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.

Wow, it’s 2012 and the TPC 3 have now been in business officially for about 19 months. Omar was running the numbers recently and came up with a pretty impressive statistic. In the year-and a half since SELLOUT was launched, our fledgling independent publishing venture has sold over 10,000 copies of SELLOUT, When Love Isn’t Enough, and A Hard Man is Good to Find combined! 10,000 copies is not going to keep any of the Big 6 publishers awake at night worried about us, but it is a significant achievement nonetheless.

Did you know that most independently published books sell less than 100 copies in their lifetime? 100 copies! When you look at it that way you can see why we are so excited! And with the December launch of One Blood, plus all the big things we’ve got planned for 2012, it truly is onward and upward for the TPC 3.

As always, this achievement would have been impossible without the support and love we’ve gotten from our fanbase, now over 12,000 strong!

Below you can read a recent press-release we launched on this topic!

Happy New Year

From Author to Entrepreneurs, 3 Authors Join Forces to Shake up the Publishing World
Indie Publishing Venture The Pantheon Collective Breaking Sales Record While Inspiring and Empowering Authors to Take Control of Their Publishing Destinies

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRLog (Press Release) – Dec 23, 2011 – In November 2009, Omar Luqmaan-Harris (who writes as Qwantu Amaru), sent a text message to Stephanie Casher and James W. Lewis: “What if [we] joined forces and created our own publishing company?” Two years and over 10,000 books sold later, their company The Pantheon Collective has completed the first stage of the mission they set out to accomplish in December 2009 – publish 4 books while blogging about every step of the process.

The three partners pooled together an initial $15,000 investment which they used to set up their limited liability corporation, create their brand identity – The Pantheon Collective (TPC Books), website, and launch their first novel, the bestselling and award winning Sellout by James W. Lewis – a book that deals with three people facing the consequences of interracial dating. With their first collaborative venture a success, six months later they published their best-reviewed novel to date, When Love Isn’t Enough – a multicultural fiction book about true love, terrible timing, impossible choices, and how you find the strength to go on when you discover that, sometimes, love just isn’t enough. In 2011, The Pantheon Collective also published James W. Lewis second novel, A Hard Man is Good to Find – an erotic romance that has been “flying off the virtual book shelves” and their first foray into supernatural suspense and horror, One Blood by Qwantu Amaru – about a voodoo curse tormenting a group of people unaware of their hidden connections.

With the exception of One Blood (which launched 11/30/11), each novel has sold in excess of 2,000 copies, primarily in e-book format. This is a significant achievement since most independently published books sell less than 100 copies in their lifespan.

They attribute their success to “the power of three” the multiplier effect that happened when the three of them discovered each partner’s area of strength. Stephanie Casher is the award-winning editing/quality control/finance pillar, James W. Lewis is the internet connection/publishing process expert, and Omar Luqmaan-Harris is the book marketing guru. By focusing on a mantra of “quality first”, they have quickly made an indelible mark on the publishing world.

Today their website/blog http://www.pantheoncollective.com receives thousands of hits each month and is chock-full of how-to’s on everything from how to decide between independent publishing or “assisted self-publishing” to free book marketing and business plan templates.

In 2012 they plan to continue publishing their own novels, with follow-ups from Stephanie Casher and James W. Lewis on the way, as well as two books on the process of creating an independent publishing venture – From Authors to Entrepreneurs and The Independent Publishing Plan. Their ultimate mission is launching an Author Services Division focused on helping other writers get their work published with the same quality standards the TPC 3 have set for themselves.

“What makes us unique is how well we collaborate together and our willingness to try and fail in terms of book marketing and promotion in this new realm of e-books and social media marketing in order to educate other authors coming in behind us,” said Omar Luqmaan-Harris.

The Pantheon Collective has been featured in several publications, most recently John Kremer’s (bestselling author of 1,001 Ways to Market Your Books) Book Marketing Bestsellers: Book Promotion Blog: http://bit.ly/v3gBNx

I just finished reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and as I completed the novel and turned off my Kindle, I went to my computer and saw that my very own novel, One Blood had completed processing in the Kindle Direct Publishing machine and was available for sale. I sat, dumbfounded that the book was actually (finally) out. I didn’t know what to do with myself to be honest.

