Author Archives: Sandra Hutchison

About Sandra Hutchison

Indie author and publisher of THE AWFUL MESS: A LOVE STORY and THE RIBS AND THIGH BONES OF DESIRE.

10 ways in which fictional romantic heroes are like my cats

Posted on by
1

#1 They both sometimes have other priorities. Romantic heroes tend to prioritize important things that really need doing, like saving the ranch, putting out that fire, saving the galaxy, or finding the murderer before he kills again. Cats prioritize themselves. (Cat people can cope with that. The rest of the world prefers dogs.)

#2 They both love the chase. Romantic heroes happily chase the heroine, often exhibiting super-human persistence in the face of discouragement, competition, and other plot complications. Kitties will chase anything that moves, dangles, rolls, or looks like it wouldn’t ever think of turning around and eating a cat.

#3. They both practice good hygiene. Yes, there are women who enjoy a sweaty man reeking of testosterone. I think these women mostly exist in books and fantasies. In real life, most of us appreciate a man who bathes regularly. And nobody wants a smelly cat.

#4. They both appreciate your cooking. It’s sexy if the romantic hero helps himself to something while a woman is cooking. (It’s even sexier if he’s the one cooking.) It’s not sexy at all when your cat helps himself. At least, not to me. (Fancy Feast commercials suggest that there is a subset of women out there who might disagree.)

#5. They both like to share a glass with you now and then. This is why I can never drink a glass of water I’ve left unsupervised in my house.

001

#6. Neither will stay where you put them. Where’s the suspense in that? Your typical romantic hero won’t be contained. (Romantic heroines aren’t big on it, either.) Your typical cat usually doesn’t want to stay where you put him, either, unless it’s in a new box. A new box is to cats as the heroine’s ultimate warm embrace is to the romantic hero.

imported from phone 12-29-15 611

#7. Both will fight for the right to get close to you. Your basic romantic plot requires a bit of competition or conflict between suitors, or perhaps between hero and heroine, slowly and reluctantly realizing It. Was. Meant. To. Be. Cats are also willing to fight each other for your favor. At least mine do. Who will get to sit on my lap? The answer is how I know which cat is currently winning the ongoing struggle for dominance in my house.

Bo was the winner that day.

Bo was the winner that day.

#8 They have ways of letting you know when they need a little attention. Gilbert Blythe pulled Anne of Green Gable’s pigtail. Older romantic heroes give their love objects a smoldering glance, a warm touch, a good laugh, the odd rescue from certain death. My cats jump on my lap, walk across my the keyboard, jump on the dinner table, and stick their butts in my face. When things really get bad, they vomit. I’m going to give men points for more subtlety on this one.

Bo 003

#9. They want in on some of your most intimate moments.  Though if there’s no sex involved, I’d say the cats are often way more interested than the men. How many men secretly wish they could go back to the good old days of waiting in another room for the baby to be born? How many would just as soon never see a single box of tampons in their entire life? You don’t have a lot of romantic heroes coping with a woman’s pooping or cramps. (No doubt women who read romantic fiction would just as soon forget about those things, too.) But cats, like children, just love catching you in the bathroom.

002#10. They really want to share your bed. Yes, they’re waiting and hoping. I often let Penny stay because she’ll sleep through the night, curled up next to me. Bo, however, snores, licks himself loudly, and pounces on my feet under the sheets, so he’s usually shoved outside my door for the night. In real life, quite a few men and women are turning to the good sleep that comes with separate bedrooms. In romantic fiction, however, heroes and heroines spoon soundly through the night and wake up refreshed and free of resentment. That’s why my favorite scene in Train Wreck has Amy Schumer laying waste to that particular cliché. Judging from this tweet and the reaction to it, I’m not the only one who enjoyed watching that.

Ah, romance. Ah, kitties. I love them both, even if I’d just as soon that litter box in the corner could find a way to take care of itself. As for guys? Thank goodness for indoor plumbing. I just wish all men had perfect aim. Because when romantic heroes have to pee — which they almost never do — they never, ever miss the toilet.

Scurrying back into the warm(er) embrace of Kindle Select

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what I’m now doing with the second novel. At least for a while, even though my inclination is against exclusivity. What changed my mind about it, at least for this book, was a recent 99-cent promotion of the earlier novel “The Awful Mess” to all the retailers. Along the way I discovered some things that surprised me.

Which retailers give you a better “sales tail”?

For the Canadian market, Kobo supported by BookBub proved a touch stronger than Amazon — but Amazon appeared to reward a strong performance better. I sold 77 copies of “Mess” at Amazon Canada during its recent 99-cent promotion (supported by BookBub to Canada). This landed me — very temporarily, of course — at #1 in literary fiction.

ingoodcompanyincanadaFor days after the promotion, I was still floating near the top. Almost a month later, it has sunk to #28,000 and my discoverability there has pretty much evaporated. But I’m still selling the occasional copy.

On Kobo during that same promotion, I sold a little more — 80+ copies in Canada. But while those sales were being racked up, my sales rank just kept worsening. Since then I’ve sold more — yes, there’s been a bit of a tail, probably from also-bought appearances. I have gotten a couple more ratings to add to what had been the solitary review there. But to this day, my sales rank has only worsened.

It’s as if sales simply don’t matter to Kobo, or maybe sales outside the U.S. don’t matter (one single sale, about a month ago, did suddenly halve my sales rank). I’ve noticed this for months now. And although I did have some promotional support across retailers for a U.S. sale (just not from BookBub), not a single copy sold in the U.S.

The truth is that without actually putting in my name or a title, I can’t browse to my book in the Kobo store no matter how hard I try — during the promotion, after the promotion, privately in the Canadian store, or here in the US store. Furthermore, browsing women’s fiction means plowing through endless public domain versions of the same Jane Austen novels. Who’s going to bother? (This is on my PC. I suppose it may be completely different on a mobile device.)

It didn’t used to be that way. There was a time when selling a few books on Kobo could push me into the Top 100 at least temporarily. People would see the book. It’s almost as if Kobo has redesigned their algorithms to punish promotions, or redesigned their store front to discourage browsing for anything but top titles.

