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You and We the People: Writing for Change

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 wnbablogphoto1   by Michael Larsen

 

“One lazy man is a disgrace, two is a law firm, and three is a congress.”~ John Adams in the musical, 1776

  

Although its follies and problems measure up to its potential and stature, the United States is the best and greatest country the world has ever had. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is worthy of celebration, if only to remind us of how it came about, its vision of America, and our role in keeping its ideals alive.

I want to recommend two things for you to watch. One may change your mind, the other your life. The first is a talk by John Perkins, author of Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded–and What We Need to Do to Remake Them. (You can watch it at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Hoodwi ) Perkins says that despite corporate bribes and paralyzing partisanship, we, as citizens, can determine what happens in this country.

America is a centrist country, but the public usually hears more from the ends of the political spectrum rather than the middle. Perkins asked his audience to do one thing every day to make the world better, an idea as powerful as it is simple. More than ever before, writers have the opportunity, not just to make a living, but to make a difference. It’s easier than ever for the right idea and the right book to change the world, and the Internet enables you reach the world with your fingertips.

Perkins said that when Rachel Carson sat down at her small desk in her Pennsylvania home to write about how DDT was harming the planet, she had no idea that she would write The Silent Spring, a bestseller that became a classic that liberated the world from DDT and started the international environmental movement.

Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, your passion and your gift for portraying the challenges we face and proposing solutions can make a difference. It’s impossible for you to know how big a difference you can make, but it’s much greater than you think.

How about writing and signing you own declaration of independence from whatever is keeping you from becoming the best, most creative and productive person that you were born to be and that only you can be? Free yourself from beliefs, people, and activities that waste your resources but don’t help you achieve your goals. That will be something for you to celebrate every day.

A revolution won is a revolution lost. When people believe there’s nothing more to fight for and just enjoy the fruits of victory, they begin to lose the victory. The only way to win a revolution is to keep striving to keep its ideals alive, especially at a time of political impasse, accelerating change, and growing urgency about the problems we face. The planet has only one hyper-connected economy and only one family: the human family. As Benjamin Franklin warned, we have to hang together, or we will surely hang separately.

America can only work if we do what we can and must to keep the vision of the Declaration of Independence alive and strive to fulfill its dream of a free, independent, thriving country, eager to reach the compromises needed to balance contrary beliefs.

That is one lesson from 1776, a musical that Elizabeth and I watch to help celebrate the holiday. 1776 offers timeless lessons we avoid at our peril. It shows how divided and ineffective Congress was at its birth, how one vote made the difference, and how it took a disastrous compromise on slavery to convince the South to sign the Declaration.

No matter where you are in your life or your writing career, remember Anne Frank’s words: “It’s never too late to start doing the right thing.”

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Michael Larsen is an author, co-owner of Larsen Pomada Literary Agency  and two of the west coast’s best writing conferences: The 5th San Francisco Writing for Change Conference / Changing the World One Book at a Time, which takes place on October, 12th, 2013 ( www.sfwritingforchange.org )  and The 11th San Francisco Writers Conference / A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community  which takes place on February 13-16, 2014 (www.sfwriters.org ) Michael and wife, Elizabeth Pomada have been helping writers launch careers since 1972. Visit Mike’s blog and Facebook page: http://sfwriters.info/blog @SFWC / www.facebook.com/SanFranciscoWritersConference

 

Ten “P” Keys to Becoming a Successful Writer Faster and More Easily Than Ever

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Ten P Keys to Success 

By Michael Larsen

 

 Now is the best time to be a writer, but technology is forcing writers to reinvent themselves. A new model for becoming a successful writer is needed.  The goal of these ten keys is to provide the model.

1.    Passion—your love for creating and communicating about your work. Using your passion to serve others is the ultimate key to success and happiness.

2.    Purpose—personal, literary, publishing, and community goals that inspire you to achieve them.

3.    Products—devoting yourself to the holy trinity of content: reading, writing, and sharing and the holy trinity of communication: people, platform, and pre-promotion:

4.    People—crowdsourcing your success with win-win relationships with engaged, committed, growing communities of people and collaborators you serve who want to help you, because they know, like, and trust you

5.    Platform–your continuing visibility with your communities and potential buyers, online and off, on your subject or the kind of book you write

  
6.    Pre-promotion–test-marketing your work in as many ways as you can

7.    Promotion— serving your communities by using your passion and platform to share the value of your work  

8.    People, Planet, and Profit—making the effects of your efforts on the holy trinity of sustainability—in this order–the criteria for determining what you do

9.    Professionalism:

–a positive perspective about writing, publishing, and your field
–reinventing yourself as a “contentpreneur” running a business that creates and re-purposes  a steady stream of scalable content in as many ways as possible
–making you and your work your brand
–using technology
–being a life-long learner


10.    Perseverance—a plan, patience, discipline, faith in yourself, failing your way to success, simplifying your life, a long-term perspective, the commitment to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to achieve your goals, and celebrating your victories.

These keys balance yin and yang—creating content and communicating about it. Integrating them will create a literary ecosystem that will build synergy as long as you sustain it with service. You can adapt the keys to other fields and your personal life. I welcome your suggestions for changes.

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Michael Larsen of Larsen-Pomada Literary Agency has been helping writers launch careers since 1972. For more information about him and the work he has done with Elizabeth Pomada to help writers, visit The 5th San Francisco Writing for Change Conference / Changing the World One Book at a Time at : www.sfwritingforchange.org  and  The 11th San Francisco Writers Conference / A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community  at: www.sfwriters.org / You can also check out Mike’s blog: http://sfwriters.info/blog @SFWC  and Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/SanFranciscoWritersConference. Finally, be sure to investigate the free classes at San Francisco Writers University / Empowering Writers to Reach Their Goals:  www.sfwritersu.com

 

Are YOU Good Speaker Material?

