Get in the VIP Club -- Kim's Krowd!

Just back from 3 days of talking about writing and marketing, my brain is going to explode if I don't get some of this wisdom on paper.
Virtual paper works too.
If I took any one message from the Chanticleer Author Conference this last weekend it is to be accessible to my readers and cultivate those relationships. Forget about hangin' and talkin' on FB to old friends or writers. If they don't read your books, don't put them first in your business account. I say this because I have very limited time and rarely have a moment these days for things like chatting with friends, cleaning the house, dressing myself. That last one isn't true but you get my drift.
I'm busy.

As a marketing author who's struggling to build a reader base, I realized this weekend I need to zero in on my precious readers and give them more fun and rewards.

So, I'm opening a Beach on FB called Kim Hornsby Beach (named after me because it's my virtual beach) and I'm going to have fun stuff going on over there for readers of my books. I'm kind of excited about The Beach. I'll have a grand opening maybe even on my birthday--May 8th.
A beach party!
Who doesn't like those things? For anyone who has to stay out of the sun, we'll have palapa huts and umbrellas and personal umbrella handlers who are very attractive and follow you around.
When the Kim Hornsby Beach opens, we'll have a bar open with pu pu's (appetizers) but remember that 5 o'clock rule because I don't want anyone getting arrested by the cops at my piece of property.

As well as the FB Site, I'm hoping to support my books with more ads, contests and giveaways to get new readers. People love my books, if they can just discover them, I'm finding.
So, I'm stepping up my game to give my Peeps the creds they deserve. Stay tuned on my FB account, Follow me on Twitter to hear what I'm doing and if you're on Instagram, I'm over there ever day or two with photos.

Here's my links and remember, you can always email me at kimhornsby@yahoo.com

www.twitter.com/kimhornsby - Follow

www.facebook.com/kimhornsbyauthor - Like

www.bit.ly/kimamzn - Follow

www.kimhornsby.blogspot.com If you have a blog, follow

www.goodreads.com/kimhornsby - Follow

www.kimhornsby.com – Newsletter signup

www.bookbub.com/authors/kim-hornsby - Follow

Anyone who signs up for two of the above and has bought and read a book, qualifies to be in my VIP Club -- Kim's Krowd. 

Feel free to let me know by email and I'll contact you about the fun coming up for the Krowd. 

Kim

More Random Tips from PNWA 17

PNWA  Conference -- Part 2

I taught a class at the Pacific Northwest Writers' Association Conference, something I've been jonesing to do for years.
The class was called Survival Kit for Your Virgin Year - Tips for First-Time Authors.

Aside from having to speak in a microphone and stand at a podium (which I find terribly impersonal) it went well. OK, my new retainer thing in my mouth kept making me salivate and was distracting, and then there was that time I sneezed and it almost flew out on the stage, but I tried to rattle off as much info as possible in 90 minutes. People stayed and listened. I promised to send them my free KDP Select manual if they emailed me. Many did and I've sent it out to a bunch of new friends.

Here's the gist of what was said at the talk, for those who missed it:

You've written your book. Now what?


For self-pubbed authors...

1.       Cover-- Must catch the eye, be suitable for the genre, look professional, Kindle Cover Creator works too if you can’t spend money on a professional photo from Stock Photos, Dreamstime etc. Standards must be used to upload a photo. Professional cover creators charge from $100 and up, depending on the cost of photos. Find covers you like and email the author, or tweet message to ask who did the cover.

2.       Formatting-- Have it done professionally if you’re not sure.  Follow standards – 12 point, margins etc. At the beginning of your document, be sure to include Title page, Copyright page, Dedication, and anything else you’d like the reader to see before beginning the story. Remember Epages are free. At the end include Acknowledgements, Referral to web pages etc. Some writers put reader guides for bookclubs, some recipes, photos.

3.       Title – Must be catchy and genre appropriate, Use popular keywords in subtitle to aid in visibility, The title must be larger than your name until you have a readership. Font is important to genre.

