Random Acts of Publicity (Giveaways!)

This week is all about Random Acts of Publicity! One of the hardest things in publishing is getting your books FOUND. So a few years ago, author Darcy Pattison came up with the great idea to randomly shout about the books/authors we love.
     And there are GIVEAWAYS!!!
     September 9: Guest Dana Lynn Smith: How to Get Your Book Reviewed by Dana Lynn Smith of The Savvy Book Marketer. www.thesavvybookmarketer.comOne-day chance for you to enter your Friend to win a FREE copy of How to Get Your Book Reviewed by Dana Lynn Smith
     ALL WEEK: Post your Friend’s name/book title on the Facebook page for Random Acts of Publicity to be entered to win a FREE The Book Trailer Manual by Darcy Pattison. One ebook given away daily; must post Friend’s name that day to be eligible and you can post it each day if you like. (Today is the last day - so get thee to facebook!)
     Twitter: Use #RAP2011
     My current fave? CLEOPATRA'S MOON by Vicky Alvear Shecter!
     What's YOUR favorite book right now? Give it some love in my comments!

#KidlitPRChat - transcript

We had a great first twitter chat last night at #KidlitPRChat as we talked about "Author Platform" - Building an Author Platform. What it is, and how to do it and what should you avoid? Couldn't stop by? You can find the transcript at http://bit.ly/rbO2GR.

Come join my Twitter Chat on Self Promotion!

Announcement! Authors Katie Davis, Dianne de las Cassas, and Elizabeth O. Dulemba will be hosting a twitter chat every first Wednesday of the month from 6 pm to 7 pm EST to discuss ways to promote yourself and your books. The twitter tag will be #kidlitPRChat and the first one will be held Wednesday, September 7th.
     Did you enjoy my article "Marketing - the Snowball Effect", "Blog Book Tours", or "Build an Easy Website (Using a blog)"? Or maybe you've attended some of my conference talks on "Online Promotion for Authors and Illustrators"? If so, this is the tweet chat for you! Because I know NOTHING compared to Katie and Dianne and you are sure to learn tons.
     And while I've dropped in on twitter chats from time to time, this is the first time I'm helping to host one. So please visit - ask questions - maybe learn a thing or two. Hope to see you there!

Writing is Hard: Constructing a logline.

Image hijacked from Ancestry.com.

In the 17th century, a log-line was the way ships measured their speed. It's also where the nautical term "knots" comes from, but that's not what I'm talking about right now. I just thought that was cool.

The logline I'm talking about is the writing term: a brief synopsis of the story that summarizes the main character and the story's hook. According to Wikipedia, it started as a labeling system for Hollywood studios to easily identify and remember what scripts were about, but developed into a pitching tool. Not only for people pitching projects to producers, but also for pitching completed products to audiences - like the blurbs in TV Guide or DVR descriptions.

I don't know how much the term is used in the publishing industry, but the concept is certainly there. Writing a great pitch or query letter is a vital skill for writers, though one that a lot of new writers admit to having a problem with. How do you condense a novel or comic series into a one-sentence summary?

There's a really useful article on Scriptshadow that explains how to do just that. The boiled down version is this: "A good logline...gives us the main character, the main character’s goal, and the central conflict in the story (what’s preventing them from getting that goal)." There's a lot more to it than that and writer Carson Reeves makes it simple, including examples from famous movies. If you're a writer and unsure about how to hook an editor or agent with a pitch, it's important reading.

Come to think of it, it's good to have a logline even if you've self-published and are trying to sell your stuff online or at conventions. In the business world, it's called the Elevator Pitch: how you would describe your product to someone in the few seconds of time you have traveling with them in the elevator. I've been to a lot of conventions, traveled a lot of Artist Alleys, and heard a lot of sales pitches from independent comics creators. Most of them would have benefited by a strong logline.

It's also useful long before you get to the sales stage of your product. It's great for making sure you've constructed a good story in the first place. If you don't have a main character with goals and something that's preventing her from achieving those goals, you really don't have a story at all.

Elsewhere... Best Comics of 2010

Hm. I should've done this yesterday to follow up the movies posts, but bucking years of tradition (and contrary to my earlier prediction), I came up with a list of my ten favorite comics from 2010. I share that link with the other Robot 6eteers, so there are lots of great comics to be discovered there. And for even more comics recommendations, check out Comic Book Resources' Top 100 list. I got to do a few of the write-ups for those too.

It's kind of interesting, I guess, that not all the books I picked for Tom Spurgeon's year-end Five for Friday made it into my final list, but there are a couple of reasons for that. First is that Five for Friday's rules require fast thinking and I never do my best thinking quickly. But I also took to heart Spurgeon's criterion that we simply list five books that we liked without having to take into account their quality relative to everything else we read during the year.

Anyway, you can easily guess my Number One pick and I did a full review of it for Robot 6. I also managed to squeeze in another critical favorite before the end of the year, Charles Burns' X'ed Out. And to start 2011 off, I questioned how much of the Silver Age should really be a model for adventure comics today.

One final piece that I'm pretty happy with is the interview I did with Archaia's Editor-in-Chief Stephen Christy and the creators of Mouse Guard (David Petersen) and Return of the Dapper Men (Jim McCann and Janet Lee) about the sell-outs of Dapper Men and the Mouse Guard spin-off, Legends of the Guard. As I say in the interview's intro, I usually ignore press releases about sell-outs, but Archaia's a great company and at their C2E2 panel I was impressed with how honest and forthcoming they are about their business strategies. Enough so that I felt like this was an opportunity to learn more about what selling out really means - at least for them as a small publisher - and what they did as a company and creators to make that happen. They were even more open and helpful than I hoped and I learned a lot. Hopefully readers will find something enlightening and interesting in the interview too.

Writing is Hard: Marketing 101

RM Rhodes is a comics creator who's married to a marketing manager. He talks about what he's learned from her in this very helpful post.

In addition to advice on bare-minimums like having a decent website (Facebook doesn't count), business cards, and an elevator pitch, he also talks about how to be memorable at conventions. And he touches on the topic of making sure you're memorable in an way that reflects your work. Rhodes wears a purple suit to conventions and that helps him stand out from other creators who are usually dressed in what he calls "hipster business casual," but he admits that "nobody knows much about the content that I produce – they just know the suit." I'll look forward to reading his thoughts as he continues to figure that out.

Writing is Hard: When to Do What

Pimp My Novel is a great blog about the publishing business from a Sales perspective. Recently, blogger Eric re-ran a post about what you can do to sell your book, and more importantly, when you should do what. It's not only informative, but as you read through his timeline it's also fun to imagine all those book deals and promotional tours you're going to get once you sit your butt down and finish the dang novel.