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speaker4

 by Patricia V. Davis

 

We’ve all been told that building our author platform can help us sell more books and that speaking in public, such as at conference or in front of book clubs, is a great way to do that.  But—are you good speaker material? By “good speaker material” I mean, are you likely to be asked back to speak again, or, after your appearance will you be crossed off inadvertently from the “Speakers to Contact Again” list?  Let’s find out:

1)      A good speaker can “wing it” when necessary. Even in the very best of facilities, equipment failures can and will happen. Projectors not working or internet connections going down will throw some speakers into a panic, or worse, a hissy fit. Utilizing these tools can sometimes make a good talk even better, but if you can’t say what needs to be said by using a handout or a white board, you’re relying too much on the bells and whistles of modern technology. Slides and websites should only enhance your talk, but not be so crucial that you can’t do without them. And you don’t want to spend the first ten minutes of your allotted time staring at your audience while a harassed volunteer or conference organizer runs frantically around looking for a technician or an explanation as to why things are not functioning properly. Try to get to your room ten minutes early if possible to check if the equipment you need is there and is functioning. Check that you have all the adapters and whatever else you need to use said equipment. If the equipment doesn’t work and can’t be fixed in under five minutes, go to Plan B ─ printed handouts and/or the black or white board, if available. The best speakers ─ the ones who get asked back—don’t roll their eyes in exasperation or whine about equipment failures, they smile graciously and get on with it.

2)       A good speaker doesn’t blame her audience if her talk is not successful. I’ll never forget a note I received from a disgruntled speaker at one of my conferences, a doctor who sent feedback that she was upset that “the audience of people attending the conference represented a very anti-professional/anti-doctor attitude.” Imagine complaining about your audience for such a reason? It actually made me chuckle and needless to say, I never responded to the complaint.  For the reason that it’s the speaker’s task to keep her audience engaged. If that’s not happening, she needs to figure out why and adjust her talk accordingly. Remember that people attending a conference or a book club event have paid an admission price to be there. That means they want to be there and want to hear what you have to say. If you’ve bored them, it’s the fault of your presentation, not the fault of your listener. 

3)      A good speaker doesn’t despair if her talks have low attendance, but treats every attendee like visiting royalty. True story: a day before one of my first book events, which happened to be at least an hour and a half’s drive each way from my home, the bookshop owner phoned me apologetically, “Do you realize we booked this event for the day before Easter? I didn’t think of it and I’m so afraid the attendance is going to be too low for you to come all this way. I’ll understand if you want to reschedule.” I asked him if he’d had any interest from his clientele at all and when he said that two people had told him they planned to attend, my reply was that if those people showed up the next day, they’d be mightily miffed that they’d carved out time in their weekend for something that was cancelled solely on the possibility of low attendance. So here’s what happened: We went ahead with the event. Six people showed up, including the two who’d said they would. They listened to me read from Harlot’s Sauce, got to taste the salsa puttenesca I’d made for the event and drink some wine. Just six. But, lo and behold—those six people bought 45 books. Why? Three of those attendees where there to preview the book for their book clubs.  The other three were there solely for the reading and the free food, but two of those attendees bought a copy of the book apiece anyway, though they told me they hadn’t intended to do so when they first walked in. Even one person sitting in your audience is a potential new reader or follower or champion of your product/book/brand.  They’ve granted you the privilege of giving you time out of their lives, lives which are just as important to them as your life and your time are important to you, to hear what you have to say. So treat them as though you feel privileged that they took that time. Be warm, be kind, be engaging. They are there to see you, though they might not even know you. Isn’t that a nice thing to know?

4)      A good speaker is not an elitist. Unless your work is as well known as Amy Tan’s or Isabel Allende’s, you are a midlist or newbie author. To go from newbie to midlist to frontlist, you need more book sales. And to get more book sales, you need a bigger platform. And to get a bigger platform, you need to put yourself in front of as many new potential readers as possible. This same holds true for whatever industry you’re in, whatever brand you’re trying to build. At any given time there are millions of people looking for a speaking engagement in their particular field and so, if you are chosen to speak, you should feel thankful, not entitled. A conference’s reputation  is built on the quality of its speakers. Part of being a good speaker is making yourself available, as much as reasonably possible, to conference attendees. Conference attendees are there to hear and see you, ask you questions, and have paid to do so.

What I noticed about the last conference I organized, The Women’s PowerStrategy™ 2013 Conference, the most successful speakers we managed to snag were the ones who spent the most time at the conference talking with attendees and vendors, sitting in other sessions and networking at lunch and during the speaker reception at the end of the day. They were present and real, smiling and talking with everyone. They exchanged business cards, they mentioned on their websites, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages that they were speaking at our conference. They even pitched in at the conference where help was needed!

Having a tight schedule is one thing. That is understandable and excusable, especially if you let the conference organizers know ahead of time you’ll only be able to be at the conference for part of the day. But if you feel the need to show up right before your session and leave immediately after, if you don’t want to sit with strangers and network at lunch, if you’re of those speakers who remark, with their noses in the air, that, “I don’t attend workshops ─ I give them,” for no other reason than to impress everyone else (and yourself) about how special and important and successful you are, you might need to reflect a bit on the attitude you hold towards your work. But in the meantime, don’t be surprised if you don’t get asked back to speak again. Ever.

