these underhanded tactics, and calmed everyone back down. In the end, the Indie authors kept writing, kept supporting each other, kept churning out successively better products, and kept building strong connections with readers. Traditionally published authors, increasingly neglected by their publishers, jumped ship and bolstered the ranks of indies until most authors found on Amazon were indies with the traditional authors few and far between. A surprising winner in this whole tale were indie booksellers who were thriving in the new world. Paper wasn’t dead; authors just wanted their due remuneration for their years of hard work. And there were readers who would always love paper.

As for the publishers and all their cronies? Realizing that their last-ditch effort failed, they initiated massive rounds of layoffs of skilled editors, publicists, cover designers, and sales people, many of whom immediately found work servicing the indie author community. Literary agents started representing indies in negotiations with Hollywood. And the large publishers consolidated until there were only two or three left in business.

What came next? Only they can say for sure. But in the words of Stephen King, the world moved on. Some moved on with it. Most others were simply left behind. Out in the cold.

Sound familiar?

By now most people have heard that ebooks are currently outselling paperbacks and hardcovers on Amazon.com (and Amazon.uk), the world’s largest book retailer. What you may not have contemplated, however, is how this change is affecting the very infrastructure on which books have been published for hundreds of years.

Allow me to elaborate. According to this Cyber College Internet Campus review of the publishing industry:

Before the 1960s, the book publishing industry was composed mostly of independent companies whose only business was books. But, growing profits made the business attractive to large corporations looking for new investments.

At about the same time that large corporations started buying publishing houses they also started buying out independent bookstores. A nine-year period, which also continues into 2011, is shown below.

The combined effect of fewer independent book publishers and bookstores has resulted in some major changes in book publishing.

While corporate profits have increased (which is good news for the shareholders) the type and scope of books have decreased.  Instead of risking the publication of new titles by unknown authors, these corporations tend to stick with known authors and past success formulas. This, of course, makes it difficult for new authors with new ideas to enter the marketplace.

Today, only a very small percentage of the works of new authors are considered for publication. At the same time, the industry is rift with stories about manuscripts that have been turned down by 20 or 30 publishers, only to later become bestsellers.

A couple of things stand out from this selection.

1) The market used to be almost entirely comprised of independent publishers and booksellers, but this gave way to the large publishing conglomerates. The impact of this is clear. The independent publishers were less concerned with profit margins than they were with putting out books about which  they were passionate. They created strong relationships with independent booksellers who shared a similar interest in providing a wide spectrum of literary options to their reading customers.

2) Today, traditional publishers are depending more and more on the ability of a few superstar authors to continue churning out global hits. They use these higher sales to cover the costs of their infrastructure and losses accumulated by publishing hundreds of books a year that never sell enough copies to break even. This puts a ton of pressure on large publishers to deliver growth year over year and makes them quite risk averse when it comes to the titles they publish, print, and distribute.

Still, the large publishers do keep their eyes out for talent. They do this via the services of professionals known as literary agents. The primary function of a literary agent is to filter through thousands of requests from authors and hundreds of manuscripts to find the very few they think can be sold to an editor at a major publishing house. Once they’ve convinced an editor to take a chance on a book, then they become author representatives and work to get the best deal for the author they can negotiate. The issue for literary agents in the current market of e-books is that there are more people writing more books than ever before – far too many books for even the best literary agent to identify the gems they may have sitting on their slush piles.

This led to the rise of the Indie Publisher. In the late 90′s and early 2000′s, the first revolution to transform publishing was the advent of Print-On-Demand technology . This enabled smaller publishers to establish a system where they only printed a book when they had a sale, eliminating the need for warehouse space for books, and creating a new wave of author/entrepreneurs tired of being rejected by literary agents and publishing houses, and deciding to do it themselves. There was only one problem – a clear quality gap existed between these “self-published” titles and the glossy bound perfection being printed by the Big Boys. Retailers wouldn’t carry these lower quality books so many of these authors turned to alternative methods to getting the word out about their books. These early authorpreneurs dealt with high print costs, rejection from retailers, and even snobbery from readers who wouldn’t sully their hands or minds with what they felt were inferior products from writers unable to secure a traditional publishing contract.