The reason for this reaction has a lot to do with the story behind the book itself. I started One Blood in January 2000 (back then I was calling it Simmons Park) in my final year as an MBA student at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, FL. The world was a different place back then but already changing. George Bush had just stolen the 2000 Presidential election from Al Gore and there was this feeling that something bad was going to happen.

It only took 18 months.

During that time, I moved from Tallahassee to Sao Paulo, Brazil where I lived and worked from May 2000 until August 2001. I didn’t get too much writing done, I must admit while living in Brazil but the poverty and inequality I saw there definitely resonated and would manifest in my writing years later.

I returned to the states a month before 9/11 – a watershed event that got me focused and writing again. I started making real progress on my first draft. Then, 6 months later I realized I’d written myself into a corner and put the manuscript down for some time.

I graduated with my MBA in May 2002 and started working in Philadelphia. I was very inspired to be living in the city that birthed DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, The Roots, Jill Scott, and many others. I was performing spoken word at spots all over town and writing quite a bit when I wasn’t working or performing. I had to start all over, but I was okay with that. I had a new direction. The novel morphed from Simmons Park (a story of trying to make up for past actions) into Bad Blood (a story of two warring families).

Over the next 4 years (and 8 months after Hurricane Katrina), I poured my heart and soul into the manuscript and in May 2006, I reached THE END for the first time. I felt sure I had a masterpiece on my hands (an unedited 600 page, 180,000 masterpiece – but masterpiece no less). I immediately began investigating literary agents I could pitch to get the book sold and decided to attend the Black Writer’s Reunion and Conference in Dallas, TX – a decision that would prove to be one of the most fortuitous of my life. While there I got a brief taste of success when the literary agent I pitched (badly) requested my whole manuscript!

I was sure I was on my way. I also, met two people who would greatly help me on my publishing journey – Stephanie Casher and Michelle Chester. Michelle agreed to copy-edit my manuscript in a completely unreasonable 2 week time frame. After receiving her edits and making the changes, I submitted the manuscript to the literary agent. I also sent it out to 8 or so advance readers to get their feedback. And they all loved it!

In August of 2006, I moved back to Sao Paulo and while waiting to hear back from the literary agent starting writing my second novel, The Uneasy Sleep of Giants. One day in October I got the notice that the agent was passing on my manuscript. So I took the feedback from my advance readers and went back in to Bad Blood to make some tweaks.

It took me another 7 months or so to get through the manuscript again as my day job was kicking my ass! In May 2007, I flew back to the US for work and linked up with Stephanie and her beau James W. Lewis (an author as well) in NYC and we had a fateful dinner at Bubba Gump Shrimp in Times Square, where completely inebriated, we made a pact that if the three of us hadn’t been published by the end of 2009, we’d publish ourselves.

None of us believed that was even a remote possibility…there was no way we wouldn’t be published in 2 and a half years…

So, 2 and a half year’s later, LOL, I was sitting in Barnes And Noble in Hoboken, NJ (I’d moved back to the states in October 2008), working my way through the novel that had evolved from Bad Blood to One Blood after Bad Blood received 17 rejections from literary agents (too long, too confusing, too different) and some very hard to swallow feedback from Stephanie and professional manuscript consultant, Anita Diggs (poor characterization, poor pacing).

Barack Obama was celebrating the one year anniversary of his amazing election and I was feeling very yes you can-ish, when I picked up my cell and text Stephanie that she, James and I should start our own publishing company. But that’s another story…

Fast forward another 2 years to yesterday and you should be able to appreciate my reaction to seeing my book on that amazon.com page: http://bit.ly/vsFb0B.

12 years had passed and I needed every single one of them to deliver a book of which I couldn’t be more proud. A dream was fulfilled.

Well folks, we’ve reached 30 reviews, so time to give away another Amazon gift card! Check out the video below to see who lucky winner is!

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Over the past 24 months or so, the publishing industry has been doing a lot of talking about a singular topic – does the growth of e-books mean the death of traditional publishing? Well last year all the pundits kept saying that ebooks represented less than 7% of the overall publishing market. What they neglected to state as openly was how quickly ebooks were taking over the trade paperback market.

Flash forward to 2011 and headlines from this year like, E-book Sales Jump in June, Print Plunges; E-book Sales Up 167% in June; That Was Fast: Amazon’s Kindle Ebook Sales Surpass Print (It Only Took Four Years); and Ebook Sales Triple year-Over-Year, paper books decline in every category. Now everyone is proselytizing about the end of printed books. What we should be talking about is the end of publishing…as we know it.

