Month: May 2018

I often write a blog post to clarify my own thinking, and that's the case for this one. It's meant to be a spur to my own thinking about what works for me in marketing. A recent marketing workshop excerpt from Larissa Reynolds was the catalyst that finally did it for me (see here to subscribe to her newsletter).

Now, when I say “what works”, I don't mean what marketing ideas, out of the vast array available, work for people, or produce the best results. What I mean is what works for me, as in something I can do comfortably and that I can reasonably have a hope of sticking to, that has measurable and useful results.

It's taken years for me to clarify my understanding of how various marketing ideas work, and which ones I, personally, should concentrate on. I've been groping towards this for a long time.

Premises

I have my own goals and standards that define how I want to run my business, and I have personal limitations and enthusiasms to accommodate. Your situation will be different

I want to sell my books at a reasonable full price (with very occasional discounts), because that's the audience I want to cultivate.
I want to sell my books on the basis of quality — good reading experience, indistinguishable in quality from traditional publishers.
I want my books to be available with the widest possible reach (countries, retailers, formats), with no DRM. If people look for my books, they should be able to find them anywhere, for any device, and my career should not be held hostage to any one retailer or country. This includes direct ecommerce.
I'm not really a people person. I like to help and I can tell funny stories, but I'm lousy at jumping into a social situation as an extrovert. I'm more of a high-functioning introvert.
I want to execute semi-automatic systems as much as possible. I'm an old IT career person, and I'm very comfortable with systems. I don't have the discipline to keep doing ad hoc experiments, but I have no problem going through the detailed (obsessive) concentration necessary to set something automated up.

Analysis

So, what does this mean for me?

For one thing, it rules out a broad variety of interesting marketing ideas that clutter up my thinking:

Wanting to price permafree — wrong audience for me to cultivate.
Wanting to focus on Amazon KU — wrong reach (not wide), captive retailer.
Discounted sales third-party newsletter marketing — wrong audience for me to cultivate, and a huge distraction.
Participating in bundles and similar multi-author promotions for free — wrong audience for me to cultivate, and I mostly write long-form, not stories.
Marketing/review swaps with other authors. I'd rather cultivate my own audience and not spam them.
Widespread social media platforms, pushing my books — not extroverted enough to make that palatable (banging on about my books).

What do I want to do instead?

May 24, 2018

Karen Myers

2 Comments

Beared again

Posted in A Writer's Desk

Bear'd last night, and bear'd the night before,
Gonna get bear'd tonight like we never got bear'd before,
When we're bear'd, we're trashed as trashed can be;
Our bears are members of the black bear family. *

Just two days ago I took this picture of our tidy array of bird feeders, in a photo essay about our 10-month-old puppy.

Here's what they looked like this morning.

Now, usually the black bears wake up hungry in early-mid spring and raid bird feeders (and garbage cans) before settling in to more natural food sources, and we had a visit from one a few weeks ago, right on schedule. We thought it was a young one, since it wasn't very competent. The red feeder (on the right) which came with the cabin suffered some damage but we repaired it and set everything to rights again.

This bear was rather more serious, and awfully late in the season, but then we had a very long winter, and heavy rains for weeks may have suppressed some of the usual food choices. Yesterday was the first day of uninterrupted sunshine in quite a while. Our neighbors have reported a sighting of a sow with four cubs in the area (one for each feeder?).

The dogs are always interested in the scent after a bear visit.

I picked up a camera to document the damage, and on the way back in the puppy did a cautious stalk on the slope behind the cabin. I thought he was disconcerted by the bees which were buzzing about in solitary fashion, but a closer look revealed a nice harmless Eastern garter snake slithering along — about 18 inches long and very slender.

Every now and then, one makes its way into the cabin and is evicted, with prejudice. The puppy who is usually scentless smelled musky a couple of days ago, and I'll bet he met a similar snake then and got sprayed, making him cautious now. When last seen, he was out back, working the back trail of the snake (hey, he's young and dumb) and not ready to give up yet.

Book Catalogues

Posted in Just for Writers

In this day and age, we generally refer interested buyers to our online catalogues, either on our publisher sites or our reader sites. Some potential buyers, however, still want paper catalogues, and we need to learn to accommodate them. They also make nice additions to your table at a book fair, or to have stashed away in case you spawn a commercial opportunity with a distributor or other professional.