But Amazon and the Kindle have changed all that. Today’s intrepid author’s, still dealing with rejection after rejection from the traditional publishers, have started going straight to the readers and allowing book buyers to determine their worth. When I read that 50 Shades of Grey is now the bestselling title of ALL TIME, this does not surprise me, because readers decided it was a hit long before literary agents or traditional publishers even knew E.L. James existed. Because e-books authors can afford to be more aggressive with their pricing, readers, enticed by low prices have started taking chances on these unknowns and guess what? It’s not all crap. If there was more willingness to take risks, the traditional publishing establishment would have found out the same thing. It’s too late for them to get in on this game, however. Their business model prevents them from exploiting these new found opportunities.

So what happens when readers figure out that traditional publishers aren’t the only one’s who can put out quality books? What happens when mid list authors, tired of being ignored by their publishers, decide to take their destinies in their own hands and reach out to their readership on their own? What happens when more big-time authors like J.K. Rawling negotiate to get the rights to their e-books back and vertically integrate from authors to publishers?

Collapse is what happens.

I already predicted this in a blog last year entitled It’s The End of Publishing As We Know It…and We Feel Fine. But to see it actually happening is another thing altogether. Like how TPC Books author Qwantu Amaru wrote about Hurricane Isaac ravaging the coast of Louisiana in his award-winning, bestselling novel One Blood, and 10 months later, folks in New Orleans are feeling the wind.

Publishers and literary agents are feeling the winds of change, but it may be too late for them to find shelter.

In June 2010, we debuted TPC’s first novel SELLOUT at the 2010 Black Writers Reunion & Conference in Atlanta. In June 2011, we launched A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND. Now, I wish I can keep on this saga by announcing another June TPC baby, but alas, I can’t (not until later this year). Still, my kids have two and one-year-old anniversaries, and I wouldn’t be a good parent if I didn’t acknowledge each with a little birthday celebration, right? So, on that note…

Happy birthday to my two kids (and TPC’s grandkids) SELLOUT and A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND!

Well, it’s more like birth “month,” but in my eyes, June will always be a month to commemorate–not only for me as the debut author, but for The Pantheon Collective, the publisher. With only one book as our sole product two years ago, the three of us knew we had to work every angle to get noticed. Being an indie–A.K.A, “small guy”–we were open to anything to let the world know about us. And I mean anything:

Book reviews, interviews (radio, print, and online), YouTube, press releases,  fan pages, websites, TPC contests, blogs, social media, entering book contests, book signings, conferences, book cover votes, mailing lists, book clubs (my bread and butter!), local book stores, Amazon, Smashwords,  All Romance–taking in deep breath–Kindle/Amazon giftcard giveaways, advertisements, book trailers, video check-ins, free books, university panels, writer groups, family reunions, weddings, airports–like I said, any freakin’ thing.

Well, we haven’t gotten this TV thing licked yet, but it’ll happen. I’m sure of it. 

Marketing and promotion for us started looooooong before we launched SELLOUT, way back in January 2010 (like I said, we launched in June 2010). This is a very important lesson that I’m glad we learned early on because many new authors start marketing after the book is published. If you think about it, you see big-bang summer movie trailers during the Superbowl!

I must say, I’m more than proud of our collaborative efforts and accomplishments the past two years–not just for what we’ve done with my books, but for Stephanie Casher’s WHEN LOVE ISN’T ENOUGH and Qwantu Amaru’s ONE BLOOD. WHEN LOVE is our best reviewed novel to date with an average of 4.8 out of 5 stars (57 total reviews so far); and ONE BLOOD received a 2012 Star of Merit and IndieReader Discovery Award by Kirkus Reviews, declared the “world’s toughest book critics.” The TPC3 has won multiple book awards and on track for several significant milestones in sales this year (5,000 copies sold for WHEN LOVE, 10,000 copies sold each for A HARD MAN and SELLOUT and 30,000 total copies sold for all books together). Not too shabby for three folks with a dream!

We have six months left in this year, and the TPC3 has more things in store, including the next installment in Stephanie’s SOUL MATES trilogy. That’s not all, folks. You want to know what else we got going on? Well, we have … naw, you’ll just have to wait and see. 

Hello world. My name is Qwantu Amaru and I am a book promotion junkie.

This is only my second blog confession since becoming a published author…not because I have had nothing to say, but because being a published author and an indie published author at that means that I am hustling…HARD!

