Book Promotions

25 Dec 2015: … End of Year Status Report

I started this blog to keep folks up to date on what’s happening with Jennifer Geoghan Novels and to share what I’m learning on my long and winding path to the Nobel Prize for Literature. So with that in mind, today I thought I’d give a status report on where things stand today.

After self publishing six ebooks, I’m finally venturing into the world of paperbacks. It was an arduous task to format my book from ebook format to an acceptable print format, but it’s finally done! The things I learned doing that gargantuan task better serve me well in life! Adapting the cover gave me a few headaches, mostly because CreateSpace, who I’m doing the paper version with, had a hard time with the concept of a letter being cut off in the title of the book. Here’s what I mean:

The end of the “d” in blood is off frame. Duh .. It’s called artistic, it’s supposed to be. I finally got them to approve the cover and received the hard copy proof in the mail yesterday. It looked pretty good but I found two things I wanted to adjust. I’ve now re-uploaded and am waiting for CreateSpace to approve. So with any luck, I’ll have the paperback out for sale in a few days.

Lesson Learned: My book is too long to be of any good for sale as a paperback 😦

At 454 pages, a 5.5 by 8.5 page size and charging what I consider the max I can logically charge of $12.99 a copy, my royalties will be only $1.50 a book. Not only that, if I were to jump onto CreateSpace’s expanded distribution (where it becomes available to retailers) my royalties would be that I owe CreateSpace $1.10 per book. Yeah, you read that right, I OWE THEM MONEY!?!?! To not owe them money, I’d have to charge $15.75 a copy which let’s face it, what retailer would pay that much for a book? In the end although Expanded Distribution sounds good … it didn’t make any sense for this book.

On the flip side … at $12.99 a book, if my book was only 360 pages (not 454) I could do the expanded distribution and get a profit of 2 cents a book. Again … what’s the point if I’m only making 2 cents? Andy again, who’d pay $12.99 for a book that was only 360 pages?

Anyway … My goal was to have it out in paperback before the end of the year so it looks like I’ll be meeting that goal. I’ve also started formatting If Love is a Lie so that I can get that one out as well. I don’t expect to sell a whole bunch of books in paperback, but want to be able to have them to sell myself at book fairs this spring.

Along with that, I’m also in the market for a printer to print up promotional bookmarks to have as giveaways at my table at book fairs and also some sort of a banner or sign for my table. Still working on that one.

While doing all of the above, I’ve still been writing my next novel too! No rest for the weary here. I’m about 60-70% of the way done on it. I’m heading up to St. Augustine this Saturday to do some location scouting. I’m thinking of having the big ending there. We’ll see what I find location wise, if anything strikes me enough to write it in the book.

This book I’m working on now I’m not planning on publishing right away. I’m going to use it as my book to send out to agents to see if I can snag me an agent with it. I’ll give it six months. If I haven’t had any interest in that time period, I’ll go ahead and self pub it and move on.

I’ve also written a short story I’d like to submit to literary magazines and contests. I just need to polish it up a little.

So all in all 2015 was a good year. Despite some hardships, I’ve prevailed and am still working on furthering my career in proactive and purposeful ways.

What’s next for 2016? I’d like to get all my books formatted for paperback. I’d like to have signed with a literary agent and be on the way to traditionally publishing my current novel project. I’d like to have been published in a Lit Magazine and have another book self published in my already published series. Will all this happen? Here’s hoping so!

So how was your 2105? Did you accomplish all you set out to?

-Jennifer

Jennifer Geoghan, author of The Purity of Blood novel series and If Love is a Lie: A Partly True Love Story.

I’d love to hear from you! So click on “Leave A Comment” below and let me know what’s on your mind.

28 Oct 2015: Sellin’ it with Book Promo Pictures

So this week, in honor of Halloween, I’m offering the first book in my series, The Purity of Blood, for 99 cents on Amazon. It’s a vampire romance series so the holiday tie in seems logical. But you know how it goes, the best way to say it is to say it with pictures! Pictures are what catch our eye on Facebook and Twitter. So to capitalize on that, whenever I want to promote a special, I troll the internet for pictures that I can manipulate to serve my purposes. In most cases, I alter them on picmonkey.com which is s super cool photo editing website you should definitely check out.