I asked them via Twitter about this. No response. I tried to ask them on my dashboard, even though the character limit there makes it difficult. Also no response. No doubt I could try sending an email, but … meh. Maybe they’ll read this and explain what is going on.

With BookBub support I also sold more than 200 copies in the Amazon UK store, more than double my Canadian sales, although my rank didn’t get quite as impressive. (I sold four copies in the UK via Kobo.) And there have been some continuing sales, as well as a couple of reviews.

003Back home in the U.S. at Amazon.com, where I had some promotional support from eReader News Today, Fussy Librarian and Read Cheaply, I sold just over 160 units during the promotion. Not too exciting at a 35% royalty. However, today, three weeks later, I can do a search for humorous literary women’s fiction with four stars or more (granted, this is fairly specific), and “The Awful Mess” shows up on page two. I’ve also sold copies of my second novel there in the days since, presumably to people who wanted to move on, though it’s impossible to know for sure.

Now, none of this changes my mind about where “The Awful Mess” is — widely available. That’s backlist for me, now, and it does sell here and there without much work on my part.

But that second novel, “The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire” has sold exactly one copy at Kobo since I made it available there, despite at least one (non-BookBub) multi-retailer promotion. Last time I tried to follow my link to Ribs at “Nook” it wasn’t even available, for reasons I don’t know (my price promotion at Nook with BookBub didn’t take because they didn’t change the price fast enough.) No doubt it’s possible I screwed something up. But that’s another reason it can be preferable to keep things simple.

At iTunes (via Smashwords, since I don’t own an Apple computer), I saw some nice sales of  “The Awful Mess” during my promotion — over 80 copies sold.  Before the price promotion, I was actually seeing some fairly steady downloads of my free single on iTunes, and usually a few of the people who downloaded the freebie would move on to buying one of the novels. But since the price promotion? Crickets.

I’m probably promoting the freebie less, but clearly there’s no tail from the sales I earned. I don’t shop on iTunes myself, so I don’t know how discoverability works there. From where I sit, though, I’ve not only got none, I’m actually doing worse than I did before the promotion.

And then there’s Google Play. I sold 11 copies during the promotion. Not a single one since. Only one or two before the promotion. (Ever.) However, I spent hours trying to get my price discounted properly for the promotion, and more hours trying to get it back to where it needed to be to prevent price-matching from Kindle.

Which brings me back to Kindle, with its simple and responsive author interface. Sales since the promotion have been fairly steady, if not exciting. I feel I’ve been rewarded for the promotion and ongoing sales with decent discoverability (of course, I also recently discovered I’d left my royalty at 35% by accident, so I suppose they might have been more excited about promoting it because of that.). I feel the kerfuffle over Google Play’s discounting was handled in a friendly manner once I got past the vaguely threatening first warning email.

Unexpected pleasure in Kindle Unlimited

The other thing that attracts me to Kindle Select right now, though, is exactly what drove a lot of folks out of it recently: the joy I’ve taken in watching the occasional Kindle Unlimited reader finally taking on my second novel “The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire” from back when it was available that way.

I love watching that blue line. I especially enjoy watching people read the book in two or three days. I  don’t know how that translates into money, but at this point in my career, money is secondary to simply knowing that I’m being read — and, usually, being read all the way through. (As I’ve noted before, I take evil pleasure in holding readers hostage.)

Harnessing the power of free

And, finally, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that not offering “Ribs” free while I could reduced its sales potential. Going free is still the best promotional tool for an unknown indie author short of a U.S. BookBub price promotion, which I haven’t been able to get.

Granted, my review average is undoubtedly higher now than it will be after going free (you get a few nasty folks who don’t bother to read descriptions during free days, perhaps because they enjoy being outraged). But that’s just the price I’ll have to pay. This title hasn’t had a chance to really catch on the way it might if thousands and thousands of people download it and at least a chunk of those people actually read it.

That’s assuming I can make that happen. I still don’t expect it to do as well as the first book did. It’s gotten a lot tougher out there, by all accounts. This book is less of a crowd pleaser, though some readers think it’s better (I include myself in that). But I’ll never really know until I give it a try. So,although I’m still a bit wary, I’ll be setting up a free promotion eventually, and the only easy way to set that up is through Kindle Select.

In the meantime, going to Kindle Select also lessens my product management duties and simplifies my marketing.

Now, ALL of this promotional effort is still a bit premature in the sense that I only have two novels and the third isn’t ready for pre-order yet. If you really want your promotions to work for you, you need a stable full of books that can sell along with whatever you’re promoting. But letting the few you have put out sink into oblivion doesn’t make it any easier to resuscitate them when the time comes.

So I’ll work with what I have. And at this point, Kindle Select simply looks like the best deal for a title that hasn’t found its legs yet. What do you think? Does your own recent experience match this, or vary from it?

Writing rape: Where do you draw the line?

Posted on by
Reply

Is it literature or romantic fantasy or voyeurism or porn when rape happens in a novel? If you’re the writer, presumably you know what you want it to be. But wanting doesn’t always make it so. I keep thinking about this as I read the Outlander books.

There was a lot of outrage recently when the Starz television show of the first book dramatized the rape of comely young hero Jamie Fraser by another man. Some thought it was just plain out of bounds.

I don’t get Starz, but perhaps because one of the strongest complaints came from a friend who also had serious difficulty with my most recent novel, I was intrigued. Just that a woman writing a romance (okay, historical/time travel/romance/adventure) novel made the rape of her leading man a plot point intrigued me. I’d never seen rape of a male addressed in fiction outside of Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” and, of course, “Deliverance.” But males do get raped. Our prisons are so notorious for it that we make nervous jokes about it. (And why isn’t that a national scandal?)

OutlandercoverSo when a copy of “Outlander” showed up under my nose while I was organizing the book section at the thrift store, I bought it. (This is perhaps an illustration that even bad publicity is good publicity.) It didn’t hurt that it had the actors on the cover and the fellow playing Jamie is rather fetching.