5)      A good speaker says “thank you,” even if the experience was less than stellar. This is not at all altruistic. This is simply good business and good manners. Anyone who’s ever spoken at an event has had a bad experience at least once. The venue might be terrible, the attendance low, the equipment dismal, the organizers distracted and rude. Your name is misspelled in the program, or missing altogether. Been there, done that ─ haven’t we all? Sure, you can offer helpful (but not disparaging) feedback if asked, but still be sure to express your thanks. “Thanks” for being invited to speak, “thanks” to the attendees (all three of them) and “thanks” the next day on your Facebook page. There are two reasons why you should do this, the first being that the reason you wanted to speak in the first place was to get more people to know your name and your work. That was achieved. Whether it was achieved as you’d hoped or not is beside the point. You came, you spoke, you conquered and that appearance is now part of your platform, a conference/group/event at which you’ve spoken that you can add to your resume.

The second reason is in regards to the possibility that that bad experience was a one-off bad experience. The following year, the conference/group/event that was awful when you spoke at it the year before is now much improved. Attendance is higher, the venue better, the marketing and promotion bigger than ever, and the speakers more high profile. And guess what? Because you were so gracious—showed up and stayed a good while, spoke with everyone, didn’t mind winging it when your projector didn’t work and wrote about the experience in a positive way on social media, you’ve been asked back and are now one among those high profile speakers. And this time, the audience is bigger, too.  Eventually, you land more speaking engagements as a result of being one of the speakers at this conference/group/event a second time. You’ve become an asset to the conference/group/event and the conference/group/event has become an asset to you. All because you were a good sport and a hence, a very good speaker, that first time. 

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 Patricia V. Davis is a bestselling author and the founder of The Women’s PowerStrategy™ Conference. For more about her visit her website at www.patriciaVdavis.com

 

 

Three Reasons Why I Do Not Give a Fig Who Steals My Books

By

Patricia V. Davis

Patricia V. Davis

 

By Patricia V. Davis

A few years back, I was in the audience listening to a speaker at a prestigious writers’ conference as he warned us about book piracy and how many potential sales authors stood to lose as a result.

“I know for a fact that people are pirating my work and even selling my books illegally online,” he said, clearly not happy about that.  

He went on to inform a roomful of mostly new writers that he’d even caught some reviewers ─ legitimate ones ─ selling their review copy of his book on eBay after they’d reviewed it. “When giving out review copies of your books, be sure to write ‘review copy’ in it, to help prevent that from happening,” he cautioned. He continued in the same vein about illegal copies being obtained for his ebooks, as well, and I observed several audience members taking notes diligently on his piracy prevention suggestions.

The problem is, I’d personally never heard of him before that conference, and if you ask me even now, I couldn’t tell you the title of even one of his books.

What does this mean? I’m getting to that.

Let’s take another scenario:  Me, as a teenager at a neighbor’s garage sale. She had a bin of old paperbacks that she was selling at ten cents each. Obviously we’re going way back here, before the internet even existed, so in essence, her reselling of those paperbacks at ten cents each was that era’s equivalent of today’s online book piracy. I bought a paperback that looked intriguing ─ why not, at that price? ─ and took it home to read. I became so enraptured by the story, that I read it all in one sitting, then raided my babysitting money which I’d saved for something else, walked all the way to the local bookstore and bought another of her books at the full paperback retail price that same day. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly bought her titles, and sometimes, if I’m feeling famished for the quality brain candy novels that she writes, and something new she’s written looks particularly appealing, I won’t even wait for the paperback version ─ I’ll spring for the hardback price of 25 dollars plus tax. (Yes, even this day of eReaders and iPads, I still buy hardback books.) So, the novel that I bought “illegally” hooked me into becoming a lifelong fan of this author. Her name is Nora Roberts and obviously I’m not her only devoted fan because she’s worth approximately 60 million dollars. But the conference speaker who’d advised new writers to “watch out” for book thieves was correct ─  Nora never got a penny of the ten cents my neighbor stole from her by reselling her book.  

So my first reason for not giving a fig if my books are pirated on eBay, resold at garage sales or passed on from person to person? Nora Roberts. If I hadn’t found that book at that garage sale at such a tempting price, her name on the cover of a paperback would be just another author’s name whose work I don’t know. I would wager that a good portion of her millions of fans learned about her the same way I did ─ from a paperback bought for ten cents.

My second reason is that when Harlot’s Sauce came out in 2009, a friend sent me an email that went like this: “I loved it! I loved it so much that I lent it to my mother and told her she had to read it. She loved it, also and passed it on to my aunt, who gave it to my cousin. My cousin loved it too! We all can’t wait until your next book comes out!”

Thrilled over my first email praise, I read it to my husband, who having majored in economics was not nearly as excited. “So, four people read one copy? Let’s see ─ you make about a dollar in royalties on each copy of that book. So what you’re saying is ─ you made 25 cents per reader?”

“We’ll see,” I responded to his cynicism.  

Sure enough, the friend’s cousin, whom I’d never met, belonged to a rather large book group, as book groups go. She really had loved the book, because she presented it to her group who then purchased 50 copies of Harlot’s Sauce. And one of the women in the club invited me to speak at her organization of Italian American Women, and there went another 125 copies. So from one copy being read by four different people, I sold an additional 175 books, and who knows how many more from those?