I like to make many different images even for this one week sale. Let’s face it, no one likes to see the same post over and over and over again. Eventually, they’ll just tune it out. So having multiple images to post make sense. I also like to have different ones, like some are funny, some stress romance, some just fall or Halloween. I try to make a picture that would appeal to someone specific in my target audience.

Here are the ones I made this past weekend for my current sale. Oh, yeah, and don’t forget to check out my book while it’s on sale this week!

Jennifer G Novels Cembrating

Now Through Halloween

-Jennifer

Jennifer Geoghan, author of The Purity of Blood novel series, and If Love is a Lie: A Partly True Love Story.

26 Sept 2015: A Great Book … With Poor Promotion :-(

I read a good ebook this week on my Kindle. Not sure how I found it, but it’s call The Marriage Certificate by Stephen Molyneaux.

If you’re a genealogist like myself as well as a writer, it’s got it all. The basics of the story is that the man buys a vintage marriage certificate from an antique shop and decides to figure out who these people were and see if he can find any living descendants of the couple to give the certificate to. The other story in the book takes place back in time and is the real story of that couple. It’s a great book, but ….

When I got to the end of the story, there are no links to his other books or an Amazon author page for me to find out more about the man who wrote such an interesting story. I have to say, I was really disappointed. I searched Amazon and found he had no other books listed so I’m out of luck there. Then I decided to google him. When I did, I found he had a website after all!

http://www.themarriagecertificate.com/

I have to say, the website has some interesting background on how he came up with the idea for the book. If I were him, I’d have written that as A Note From The Author at the back of the book and embed a link to his website as well. Even if he isn’t looking to cross promote other novels he’s written, he could have enhanced his readers experience with that added info at the end of the book and the link would have added photos of the places visited in the book.

Like I said, I really enjoyed this novel. The characters are very engaging, so much so that when they start to die out of no where, I was totally shocked! Anyway, I’m posting about it because it was a great example of a wonderful book that is totally lacking in the promotion department. It’s such an easy thing to do to embed links at the end of your novel. Write up your author Bio and put it in the back. Readers want to know about the person who wrote the book they just read. If it was inspired by actual events as this book was, THEY REALLY WANT TO KNOW THAT! Yes, he has a website, but I had to go off Amazon and my Kindle to google it. I’m afraid that’s not quite good enough these days.

-Jennifer

Jennifer Geoghan, author of The Purity of Blood novel series and If Love is a Lie: Finding and Losing Love Online.

23 July 2015: A Media Kit? What for?

As I mentioned last week, in an attempt to create a more professional “Jennifer Geoghan Novels,” one of my current projects has been to create a media kit to have as a page on my blog.

What’s a Media Kit you ask???

Well, from what research I’ve done, a media kit is designed specifically for members of the media (reporters, bloggers, etc.) It should contain more detailed information than the basic “about me” content on a website as well as have more thorough contact information. Your media kit should provide the media with what they’ll need to do a story on you. Kinda like an interview without the interview. It should include things like:

Author Bios
High res photos of the Author
Jpgs images of Book Covers
Contact Info
List of all books (with ISBNs, length, links to where to buy, etc.)
Synopsis of books
Frequently asked questions & suggested interview questions (Questions and answers listed)
Excerpts from your book/sample chapters
Excerpts from reviews of your books
Awards you’ve won
Past press mentions of you and your works

At first I started working on this as sort of an exercise. I knew I wanted to tune up my Author Bio (the one I had on my Amazon Author page and a few other places) But I have to say that working on this project has been very helpful to me. How helpful it will be to the media … well, that remains to be seen.

It was suggested that you have four different author bios.

One that is 140 characters or less (tweet-able)
A Short Bio (50 words)
A Medium Bio (100 words)
A Long Bio (400 to 600 words)

Personally, I started with the long one and then shortened it down to the shorter versions. While rewriting my bio, I finally understood what a few sources had said about media kits, that’s it’s really about creating a unified message, and directing that message in the way you want the media to present you to the world. Working on my bios made me take long look at another thing I’ve read along that way, and that is that as an Indi Author, I AM MY BRAND. My bio is the description of the Jennifer Geoghan Novels brand. If you’d like to read the new long version bio, click on the About Me tab here on my blog. I’ve updated it. See, my media kit is already coming in handy!