No doubt the TV version of this rape, which I haven’t seen, shows this actually happening in real time. Gabaldon gets away with it in her book at least partly because it is told after the fact, not happening right there in front of us. There’s a lot of that in that first novel, quite expertly done. Whenever point-of-view (POV) character Claire Randall is not on the scene for key plot turns, Jamie can be counted on to become an incredibly gifted storyteller, even about things you’d expect most traumatized young fellows to keep quiet.

(Yes, I can just hear myself in a writing group telling Gabaldon she should make Jamie another POV character so we could see these scenes happening in real time, and her smiling and quietly thinking, “No, thank you, I’ll just wait a decade or two for the TV version.” But I do notice that she is branching out in her POV as the books go along.)

But since Jamie is such an excellent storyteller, we get quite a lot of vivid detail. I found myself admiring Gabaldon’s daring. In the same situation, I backed way, way off. I’m not sure anyone who has read “The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire” even realizes that Molly and Stephen have something in common after that party at Gina’s house, because I couldn’t see Stephen ever telling Molly about it. Molly does wonder about it, and wonders why it would be so much more unspeakable than what happened to her — but that’s it. Stephen is no Jamie Fraser. He just wants to get the hell out of town.

I backed off with Molly, too. Most of the rape scene ended up cut out, mostly because I ultimately decided that if I wasn’t willing to read it out loud to my writing group, maybe it shouldn’t be there. Maybe the point would be better made without quite so much horrifying detail. Most of all, I was afraid that someone would get off on it for all the wrong reasons, a tension that comes up explicitly in regard to Molly’s mother’s art later in the book.

And that’s the most discomforting issue with writing about rape, to my mind. There’s a whole ton of romance and erotica, especially after “Fifty Shades of Grey,” that glories in submission, and rape fantasies are part of that. I won’t claim to be immune to its charms, either, which is a pretty embarrassing admission for a feminist. “Outlander” at least skirts the border of this phenomenon. Is this what makes the books so popular?

According to Daniel Bergner’s fascinating New York Times Magazine article “What Do Women Want?” there’s research that shows women are almost always turned on by sexual imagery, and not too fussy about what it is (men on men, men on women, women on women, bonobos on bonobos). Women SAY they’re not aroused by the non-hetero (and non-human) pairings, but measuring devices show they are. Some women, the article notes, even admit to getting aroused while being raped (which generally intensifies their sense of shame).

Meredith Chivers, the scientist whose work is the focus of the article, theorizes that this has been bestowed on females by evolution: the average cave woman was presumably  at pretty decent risk of being raped. Arousal during an assault provides protection against injury, infection, and death, and thus increases the likelihood that a woman will at least live long enough to bear and raise children. Chivers also theorizes that it may be more a physiological reflex than a matter of actual lust.

If so, I’m thinking that physiological reflex seems to inform a hell of a lot of dubious romance. How else do we explain the success of Luke and Laura? And why are the loudest objections to “Outlander”  over Jamie’s rape and not some really questionable interactions between Jamie and Claire?

There has been controversy over a beating — and, yes, it gave me pause. I was willing to accept it in that historical context, but I had a hard time forgiving the author for making a kind of saucy joke out of it, with Jamie happily confessing to enjoying it.

But maybe it was because I’d been forewarned about those last two scenes that I actually had much more trouble with a later scene. Jamie warns Claire that he won’t be able to be gentle, and although he does give her a chance to get the hell out while she can, he doesn’t oblige later when she says, “Stop, please! It’s hurting me.” And we’re meant to believe she then continues to have passionate, flesh-tearing, screaming, ridiculously violent sex with him that turns into a moment of great emotional completion.

Really? Okay, so maybe the bonobo/lizard brain in me is getting turned on by that despite myself, but the feminist me thinks: Seriously? Are we going to allow a romantic hero to make the excuse of rapists everywhere? He can’t help it? Under emotional duress, even a man as heroic and intelligent and affectionate as Jamie can’t control himself? Once a man’s in bed with you, all bets are off? How could you not feel betrayed when he can’t listen to what you’re saying at that most basic level?

So I call bullshit on that scene. I don’t believe it of those characters, and I also don’t think it should ever be an excuse for any man anywhere. And I’m a little alarmed that this sort of thing seems to sell so well.

The other scene that really bugged me arrives a little later, when Jamie freaks out that his sister has named a kid he thinks was the product of rape for him (yeah, rape is a constant threat in those books — if that bothers you, don’t even pick them up), and that she married his best friend after becoming defiled.

Seriously? Jamie was pretty inconsistent there. He’s an earthy Highlander who’s quite happy to marry a widow who isn’t a virgin, but freaks out because his own sister wants to marry a man after being (apparently, but not actually) raped? What the hell is that sudden patriarchal squeamishness about? So what if she was raped? It wasn’t her choice if she was. At that point in the book I honestly wished she had been, just so Jamie could learn that that he was being a complete clot-heid about it. Instead, he was simply corrected about the status of her virginity prior to marriage.

Yes, his reaction might have been historically accurate. And presumably he has to re-think that as the plot moves along. (He does react better in a similar situation later.) God save us all from the expectation of female purity. Women get honor-killed and beaten and ruined and ostracized for that all the time even today. Enough, already.

I’m really hoping that the popularity of these novels is more because of interesting characters and fast-paced, intriguing plots than the sex. Or that if it is the sex, that women  realize it’s fantasy sex, not real sex.

And meanwhile, of course, I’m still reading.

Indie author moves to Booktrope: An Interview with Massimo Marino

Posted on by
10

Update: Booktrope is no more.

Sandra Hutchison interviews fellow Awesome Indies author Massimo Marino about his decision to republish his indie titles (and future titles) at Booktrope, an eBook publisher that is staking out new ground between traditional publishers and independent authors.

Massimo Marino

Massimo Marino

Massimo, give us a short history of how you came to be an indie author.

Writing, for me, started early in my childhood. My dad received Astounding Stories. I wasn’t allowed to read those magazines, but they also had astounding covers. Based on those covers, I created stories in my mind, then put them down on paper so that I could re-read and never forget them. I didn’t think in those days about plot and action, character development, building my voice, or what themes and belief systems I wanted to cover. The place and the setting came from those cover pictures, and I wasn’t that concerned with temporal or structural issues.

