Self Publishing

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

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

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

4 Jan 2015: The closest you’ll ever come to being God

The rich people of this world think they’re gods. They think money gives them power, and power gives them control over us. This goes to their heads and makes them crazy. Don’t believe me, just watch the news. But I’m here to tell you, the true gods in this world are writers. Huh? you’re saying as you read this. Yeah, you heard me right.

In this world we live in, we have no control, but in the world I created in my novels, I have complete and total control. I created this world then I populated it with my characters. I created them from the dust of my mind and fashioned them to do as I bid them. They live and die and my whim, their only purpose to please me (and my readers).

Control in the world we live in is an illusion. Here’s a little of how I described it in an excerpt from my third novel.

The Blood that Binds, by Jennifer Geoghan:

“Problem is, control is generally an illusion, isn’t it?”

“How so?”

“In reality, what do we really have control over besides the way we react to things. We certainly can’t control what happens to us or the circumstances we find ourselves in most of the time. It’s nice to think we’re the masters of our own fates, but I think God is the one in ultimate control of things down here …”

Sure, people with money may be able to give you a job and take it away from you, but they have no control over how you react to these life events. They can direct your circumstances, but they can’t direct your reactions. What’s that old saying … something like: Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. But as a writer, the power I wield in my universe is heady sometimes. I mean I’ve killed people!! And I’m not ashamed to admit, I kinda liked it. Death scenes are the best to write. I’ve killed good people and I’ve killed bad people, and you want to hear something??? I’m going to kill again, exactly when you least expect it! At the same time, I’ve created life. I’ve given birth to characters that make me laugh and often make me cry.

So yes, I am the god on my universe. Good thing it’s a fictional one though. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the God of our real one. Sorry, I don’t have time for that. I’m too busy writing. :-}

-Jennifer

1 Jun 2014: The Old Lighthouse Museum, Stonington, CT

So now that book three (The Blood That Binds) has been out for a while, I thought I’d start to post some photos related to its contents. Today I’m sharing some pictures I took inside the Old Lighthouse Museum in Stonington, CT. As my read…ers will know, a lot of the action in Book 3 centers in and around this small museum located in the lovely lighthouse I fell in love with at first sight. The blue door you see is actually the doorway that leads into the backroom where “Roger’s office” is located in my books. All of the other photos are of the ground floor main room of the museum. You should definitely check it out if you’re in the area someday.

The Old Lighthouse Museum, Stonington, CT

28 May 2014: Inspiration inside a Fortune Cookie

Fortunes? Really? Yep, I love reading my fortune out of Fortune Cookies. I even have a little collection of the best ones I’ve pulled out of cookies. I don’t remember how it started, but at some point I decided to challenge myself to see if I could find creative ways to write in some of my favorite fortunes into my books. These two babies are in my recently published Book Three. Can you find where???

Fortune Cookies

Vampires? Yep. And I say, why not?

So a lot of people have asked me “why vampires?” Yes, my books are basically romance books, but they’re really so much more when you get right down to it. They’re the story of Sara and how she deals with all the changes in her life that suddenly rush upon her in the most unexpected ways. It’s not only her romance, but so many other discoveries about who she is that make up the arc of the five books I’ve written in the series. Why vampires? Well, why not? I like vampires, I find them the most interesting of the genre of horror creatures. I remember last year when my friend Jim reading book one, a friend or coworker asked him what he was reading so he explained his role as my editor. His coworker/friend kind of rolled their eyes and said vampires had been done to death. When Jim explained my rather unusual take on them, his friend/coworker was intrigued. Basically, I try to make my vampires as realistic as possible. Yes, they are creatures of fantasy (at least as far as I know) but what if they were real? Somehow I don’t think they’d have the ability to transform into bats or have sparkly skin in the sunlight. I thought long and hard about what characteristics they’d have and came up with my own very different take on them as a species. Yes, but why vampires at all? Ok, the premise was how to write a book where I could take my real life ancestors and somehow intertwine them into a modern story …. This is all I’m going to say on this subject because if you want the full explanation, you’re just going to have to read the books. So, why vampires? Well, they just solved a lot of my problems, metaphorically speaking that is.