I’ve also been picking out photos of me that represent me as a brand. I’m a romance writer, so I’m thinking they need to have a somewhat romantic feel about them. Am I a single gal who lives alone? Yes, but my brand needs to read a little differently than that. What I write is romance with a twist, unconventional love stories. Not only that, but I firmly believe that romance comes in all shapes, sizes and forms. This is why I like to have two different versions of my novels. So the same story can be enjoyed by folks who enjoy different forms of romance. This is my brand! Yay, know I know how to sell myself!

Right now I’m working on reworking my book blurbs. They’re what I have pasted in my kit so far for a book synopsis, but again, you’re supposed to have a short and long version description of each book. Why? I’m thinking it’s so that a journalist who only wants a two sentence description of the book won’t just take the first two sentences of the long description of your book (you know chopping off the good stuff.) Again, it’s about controlling your message.

Lord, I wish I’d done this so long ago. So that’s my word of advice for today. Start to think about your message, your brand, and how you can use your blog, your Facebook page, your novels, Goodreads, Pinterest, twitter, in short everything to help mold and shape the perception of your brand image as a writer. I guess I knew this on some basic level when I first started publishing, but it wasn’t until I started this media kit exercise that I really saw the big picture come together.

So do you have a media kit? Have you found uses for it? I’d love to hear from you!

-Jennifer

Jennifer Geoghan, Author of The Purity of Blood novels and If Love is a Lie: Finding and Losing Love Online.

5 July 2015: Ancestry.com to promote a book? Huh?

Really this post is about thinking about thinking outside the box when it comes to book promotion. With that in mind, read on …

So I was combing through some old emails I hadn’t gotten to yet when I found one from Ancestry.com saying I had some “Hints,” or possible record matches for some folks in the family tree I built on their site. It was when I clicked on the link and started looking the hints (or leaves as the refer to them on their TV commercials) that it suddenly dawned on me … there was room here to promote my book.

I bet you’re scratching your head over that one …

Yeah, I’d never thought of “advertising” on Ancestry.com … until I remembered that I based two of the main characters of my book series, The Purity of Blood, on my real life ancestors (my 4^th great grandparents in this case). Same names, same facts of their birth, death, marriage, etc. I just fashioned those facts into real people that I brought of the 19th century into today.

How’d I do that? Vampires, or course, Silly!

So on Ancestry, you can write a story about your ancestors, things like items you can’t list with a simple date and place. In the case of my grandparents, I attached a story to their profiles telling that I’d written them into my novels and that if you were reading this, you were my cousin and might enjoy reading more about how I envisioned those grandparents would be as living, breathing characters in my novels. And, oh yeah, they’re available for sale on Amazon. I don’t feel bad about doing this seeing as I really do think they are my target demographic for my books. Anyone who shares Randall and Lois as ancestors I’m sure would really enjoy how I took the time to as accurately as possible pull them from the pages of history books into a story with heart.

By the way, when I posted that item on their profiles in my family tree, a little “Leaf” popped up on everyone on Ancestry.com with my grandparents in their tree as well. It’s a link to that story I wrote …. Talk about direct marketing!

I’m telling you this story because it was an unusual promotion platform.

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!

We all have Facebook. We all have Goodreads, blogs or websites …

But what makes your story, your book special and unique? For my novel series, it was the real life ancestors I wrote into my fictional story. I’d love to hear from you about unusual ways you’ve found to promote your books.

-Jennifer

PS: Don’t forget my latest novel, If Love is a Lie, Finding and Losing Love Online, hit Amazon just this weekend! Check it out:

If Love is a Lie: Finding and Losing Love Online, by Jennifer Geoghan

2 July 2015: Book Launch Promotion Ideas #7: Listing your Platforms

Continuing my series of book promotion ideas leading up to the launch of my new novel, If Love is a Lie, Finding and Losing Love Online, here’s today’s topic: Listing Your Platforms

There are many ways to get the word out, but I never realized how many different ways I could spread that word until I sat down and started to write them out as a list. In many ways, listing your platforms is like listing your blessings.

Here’s my (still growing) list of online platforms I can use to promote my books:

Facebook personal page
Facebook Author Page
Romance Book Facebook pages
Vampire books Facebook pages
Jennifer Geoghan Novels Blog (What you’re kindly taking the time to read right now)
Wells Genealogy Blog (My blog about my genealogy research)
Goodreads
Pininterst
Me.com
LinkedIn
Amazon Author Page
Ancestry.com (I’ll be posting more on this later on)

When I looked at that list I realized I have a lot of work to do. I needed to create a posting schedule and I need to keep up to date on all these sites when the book comes out. Honestly, had I not sat down and made this list, I’d probably have just updated Facebook and this blog.