4.       Content – Make sure you have a catchy beginning and keep the pace snappy. Imagine a contest submission for the first ten pages, then thirty etc. Use beta readers before you publish and listen to their comments, especially if several have the same criticism, Follow advice on how to write a compelling novel. Writing a good strong story without typos and problems is your best defense against fading into obscurity. Use a pro editor if you can afford one.

5.     Keywords and Categories – Amazon Keywords can make or break a novel, Make sure you have the ones that will put your book in front of readers, Learn how to request a unique category to boost sales.

6.     Promo – Free Days on Select, $0.99 Promos, Kindle Matchbook, Kindle Countdown Deals, Online ads, Some promos and sites are better than others for visibility.

FOR ALL AUTHORS--Self-Pubbed or Traditional

7.       Reviews – Must get reviews right out of the gate. Encourage friends and strangers to write you a brief review. Manage the review section of Amazon by engaging readers. (I thank every reviewer but don't comment on bad reviews!)

8.     Social Media – Pick two and do them well. Facebook has a wealth of groups you can join, use for promo, Photos! Make an Author Page and get likes, Pinterest is up and coming with a large female following, Twitter is a great way to spread the word. Follow back. Brand yourself.

9.     Friends – How to use your friends and family to get the word out without looking like a leech. Refer them to a blog on how to write you an honest review. Tell them you have a goal of 20 reviews by Month’s End. Use friends to find appropriate readers, share on Facebook, Give them a free copy to pass on.

1       Stamina – Pace yourself because you’re in this for the long run, Take short social media breaks, Keep writing, Set a 5 year plan with goals to release new books, Write short stories to promote your novels and give you a break from the full length commitment, Have short stories feed into the more expensive novels. Make them perma free, Accept the disappointments as challenges and keep going.

I have a manual on advertising and where to put money to have successful promotions on Amazon KDP Select. The booklet includes over 50 sites for free and cheap ads when you have a promotion and saves the author over 20 hours of searching for ad sites. email me for the manual and I'll send it.

Random tips

Create a great bio on Amazon's Author Central and link everything to social media

Mail Chimp for author newsletters

Don't include last names in acknowledgements or they may not be able to review

Start a group blog like this www.beachreadauthors.blogspot.com

Share readers with other similar writers- band together!

Always ask readers to sign up for your newsletter, collect readers like they are gold!

Have a pro author photo taken

I thank all reviewers bad or good to create engagement on Amazon

Ignore Goodreads reviews because their star system is brutal

Take out ads! Promo the heck out of your book like it's the best read since Harry Potter!!!

Email me for the KDP guide at kim hornsby @ yahoo .com (no spaces)

Go Get'em, Virgin!

Kim

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PNWA 2017 Was Awesome! -Part 1

I just got home from attending the Pacific Northwest Writers' Association Conference in SeaTac this weekend and man, I'm on information overload!
I took in way too much for the size and age of my brain. It may blow up. I'm staying outside just in case things get messy if I explode.

Web page for the Conference

I was not exactly attending the con every day but was helping authors with pitches Thursday night, doing the book fair Friday night, and was officially at the Con all day Saturday beginning with an 8 AM class with beautifully eloquent Laurie McLean of FUSE Literary.

Let's start there, shall we?

Laurie McLean must've been up since 4 AM because she was so awake and spot on, and informative, it made me feel like a front row sloth on NyQuil. I managed to take some strange notes and the following is from my chicken scratch...

