My Alternative to Blog Tours: Two Week Vacations
One of the reasons I was hesitant go the traditional route in publishing was the horror stories I had heard about book tours, from my friends who were published authors and from authors’ blogs. (You know, the headaches of organizing tours, the long car rides, bad hotels, bad food, and hard-to-find venues, and the embarrassing book signings where no one shows up or those who show don’t buy any books.) However, when I decided to self-publish, which meant that my books would be sold primarily as ebooks, on line, I discovered that a new method of marketing had emerged, called the Virtual Book Tour, or the Blog Tour. I first read about this in an informative piece on Publetariat in 2009 called What’s A Book Blog Tour? In the past few years, doing a blog tour when you launch your Read more…
Podcast Review and Interview on Maids of Misfortune and Self-Publishing
Jane and Mark Kalmes have done a lovely Podcast Review of Maids of Misfortune and then followed up with an Podcast Interview with me that discusses the writing of this book and my experiences with self-publishing. The review can be heard at http://www.indiebookpodcast.com/2011/11/02/mystery-maids-of-misfortune/ The interview comes in the second half of a podcast found at http://www.indiebookpodcast.com/2011/11/14/thriller-this-is-life/ Hope you find these podcasts of interest. M. Louisa
Categories, Key Words, and Tags, Oh My: Why should an Author Care?
Two weeks ago I published my second historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, and in the process I was reminded of how confusing it can be to determine the best category and key words I should use on Amazon to describe my book. Since there are several other authors who have been wrestling with the same question in the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative (HFAC) that I belong to, I decided to write this post on how to use categories and keywords to maximize ebook sales. For the purpose of this post I am focusing on ebooks on Amazon, in part because that is where I have the most experience, but also because Amazon is definitely ahead of the other ebook stores in its sophisticated approaches to helping readers find books. My understanding of these issues is based on my experience as a Read more…
My Book Ate My Blog
I ran across an excerpt of this interesting post entitled “My Book Ate my Blog” by Sophie Perinot on the Passive Voice blog (which if you haven’t discovered the Passive Guy yet, run right over and check him out!), about the difficulties of balancing the demands of maintaining a blog while trying to write. The comments on her site, and on the Passive Voice, were filled by people who agreed that blogging was taking them away from writing or how hard it was to maintain a balance. As I thought about my own history of blogging, I found an interesting pattern had emerged. First of all, I am not a prolific blogger. For the whole time I have been blogging (21 months) I have produced only 40 blog posts-counting this one (which means an average of 1.9 posts a month). My blog Read more…
Writing Full Time: What does it look like to you?
I haven’t written a post in some time, because I was working furiously to finish the first draft of Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to Maids of Misfortune, my historical mystery set in 1879 San Francisco. The manuscript is now out to my first set of beta readers, I have just finished a week of family visits and entertaining my grandchildren, and, to keep from obsessing over whether my beta readers will like the new novel, I thought I would try to take stock of my writing process. I was particularly interested in looking at my own speed after the lively discussion on blogs this past month over this topic prompted by Dean Wesley Smith’s post on writing four novels a year. Last fall I made the decision to retire completely from teaching (see this post) and start to work on my Read more…
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