I stopped when I started my studies in physics at the university, but the urge to write always lingered. Then, after all seemed forgotten, a story found me and kicked hard to come out. It lingered for over a year, so I joined a writers’ group for peer review and honing my skills.

Like most, I started submitting manuscripts to agents. I got standard rejections but also some encouraging personal notes from agents. They pointed to “what the market wants” and said “nobody takes a risk on something at the edge.” But I decided I had to take the risk and prove to myself and others that writers cannot react passively to the market, but must be encouraged to innovate, forget about what sells, and write what they must.

For you, what have been the greatest rewards and frustrations of being indie?

The greatest rewards happen frequently: they are the words from readers, the thank you messages, comments like “from now on I’ll read whatever you write.” As an Indie writer, this is encouraged and I believe readers feel less intimidated and will often contact an Indie writer without fear, as opposed to trying to write to Stephen King, for example.

The frustration is realizing that it does not matter whether your story is good, or is so well-edited that readers find no issues, typos, mistakes, or find it completely engaging. Some readers still give you no chance because you are an independent author. The stigma is less than it was only a few years ago, but you’ll never convince the reader who only buys from the New York Times bestseller list.

We met through Awesome Indies. How have that and other communities for readers and writers been important to you in your career as an author?

It is always of the greatest importance to compare yourself and your writing with that of others. I also wrote about this on my blog, about the hubris of many self-published writers. (Sandra interrupts quickly here to note that she obviously decided to embrace her own sheer hubris.)

To be a good writer, you must make your ego fall apart like a soaked sponge. That will do marvelous things to your writing. Too many believe they are at the zenith of their craft and work entirely alone; thus, the majority produce unreadable stuff. They fuel those readers who say any writer who does not write with a publishing house is a joke at best.

You’ve recently transitioned from being an indie author to being published by Booktrope. What inspired you to make that change?

The glass ceiling. It is there, and I wanted to see how it was working with a traditional publisher. I met with a wonderful agent at a writers’ conference. She read my trilogy and liked it. She introduced me to the publisher. They accepted “Daimones” and asked for the others. So Booktrope is now publishing the “Daimones Trilogy” and will publish my fourth novel, too: “The Law” – YA Urban SF.

I work with excellent professionals, from the publicist, the editor and proofreader, to the cover artist. The staff is extremely supportive: they show a genuine interest in promoting and selling my books. After all, they can only make money if the books sell. Incidentally, the investment already made by them on the trilogy has exceeded my Indie budget for each book by not less than a factor of 10.

What are your major goals as an author right now?

The same as before. Getting better line by line. I was accepted at SFWA, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. There I’m meeting great authors and learning even more. “Daimones” has also been considered for nomination at the next Nebula Prize. While I don’t dare even think about that possibility, that would meet a major goal.

What’s your best advice right now for aspiring writers in your genre, science fiction?

You need to read: the SF classics, the big names, those who created new paths in SF, not those who followed. Then explore the current scene, from Scalzi to Howey, Crichton, VanderMeer. When you have read millions of lines from SF novels, you start to have the tools to help your imagination fire.

Learn more about Massimo Marino at his blog: http://massimomarinoauthor.com.

About “Daimones”:
Nothing could have prepared them for the last day. Explore the future of humanity in Massimo Marino’s sci-fi debut, Daimones, an apocalyptic tale that feels like it could happen tomorrow. You may never sleep through a windstorm again.

Discover the "Daimones" by Massimo Marino Daimones Trilogy on:

Amazon link to "Daimones"
Nooklogo

 

 

 

On NetGalley:
https://s2.netgalley.com/catalog/book/70976

 

Okay, this is Sandra, confessing that I have been curious about Booktrope myself. I found  another point of view, one that is a bit less enthusiastic, from Tiffani Burnett-Velez at “My Year with Booktrope.” I believe, however, that her experience may be colored by timing. Many indie authors are noticing that it’s a lot harder to gain any traction out there today than it was when she self-published her first book.

If you have any insights, feel free to share them with us below. (This is a moderated blog, so it may take half a day or so for your comment to show up, but it will get there.)

Trying an international book promotion across multiple retailers

Posted on by
Reply

Cover for The Awful Mess: A Love StoryDo you sell books across the world? I did sell a book this week in Finland (through Kobo). But that’s far from common for me (Finland OR Kobo). Of, course I’d like to change that. That’s why “The Awful Mess” is going to be on sale across the globe August 22-24.

BookBub turned it down the last time I tried, but accepted it not long after when I tried again for a promotion just to the UK, Canada, and India. I do have some other advertising support set up in the US — eReader News Today, The Fussy Librarian, and Read Cheaply — but that’s probably not enough to make things go crazy hot here on an older title. But is it possible a good sale in other parts of the world will also boost US sales? It should be interesting to find out. I could have set up a whole lot more in the way of promotion, of course, but I’m honestly just more focused on writing right now. None of this promotion will matter a whole lot until I get a critical mass of books published.

cover for book The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire by Sandra HutchisonThis will, however, be my first promotional support for Google Play sales, and I’m very interested to see if it makes any difference. (So far I’ve sold a grand total of ONE book there.) And will any of this bump up sales of my more recent novel “The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire”?

It would be nice for something to work. I’ve been wondering why my Kindle sales came to a dead stop Matildachicklitfinallast week, and I think I finally figured it out. My perma-free romantic comedy “The Short, Spectacular Indie-Publishing Career of Matilda Walter” got put back at 99 cents at some point (without any notification to me). I could look at this as a favor, really, since I’d just as soon not have a free option distracting folks when I am offering a great price on another book, but I have to wonder how many Kindle readers  I’ve misled and possibly annoyed in the days it took me to notice this.  Lesson: Keep tabs on your perma-free status.

Anyway, here’s the pssst just for you part: It can take a week for price changes to filter through to India’s FlipKart, so “The Awful Mess” is already 99 cents at Smashwords and some of the services it feeds into, like iTunes. So you could go grab it at a good price right now!

