If Love is a Lie

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.

13 July 2015: The best part about being an author

I think the most rewarding part about being an author, I mean the part that makes all the hard work and time sacrificed worth it, is when I get positive feedback from my readers. Sometimes that’s just a friend I haven’t seen in years telling me they stayed up till 3am just to finish one of my books, that it was so good they couldn’t put it down till they knew how it ended.

Really, as a writer, is there anything better than that?

Last week I had a friend say something a little different to me. She was about half way through If Love is a Lie and said that having read what she’d read so far, she got it. Got what you ask? Well, she finally understood how a man like Antonio wormed his way into my affections so quickly. As I’ve mentioned before, the first half of my novel is almost the gospel truth of what happened to me with my Match.com dating scammer. At the time, I knew my friends thought we were rushing into a relationship, but when you’re swept up in the romance of it all, you don’t see that. So when a person who had watched my relationship with Antonio from the outside said not only that she got it, but she probably would have reacted the same way too, it was a real treasure to hear. For two reasons really.

First because I apparently wrote it out well enough that she was seeing the events through my eyes. I have to imagine for someone who is actually a character in the book (yes, she was so close to the events in the novel, I had to make her a character) that it would be harder to step back and see things from my protagonist’s point of view.

Secondly because I now have a sense of peace knowing that I wasn’t just me. Antonio was good, real good. In the end, his real problem was that he came up against a suspicious ex-New Yorker. But still, it’s nice to hear that she likes the book and understands where me/my protagonist Emily could have fallen for old Antonio’s lines.

Anyway, if you’d like to find out more, check out If Love is a Lie on Amazon. Click on the book covers below to be taken to their pages on Amazon.

It comes in two different versions. A PG version (The green cover) and a NC-17 version (The purple cover)

-Jennifer

If Love is a Lie: Finding and Losing Love Online (The Spicy Version), by Jennifer Geoghan

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

11 July 2015: Two things I learned this week

Since I like to pass on what I’m learning on my long road to becoming America’s best-selling novelist … I thought I’d share two things I’ve learned from my book launch last week.

#1: Don’t launch both versions of the book at the same time.

Seems folks have been buying the wrong version of the book, or should I say not the one they intended to buy. Folks have been buying the PG version, when they meant to buy the Spicy version. In retrospect, I think I should have realized this would happen. It did to a lesser extent with the launch of my last novel as well, but not to the extent this one did.

Lesson I learned: Next time, do two book launches at least a week apart. Would also help draw out the launch celebration.

#2: I didn’t get my act together in enough time to do preorders …

With all the time I poured into creating the excitement for the launch, I never looked into getting preorders set up on Amazon until it was too late. Seems you have to have your manuscript uploaded at least 10 prior to the book launch date. I went on 5 days ahead.

Lesson I learned: You need to have the book finished and ready to go well ahead of your launch date. At least 14 days, 21 would be better. Will give you enough time to upload on KDP and still start the marking blitz leading up to launch and manage to capture preorders while you’re spending all the time marketing.

Alas, I learn more with every book I put out there. I get frustrated when I make mistakes, but I also feel encouraged that I now have a new piece of the puzzle that I didn’t before. Hopefully, if you’re reading this, you won’t make the mistakes I did. Would be nice to think I’m helping others.

-Jennifer

PS: Saw this item in the back of my Entertainment Weekly this week. Thought my fellow writers and readers would enjoy.

9 July 2015: …. So Now What?

So I launched my latest project last week, If Love is a Lie. Sigh … always a big weight off your shoulders when you reach that point where you can’t tinker with the book anymore. And if I’m anything, it’s a tinkerer.

So what’s next?

A good question. Right now I’ve got a couple of things going on. First off, I decided to put a hold on starting to pound out my next novel. Instead I wanted to concentrate on the first book in my series, The Purity of Blood. As stated above, I’m a tinkerer, and of all my books, the first one seems to need a little tune up the most. Besides retooling the cover, I wanted to make sure the book was a tight as possible, because …. I want to try to get it reviewed. I have to say I’ve never tried to get any of my books reviewed before, and since I’ve changed my mind-set to a business oriented one when it comes to my writing career, it’s time to kick up my game to the next level.

On that train of thought, my other project is putting a media kit together. A media kit is meant to provide the media, bloggers, or anyone else interested with the basic at a glance facts of your life, career, novels, etc.. Sounds easy enough to put together, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I started working on it last night and I’m sure will be doing a few blog posts on my progress.

So … do you have a media kit? Do you find it helpful? I’d love to hear anyone’s opinions on the subject.