I could go on, but you get the point, which is: If you have a dog-eared copy of one of my books that you’d like to lend to someone, or even sell to someone for ten cents, go ahead─ I won’t call the Feds. For me, at this point in my writing career, it’s not about how much money I’m making; it’s about how many readers I have access to and whether or not those readers are enjoying my work. I’m a long way from a sixty million dollar income, but I do know this for sure ─ people are reading my books. Monthly, weekly, and occasionally even daily, I’ll get an email or Facebook message from someone who says, “Hey, I just finished your book, and I loved it. When are you going to write another one?” And sometimes, that note is from someone who lives in Australia. Or Indonesia. Or someplace else I’ve never been. Now, that’s the true miracle of the worldwide web. Or maybe, book piracy.

The third and last reason that I’m listing here today (although, believe me, there are many more than three) on why I don’t care who pirates, lends or sells my published books is probably the most important reason of all. It has to do with some of my former pupils in the NYC Public School system whom I will never forget. The ones who were poor and lived in group homes, the ones whose parents were about 15 years older than they were, the ones who didn’t speak English as their first language but had to translate for their mothers and fathers ─ those were the students who seemed most fascinated by the stories I read to them in English class, because they had never been exposed to them. Can you imagine never knowing Jack London, or Harper Lee, Roald Dahl or even Judy Blume? These authors and many others opened up worlds for me as a I grew up and I believe I passed on my love of their work to my pupils. The only way those young people would ever be able to read a book would be because someone had read it to them, as I had, or given it to them. Eighteen years after teaching at that school, I ran into a former pupil, now in her 30s and she exclaimed, “You’re Mrs. V, my former English teacher. Oh my God — A Tale of Two Cities — I will never forget how much you made me love that book.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not of the ilk who believes that all of us artists have to be broke in order to be “true” artists. Quite the contrary. I want to make money on book sales and lots of it. But I also give away plenty of my books when I feel someone will benefit from my work, or just because I want that particular person to read it.  And I’m also looking at the bigger picture of how an author can build a platform. It’s not by hoarding one’s work, or expending energy worried about how many ebooks have not been accounted for. The irony in thinking like that is this: When you get well enough known, it’s much harder to be pirated without someone noticing. I know Harlot’s Sauce has been printed in Chinese but so far, I have received not “yuan” penny for that translation. (Ha ha) But when JK Rowling’s work was pirated in China, her publishers in the US were able to put a stop to it right away. And that was only because she was already famous. Will fame happen to all 3 million authors who put out a book this year alone? Can their publishers afford the money and time it takes to create a huge marketing campaign for each book they publish? Hardly. The slower, more possible way to get known is by word of mouth.

So go ahead, steal my ebooks. And then send me an email and let me know how you liked them.

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 Patricia V. Davis is the author of the bestselling Harlot’s Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss and Greece and The Diva Doctrine: 16 Universal Principles Every Woman Needs to Know. She is the founder of  The Women’s PowerStrategy™ Conference


Guy Kawasaki Goes APE over Self-Publishing

By

Frances Caballo and Guy Kawasaki

 

   By Frances Caballo

 

 

 

I recently met Guy Kawasaki, the social media ninja and author of 12 books, at the San Francisco Writers Conference. I’ve known about Guy for years, followed him on Twitter, read his book What the Plus!: Google+ for the Rest of Us, and regularly use his Alltop.com website to curate content for clients. Naturally, I wondered what this guy would be like in person.

Guy is the epitome of social media: he’s accessible, authentic, knowledgeable, generous and hilarious. He’s also amazingly unpretentious despite his incredible success and formidable talents and at every turn spews great content.

He was at the conference to promote his book, deliver a keynote address (for free) and talk with indie authors. For his first 10 books, he turned to traditional publishing houses but he self-published his most recent books, What the Plus! and his newest tome, APE: Author Publisher Entrepreneur, How to Publish a Book.

 

Artisanal Publishing

 

Don’t call Guy a self-publisher; he eschews the term. Why? He made this point during his keynote address: We don’t linguistically downgrade craft beers or artisan breads as “self-made.” Instead, we consider these specialty items – beer, wine, cheese and bread – to be carefully crafted by skilled artisans.

Guy encourages us to drop the term self-publishing to better describe what Indie authors are: artisanal publishers. That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

 

Guy Kawasaki’s 9 Tips for Indie Authors

 

  1. His Number One Tip for authors is simply to write for the right reasons. Produce great content. In fact, while you’re at it, go all the way and produce a piece of art.
  2. Don’t write a book to make money or to increase your consulting practice. Write to enrich the lives of others, to further a worthy cause, or to meet an intellectual challenge.
  3. Use the right tools when you embark on a book. These include Microsoft Word for word processing, Adobe InDesign, Evernote to keep your notes from disappearing, DropBox to keep your manuscript in the cloud, and YouSendIt to send large files to your editors.
  4. Write every single day. We already know this as writers but sometimes it’s difficult to find the time, right? Well, get up an hour early every morning or use your lunch hour to draft a story. As Nike says, Just Do It!
  5. Create an outline of your book and then distribute it to your friends as a Google Doc to solicit their input.
  6. Build your marketing platform nine months before you publish your next book. You can accomplish this by: curating and disseminating great content on your blog and social media networks, attaining 5,000 followers, tapping your audience for their skills as beta readers and content readers.
  7. Ask your copyeditors, content editors and friends to write reviews on Amazon as soon as your book becomes available.
  8. Hire the best copy editor and cover designer you can afford.
  9. Never give up!

APE Author Publisher Entrepreneur is available on Amazon and Kindle. This is a must-read for all writers pursuing artisanal publishing.  Visit Guy Kawasaki’s blog, “How to Change the World: A Practical Blog for Impractical People.”