By the way, if anyone is willing to help me get the word out on the 22nd, 23rd, or 24th, I’d be grateful. I will be happy to share detailed results with those of you who do. Just contact me offline or comment on what you’d be willing to do in terms of retweeting or FB posting or sharing or whatever and I’ll try to make it super easy for you to do.

Enjoy what’s left of the summer! I’m prepping my courses and have managed to turn the corner into the last major act of “Bardwell’s Folly.” I don’t expect to make much further headway with it while teaching four comp courses, but you never know. It’s been my observation over many years now that ridiculously busy people often actually accomplish a whole lot more than those of us with less pressing schedules.

 

 

 

Another technique for finding new readers on Twitter

Posted on by
Reply

One of my more popular blog posts here is “The fine art of Twitter stalking,” which explains how you can use Twitter to essentially hand-sell to people who are following authors like you, and/or describing themselves as avid readers.

I’ve refined that a bit in the year and a half since that was posted, so I’m going to share what I do more often now. I should warn you that, just as before, it’s laborious, and it won’t work for long unless you have something like the free app Crowdfire (formerly JustUnfollow) in your toolbox.

Step 1. Make sure your front stoop looks nice and is ready for business

Make sure your Twitter profile is attractive and offers a call to action. It should…

  1. Explain who you are clearly and positively without getting obnoxious (in other words, don’t fill it up hard sells and hashtags)
  2. Have reasonably attractive graphics. This does not have to be anything crazy. Go to another wonderful free app at Canva.com and you can create something just the right size that looks pretty darn good. (Pro tip: The less design knowledge you have, the more you should rely on their attractive templates.)
  3. Include a link to your web site under your info (or use a link to your Amazon author page if you’re exclusive to Amazon in mostly one country — I’m not, so I don’t).
  4. Mileage varies a LOT on this one, but personally I try to make sure I haven’t been loading up my Twitter stream with promos. This is the number one reason I don’t belong to some otherwise appealing writer’s groups. Their authors may be doing much better than I am, though, so do whatever works for you.
  5. Here’s the selling part: Include a pinned post at the top that could at least potentially lead someone to do something you want. Include one call to action with a key link. If your own blog page doesn’t tend to convert people, or you don’t have one, use your Kindle author’s page, or product link, or whatever would work best where your readers live. (Obviously, you might want to play around with different options here.)  I probably have my best luck when my free little romantic comedy is pinned to the top, but I will vary it depending on the audience I’m going after.
    TIP: Canva is great for creating just the right size Twitter graphic, too, like this one. I’ll vary the actual buying link, but the others are right there in the graphic, so people who are intrigued can go look it up at their favorite retail site.

twitter promo exampleThere are surely ways to track this and and improve my performance. Finally figuring THAT out might be one of next year’s resolutions.

Step 2. See what other authors your readers are buying

As noted in the original twitter-stalking post, Amazon’s author pages make this easy. Just go to your author page and look at the links under “Customers Also Bought Items By.” You still have to use your judgment, and results will be skewed if you’ve recently been promoting (the authors promoting at the same time are the ones who will show up most) — but dig down and you’ll find authors who appeal to the same readers who should like your stuff. For indie authors, your best bet will almost always be other indie authors, because their readers already know that we don’t all have cooties.

detail from author's page screenshot

If your book has gotten a bit moribund, or you’ve already hit up everybody on your also-bought list, you can dig down even further and check out the also-boughts for those authors.

TheAwfulMess_3DAn example of using my judgment about also-bought authors: “The Awful Mess: A Love Story” crosses over into religion and spirituality, specifically, into progressive Christianity. Some of my also-boughts are Christian “sweet” romance authors. I have to be careful there, because the category “Christian fiction” runs conservative and some of those readers will be offended by the cover, let alone the content. Other authors in my also-boughts are mystery writers. Would their readers be interested in my women’s fiction? It’s probably worth trying.

Step 3. Search Twitter for “by [author name]“

This gets you to tweets posted by people who have read and/or reviewed on Goodreads or their own blogs. (At least for now it does. All of this is subject to change. Amazon, for example, no longer gives people the option to tweet their purchases.)

Step 4. Follow people who appear to be genuine potential readers

Check out each potential reader to make sure he or she is:

  • A real human rather than a fake spam account
  • Still active on Twitter
  • A relatively kindred spirit

Bloggers probably expect most books to go to them free, so they are not your best prospect. However, you might want to think of them as a potential reviewer and take note accordingly — you might create a list of them, for example.

And just because their counts may suggest they never follow back doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow people — remember, the goal is to entice people to check out your book, not to get them to follow you back. (Though that can be a nice bonus.)

Out of a dozen or two dozen people you follow, maybe one might be interested enough to actually purchase your book. You’ll have to decide for yourself if this labor-intensive approach is worth it. Note that it will also help you build your Twitter audience, however. And you might just find some good reading for yourself along the way.

Step 4. After a week or so, unfollow the people who’ve shown no interest

No, you’re not being a jerk. You don’t hang around outside of people’s doors when they don’t call you after a date, do you? And this wasn’t even a date.

Besides, Twitter won’t let you keep following new people if your ratio gets out of whack. And once you get past a few hundred people, you’re certainly not hurting for material to read in your Twitter stream. So unfollow people. Crowdfire makes this easy. (There is a daily limit if you’re doing it for free, but I almost never reach it.)

Personally, I usually follow everyone back who doesn’t appear to be a spammer, marketing something I have zero interest in, of dubious integrity, obnoxious, or impossible for me to translate enough to figure any of that out. This is a social medium. That means it should be a two-way street. So if you’re not following me back, you’d better be a celebrity or extremely informative about something valuable — and for that, to be perfectly honest, I can put you in a list instead of following you.

All of this could change at any moment, of course. There’s talk of Twitter going all Facebook on us. Which it has the right to do.

Want to add any tips of your own, or tell me where I’m going wrong? Please do!

My name is Sandra and I’m a basket-aholic

Posted on by
5

I’ve been in a spate of decluttering, mostly because I can’t find the friggin’ lithium ion battery to my new hedge trimmer and I’ve already ruled out the garage and the sun room by cleaning them up, so at this point it has to show up where I least expect it. (Most likely, as my stepdaughter suggests, I will find it as soon as I buy a replacement.)