This is definitely a WWGD (What Would Guttenberg Do) moment for traditional publishers.

For years, The Big 6 have been exceptional at doing two things: 1) Creating Global Bestsellers and 2) Making Money off of Dead People. Let’s examine the impact of the ebook on each: If the Harry Potter series, Twilight, and Dragon Tattoo books had been self-published, it is unlikely that millions of people around the globe would know these stories. So the global bestseller category is still the realm of the traditional publisher. They better keep their authors locked up tight, however, because once you create a brand like J.K Rowling, what’s to stop her from taking ownership and control of her brand in this day and age of social media and cheap independent publishing and making even more money. See Exhibit A: Pottermore.

What about the dead folks? Well, with the classics being given away by everyone from Amazon to Google, it looks like that well is going to run dry. They can’t even count on bookstores to keep that inventory moving anymore because the bookstores are going the way of the dinosaur. See Exhibits B & C: Borders and Barnes & Noble.

So if they stand to lose their global brands and old faithful, where can the Big 6 turn for revenue, or even inspiration? Well here’s a thought:  Publishing companies used to invest time and money in finding that next big thing – developing authors from unknowns to icons. But they got lazy and started churning out MOTS (more of the same). I mean how many YA vampire novels can the world stand? Anne Rice is rolling in her grave and she isn’t even dead yet!

But can you really blame them with a business model that willingly accepts 100% of returns? They did this to themselves.

Here’s a prediction for you that’s already partially come true. First, ebooks will reach and then exceed trade paperbacks in unit sales. Trade paperbacks are the bread and butter of bookstore chains so they will crumble under the weight of all that stagnating inventory on their shelves. Big Publishing will respond by jacking up the prices of their own ebooks without upping their author’s royalties, causing a mass exodus of authors from their ranks. The best literary agents will broker phenomenal deals for the superstar authors making the bottom line ache even more for the Big Guys. To hide their wounds, The Big 6 will become the Big 2 or 3 as inevitable consolidation becomes all the rage. Meanwhile, indie publishers and authors will become savvier and the complexion of top lists like the New York Times Bestseller list will change permanently when there are as many indie authors represented as traditionally published authors. It is at this moment that Big Publishing will give up the ghost and start a massive round of layoffs. This is the worst thing they could ever do, as some of the world’s best editors, book marketers, and sales people will now be free agents and thus competitors to the very companies that fired them. Consolidation will continue until there are only two Big Guys left who have finally found a niche to make money: hardcovers for the die-hard collectors and textbooks.

Sound like fiction? We’ll see. In the meantime, if you are an indie author out there looking to get in on the ground floor, check out The Pantheon Collective’s TPC Tips and Marketing 101 series for everything you need to know to start making your way in this brave new world. And it’s FREE, our gift to you!

Good luck and good selling!

TPC Books WHEN LOVE ISN’T ENOUGH and SELLOUT placed as Finalists in Dan Poynter’s Global Ebook Awards (Multicultural Fiction)!

Not bad for a small publisher still trying to spread its baby wings! 

Well, the TPC3 have been busy busy busy… Summer is book fair/festival season, and since we are authors with books to promote, it is part of our job to attend as many of these bad boys as possible. After our successful trip to Houston for the National Black Book Festival, we were at it again a mere two weeks later, but this time a little closer to home. Event #2 would bring us to Los Angeles, CA for the Leimert Park Book Fair.

We’ve been to quite a few events over the past 16 months, and this one easily ranks right at the top of the list for us. First of all, it was a great venue — hosted outdoors with lots of food, music, and sunshine for everyone to partake in. It was FREE and open to the public, which is always good for us authors, because anyone can wander in off the street and buy our books, lol. There was also a diverse array of programming – from panels, to celebrity Q & A, to musical performances. They even had a special section just for the kids, where they were focusing on children’s books and activities, and anything that promotes youth literacy gets a big ole gold star in my book. All in all, we had a wonderful day slanging books, and look forward to making this an annual stop on TPC’s book tour itinerary.

As usual, we’ve got a little video to go along with our words, you know, for those of you that are living vicariously through our adventures!

Hats off to Eric Brasley and the Leimert Park Book Fair organizers for a truly stellar event… see you next year!