Amazing stats on new titles

According to Worldometers’ real time world statistics, there were 1,694,179 new books published this year immediately before I began writing this post.

By the time I finished that sentence, the count had gone up to 1,694,182.

I’ve just taken another peak at the counter and that number is now 1,693,183.

That means, roughly every twelve seconds, a new title is published somewhere in the world.

1,694,195 now.

Amazing.

BOOK REVIEW: “The Sleeping Warrior” by Sara Bain

Thanks to Kelly Smith for her great review.

“I highly recommend it for anyone who likes very involved, layered stories with enigmatic characters and danger lurking on the next page.”

BOOK REVIEW: “The Sleeping Warrior” by Sara Bain.

Winning words

THE Sleeping Warrior has just been given its very first accolade.

OK, it’s only a small one, but it’s a very good start to what has become a lengthy and intense promotional campaign to get the book noticed.

It is now book of the month at the website of author Richie Earle who makes the time and effort to support other authors. This is Richie’s first book of the month poll and The Sleeping Warrior garnered 50% of the vote from just over 60 who participated: http://onethousandworlds.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/MMG1.html

The book is also number nine on The People’s Book Awards. It did reach higher than that until a few new entries came in with massive numbers of votes that my paltry 91 couldn’t compete with: http://thebookawards.com/awards/the-sleeping-warrior

In these types of polls, those who know the largest amount of people on the social internet sites and can persuade them to vote for them are the ones who win. It has nothing to do with whether your work is better or worse than your fellow competitors. It’s all about who you know. Most of your voters will probably never have even heard of your book, let alone read it.

This, I am aware, gives a very false impression as to an author’s true worth and I doubt very much that winning will increase sales. Entering this type of competition solely serves as another step up the promotional ladder and expands social network infiltration a little bit further. Once Richie’s blog takes off and gathers more followers, for example, so will more people learn about the book. Conversely, more people will learn about Richie through symbiosis.

Book polls reveal the importance of social networking and how followers in quantity can make all the difference to a marketing campaign.

It’s not exactly a giant leap, but it’s the small steps that count.

Promotion Promotion Promotion

THE most difficult aspect of any business is getting people to invest in your product. No sales means no business.

Five per cent of publishing success is in the writing of the book while the other ninety five per cent is taken up with marketing it. With tens of thousands of new books being produced each month with internet publishers, it’s very easy for a new author, and even a well-established one, to get buried under what is now becoming the bottomless virtual slush pile of e-Books. Very few new books are an overnight success, the probability calculated at one million to one, and the precious works of many new writers will never see the light of day. 

Most authors are not entrepreneurs and, when writing a book, rarely give a thought to the journey ahead of them in marketing it. For the majority of us, there is no easy path to success. It should be true that, if a product is good enough, it will market itself; this belief, however, is hopelessly naive. Even traditional publishers require their authors to be pro-active in marketing their books through social and traditional media and it apparently takes a new author at least eight months from publication to acquire an effective audience. Many never will.

Of course, with any new product, quality is key to success. Good writing and good design should be the minimum starting point when building a sales platform. Even before ‘The End’ is written, authors should not sit back and congratulate themselves for being so clever. The real work begins with self-promotion. This means pulling in a healthy following on Twitter and Facebook and joining a number of reader/author sites like Goodreads. When the book is published, then it’s time to find those nice people who are willing to review your novel and promote it for the price of a free copy.

I’ve read and heard mixed reports on whether paying a blogger or promotion site for their services actually helps increase sales. They tend to use the Twitter, blogging and Facebook platforms to inundate the social network sites with information on how good a book or author is. The trouble is that a lot of readers (the target market) will see this effort as tantamount to spam. Also, the higher the number of followers per ID on the likes of Twitter, the more people will miss the tweets.

I am relatively new and green to social networking but, for the past few weeks, have been working like a dog on promotion. I now have over 1,500 followers on Twitter but not too many on Facebook, as I tend to regard the latter as a personal message board. This is probably a mistake and I’ll have to change my tactics if I want to reap the benefits of this obviously powerful marketing tool.

Good reviewers are few and far between. Most of them are so inundated with review requests that they are forced to close their lists for long periods of time. Many of them will not review self-published authors nor even authors of small independent publishers. I have been fortunate enough to find a few very good people who are committed to supporting authors through their sheer love of reading and are willing to give up their time and effort to be part of the publishing process. One in particular approached me to ask if I would be prepared to give away a book to mark her book review blog’s first six months of success: http://sunmountainreviews.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/six-month-blogoversary-giveaway. Of course, I was delighted to do so. The book is now out with at least six independent reviewers who don’t know me and I can only hope they’ll like the book and rate it favourably.