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 Frances Caballo is a social media trainer, blogger and author of Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books. She helps writers and businesses attain their social media marketing and public relations goals. Presently, she is the Social Media Editor for the Women’s National Book Association-SF Chapter and the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association. You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Social Media Just for Writers is available on Amazon and at Copperfield’s Bookstore in Santa Rosa.

Twitter Marketing for Writers: Out with the Old Twitter Apps, In with the Four New Apps

By

Frances Caballo

Frances Caballo


 

 By Frances Caballo

 

With more than 500,000 applications available, it’s not surprising that some simply don’t survive.

StrawberryJam, a Twitter application, rose to early stardom last summer when social media bloggers merrily opined about the benefits of an application that would sort through your news stream, discard the bad seeds, and serve up a delectable summary of the most cogent messages populating your stream. Today? Well, StrawberryJam can’t be found.

Three More Twitter Applications that Died

  • FollowFridayHelper: This was a terrific application that could quickly list your best retweeters of the week. One day it was working, the next day it vanished.
  • TweetEffect: This application would analyze your last 200 tweets and provide an array of information. It’s gone too.
  • Timely: This tool would analyze your past tweets and schedule your future tweets at suggested time slots for your optimum exposure. Adios, Timely.
  • TwitTrans: I loved this application, but it no longer exists. It used to translate your tweets into a variety of languages.

Four New Twitter Applications

  • Twtrland (http://twtrland.com/): Serving more than 750,000 users every month, this nifty application helps you to understand current and potential followers by the type of content they share.
  • TwitCleaner (http://thetwitcleaner.com/): Now this is a great tool that I use several times a month. After analyzing your news feed, it will tell you which Tweeps are bots (software applications that run automated tasks), never interact with their followers, never retweet, and more.
  • Sayonara (http://www.sayonarapp.com/): Would you like to be notified every time you lose a Twitter follower? Then sign up for this application.
  • Twaitter (http://www.twaitter.com/): Twaitter, which I discovered a few months ago, has already experienced a name and software change. Now called Gremlin, the application promises to provide “essential and intuitive features” to enhance your social media marketing strategies.

 

Watch for intuitive features being touted more frequently. The trend is to develop applications that will know what information you need to better enhance your marketing or simply to help you become more efficient when you’re online.

It’s your turn. What are your favorite Twitter applications?

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Frances Caballo is a social media trainer, blogger and author of Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books. Presently, she is the Social Media Editor for the Women’s National Book Association-SF Chapter and the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association. You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+.

A Better You Equals a Better World

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No matter what it is we do for a living, most of us seek new ways to improve our skills, because we hope that improving professionally will lead us to a greater return. But what about our human being skills? Often our lives are too busy to even consider that if we make small adjustments in how we view and respond to the world, we could be sending out a more positive energy, an effort that will come back to us tenfold. Below are three simple suggestions on how building a better each of us will help build a better world.

1)      Instead of making resolutions, let this year be a year of “gratitutions.”  Gratitutions are statements of gratitude made along with any criticisms you have of yourself or changes you wish to make. So, instead of saying, “This year I have to run that 10K” a gratitution would be, “I’m thankful my legs work well and I’m able to contemplate running.” Instead of, “I must get all the rooms in this house painted, “a gratitution would be, “I’m thankful that I have a home of my own.” This doesn’t mean you won’t run that race or paint those walls. A gratitution doesn’t keep you stuck in one place; it frees you up to help you appreciate where you are as you continue to go forward.

 

2)      Keep your ears open and your mouth closed when people disagree with you. We all have the tendency to get defensive when our opinions and beliefs are not validated by others. But instead of lashing out with angry comments or sarcastic comebacks, (one of the reasons many of us cringed as we read our Facebook feeds this past November) why not ask the person who disagrees with you, “What makes you feel that way?”  And then genuinely listen to the answer. Most people have passionate beliefs because they’ve either researched the topic thoroughly or they’ve got a blind spot due to misinformation. So think of this: if they’ve researched a topic much more than you have, doesn’t it add to your knowledge base to hear what they’ve learned and what conclusions they’ve drawn as a result? You don’t have to agree, but the simple act of listening is a free education on the subject. Conversely, keep in mind that because people are unable to listen to new ideas unless psychologically ready, arguing with them will only pull them away and close a door, but a listening attitude can do wonders to open a mind.

 

3)      Do one good thing for someone who cannot help you in return. In many industries, there’s much talk about social networking and building relationships to improve our chances for “getting ahead.” The principle is simple: reach out to someone in a position of success and do something for that person that he or she will appreciate, so that when the time comes when those people can help you in some way, they will remember you. Though not always successful, this is a fair-minded and in some ways, organic way to grow your network and your reputation. But what about those who are no position to do anything for you ─ why help any of those people? Believe it or not, there is a return and it’s a very valuable one. It’s the knowledge that you were able to do something that’s made a difference to someone else. In the world we live in today, it’s easier for the average person to get a hold of a weapon than for them to get a hold of a kindness. An unexpected kindness bestowed with no thought of any reward for doing so can be more powerful and have more of a pay-it-forward effect than anything else you might accomplish.

 

 Now it’s your turn: what suggestions might you have for self-improvements that might not only help you, but help all of us? And what gratitutions can you come up with? Feel free to leave them in the comments. And by the way, happy 2013.