Now, if you're trying to contact dozens or hundreds of such outlets — perhaps you're trying to reach every music shop in America — it can make sense to use a commercial service, where for quantities of a few hundred, you can pay a dollar or two for each catalogue (depending on page counts, etc).

For example, the high-quality printers I use for business cards offer catalogues, designed for all kinds of retail needs, not just books. Play around with the pricing options here to get some ideas about the costs for an 5.5×8.5 inch catalogue, on the sort of paper stock that you typically receive from quality clothing retailers.

I don't find this helpful for my needs, myself. For one thing, I haven't got a mass distribution list that I can use for my fiction titles (unless I want to do a mailing directly to indie bookstores). More importantly, my catalogue:

Adds new titles frequently, multiple times/year
Never closes backlist titles
May need to address foreign languages

This means that I can't benefit from the economies of scale inherent in a professional mass print job.

May 17, 2018

Karen Myers

2 Comments

Writing with a puppy in the house

Posted in A Writer's Desk

Image of taigan puppy in snow — The bold Hussar (6 months)

We have no children, but I have immense respect for the authors I know who manage to write while babies and toddlers are under their care. I don't know how they do it.

All of my pets are older than my writing career, but last September we got a puppy to keep our other dog company, after the death of an older dog. My writing has come to an almost complete stop since.

We have friends with exotic Asian sighthounds, and when litters happen, they think of us. Our older dog, Uhlan, is a tazi, one of many names for the country-of-origin dogs that run from North Africa to western China from whom the Saluki is derived. His parents are from Kazakhstan. So when an opportunity arose for us to take in a taigan, a country-of-origin version of the Afghan hound from Kyrgyzstan, from the first litter bred in America, we signed right up and called him Hussar (as in “the bold Hussar” of the song — boy, we got that right).

We read up on how he could be expected to be about the size of the tazi, who is 70 pounds, and envisioned the two of them racing across the fields, one slender, and one more robust.

Image of two dogs — Hussar (3 months) and Uhlan

Heh. He kept growing. And growing. And GROWING.

At first, Uhlan kept him in line, as befit an 8-year old dog with a proper sense of his own worth and prerogatives. Lots of snarling and fangs, and desperate puppy dodges when the play bows proved to be insufficient excuse for outrageous behavior.

At this point, they more or less get along, except that Hussar is still a puppy, at 9 1/2 months, and terribly eager to get his older brother to play with him on any and every excuse. They pursue chipmunks in the log pile with equal zeal.

And he weighs 90 pounds, with no end in sight. That's about double the size you see him at in most of these pictures.

May 14, 2018

Karen Myers

Report from the Altoona Bookfest

Posted in Events

Some day I will learn to take a decent photo with a cellphone. You'd never know I've been a semi-pro photographer (with real equipment).

The anticipated outdoor festival with music and dancers was prudently relocated to 3 internal floors of the Altoona, PA library, and when the skies opened in mid-afternoon, we were all very glad. On the one hand, the venue was rather less pleasant; on the other hand, no one's books were soaked. Considering this was the first occasion for this particular festival, I thought the organizers rose well to the challenge.

The 8-foot tables were expansive (many authors were geared up for 6′) but, alas, I forgot my props to make the display more interesting.

There were 51 local authors (regional to central Pennsylvania), which covered a surprising number of genres, and both traditionally as well as independently published writers, at various stages of their careers.

Quite a few people attended, and there was traffic all day long. Though I wasn't surprised to see a couple of people I had encountered from other activities (speaking at a local writers' group), I was stunned to meet 3 local readers who actually recognized my name or the names/covers of some of my books. There was even one who spoke to me at length about an audiobook (and I have some idea just how unlikely that was, considering its obscurity.)

You meet people at book festivals that are a different cross-section of potential readers than you deal with the rest of the time. A great many did not do ebooks. Except for kids with indulgent parents, not many carried around armfuls of purchases. Budgets were in evidence everywhere (lots of proposals to do book swaps). In fact, I had a purchase after my books were boxed up and on the dolly at the exit door from someone who had wanted to buy the book earlier, but only just had a sale herself so she could now afford to do so. (Bless her — hope she enjoys it!)