I had the benefit of having done much of the pre-launch marketing work for 4 previous published novels, but the authors of those books never told me how “all-consuming” book promotion can be. At first I tried to organize myself with 5 daily tasks I would do to promote my book. I quickly realized I was leaving important things off my list so I came up with 5 other tasks and decided I would alternate between the two lists. Here are the tasks, naked and open for you to see:

Daily 5 Tasks:

Connect with 5 potential interviewers
Contact 5 potential reviewers
2 Posts on FB fan page
2 Tweets on Twitter
Comment on 2 Blogs/FB Group posts/Page of interest
Outreach to 1 Bookclub

Alternate Daily 5:

Outreach to 1 Media Outlet
Evaluate 1 Book Awardor Contest for Entry
Outreach to 1 BlogTalkradio host
Develop 1 New Book Promo Idea
Friend top reviewers on Shelfari and Library Thing
Add Book to 5 Goodreads bookshelves

Pretty organized, right? And you would figure that I could blow through these lists in easily an hour or less and get back to my day, right? Wrong!

Authors beware of the time-sucking traps that are Facebook and Twitter. Early on I found that I could not pull myself from the gravitational pull of these moons. I would post and wait. Post, and check for mentions. Post, and respond. All. Damn. Day. (even now as I compose this confession, I have checked FB 3 times and twitter 4).

It was very hard to post and move on to other more important activities, like finding early reviewers, which is much more time consuming but ultimately more rewarding. Reviews, author friends, are the lifeblood of a newbie author. Newbie author, for your information, is defined as any author with less than 5 published books or less than 25,000 books sold. Reviews are how our beloved readers find the proverbial golden needles in the haystacks of dreck and drivel being published on a daily basis. Yes, I am aware of the Amazon reviews controversy, but people know the difference between planted reviews and real ones. I hope.

Anyway, just as the mantra of our esteemed president should have been Economy, Economy, Economy for the first (at least) two years of his presidency, my mantra (and yours) should be Reviews, Reviews, Reviews for the first 90 days post publishing. You see, as an indie author, unless you build advanced review time into your production cycle (and let’s face it, few of us do), you will launch with a goose-egg in the review column on Amazon.com. And believe me, Amazon is keeping score, as are the thousands of e-book readers flocking there in droves each day. Reviews are one of the key drivers of the mystical Amazon ranking algorithm that you must master in order to be found by prospective readers. This algorithm is a function of price point, reviews, customer tags, likes, and listmania. Price is the overall driver which is why so many .99 cent books get into the top 50 of many genre’s without a ton of reviews. But were that same .99 cent book to have over 50 reviews it would stick in the top 10.

So my current addiction is finding and connecting with prospective reviewers. I have given away thousands of copies of One Blood in this effort, and will continue to do so until I see One Blood top 100 reviews on Amazon!

Thankfully, the 38 reviews I have received on Amazon make me very happy, as well as the phenomenal review One Blood received from the Kirkus Book Review and the superb blurb and endorsement award-winning bestselling author Brandon Massey supplied me stating that, “ONE BLOOD is a richly detailed, intricately woven tale rendered in lush, evocative prose. This memorable debut heralds Qwantu Amaru as a talent well worth watching.” ~ Brandon Massey, award-winning author of DARK CORNER and COVENANT!

With that in mind, if you are interested in feeding my review addiction, e-mail me at qwantuamaru@gmail.com and we can work something out!

In my previous life as a Sr. Marketing Director for a large pharmaceutical company, I was known for making brash predictions come true -like doubling sales of a troubled brand in merely 12 months. Since then, in my current job, I’ve taken a struggling meeting production company from the brink of bankruptcy to a company with a premier mobile web application that was transforming meetings 16 months later. Book marketing, however, has become my biggest marketing challenge by far. First of all, there is the resource issue. At the pharma company, I had millions of dollars at my disposal – the trick was applying resources in a few key areas with a laser-focus on execution of key tactics. If you are just getting introduced to Our Story, we started The Pantheon Collective with a $15,000 investment, which wasn’t enough money to properly launch one book, let alone four. Next, we made a key strategic and financial decision early on to live and die by our ebook sales. With per book gross sales of $2.40, you have to sell A LOT of ebooks to turn a profit. Finally, I didn’t know jack squat about book marketing!

What I did know was that product positioning is one of the most important elements of marketing, period. So I took that knowledge and created the first marketing plan for SELLOUT by James W. Lewis. Looking back on that marketing plan today, I can see how naive I was about this whole book marketing process. For example, we spent $2,000 on a very unique book trailer for SELLOUT that eventually went on to win 3rd place in a major book trailer competition conducted by AALBC.com and consequently led to large brand exposure to thousands of readers. Great, right? Well, not so fast. In the beginning, I believed that producing a great book trailer would directly lead to thousands of youtube and other social video sharing website comments which would indirectly lead us to immediate sales. I’ve now come to realize that book trailers are a brand awareness tactic: nothing more, nothing less. There is no correlation between the trailer and sales, and even less of a relationship between the cost of the trailer and the potential ROI.