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Patricia V Davis is the author of “The Diva Doctrine: 16 Universal Principles Every Woman Needs to Know” and “Harlot’s Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece,” and the founder of The Women’s PowerStrategy™ Conference.  Lydia Selk is the senior photographer for HS Radio e-magazine

 

ABCs of Things Authors Must Know When Working with Retail Bookshops and Retail Bookshops Must Know When Working with Authors

By

Patricia V. Davis

Patricia V. Davis

   

    by Patricia V. Davis

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Booksellers:

As a responsible author, business woman, and former bookshop owner, I understand how tough times are for retail bookshops these days. Therefore I make it my duty to make sure that my author events are well-attended. I put a great deal of effort into every one of my book events to make them successful, not only for myself and my readers, but because I love retail bookshops and want to see them around for many years to come. I also consider it a privilege to be able to hold a book event at a retail bookshop and want the booksellers to come away from my events feeling financially rewarded and esthetically pleased by them. Having said all that, oddly enough, I’ve sometimes been shot in the foot during that pursuit by my very “partner” in the events ─ the bookshops themselves ─ whom I assume would want to sell as many copies of my book as I do.

I’ve had bookshops order boxes of my book for an event and then not be able to find where they’ve been stored, or if they’ve been shelved, where they’re located in the bookshop.

I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on beautifully designed posters and gone into the bookshop as near as one week before the event and not seen them up anywhere in the shop, nor does anyone know where those posters are when I inquire. Occasionally I’ve even discovered that there’s been no mention of my event in their email lists (to which I’ve subscribed, of course)  nor even on the bookshop website.

I’ve had readers contact me via Facebook to say they phoned the bookshop to ask about my book event and the sales clerks answering the phones knew nothing about it and so that was why they were contacting me.  I’ve had my name misspelled in fliers and on websites (sometimes even in shops where they know me very well) or given incorrectly when I’ve been introduced. Just for the record, “Patricia V. Davis” is women’s empowerment author and “Patricia Davis” is an aromatherapy author.  Patricia Davis and I constantly get each other’s emails from booksellers and one of my titles was misfiled on barnesandnoble.com under her name, which took months to have corrected. For the longest time I was told that my book, The Diva Doctrine wasn’t being stocked by Barnes & Noble. It was indeed being stocked; it just wasn’t possible for the individual outlets to find it in their computers until one enterprising sales clerk decided to look it up by its ISBN number. A number, by the way, which the customer ordering the book only was able to give the clerk because she’d used her iPhone to look it up right there and then on amazon.com!

I’ve had calls from bookshops saying they haven’t been able to order my book, even though the information on how and where to do so was given to them well in advance. I’ve had books not ordered in time for a book event, and so had to bring my own copies to sell.  

And most astonishing of all, considering the looming threat of online retailers, have even had the manager at one independent book shop across the country tell me in a reassuring way when I began to discuss advertising, “We’re not concerned about how many books are sold at our events. Whether it’s one or one hundred makes no difference to us at all.”  

(Hmm. I wonder if that manager is still working at that bookshop? In fact, I wonder if that bookshop is still in business?)

And so I offer here with respect and affection, a checklist of questions booksellers can ask themselves in order to insure that every book event, whether by a debut author or a NY Times bestselling author is as rewarding for the effort it takes to organize as it can be. It would be prudent for authors to read this list too, if only to understand the steps involved (and the mistakes that can be made) from a bookseller’s end when an author event is in the works.

 

BOOKSELLER LIST OF QUESTIONS

 

a)       Where is the event going to be advertised? Do you have a website, a monthly flier you mail out or have copies of for when your customers come into your shop, and/or an email list? Are there any book clubs or groups that meet in your shop that you can personally invite who might be interested in this particular title?

b)      Are you displaying the author’s book one month to two weeks before the event, along with a flier of information about the book and the author? Are posters (if any have been given to you by the publisher or the author) displayed at this time too, so that customers can become aware of and excited about this book event? If not, have you made up 8 ½ x 11 fliers about the event that customers can clearly see and maybe even take home with them or have you requested them from the author? Is the author’s names and book title correct on your website? Is there a hot link for the title so that customers can order it from you online?

c)      Are all floor sellers in your shop aware of the event so that if they receive a phone call about it they can answer questions? Have they been made aware of special details about the event, such as special guests, music, or refreshments, that might attract more attendees? (This can be achieved easily by sending an in-house email with the date and all the details of the event well in advance. If you have a large bookshop where lots of events are held, a weekly staff meeting to go over each event should not be too difficult to organize.)  Does everyone at your bookshop know the correct name of the author, the correct title of the book and where in the shop the title can be found in case a customer cannot attend the event but wants to buy a copy of the book, anyway?

d)      Might you have a small yet visible space in your bookshop to display the titles of local authors who have held events at your shop recently, or who have an event scheduled? Can this space list the upcoming events of these authors? If this isn’t possible, can a list of upcoming events along with the authors’ names, titles of their works , ISBN numbers, date and time of their events, be generated in a Word document weekly for your sales clerks to check when a customer comes in to inquire about them?

e)      Does your ordering department know how, where and when to get the title? Do you have contact email or telephone number of the author in case there is a problem? If you haven’t worked with this particular distributor or wholesaler before, does your ordering department know to contact the latter well in advance of any book event, so that the books will arrive in a timely manner?

f)       Last but not least, for you alone ─ to insure that your time and money has not been wasted─ can the staff member who was supervising this event tell you if this was a successful event? How many copies of the title were sold? Did the event generate any additional traffic and business apart from those sales? Did this particular author have a good rapport with attendees? Did attendees enjoy the event and feel it was worth two hours of their time? (After all, these are your customers, too, not just the author’s readers.) Was the author rude to your sales clerks or gracious? Is it worth your time and effort to work with this author again in the future?