I haven’t read “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” yet, but I’ve peeked at enough blog posts about it to know that it recommends putting all like items together. That’s how I came to this stunning arrangement on my basement floor today.

A pile of at least 25 empty baskets of various sizes

And those are just the empty ones!

I already instituted another recommendation in the book — organizing my drawers vertically, so I could see the contents at a glance. The only issue with this is that it exposes a lot more shirts to cat hair when somebody decides that looks like an excellent spot to hang out on.

cat lying on shirts in a drawer

And by the way, if I had started this process earlier, I would have known that I already had a lifetime supply of dolomitic lime in an old cat litter container in the garage before I drove out to Agway to get more.

No doubt I should try to relate this to writing somehow. Perhaps freeing myself from clutter could be seen as clearing the deck so I can get down and focus. More likely it’s just another way of procrastinating.

Meanwhile, I haven’t actually given away any of those baskets yet. I’ve just created a tower of them. If I were Cassandra in The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire, I could probably find a way to make an art installation out of it, though I’d need to find a way to sexualize it a lot more obviously. If I were Professor Kinney at UMass, I would probably already see something sexual about it (bowls and baskets are very feminine in Freudian criticism).

For myself, they are (mostly) each lovely in themselves, and they represent potential. Potential storage, potential gift baskets, potential decoration, potential cat beds… but there’s such a thing as having too much potential. Where does potential end and become hoarding? And no, I don’t want to be a basket collector. At this point in my life I don’t want to collect anything other than writing credits and book reviews.

What do YOU accumulate too much of against all reason?

Being white, writing black: An interview with Cori Tadrus

Posted on by
4
Cori Tadrus

Cori Tadrus

Sandra Hutchison interviews Cori Tadrus, author of “Flawed Happiness,” a novel about a biracial woman’s struggles to get past perfectionism and find happiness.

Cori, I remember when I first met you over email, via a third party, it was about an editing project we didn’t end up working on together. You described the work to me, and I felt compelled to tell you that I hadn’t actually read much urban fiction, and I wasn’t black. You then surprised me by telling me you were not black either, although you certainly did read a lot of fiction with multicultural characters. What specifically led you to want to write from this point of view?

I’ve been exposed to a great deal of diversity from the time I was a child. The neighborhood and inner city school system in which I was raised was comprised of people from various races, cultures, and economic classes. My friends all looked different, talked different, and lived in different circumstances. I witnessed, and became conscious of, all kinds of false stereotypes long before I graduated high school. And because of this, I believe, I’ve always gravitated to multiculturalism, from friendships to education (my degree is in cultural anthropology and African-American studies) and employment (I worked for many years as a refugee case worker).

There’s also this inherent part of me that seeks to question the status quo, to look at things like history, popular culture, and current events from differing perspectives. So, when I started writing my manuscript, it didn’t feel natural to write my protagonist, or any of my characters for that matter, from simply a “white perspective.” It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision either; I saw Athena as a biracial woman in my mind, so that’s the cultural identity I gave her.

Given how the country reacted to the outing of Rachel Dolezal, an NAACP chapter leader, as white – and her subsequent resignation — do you worry about readers being offended that you are not African American?

The thought didn’t occur to me at all during the first draft of the book, as my intention in the beginning was simply to lose myself in the writing process and live vicariously through Athena and her experiences. I was seeking the answers to my own happiness through this character’s journey, and it unfolded in such a way that I didn’t know where the story was going to end until it did just that.

When I finished the first draft and started considering publishing is when I began to think about whether my story would strike the reader as inauthentic because my main character is half-black, and I’m not.

FlawedHappinessI kept coming back to the fact, though, that unless an author is penning a memoir, there will always be some element of distance and fictionalization when creating a character (even when speaking to such basic characteristics such as gender, age, etc).

With this, many of the characters in the book are based on my own friends and acquaintances, on how we communicate with each other and our tastes in fashion and music, so I was conscious throughout the editing process of ensuring that their qualities were reflected and not stereotyped.

Sometimes, there is a fine line there, especially when writing dialogue, so I recruited beta readers of different ethnicities, as well as a professional editor/author who is a woman of color, to read the manuscript and provide feedback to exactly this point.

In regard to Rachel Dolezal: Unlike her, I’m not purposefully misrepresenting my ethnicity. My photograph, in which I am clearly Caucasian, appears on my book cover, website, and all of my social media pages. I hope that no one would be offended that, as a white woman, I chose to have diverse characters in my novel, or that my main character’s biracial identity does not mirror my own. If I were touting the book as nonfiction, or addressed issues such as racism and white privilege in the plot, then of course that would be a different story.

A UK author named Nikesh Shukla recently posted what he called a “provocation” that says “…if we want true diversity in books, white people need to write about non-white people. It’s not just my responsibility, as an author of colour, to write about my people…” He had already pointed out that “every character in every film and novel was white unless they had to do something ethnic.” He wants to see white people writing about ethnic people as just normal instead of “the other,” instead of exotic. I take it you agree with him? Would have you have any other insights here?

Yes, I absolutely agree with Mr. Shukla’s points, especially in reference to the notion of tokenism in contemporary literature and film. It seems that many times, a person of color isn’t simply another character in the story; rather their “Blackness” or “Indianness,” etc., is somehow relevant to the plot as a whole. I’d really love to see more authors, especially in the mainstream, incorporate more diversity into their writing, without feeling the need to justify doing so.

Personally, I’ve always been drawn to fiction that is classified as either multicultural (like “The Joy Luck Club”) or African-American (like “Waiting to Exhale”) for the very reason that so much of the entertainment we consume in the US is from a majority perspective. I find it interesting to read a story written from a different viewpoint. Yet even reading within these genres, I don’t think I’ve ever found a book that speaks to my experience as an individual who came up in a multicultural, urban environment.I mean, in 2015, how unique could this perspective possibly be?

Where are all the novels, especially in women’s fiction, with girlfriend characters that are not all of the same color, or sexual orientation, or physical ability, without their being an explicit reason or message behind their differences? Even though it wasn’t a conscious decision on my part to write a culturally diverse novel, I think that deep down I sought to write the book that I couldn’t find on the mainstream shelves.