Even when these affairs are barely profitable, they are useful for other reasons, particularly networking. I spoke with several people about indie publishing, got a good lead for where I can consign excess inventory when I change the covers on the Chained Adept series, and (best of all) found out about a distributor who would be a good fit for me at unusual outlets like gift shops, truck stops, etc. (once I figure out how to make a physical book catalogue of the right quality without paying a fortune).

May 8, 2018

Karen Myers

2 Comments

Evaluating your business

Posted in Business, and Just for Writers

As authors and publishers, we hear a lot about new tools intended to improve the performance of our business in areas like marketing, formatting, distribution, outsourcing, and so forth.

What I'd like to see more of is articles about how to evaluate our businesses, to look upon our activity as authors and publishers just as if we were a small factory.

What that means is being able to ask questions like these:

Is our business model sound?
Is it improving over time?
Is it covering all of our costs, including those not specific to individual titles?
Are we actually making a profit, and how long should we expect that to take, after starting the business?

It's not just a matter of counting our sales at the end of the year.

What's the point of financial analysis?

An Income Statement isn't just a tedious document that old-style businesses put together — when done right, it's vital and important information to help you direct your spending and efforts.

I've been a Chief Operating Officer and a Chief Financial Officer for several small-medium businesses, both public and private — all of them young (1-10 years old). I'll use accounting terminology from the USA business world, but all countries do similar things though the terms may vary.

I'll focus on three ways to look at our businesses, and the data we need to support that.

1. Gross income — your business model

When we start as indie authors, we generally focus on the creation of work to publish (I'll call that “books” or “titles”, whatever you may be writing), and the delivery of that work to distribution and retail publishing channels.

Over time, many of us develop additional ways to earn income. As an example, I have the following channels today, in various stages of maturity:

Creation and sale of 24 titles (my own books)
Publication of titles for others (publishing work, several imprints)
Consulting work for colleagues
Speaking engagements

Each of these is a “line of business”, with its own costs and income. Some are relatively predictable while others are not, but all can be grown by marketing, if that seems like a worthwhile investment.

May 3, 2018

Karen Myers

Prairie Home Companion and the origins of Perkunas Press

Posted in Events, Harmonious Companions, and Volume 1

I originally posted this on Facebook back on Dec 9, 2017, when Garrison Keillor got dropped down the memory hole, allegedly for some sort of “conduct unbecoming.” I thought I should reproduce it here, since it was my first sale of the first book published by Perkunas Press, in the spring of 1993. (And the only book so published for almost 20 years.)

Keillor's show that year was called something else, the title of which escapes me, but he went back to his older title (Prairie Home Companion) later.

I guess my 15 minutes of fame back in 1993 on Garrison Keillor's show has been erased along with every artist who ever performed for him, in the grand auto-da-fé that has consumed all his works.

Seems a bit much… Like the Lord Dunsany character who so offended the gods that they caused him not only not to be, but never to have been.

Back in the 80s and 90s, I wrote out a lot of 2-4 part traditional/collegiate songs which my post-college friends and I sang from. I collected 100 of them and did a nice songbook, then self-published it in 1993 from the newly-founded Perkunas Press. Several hundred of them are still in storage. Info here and here.

(I still have the original sheets — maybe I'll reissue it sometime. But there's no demand for that sort of thing these days.)

I sent out a mailer when the book was available, and Minnesota Public Radio returned with an order, and then invited me to the show in St. Paul, where Garrison & I led his chorus in 3 of the songs.

It was quite a hoot standing around backstage watching all the incredible regular musicians and sound effects professionals doing their jobs.

At the time, I was doing a weekly stint for a traditional folk music show at a public radio station (“WMNR, Fine Arts Radio, 88.1 on your FM dial”) in Monroe, Connecticut, so it wasn't that unusual for people in the local grocery store to recognize my voice. But coming back from the Garrison Keillor show and being asked for a signature in the hotel elevator by someone from the audience was a new first.

I've got arrangements for a couple of hundred more tunes, but alas no audience. Any singers out there?