-Jennifer

Don’t forget to check out my latest novel, If Love is a lie, now available on Amazon. Click on the image below for a link to the novel on Amazon.

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

4 July 2015: The Florida Writers Association – What I learned

This past week, I attended a meeting for the Florida Writers Association over in Winter Park, FL. I’d never been to any sort of association meeting like that before and really enjoyed being in an atmosphere that wreaked of writing!

Basically, we started out by going around the room introducing ourselves. Most folks were aspiring writers, maybe a little less experienced than me. Let’s say they were Freshman in the School of Hard Literary Knocks, where as I’m more of a Sophomore. Some had published their works, others were looking to learn how to get started. Others were already publishing and doing quite well at it.

The speaker, Ben Hale, an author and publisher was very interesting. Here’s a few things I took away from his talk:

I’m doing a lot better than I thought … and a lot worse …

How’s that? The Good: Well, I’m actually plugging away at my writing without letting anything stand in my way. I write – write – write like a little fiendish little writing demon. The Bad: I waited to really get down and dirty in the trenches of marketing and promotion of my books until just now … yes BOOK SIX!!! I should have started with Book 1. But, you live and learn, and I learned it’s never to late to start.

I might want to think about redesigning the cover of my first novel.

Ben said something to the effect that when you’re writing your novel, you can get all emotional about it, but the day you have a completed manuscript, you no longer have a baby, you have a product that you now have to sell. Yes, I like the cover of my first novel, but it’s not eye-catching enough for the person scrolling though all those other books on Amazon. It needs work. I’m also thinking about renaming the series. Here’s the good part, since I didn’t really do much by way of marketing on them, there’s not much to be undone by rebranding the whole series, covers, titles, etc. Talk about a downside having an upside!

Writing for a smaller niche market means you have less competition.

There are hundreds of thousands of romance novels on Amazon. Why would someone pick mine? Well … besides the fact that they’re awesome, I mean 🙂 If you search just “Romance Novels,” you’ll have to sift through more books than you can shake your Kindle at, but if you search for “Cat Mystery Novels,” as Ben explained, and that’s what you’re writing, your only other competition on Amazon is going to be the one other lady up in Peekaboo, WA penning them on her back porch. A LOT LESS COMPETITION for you. No, as intriguing as it sounds, I’m not about to start writing cat mystery novels, but I am about to start thinking about how I can gear my novels towards a smaller pool of readers that I’m more likely to capture the attention of.

Audio book? Of my little ole’ book?

Yep, Amazon has a side company that will do all the recording for you. Whoda Thunk! They actually came up with another way to make money off of us lowly authors! You can either pay for the studio time to get it recorded and get more royalties, or let them take on the expense of recording it and take less royalties. Either way, they produce it for you. You can send them a sample of your book and they will send you samples of different narrators you can choose from. Ben’s good advice if considering this option was to pick a narrator not so much based on how wonderfully they read your book, but also to consider the following that particular narrator already has. Seems some audio book narrators have fans and people will seek out books to hear that narrator read them. If you get a narrator with a following, that following will see your book as an option to buy when the search him out. Here’s the website for this: http://www.acx. com

Sprechen sie Deutsch?

If you want to get your book into foreign markets, one of the best ways is to get it translated into another language. when I asked Ben what languages were the best for say a romance novel, he said to see where your international sales were coming from. If I have sales in Germany, German might be the way to go. Don’t speak German? Cause I know I don’t, well here’s a company that will do it for you: http://www.babelcube. com

Well that was the highlights of what I learned, which as you can see was quite a bit. They have this meeting once a month and I think I’ll be becoming a regular attendee.

-Jennifer

Author of the novel If Love is a Lie: Finding and Losing Love Online. Now available on Amazon along with her other fine and underappreciated novels. 🙂

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

3 July 2015: A Writer’s Favorite Day – Book Launch Day!

Yep, I think any writer will tell you that their favorite day is the day they have a new book hit the market, and for this old girl, that’s TODAY!!! Yep, If Love is a Lie, Finding and Losing Love Online, hit Amazon this morning. There are two different versions of the book for sale. The regular version, and “The Spicy Version.”

It’s a romantic thriller at heart, but a romance none the less, and I did two versions to satisfy two different Romance Reader types. Those who like a little more spice in their romance, and those who prefer a little more fade to black when things start to heat up. Hence the regular, PG version, and the Spicy Version, a bit more NC-17 plus. 😉

Still, why do two versions of the same book?

Funny you should ask, but it only takes a few hours to make the modifications if while you’re editing the original version, you highlight the racy bits and bobs.

But enough to this, now it’s time to celebrate! To check out my book, you can click on the book cover images below to be taken to the book’s page on Amazon. PURPLE = The Spicy Version. GREEN = The Regular Version.