Now I’m trying to SEE THE BIGGER PICTURE.

I need to update and link these pages together to work for me in unison.

This ends my series of Book Promotion Blog Entries, but I’m still very much a work in progress. Like I said when I first started the series, this is the first time I’m trying to take an organized approach to launching my book. I’m very curious to see if I see better sales as a result of my efforts.

So what about you?

I’d love to hear more idea on how to promote your books, and by books I mean Ebooks. Had I a paper version of my books, I’d have more avenues for promotion, but I haven’t gone down that road yet.

Don’t forget, my latest novel will be released on Amazon tomorrow. Check it out if you love a good romantic thriller!

-Jennifer

30 June 2015: Book Launch Promotion Ideas #5: Engaging your Team

Continuing my series of book promotion ideas leading up to the launch of my new novel, If Love is a Lie, Finding and Losing Love Online, here’s today’s topic: Engaging your Team.

No matter how much of a lone wolf you are, I’d hope you have at least a handful of fans, either friends, family or loyal readers. In my case, I’m lucky enough to have all three. As the sole employee of Jennifer Geoghan Novels, I’m not only the president, but in charge of all promotion of my book.

YUCK! Where’s the help when you need them!

Let’s face it, there’s no way I can do this all by myself. Without that huge marketing department a big box publishing company has at its disposal, my only shot at success is by getting the word out on the street by good old word of mouth. That’s where my team comes in.

TEAM JENNIFER …

Team Jennifer consists of course of my mother! Let’s face it, no one is as big a champion of my wonderful abilities as the woman who brought me into this world. She has no qualms telling people about my books and how good they are. Now if only everyone else would do that!

Other notable members of Team Jennifer are my friends at work. They’re always intersted in what I’ve got cooking and several of them have read my books. They’re also eagerly awaiting the next one.

I also have my outside of work friends, who enjoy my books and love to feel like the get the inside scoop on what’s coming up next with Jennifer Geoghan Novels.

So, sounds like a good Sales Team, doesn’t it??

I’ll be keeping this team up to date not only in person, but on Facebook as well. As the countdown progresses, I’ll be asking them to post on their Facebook pages about my books and asking them to pass the word on. I just have to make sure I give them an engaging message to spread, which of course is the hard part.

Let your friends and family BE YOUR CHAMPIONS!

Give them something tangible to pass on to the rest of their social circle.

So how do you engage your “Team” to get the word out about your latest projects?

Let’s hear from you, after all, we’re all in this together!

-Jennifer

28 June 2015: Book Launch Promotion Ideas #3: The Big Countdown!

Continuing my series of book promotion ideas leading up to the launch of my new novel, If Love is a Lie, Finding and Losing Love Online, here’s today’s topic: The Big Countdown.

Sad as it is to admit, my previous books (The five novels in The Purity of Blood series) all launched with a “Hey, here’s my book. Please buy it,” mentality. I’d never really given much thought into the idea of creating excitement around and leading up to the big day where it goes live on Amazon for sale. I mean, in hindsight that makes perfect sense, but back then, I was thinking like a writer, not a promoter.

Yep, these times they are a changin’ ….

And this old girl had better get up and start changing with those times if she wants to quit that place she goes to Monday through Friday for forty hours a week. You know, that forty hours a week she could have spent writing but was forced to go to in order to pay the rent.

So apparently, thinking like a promoter means creating excitement and anticipation about your book. With that in mind, for this book launch I decided to do a seven day countdown on Facebook. Each day I’m posting a countdown Picture (See below) along with a post about the book and what it can do for the reader.

Yep, you heard me … What it can do FOR THE READER.

I’ll be posting more about that tomorrow, but mainly today I’m talking about creating excitement and a buzz. Get the word out on the street that something is coming … something that they should be looking forward to. Post it far and wide, on Facebook, on your blog, tell your friends, tell your enemies (well, don’t tell them, they’re mean).

When I created my countdown images to post, I tried to be creative and scanned my phone to use as the image on each one. Each image has a scan of a text , a real text sent between me and my scam artist, Antonio, about whom my book is written about.