Around the same time, I was reading a great book called Word of Mouth Marketing and applied many of these learned principals to the SELLOUT launch and future book launches. I knew that book clubs had the keys to the kingdom when it came to literary influence, but I severely underestimated just how inundated each book club is by not only established authors and publishers but the thousands of indie and self-published authors as well. Breaking through to this select group was going to take something beyond extending a simple author introduction. Plus, there was the catch that an author needs book clubs to boost word-of-mouth, but book clubs don’t like to waste their time on an unproven author, any more than the Big 6 publishers do. That was the second nut I had to crack as a book marketing professional–how to be enticing to book clubs without annoying and emerge from the crowd as a found gem that would dazzle book clubs. It also didn’t hurt that James’ online hustle is only matched by his Captain America-esque good looks (lol).

Then there was the marketing enigma that is Facebook. On one hand, here is a site that collects more detailed user data than any company in history. On the other hand, if you can get a stranger to “like” you, there’s no guarantee that this extends beyond the rampant voyeurism that pervades the site. Not to mention that all the so-called marketers on Facebook are screaming, “LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!” Step one for me was to figure out the science of crafting Facebook ads that led to likes. Step two was figuring out how to engage the “likers” once I had them on my FB page. And I tried everything…only to receive a spare comment or post every now and again. Until one day, while re-reading the Bible of book marketing, 1001 Ways to Market Your Book, I had an epiphany: To engage Facebookers I had to create a promotion where everyone won something but one person won EVERYTHING. The key was to ask the fans for the right action. The one that would really kick things into gear for us. Once I decided on the action, I convinced Stephanie and James to try it out and this one tactic, in addition to playing the .99 pricing game on Amazon has turned TPC Books from a company that had sold 500 copies of two books by the end of 2010 to a company that ended 2011 with over 9,500 copies sold in that year. We’ve run the same promotion for When Love Isn’t Enough and A Hard Man is Good to Find and seen the exact same results, only much faster.

The other learning about book marketing is that it does get easier as an author matures. We spent far less time and money marketing and promoting James’ second book than SELLOUT. That’s because by the time we launched A Hard Man, James had already won The NBBF’s Best New Author Award and was selling roughly 1,000 copies of SELLOUT a month. This lets me know that the up-front expense really pays out on successive books – provided you are giving the reading public what they want.

So I had the benefit of trial and error going for me by the time we got to our fourth book release One Blood by Qwantu Amaru. Still, the perfectionist in me never wants to rest on my laurels. I have to top myself. Otherwise, I feel like I haven’t learned anything. So, if SELLOUT was in-the-park home run, When Love Isn’t Enough was a stand-up triple, and A Hard Man was a walk-off home run; I needed One Blood to be a Grand Slam. My nearly two years in publishing told me that I was developing a formula for success; I just had to refine it. That formula goes something like this:

To create a bestseller you have to do 4 things:

1. Get (Good) Reviews: There is a direct correlation between good reviews and sales as you move an ebooks price point from say $3.99 to $.99 and back up on Amazon.
2. Get Networked: Connecting with established authors, bloggers, interviewers, online radio show hosts, book club presidents, reader communities, local genre meet-ups, and the like is crucial to boosting your book’s profile and visibility.
3. Get Exposure: Targeted advertising using google adwords, facebook ads, goodreads ads, and youtube ads is key to driving up brand awareness. If a reader doesn’t know about your book they can’t buy it, right?
4. Get Press: Whether you win a book award, get interviewed by your town’s local rag, or speak at your alma mater, nothing boosts your profile to prospective readers like positive press.

I have applied all 4 of these principals to One Blood and after the first 60 days post-launch, One Blood has 19 four and five star reviews (on Amazon and goodreads); the author has had interviews posted on seven websites and has participated in 3 major blog tours; the One Blood book trailer has been viewed nearly 7,000 times on youtube, and he has over 4,000 Facebook fans; and he has released a national press release, been profiled by his local cities website,  and spoken at his alma mater.

The result? Sales of over 1,300 books so far. Not staggering numbers by any measure, but when I compare the first eight weeks sales of One Blood to SELLOUT or When Love, I see a definite trend break. So here’s to turning trial and error from a science into an art. May you have even greater success as a result of our failures!

To see a specific example of a promotion we are running for One Blood, check out this blog on the One Blood TRUE FAN contest launching 2/7/12 and running until 3/31/12.

Good luck and good selling.