If Love is a Lie: Finding and Losing Love Online (The Spicy Version), by Jennifer Geoghan

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

IF LOVE IS A LIE …. Love is never as easy to find as we wish it would be. When Emily started her online romance with Antonio, a man who seemed to be the one she’d been waiting for all her life, she had no idea what sinister motives lied behind the photos of Antonio’s amazing brown eyes. Blinded by her own desires for romance and companionship, she embraced the lie and ignored the truth of her persistent suspicions of his motivations. What will she do when she learns her great love is nothing more than a scammer, not after her heart, but her money? With revenge her only motive, she sets out on an adventure to bring Antonio down and see him punished for what he’s done to her. But when she’s forced to confront him face to face, will she ultimately find love in his arms, or in Evan’s, the sexy but stoic FBI Agent who enlists her to bring Antonio to justice?

Loosely based on the author’s own unfortunate online romance with a scam artist she mistook for the man of her dreams, the first half of this novel mirrors the author’s own journey to the startling truth of her paramour’s guilt. In life it’s true that we can’t all have happy endings, but though we can’t live them, sometimes we can write them for ourselves.

The real question is … in this case, is truth stranger than fiction?

IT’S HERE!! If Love is a Lie, by Jennifer Geoghan

1 July 2015: Book Launch Promotion Ideas #6: Emails … Emails … Emails …

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: Emails … Emails … Emails …

Coming a little late to the promoting party, I don’t have a Jennifer Geoghan Novels official email list yet. I started the process of collecting emails with mailchimp.com, but don’t really have enough to do get my quarterly newsletter off the ground yet. That said, that doesn’t mean I don’t have an email list.

As part of what I posted yesterday about engaging your team, I went through my personal email contact list and created a group. I put in that group friends and family far and wide that I thought would respond well to receiving an email asking for help.

HELP THE STARVING WRITER!

In my email, I’ll give them the book blurb and cover image. Above that I’ll tell them that I’m releasing my latest novel and was wondering if I could ask them to forward my email to anyone they had in their contact list who might like to read a good book with a great message. Some friends and family will be happy to help you out …. Some will not. I think we all know who those people are. (Yes, I mean you Uncle Joe! … no, I don’t really have an Uncle Joe … but we all have a few ‘Uncle Joe’s” in our lives.)

Heck, there’s no harm in asking for help. Worst that happens is that they delete your email and forget about it. I think most will forward it on to at least one person.

I added 136 names to my email list. If they all forwarded it to just one other person, then I reached 272 people with the links for my book. If they forward to two people, that’s 408.

It’s about getting the WORD ON THE STREET! And emails are a great way if written in such a way as to ASK for help, not demand it.

So what do you think? Do you think most friends will help promote you books to the outside world? DO you utilize your personal email list in lieu of an “Official” opted in list?

-Jennifer

29 June 2015: Book Launch Promotion Ideas #4: What I Can do For You

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: What I Can Do For You.

If Love is a Lie, my newest novel is about the woes of internet dating, and as an experienced internet dater, I can tell you one of my turn offs are guys who start out by writing “I don’t know what to say about myself.” Or “I hate talking about myself.” Gee, don’t those sound like charming dinner companions?

There’s a fine line between these guys and that other charming of men, those who’d say “I’m the best guy you’ll ever meet and you’d be lucky to go out with me.” But as a writer who’s forced to also be her own promoter, you have to find a way to tell your readership how great your books are, while at the same time not sounding like you think you’re Hemingway incarnated.

I mean, I know I’m a wonderful storyteller. I know I can write like nobody’s business. But no one wants to hear how great I am or even how great I think my books are, they want to hear what my books will do for them.

As a promoter, I’m a salesman, and every salesman will tell you, you sell an item based on what it can do for the buyer, not what the buyer can do for the seller.

So what can my book do for the reader, you ask???

Good question. Here’s some answers to that question:

Be enthralled in an excellent story.
Be educated on the horrors of scam artists on dating sites.
Learn my true life story as the first half of the book is based on my own personal experiences. (This means I’m giving them permission to be nosey and who doesn’t like that!)
Experience a happy ending. (This is pretty big on my list for book experiences. It’s all about the ending, baby!)

What can my book do for you? This is an important question to ask yourself about your own book. How will my book make the reader happy or give them the experience they desire? When you figure that out and also an effective way to say it, you’re much closer to making sales then just yelling from the top of your lungs on Facebook “I’m Great!!! Buy my Book!!”

So what about your book? How do you sell to your audience given the parameters of what it can do for them? I’d love to hear from you!!

-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

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