I’ve had a number of author interviews and book promos on targeted promotional sites like Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7244296.Sara_Bain), Smashwords (https://www.smashwords.com/interview/IvyMoonPress), BookGoodies (http://bookgoodies.com/?s=sara+bain), humanmade (http://www.humanmade.net/sara-bain), The Reading Room (http://www.thereadingroom.com/books/details/the-sleeping-warrior-sara-bain/8029173) and Awesomegang (http://awesomegang.com/sleeping-warrior-sara-bain/) as well as a few more on blogs, eg Reading Renee’s blog: http://www.readingreneereviews.com/2013/08/the-sleeping-warrior-by-sara-bain.html?zx=f7e3f47efe20d543. Most of these great people I have found on Goodreads, which is an amazing place on the internet that brings authors and readers together. Another networking site for readers is Riffle which, at the moment, is in beta version but looks as though it is probably going to be quite big – although, I haven’t had the time to sit down and decipher how it works yet.

I’ve also bugged a lot of writer friends to help promote my book through their blogs (eg, Bill Kirton: http://bill-kirton.co.uk/?p=1324) and a few more are scheduled across the internet over the next few months. In turn, I have started up an author interview part of this blog which not only reciprocates the generosity of my fellow authors but also serves to widen my audience.

I’m still working on it and probably will be for the next eight months at least. I have to aim to receive and host as many independent reviews, author interviews and guest blogs as possible and, once the printed copies have been made and delivered, will have to work hard on traditional methods of promotion like book launches, press releases and Uncle Tom Cobbly and All …

Such a lot of work for one little book but, as they say, ‘no pain, no gain’.

 

 

A trip up north

I’m over in Northern Scotland today (virtually, of course) to speak to author Bill Kirton about the book and the press.

Take a look: http://bill-kirton.co.uk/?p=1324#comment-6190

The Sleeping Warrior

Cover preview

It’s taken a while to get right, but I have now completed the cover for my debut novel, The Sleeping Warrior: the very first book published by Ivy Moon Press.

For those who don’t know Scotland well, the Sleeping Warrior is a well-kent profile of the Isle of Arran’s most dramatic mountains (ie, Goat Fell, Caisteal Abhail and Cìr Mhòr), seen from the Clyde Coast. From the mainland, they resemble a recumbent man.

I had been writing the book for a while but it was a trip to Arran that gave me the title, which fitted perfectly with the story.

The Sleeping Warrior can loosely be described as an urban fantasy. In some ways, it reads like a crime novel and police procedural, but it is the gentle fantasy elements that are intended to stretch across the literary genres and nudge the imagination. Purist crime readers may find the fantasy element irritating, but those who can relate to a sense of other-worldliness may get the subtleties and hopefully enjoy it.

The story centres around a young female London lawyer who unwittingly finds herself the focus of the wrath of a serial killer and the interest of an enigmatic stranger called Gabriel.

Set in London, Arran, and briefly in the North West Highlands of Scotland, the book’s underlying themes are the importance of a name as a label and the warrior spirit which lies dormant in us all until times of crisis when it awakens.

With this in mind, a good book design must encapsulate the spirit of the story.

I started with my image of Arran’s familiar landmark and blackened it to give it mystery. The smoke signifies the veil of anonymity and the unknown, while a dark eye watches from the background. The picture tells the story.

Fonts can make or break a good design. You can mix serif (those fonts with curly descenders or ‘tails’ as in Times New Roman and Garamond) and sans serif (those ‘without’ a curly tail, such as in Arial or Calibri) but only with caution. I like the crisp and clean look of a sans serif headline or chapter head against serif body text. Never use more than two different typefaces in a design, it just looks wrong. Professional publishers hate the ‘joke’ fonts, like Comic Sans and Jokerman, for obvious reasons. Comic is OK for a poster advertising Charlie the Cheery Clown coming to a children’s gala but has no place in the make-up of a novel – unless, of course, the story is about Charlie the Cheery Clown at a children’s gala.

Not wishing to get into trouble with the law, I chose fonts that are free for commercial use. For the cover, I used VTCGoblinhand for the title and Trebuchet MS for the subtitle and byline. The spine font was limited to Create Space’s choice but it is a regular sans serif, probably Calibri, and bears an acceptable similarity to the Trebuchet family. Free fonts can be obtained from sites all over the internet. Just make certain before downloading and installing them that they are not limited to personal use only. Using a font that specifically states it is not for commercial use is a breach of copyright.

For the interior of the book, I’ve used Garamond 11pt for the body text and the beautifully rounded ss font Century Gothic 20pt bold for the chapter heads. A point size down is preferable for the text but I saved the file as a pdf which is really an uneditable ‘snapshot’ of the completed manuscript. Since a pdf is, to all intents and purposes, a picture file, there’s a choice to allow for a printable margin around it.  Choosing this option not only brings the point size down (as the picture will shrink to fit), but also keeps the text within the confines of the book’s margins.

I’m awaiting the printed proofs from Create Space and need to register the book’s ISBN.