So where else would you go to spread the word that your book is about to come out? How do you create the excitement to entice folks to want to buy your books?

Let’s hear some good ideas!

-Jennifer

27 June 2015: Book Launch Promotion Ideas #2: Quote Teasers

Continuing my series of book promotion ideas leading up to the launch of my new novel, If Love is a Lie, Finding and Losing Love Online, here’s today’s topic: Book Quote Teasers.

So I’d recently started noticing another author I admire posting on her Facebook page little images with quotes from her novels on them. I liked the idea. Facebook is visual. Let’s face it, you can write out in text form all you like, but what really gets read are posts with pictures. But how many times can you post and re-post you book cover without it getting old … This goes for Pinterest as well.

So her quote images were nice … but the images were a little boring. I had a feeling I could spice that up a little and decided to take a whack at creating my own. I have to say that to do this effectively, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you think about this while you are editing your book.

Why??? You ask???

Well, I’ll tell you why, because it’s a heck of a lot easier to highlight those quotes when you’re deep in the editing process than it is to try to find them after you’re already done. Sure, you can probably think of a few good ones off the top of your head, but the little gems will be harder to find.

Thankfully, I was still editing when I came up with this idea. I kept a little list of them and started fiddling with the best ones I had and searching for good high quality images to pair them with.

THIS IS KEY … The image really needs to match the quote in some way.

Don’t be too literal and don’t be too generic.

I’m not a big fan of showing faces on these images. I like to leave faces to the reader’s imagination.

For my books, the best quotes are usually things like:

A character’s first physical description.
A first kiss.
A point of great conflict.
A point of great revelation.

But always something where I feel I surpassed myself in my descriptive language, where in a handful of sentences, I conveyed a great emotion or impression.

Keep it short!

If your quote is too long, you have to have a small size font and you want it to be a quick easy to read quote, where the book title and author’s name are clearly visible. You want whoever reads it to say “WOW. I want to read the rest of that book!” Based solely on those few sentences.

So, have you tried this? Where do you post them besides Facebook and Pinterest?

-Jennifer

If Love is a Lie, a novel by Jennifer Geoghan

26 June 2015: Book Launch Promotion Ideas #1: Pinterest

Today, I’m starting a countdown series of posts leading up to my book launch next week. In celebration of this launch, I’m going to be posting on my blog along with my daily countdown. These posts will countdown the different ways I’m promoting my book to generate excitement and sales.

Today’s Topic: www.Pinterest.com

I’ll admit I can be a little slow on the social media uptake at times. I’d like to say it’s a generational thing, but really I’m just anti-social (in the best sense of the word, of course) So when I heard people talking about using Pinterest.com to promote your book, I was … confused to say the least. Ever the optimist, I decided to embrace Pinterest and see what happened. Yes, I created a board called “Jennifer Geoghan Novels” and started to pin things to it related to my series, The Purity of Blood novels.

I pinned pictures from the various places the books take place in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, etc. I figured if you were already reading the books, it would be nice to see the places I mentioned in the books. Still … nice as that is, I still wasn’t getting how that was supposed to promote the books to new readers

And then light dawned in the forest ….

Or in the case, I got an email from Pinterest.

In that email, it said that something I’d pinned to my board had been repined to someone else’s board. Humm… That’s when it occurred to me that if I created my OWN pin, one where I could write the caption to the image and not just re-pin something someone else had pinned, that this might be were the promotion aspect came in.

Embracing this idea, I started adding lots of pins, photos in this case, pictures I’d taken of the various places in the books, as well as other images like quotes and the covers of the books.

I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say I posted a photo of the Old Lighthouse Museum where much of my third novel takes place. I’d post the photo with the caption “The Old Lighthouse Museum, Stonington, CT (As mentioned in The Blood that Binds, The Purity of Blood Volume II by Jennifer Geoghan now available on Amazon)” And yes, some of those photos have already been repined and sent out into the great cyber world, hopefully to bring me riches in the form of royalties and the knowledge that I have made the world a better place through the majesty of the written word.

ALSO: once you upload an image, you can click on the “pencil” to edit it. Open it up and you can insert a URL to link the image to a webpage. In my case, I linked the image to the book’s page on Amazon.

I’d love to get your feedback on Pinterest. Have you had success/failure with it? Any ideas to work the site better for promotion? Let’s hear from you!

-Jennifer