As for authors, you’re not off the hook when it comes to making your own book event successful, either. The days are over when an author could show up at the designated bookshop, ask, “Where do I stand?” then read, sign books and be on her way. In today’s publishing world authors who want to eventually become bestsellers, or at the very least be invited back to a retail bookshop a second time, should be able to answer the questions below.

 

AUTHOR LIST OF QUESTIONS

 

a)      Is this my first book? If so, where is my nuclear fan base located? By “nuclear fan base” I mean your group of friends and family who you know with certainty you can rely on to attend. Discern where most of this fan base is located and choose a bookshop that’s close enough to make it easy   for them to attend. When my first book, Harlot’s Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece was launched, none of my nuclear fan base who I knew I could absolutely count on to attend had to travel more than 10 miles for that launch. (The only exception was my family, who lived further, but would have traveled to the moon to be there.) So, don’t pick the “in” bookshop, pick the one that closest to your nuclear fan base that holds book events,( which you can check by visiting the shop or the shop’s website.) Investigate where this might be at least six months prior to your book’s release date.

b)      Once you choose the closest bookshop, ask yourself: If I were this bookshop owner, what would I need from a debut author who wants to have an event at my bookshop? This is a question few if any authors think of asking themselves. With 3 million new titles per year, why would your local bookshop choose your new book and allow you to use their shop to hold a launch instead of another author?  What will they get in return for ordering your book, advertising your event on their website or in their newsletter, paying personnel to assist you with your launch and permitting you to take up space in their shop for two hours or more? In this day of high costs and dwindling profits for retail bookshops, you as the author have to consider all of the above. Can you guarantee a minimum of 20 copies of your books sold? ( Even if you have to buy them back from the bookseller yourself?) Will you do everything you can to advertise your event, including announcements on Facebook, Twitter, evites and emails out to your list? Will you spend one full day to write out advertisements to all of the online local “events calendars” such as Patch.com, Eventful.com and all the local newspapers? Will you search for and contact neighborhood book clubs? Are you in any local writers’ groups that can help you pass the word along? What about any local groups that might have a special interest in your particular title? ( With Harlot’s Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece ) I sent invitations to every local Hellenic Association or Greek Group I could find.) If you can present a “business plan” for the event to the bookshop events planner and do so well in advance of when you wish to have the event, you have a much better chance of getting them excited about having your launch at their facility.

c)      Now that I have brought in friends and groups, what can I do to bring in others? To an author, any stranger = a potential new reader. To a bookshop, any new reader = a potential book sale.  What can I do to make my event fun and unique so that even people who might not know me or my work might be tempted to come into the bookshop for my launch? The more creative you get the better chance you have of drawing in people. To see some ideas I’ve utilized in the past and to see some well attended events, check out the photo gallery on my website.


AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST:

 

d)      How can the bookshop order my book? The most vital information every business-savvy author will have on hand when she’s talking with a bookshop is the correct ordering information. Who’s the wholesaler/distributor of the title? What are the terms, meaning discount to bookshop and payment schedule? What is your publisher’s return policy for booksellers? How long before the event does the bookshop need to order the books for them to arrive on time for the event?

If you’re thinking, “Shouldn’t the bookshop know this?” you’ll learn that often they don’t. I’ve had bookshops say they can’t “get” my book, can’t “find” my book, and can’t open a retail account with my book publisher(s). Even before your book is published you should make a call to your publisher and get the information above so you can pass it on to bookshops, just in case. If your book is self-published, you need to set reasonable discount terms with a bookshop in order to encourage them to carry your book. Reasonable terms include at least a 35-40% discount off cover price and full right of return after three months if the books don’t sell. If they’re not planning on carrying your book as part of their stock, you’ll need to offer a consignment deal for any event. This means you bring your books in, they get an agreed upon discount off the cover price on every book sold and you leave the event with whatever remaining unsold books from the books you brought in. Arrange with your publisher to receive an author discount of at least 50% if you plan to sell the books yourself to bookshops. A smart debut author knows it’s not the amount of money she makes on each title, it’s how much volume she moves and how many new readers she garners. Remember that you’re not selling fruit, (though it sometimes may feel that way) you’re building your name as an author. And the only way to do that is to make sure you move your published works to as many readers as possible. This includes not organizing an author event out of hubris, but to sell books.

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PATRICIA V. DAVIS is the author of the bestselling Harlot’s Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss and Greece, and The Diva Doctrine: 16 Universal Principles Every Woman Needs to Know. Her latest work and first published fiction, “Chopin, Fiendishly” appears in Tales From the House Band: Volume I.  Patricia holds a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Education, and is the founder of The Women’s PowerStrategy Conference. This article is excerpted from Patricia’s upcoming book, written with Gilbert Mansergh, with the working title, PowerStrategy Publishing! The Paramount Guide for Authors, Publishers and Booksellers On Leveraging Industry Change.

 

Master Twitter With These 7 Apps

By

 By Frances Caballo

Frances Caballo, Social Media Trainer

 

Over the past three years, according to a recent study by Beevolve, one million Twitter users sent a minimum of one billion tweets. This new data confirms that Twitter is the place to glean great gems of information, expand your contacts, market your books and find great reads. There isn’t another social media network like it—at least not yet. The limitation of 140 characters doesn’t diminish the impact of this great social media channel. In this era when the attention span of many people is shrinking, tweets are an efficient way to communicate great nuggets of information about your books, blog, workshops, and telesummits.

7 Apps to Enhance Your Tweeting Experience

With 70,000 Twitter applications on the market, it can be difficult to discern which ones are right for you. Here are seven applications for you to consider using.