I notice that your debut novel was published by a small press. How did that happen, and what would you say are the pros and cons of that experience?

When I decided to pursue publishing, I did as many new authors with stars in their eyes do and queried only the top literary agents and publishing companies. Then, after rejection letters and reality began to roll in, I shifted my approach to researching small presses that would be more likely to take a chance on an unknown such as myself. That’s when I came across a local, indie company accepting manuscripts from previously unpublished authors. After a few months of emailing back and forth, I had a publishing contract in hand.

In my experience, the benefit of working with a small press is primarily the structure and education they bring to the table. Their team edits, designs, and distributes the book on your behalf, and as someone with no prior knowledge of the publishing industry, this was the most appealing factor in my decision to go this route.

When considering self-publishing, I was overwhelmed by the choices I would have to make as far as who to hire for each step in the process, as well as the financial liability this would incur. Although traditional publishing (at least by a small press) has proven to not be inexpensive, as the cost of marketing (for which, most of time, the author assumes primary responsibility) has not been offset by the royalties earned on book sales.

This is to be expected, especially with a debut novel, but honestly, it can be trying to relinquish both a lack of control and cash flow with a project you have put so much of yourself into. Overall, I wouldn’t encourage or discourage an author from traditional over self-publishing; it comes down to which path best suites your needs, goals, and personality.

A big thank you to Cori for taking the time to do this, especially when she’s expecting her second child literally any moment now! You can find her book at most online retailers.

Buy “Flawed Happiness,” a National Indies Award finalist, at these retailers:
AmazonNooklogo
 kobo

 

 

More about Cori Tadrus

Born and raised in Syracuse, NY, Cori Tadrus spent most of her twenties working as a refugee case worker by day and a bartender by night. Eventually she decided it was time to get a 9-5 job that paid the bills and pursued a career in finance, but it left her feeling uninspired. She found respite in writing a story about a character named Athena who, like her, was seeking a more fulfilled life. Then Cori married an active duty army officer. When she was nine months pregnant with her first child, she left her job to join him in his travels. With change came perspective, and the ability to look inside of herself to discover what she truly wanted to be: an author. Cori is expecting her second child any day now, and continues to write.
Addition 9/6/15: Want some tools to help you reflect diversity in your fiction in a respectful manner? Check out this great round-up from literary Agent Carly Watters.

Technology, gay rights, the Confederate flag, and other cool ways to date your novel

Posted on by
Reply

It’s exhilarating to be living through so much change, especially when it seems to be going in the right direction. But what if your books become dated because of it?

Earlier this month at the Glens Falls Public Library Julia Spencer-Fleming, my favorite living Episcopal mystery romance novelist*, took a question from the audience about coping with changes in technology in her books.

As she pointed out, cell phones have made mystery writers’ lives a lot harder. She also noted that she is fortunate in her setting — a place an awful lot like Argyle, New York — because if necessary her characters can encounter poor or no signal in the local wilderness. (I’m thinking Clare and Russ really need to avoid Verizon, because so far I’ve had no trouble up north.)

Rico Shen [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5 tw (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/tw/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Rico Shen, via Wikimedia Commons

Spencer-Fleming also mentioned advice she’d gotten to keep technology as unspecific as possible. In other words, perhaps your characters should just call someone rather than doing something with a “phone.” Specific devices or ways of using them can become obscure in a couple of years.

I had to deal with this as I spruced up (AKA finally coming up with decent endings for) some short stories I used in “Missionary Dating and Other Stories.” Cell phones hadn’t even been thought of when I first drafted one of them. Some beta readers told me I needed to clarify when these stories were set, or update them, because they were no longer realistic.

This week another of my books got dated in the way I had always hoped it would. “The Awful Mess: A Love Story”  has a sub-plot involving gay rights which is centered largely on Winslow the cop’s support of his lesbian sister, and suspense over Winslow’s conservative father’s ability to cope with the discovery that his daughter Laura is not only gay, but she and her partner Carla are having a child.Cover for The Awful Mess: A Love Story

One of the issues is that Laura would have no legal rights to a child born of Carla if something happened to their relationship. But as of this week, the Supreme Court has made marriage equality the law of the land. Laura and Carla wouldn’t need to worry that their marital or parental rights wouldn’t hold up simply because of where they were living.

So if the need for nationwide marriage equality had been my A plot, my book would have just become a bit quaint. Such are the risks of dealing with current events. But that can also add a depth of truth, assuming one can avoid stooping to mere propaganda.

ManfieldPark1999One of the reasons I enjoy the take on “Mansfield Park” in the 1999 movie is that it links the Bertram family to slavery in the West Indies, whereas in Austen’s novel you’d have to be pretty aware of the history to even suspect it. (It also spices up Fanny by crossing her with Jane Austen herself — an unforgivable sin in the eyes of some Austen purists, but personally I think this particular Austen novel needs a bit of tinkering before it will work on screen).

I’m also conscious of history changing as I work on my third novel, “Bardwell’s Folly.” It’s about the daughter of a famous dead Southern novelist who was raised in the North, almost completely ignorant of her family roots. When she gets caught saying something racially insensitive, she is forced to try to better understand her Southern legacy.

And oh boy. We have we seen some fast changes in that regard this week, especially in regard to the Confederate flag. Good changes. Way overdue changes.

Of course, the flag is the least of the issues involved, as opposed to the continuing institutional and social racism endemic in the South and the rest of the country, almost as if the Civil War continues to be fought — and sometimes even won by the wrong side.

Still, having people like Strom Thurmond’s son proclaim that the Civil War was fought over slavery is a good step forward. For someone who grew up in Florida watching people like Thurmond and George Wallace win elections using racist code language (or out-and-out hatefulness), it’s astonishing to see the Confederate battle flag so quickly lose supporters.

Sometimes it’s a minor thing that can mess you up. I’d been toying with the idea of having my heroine and her traveling companion, the daughter of a distinguished African American, meet up with a figure very much like Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to explore their ancestry, much as is done in the fascinating series Finding Your Roots.