- Print is not necessarily on the rise, ebooks rule and are still on the rise.
-Think about marketing towards the phone generation who are getting older and do everything on the phone.
-Audio are still subsidiary rights for authors
-Do something different like alternate endings or a YA version of your thriller, keep current of what can be done for an eBook.
-Do a Goodreads Giveaway for your ebook
-Podcasting is popular now! Get a youtube channel
-Book Baby is like KDP
-Book Scanner has something to do with checking ranking (cryptic notes)
-It is possible an agent will rep an audio book only-kind of a new idea that Laurie might have invented.
-ACX - you can do a royalty flip or one time fee to the narrator
-Do Facebook Live events everywhere you go that's interesting!
-Submit your book to agents who rep book to film deals
-Don't forget merchandising rights to all things connected to your book. eg) create a line of clothes or jams, or toy swords etc
-Word Press looks like a web site but is a blog and it's free
-Follow Bestselling authors who write better than you in your genre and comment on Twitter and FB
-Laurie McLean is a wealth of info, from a tech background as well as literary and says this publishing biz is a revolution that didn't change for decades and now changes drastically every week! Keep up with the changes, author.
Being repped by FUSE must be awesome!

Next, I went to Social Media Marketing with Lisa Dawn of The Wild Rose Press
She knows a ton of stuff and was really well-spoken!

-Social Media most effective Wednesdays and weekends
-Create a community who think you're great and want to be like you
-Have your brand and tag on EVERYTHING
-Have FB cover reveal parties, rafflecopter giveaways, invite co-host authors, give them 15 minutes at the party to talk, promote, ask them to invite 200 followers, Invite people from events you attended. Time your party with your preordering release day
-Twitter parties are frenetic, be ready, create a hashtag, 7-9 Eastern time is best to grab everyone.
-Give away Amazon gift cards, have co-hosts
-Pinterest is a place to find new people you'd never have access to otherwise.
-Make boards for your books
-Pin your covers directly from Amazon, not your jpeg
-Boosting FB ads works great when you customize who will see it
-Have key words in profile to link back to your books
-Posting tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, Dilivrit.com is content management. Roundteam does auto posting so you can do all your posting one day a week.
-Twitter - Go to managefitter.com to clean out your twitter.
-Post bits of dialogue on Twitter.
-Make memes with Pic Monkey to sneak more info and words in first glance
-Thunderclap an event, launch or do headtalker.com -- one big tweet at once
-Search Engine Optimization- Use keywords for spiders to find your book
-All bios must use good keywords for the spiders to find you
-Change out your KDP 7 keywords every few weeks.

At this point I had lunch, talked a lot, needed to look at my notes about Surviving your First Year of being Published and then taught the class.
Tomorrow's blog will be about the talk I gave called How to Survive Your Virgin Year.
Stay tuned! Or sign up for my blog notification and you'll get an email when I upload blogs.

I heard such amazing stuff on all the talks and wish I'd had the opportunity to sit in more. Next year, I will. Never again will I hold off on registration for a highly recommended event just because it's in the middle of summer which is my most cherished and guarded time all year.

The conference next year is September!! Can't wait.

KIM HORNSBY is an Amazon #1 Bestselling novelist who lives in the Seattle area and writes books about women in dire circumstances rescuing themselves.
www.bit.ly/kimamzn
DANGER-DREAMS-COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIPS

Affordable Help with Book Promotion - $40 special

Today's Guest Blogger: SUZIQS AUTHOR SERVICES


Hello Writers/Publishers/Jacks of all Trades!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Authors: It’s time to think about December Promo and what you’d like to promote this very important month. We have only a few spots left for December Book Promotion and it's first come, first serve. Drop me an email to see if there's still a chance to get in on December Promo. 

At SuziQs, we are busy making holiday-themed posters, finding the best hash tags with the most bang for your book and gearing up for the busiest month of the year for book sales.
Are you ready for your book to be on everyone’s Christmas list?

Here’s why the next six weeks are very important to Authors: 

1. 'Tis the season when potential readers keep that debit card handy
2. Many potential readers get devices for Christmas. Buying books for those readers carries through to the middle of January making the following weeks a six-week opportunity to gain new readers! It’s a time for gift giving (even to oneself!) and that means buying books, whether it’s print, ebooks or gift cards.
3. If your target market are moms, this is a demanding month and they need a little down time with a great book at the end of a long day.