Buffer App

As a social media scheduler, Buffer App is great. Buffer collaborates with Tweriod to determine the best tweeting times for you. With Buffer, You’ll never again have to figure out whether your best posting time is 2:10 p.m. or 11:47 p.m. It’s easy to set up and use too.

SocialOomph

This application is a social media dashboard on steroids. It will not only schedule your tweets, LinkedIn updates, and Facebook posts, but will also track keywords for you, email a daily digest of retweets and mentions of your username, purge your inbox of direct messages, track your clicks, and find new followers for you. It is a bit tricky to set up but SocialOomph has great customer service techs to walk you through it. If you want more than a scheduler, this is the application to use.

Tweepi

This is a very easy application to use to find new people to follow and flush those users who aren’t following you back. It details the time of a user’s last tweet so that you can rid your newsfeed of the inactive users too.

Listorious

Are you having trouble finding new users to follow? You can use this application to search for individual users or lists of writers, agents, or writing coaches. This is a good application to use when you are starting out on Twitter.

FollowFridayHelper

#FollowFriday is a great tradition on Twitter. Each Friday, users thank Tweeps who have mentioned or retweeted them earlier in the week. With this application, you no longer have to keep track of your retweeters. This application will save you time.

TheTweetedTimes

Would you like to find a way to sort through the hundreds upon hundreds of tweets from your followers? This application will quickly process your incoming tweets and display the trending topics for your account.

Twylah

This is perhaps the easiest application available. It will preserve your tweets, set up a web page that sorts your messages, and provide powerful backlinks to improve your search engine optimization.

Some of the greatest minds in publishing, writing, coaching and other fields are on Twitter and they freely share their expertise. This social media darling is probably the best platform to keep up to date on writing conferences, writing prompts, newly released books, social media, politics, or whatever your fields of interest are. It’s on this network where you can learn to market your book, find a publisher, seek an agent, or converse with the author of your favorite book.

If you’re not yet on Twitter, sign up today. Then try the applications mentioned here. Let me know which one is your favorite!

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About the Author: Frances Caballo is a social media trainer, blogger, and author of Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books. She helps writers and businesses attain their social media marketing and public relations goals. Frances is the Social Media Editor for Redwood Writers, the largest branch of the California Writers Club, and for the Women’s National Book Association – SF Chapter. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Social Media Just for Writers is available on Amazon.

Sales are Sweet, But Readers are Golden

By

  by Robert Digitale

 As a storyteller, you want as many people as possible to read your book. As a business person, you want them to pay for it. And as a new author, you want to find ways for more readers to take note of your work.

 So do you ever give it away for free?

I’ve watched the newspaper business grapple with this sort of question for years. If you think you’ve had trouble knowing what to do about free material, consider the plight of my fellow old media pros. Here were people working for established brands, most of which had dominated their markets in print for years. But when they entered the digital age, editors and publishers found how difficult it is to strike the right balance between attracting new readers and getting them to pay for online content.

Most papers quickly decided that while they could demand money from their print readers, they had to give a free pass to their web sites and hope to still survive with online ads. However, since the industry is half of what it was roughly five years ago, the wisdom of that strategy remains open to debate. And some papers, including the venerable New York Times, are now charging readers or limiting the number of free stories they can view each month.

So newspapers demonstrate that there may not be easy answers in such matters. Even so, I still think the question is worth asking new authors: Are there times when it makes sense to focus on connecting with readers rather than selling books?

Let me share two recent examples when I answered “Yes” to this question.

The first came last spring when I ran a murder mystery serial on a blog that I host for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, www.digitalestories.com. What made the story different was that I collaborated with 15 other journalists and local authors. Each of us wrote a chapter for a thriller set in our home turf of Sonoma County. The executive editor liked it so much that she ran the “Sonoma Squares Murder Mystery” in the print edition as well. We went on to put it out as an ebook.

Nobody made any money on this story, so why did we do it? We all had fun, certainly, but it also was a chance to connect with new readers. In doing so, I hope we introduced some talented writers to readers who might otherwise never hear of them. It was a small step, but it was well received and I hope we’ll do it again.

The second occasion was this summer when I learned that our Sonoma County public library was creating a site for local authors, a place where patrons could read a brief bio and discover their books. As part of this effort, the library was exploring the possibility of also hosting local authors’ ebooks. I contacted the library’s collections manager and became the first author to provide them ebook files, offering up my fantasy novel HORSE STALKER.

I did this even though ebooks downloaded from this site would never expire on reading devices. Instead, local patrons would be able to freely download the ebook, just as if they had paid for it on Smashwords. I know that many authors would steer clear of this. I don’t pretend that this makes sense for everyone, but I’m glad I tried it. And the collections manager since has placed my novel into the library checkout system for OverDrive, which means the ebook is eligible for library patrons at plenty of locales around the U.S. (On OverDrive, the ebook does expire from the reading device at the end of the lending period.)

I wish I could tell you that these steps have made an incredible difference in the bottom line. They haven’t yet, but I think they’re still worth trying. I remain convinced that the biggest challenge for new authors isn’t selling books. It’s connecting with readers. And what I like about these two examples is that they both involve collections of local writers. The newspaper serial and the library’s local authors site offer readers a chance to discover groups of writers, not just a single author.

I’m looking for more such opportunities to join forces with other writers. And I’m going to keep looking for ways to connect with readers, even if it doesn’t make a cash register ring.

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Robert Digitale has been a newspaper reporter for three decades at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. He hosts the paper’s online blog, Digitale Stories, and is the author of the fantasy novel HORSE STALKER, book one in the series, THE ROOT OF GLORY, www.horsestalker.com.