But that show has just been suspended. Gates is in hot water because the show left out Ben Affleck’s slave-owning ancestors at Affleck’s insistence.

My reaction to this: Affleck is a wuss. Part of what inspired “Bardwell’s Folly” is my own infamous ancestor, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest (yeah, that guy who built his fortune trading slaves, massacred black soldiers at Fort Pillow, and served as an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan). My maternal grandfather’s first name was Forrest, after him. And Forrest, along with the Confederate battle flag, is more popular than ever on Confederate bling marketed to that anxious subculture of white Americans who say they “want their country back.”

I find that deeply disturbing, frankly. Especially in a country where, since 9/11, domestic terror is taking twice the toll of the foreign-inspired terrorism we’ve just spent vast fortunes and thousands of American lives trying to defeat.

In other news…

Summer blog post schedule

I’ve been keeping dutifully to a Saturday posting schedule for this blog since I started following a regular schedule in February, but as of this week I’m switching to summer hours. (Part of this is because I was with my lovely grandkids this weekend and vastly over-estimated the energy I’d have left after my return.) So, through August I’ll post every other Sunday. I may also have some interesting guest posts for you soon.

Requisite book flogging

Cover of Missionary Dating and Other Stories“Missionary Dating and Other Stories” goes live Tuesday, which (I just learned) is the absolute worst day to launch a book, because that’s when traditionally-published books release.

It’s always fun to learn these things.

Anyway, it’s currently available for pre-order in e-book format only at all the retailers.

* Dorothy Sayers is my favorite dead Episcopal (technically, Anglican) mystery romance novelist.

 

 

 

Is it the cover? A PickFu polling case study

Posted on by
3

by Sandra Hutchison

It became clear during my recent Kindle Countdown Deal that my second novel was not catching on as well as my first. Intellectually, I had expected this. It has a literary title, it doesn’t cross over into romance, and I never offered it free.

Emotionally, however, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d crippled it in some way. Was the problem possibly just the cover?

One of the things I’ve noticed over time is that my “also boughts” on the first book all have a certain look that my books don’t have. (They are also all indie titles, which is an indicator that when you’re an indie most of your sales come during promotions to the same lists of willing indie readers.)

Alsoboughts

My covers are a little edgier, which may be appropriate, or may just be scaring people off.

Sandrasbooks

It’s also true that guys are often scared off by books with females on the cover. This may not be terribly relevant since most book buyers are women, but some of my most satisfied reviewers have been men, so I hate to cut off that potential audience if I don’t have to.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my covers. I think Damonza.com has done a great job, hitting a nice compromise between literary and women’s fiction. (They didn’t design the last two shorter, lower-cost titles, since I did them myself, but as you can see I have tried to maintain some branding.)

Something else had happened recently, though. I’d been playing with cover concepts for my third novel and asking for feedback on my Facebook profile. Two of the thumbnails had women on them. The third had an “oilified” plantation house. And most people, including loyal readers, had come down in favor of the house instead of the women.

That got me wondering if I’d gone the wrong way with the first two covers. SHOULD they look more like those books on my “Also boughts”?

That’s when I remembered getting a code for some free PickFu polling from a Tim Grahl post.

PickFu is an internet polling service. It’s incredibly easy to use and very reasonably priced. How well it lines up with my target audience is another question. But I decided it was worth trying out the service to see about two other possibilities for covers for “The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire.”

One was my best shot at a thumbnail using an “oilified” generic street scene that matches the neighborhood in the book, similar to the plantation house cover that my readers had liked for Bardwell’s Folly. So after narrowing in on that with my Facebook friends, I tested it versus the current cover on PickFu. (This would normally cost $20, but I had credits.)

thewinner

The results? The current published cover won handily. But when I dug down into the demographics, my target readers of women who are little older and perhaps a little more educated seemed to prefer the street scene.

demographicsThe comments were also fascinating. One thing became clear: My current cover is considered bleak. The title also puts off and confuses some people, suggesting to them that it’s either about eating disorders, a “trashy romance,” or erotica, none of which is true.

I knew I didn’t have time enough or money enough to act on the title (new titles require new isbns), but I’m definitely storing this away for the next time I’m trying to decide on a title.

Now, I’ve actually dealt with horrifically expensive, possibly flawed market research in my past life in publishing, so I knew (as PickFu will readily point out) that this poll of fifty people was not a scientifically valid sample size. I also had no idea how self-selected the audience might be. Given all that uncertainty, the time and money it would take to create a new cover based on this less than resounding finding seemed unwarranted.

That’s when I wondered how much damonza.com might charge me if I tested one of the original cover design options I had turned down (not without some trepidation). To my delight, they said they would provide it at no cost. And so I ran another test of that versus the neighborhood cover I was considering instead.

This time the results were clearer. You can see the whole case study here: a second A/B test at PickFu.

cutoffsversusoilified
So I switched my cover.

And nothing much happened. At that point, Amazon was still giving the book some play, but I saw maybe one day’s uptick in the trends, which could have been completely random.

So I’m back to the original cover now, because it’s a lot of work to go through everything I’ve done so far and switch the art out, and if it’s not going to make a significant difference  I’d just as soon put that effort towards my next books, “Missionary Dating and Other Stories,” which is available for pre-order now, and “Bardwell’s Folly,” which is still months out.

That’s not to say that someday I might not decide to put in the effort to switch over, because I do truly like the other cover. It’s definitely less bleak. But I’m still wondering if some women’s fiction-y neighborhood cover might not do better with my target audience than either of them.

So you’d better believe I’ll be testing different approaches with “Bardwell’s Folly” before I publish. Depending on how that goes, I might then work backwards on the other covers.

What do you want to know about your books before you publish?

If you’d like to give PickFu a spin, the folks there were kind enough to offer a discount for the first 50 readers here — just use the coupon code HUTCHISON and you’ll get 20% off your first poll. (I get no affiliate income from this. At least, I don’t think I do.)

If you find it useful, let me know! I know that back in the days when I was a marketing manager and an acquisitions editor, I would have really loved having access to a fast and easy tool like this.

Now if PickFu could just find a way to poll avid readers of our genre, we indie authors would truly be in data heaven…