Our Basic Promo includes 5 tweets per day, starting East Coast Time, using researched hashtags, and photos of your book covers. Your promo also includes 5 posts per day to specifically targeted FB groups. It’s important to note, the groups we use have a minimum of 15,000 members and that’s a lot of views! This means we give you 50 chances each week to get more readers. 

This is our last month at the special introductory offer of $40, then our monthly price changes to $50 in January.

We get you clicks, and then it's your turn to hook the reader to click on BUY.

Chanticleer Book Reviews had a great article last week on making sure your Author Central pages are the best they can be for this important season. http://www.chantireviews.com/2015/11/22/quick-and-easy-tips-to-get-your-books-ready-for-the-biggest-book-buying-season-of-the-year-by-kiffer-brown/

SuziQ Ad-Ons you might consider this month:

Posters for your book - $10 per book (increases your “ad” size and character usage on twitter.)  

Here’s an example of what you can expect ...

The Tweet Before:

__________________________________

Great day to READ! Free Books http://amzn.com/B00JTMDO7G  #Kindle #amreading #BlackFriday

______________________________________

The Tweet After (Using a poster to increase word usage):

__________________________________________________________

Kim Hornsby- Author ‏@kimhornsby  Nov 27Washington, USA

Great day to READ! Free Books http://amzn.com/B00JTMDO7G  #Kindle #amreading #BlackFriday

__________________________________________________________

Here’s an example of a poster/banner that gets a ton of info across in one tweet, without asking the reader to commit to a click thru.

Suggested Ad-Ons:

-We can help you book ads for a promotion. If you have FREE DAYS coming up, we book your novel an ad on sites like eBookasaurus and eBooks Habit, and many more. The $25 fee gets you exposure on at least 25 top sites.

-If you want extra tweets on the Saturday and Sunday after Christmas, add-on $10 this month, to insure you promote on both very important sales days.

-SuziQ can “Like” all your pages, comment on blogs, comment on reviews, proofread a manuscript and many other helpful things. Let us know if we can take some of this promo or non-writing work off your plate this Holiday Season.

Want to bump up your promo for December? It’s easy. Let us know at kimhornsby@yahoo.com 

We look forward to an exciting SuziQ month of promotion!

Kim and Susan Hornsby

SuziQsAuthorServices

sqsauthserv@gmail.com

Kindle Direct Publishing Select Free Days. Read this First!

KDP FREE DAYS, OR NOT? THAT’s THE MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION.

There are thousands of readers out there who will pay for your books but many of them will barely look at your novel without a sign it's worth paying for. Especially if you are a new author and without a huge following. 

One way to help get sales is to offer your novel free. This generates free ‘sales’ and looks good on paper, even if you don’t see money for those downloads. And, if you’re in this for the money, I feel kind of badly for you right now. (Imagine me patting your back and handing you tissues) I have done KDP Select free days about 10 times now and feel like a bit of a Select Amazon expert.

Amazon Headquarters in Seattle

For free days, I upload a version of my book that includes a note after THE END to ask if the reader sees fit to review, the author would really appreciate it.

In the days after free days, sales escalate. So do the reviews a week or two later. The ranking looks much better approximately two days later. Don’t freak the morning after free days when your book is 164,000 in rank. It’ll decrease as the day goes on.  Soon after, you’ll get reviews. Many of the reviews that follow your promotion will start out like this “I wasn’t sure what to expect but …”
Why do they expect so little? Because it was FREE! The expectation is less than if the reader paid $12.99 for an e-book download. It’s no wonder some of the best books don’t have all 5 star reviews.  Novel readers want their moneys' worth. I have yet to read Gone Girl because of the cost. Just sayin’. Oh and now it's going to be a movie, without my help.

                                                              Gone Girl Cast Announced

 If you have lots of reviews that are above 4 stars, you'll get more real sales eventually. This is fact. The readers who don't subscribe to free day lists on a daily or weekly basis will jump on board to buy the book when they see more reviews. Books with 200 reviews and over a 4.7* rating are more likely to catch on than 6 reviews and a 3.2* average. Do some hopping around on Amazon, and check out Safe Haven, Sins and Needles and Warm Bodies. I use those three because my novel was lumped in with them and I spent weeks/months watching. Two were movies and one was a breakout series that came out boom, boom, boom and caught on like wildfire.

I'm a stat watcher. I watch my stats daily, sometimes three or four times a day. When things are going well with a book, I’ve been known to wake up in the middle of the night and check stats. By stats, I mean ranking, not sales. It’s not necessary to check my sales if I’m looking at ranking on the Amazon list. Ranking reflects sales. Another thing I do is keep track of books that were published the same week as me. I love to reflect on how their sales are better than mine. From this obsessive activity, I’ve learned a lot. Here’s some of what I know to be true. The ranking is directly related to sales and sales are affected by :

1. 'NY Times Bestseller' at the top of the cover, or something similar

2. Lots of good reviews – Over 100 is good, Over 300 is better

3. Amazon Ranking (or Kobo etc) Less than 10,000 in Kindle books is great

The above indicators help a reader to avoid paying for a clunker. And there are a lot of poorly written books out there right now, with self pubbing at an all-time high.

4. Whether you have the power of a publisher or NY publishing house behind you.

5. Whether it's a series, or not. Series are BIG!!

6. COVER! Non-pro covers are overlooked on a regular basis. Pay the $200.

7. Whether the author has a following. If this book is the third of a series, the sales should be better than a first one with no second published.

8. Ads, marketing, word of mouth, BUZZ!

9. If you love ranking, find a rare category and boast that you are top ten in psychic romance. Sure it might be Romance, Suspense, time travel, werewolf, psychics but you’re top ten!

I watched Safe Haven rise to the top of the lists this year. And stay there. For a long time. Yes, Nicolas Sparks has a huge following. Look at the list above and the only one not used was #5, the series, and instead of that he had a movie with Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel.

I also watched a novel (comparable to mine) rise to a USA bestseller in the last ten months. The author did free days with me, right after we both published late December 2012, both of our books did well, then she published the second and third in the series within two or three months of each other and her rise to stardom was imminent. The writing is pretty clean for a self- pubbed author, the cover is hauntingly compelling and she has over 200 reviews on each of the 3 books. Ta Da! She went free several times with the first one to get her stats up, published the second, went free to get those stats up and the rest is history. What this author did with her high concept romantic suspense novel that I did not do, was release 3 in one year, had a pro cover to start with, and who knows what else. I'm still watching her... Not that The Dream Jumper’s Promise was left in the dust. It’s done well for itself. Especially for a first novel, but without a second in the series to keep the readers engaged, I lagged behind.

And so, dear readers, these are my observations. I’m a huge fan of Free Days. And of marketing those days to the absolute max. When my thriller, Necessary Detour, went free over Valentine’s Day in 2012, with The Wild Rose Press, I had 42 ads out there to announce the deal. Some were free to me, some cost a few dollars. None cost over $20.  I got 35,000 downloads in 5 days and made almost $2,000 in the following month in royalties as well as landing #42 in Author ranking, above some very heavy hitters. That was a month to remember.

If you decide to do KDP and take advantage of the 5 Free days, here’s my gift to you. 

Do 3 of your 5 days at the beginning of the 90 days, and do 2 days, 60 days in. To advertise, log on http://authormarketingclub.com/members/submit-your-book/  to see 20-30 sites that will advertise for your free days at little or no cost. Then sit back and watch. 

You’re welcome.


 

Kim Hornsby is the  author of KDP Free Days, http://amzn.com/B00AFJ8BJS a cheap eBook on Amazon that elaborates on how to get the most out of your Select Free days.
She's also the Amazon Best Selling Author of Necessary Detour and The Dream Jumper's Promise. He highest ranking as of November 10, is The Husband Hunt, a perma free short story that reads like watching a series of THE BACHELOR.