New Book Tour Class

I graduated from the Blog Book Tour class in May 2009. Wanting to keep what I learned fresh in my mind as I worked toward my own Book Tour, I agreed to teach a class on Virtual Book Tours to fellow authors of Wings ePress. I had such a good time teaching the class, I decided to continue on teaching.

Next session will begin February 1, 2010. A minimum of 20 students required. The 8 week class includes what is a Blog or Virtual Book Tour, how to manage your time and plan a tour, find tour stops, care and feeding of hosts, preparation of tour materials, the actual tour, evaluating and collecting statistics, cyber schmoozing and the importance of social networking, including Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, and book clubs. This is a cooperative class, working together to learn from each other and help promote all members. This class is free (although donations gladly accepted).

Sign up now for your space.

Special Guest Elysabeth Elderings

1. Elysabeth, your book is a story for middle grade kids. Tell us a bit about it.


Actually, I'm doing a series for grades 4 through 6. Each book will be one state and is written kind of like a handheld game giving the kids clues (facts and trivia type information) from whih they have to guess the state. The characters' interactions are based on each clue; some will have more interation and some less. I have been relating it to a Jeopardy! type game except they don't have to formulate their guess in the form of a question. The books are fun and educational and I've had requests for more.

2. What are you doing to market the series?

So far, I've had virtual blog tours, real book signings, and school visits. I've also hooked up with some folks at the Welcome Center in my state during Travel and Tourism week and have done some promotional things there. Since I'm all about the states, I do interactive promotions where I have games or puzzles and lots of giveaways (USA map puzzles, activity booklets for each state which include coloring pages that are state specific and games and puzzles that can go with any state, state related pins, pencils, and other stuff that has been sent to me, USA flag pins I made, - all USA related or red, white and blue things). It's very difficult to market one or two books in a 50-book series. You need to have quite a few books out before marketing really pays off. I am in the process of writing a letter to the Jeopardy! people to see if they will sponsor the series by putting copies in every elementary and middle school across the United States (I'll let you know how that turns out in the future).


3. What unique challenges do you face in trying to market it? And what unique opportunities?


Right now, I don't think there are any unique challenges as every author is facing the same sort of things and children's authors are facing a few extra. The economy, the CPSIA has been a big damper for anyone who deals with children's products on any level. Because of this stupid law, the cost of printing a book has gone up and therefore, the cost of purchasing a book is higher and people don't have much money to spend on books right now.

Unique opportunities have been getting in with book festivals that are specific to children's books (just did the Savannah Children's Book Festival and had a blast. Got to meet a few other children's authors but was super busy so I didn't meet as many as I would have liked to.)



4. Everyone has their own idea of success "Best Seller List", what is yours?


This would be to have my books available to every elementary and middle school in the nation, at least one copy in the shool library or a classrom. Then I know I am reaching the audiencce I intended to reach all along.


5. What else would you like to share with the readers?


The series is progressing and hopefully things will look up and we can get back on track of getting four states out a year. The next few months will be the ones to look out for since the series will be moving rather quickly, at least so I've been told. If you like the books and feel they would be something your friends would enjoy, then nothing helps like word of mouth. Without the readers telling other readers, the authors wouldn't be anywhere. We don't have a job without readers who enjoy our books. So keep reading and letting everyone know about what you are reading so that they may possibly enjoy the same books you do.

Books are available for order through the publisher at www.4rvpublishingllc.com or through the author's website http://junior-geography-detective-squad.weebly.com/ or special orders through email via Vivan (president@4rvpublishingllc.com) with a notation of special order in the subject line or the author, Elysabeth Eldering (eeldering@gmail.com). Special orders would be schools wanting more than one classroom or library copy to receive a 10% discount if ordering at least 6 copies per title and to order the accompanying study guides per title. If an order is for at least 10 copies of a title (still recceives the 10% discount), the study guide is free.

Thanks for having me on your blog today, Linda.

VBT Author Exchange

I belong to VBT, Writers on the Move. This is a group of authors and writers helping one another to promote our works and achieve our dreams through the use of virtual book tours, interviews, blogs, reviews and many other beneficial tools and strategies.

Every month, we visit each other to promote our books. So tomorrow on Journey to the Best Seller List, I will have my first guest author, Elysabeth Eldering. Elysabeth is working on a series of books about the 50 states for children, incorporating the idea of a video game to teach kids interesting facts about the state. Children have to follow the clues to figure out what state each book is. She currently has two books in the series and third one is about to be published. I asked her questions about the unique challenges of marketing a children's series.

And I will be visiting another VBT author, Dallas Woodburn at http://dallaswoodburn.blogspot.com/
I will be talking about writing handicapped.


Check out http://tinyurl.com/yh9vry6 for list a participating sites and more details. Join famous and new authors of a unique book tour. Mystery site, prizes.

Please stop by tomorrow to visit with Elysabeth.

Productivity Can Be Learned?

I am a handicapped writer. I'm sure that lots of writers like me have some handicap, mine are arthritis, diabetes, depression. The worst handicap comes from the medication I must take to function, which block my creativity and my ability to write.

But today I was given hope. Karen Wiesner was one of the first writers I met online back in 2000. I found her words encouraging then. Today I read her free article, http://www.angelfire.com/stars4/kswiesner/productivityarticle.pdf
and was given hope again.

Like she states in her article, I felt like giving up writing. I have lost the ability to create new stories, to brainstorm, and though I have WIP, I don't seem to be able to accomplish anything.

I am going to try her plan of goal setting and writing in stages. Perhaps knowing exactly what I am expected to accomplish and being able to check off complete goals, will help me stay focused and actually accomplish something.

So the first step is to work out my plan.

Thank you, Karen Wiesner http://www.angelfire.com/stars4/kswiesner/index.html

Why Twitter?

Read Charlotte Abbott’s article “To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Twitter Basics for Publishers and Authors Promoting books in 140 characters or less” in Publishers Weekly, 3/30/2009 for a clear and concise answer.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6647149.html

If you are new to Twitter, here are some suggestions:

Twitter works if you work it, but as Charlotte Abbott points out, you don’t have to spend a lot of time.

The key is to post often.

Post 3 4 times per day. You need to consciously post a combination of posts with links, replies, and retweets so that they can be seen by as many of your followers as possible during the day. Remember your post will disappear from the rolling updates “the stream” very quickly. So repetition is important.

What should you post?

1. Post links to your blogs. If you are a guest on a blog or have a guest on your blog, post the link several times during the day. (Remember, the stream flows fast.)
2. Post links to information others might find useful (news)
3. RT a story with a link (RT stands for Re-Tweet)
4. @reply to someone’s tweet - but remember that @reply interaction is good when balanced, but you can have too much of this. Here's the problem. If your followers aren't programmed to read everyone's @replies, they won't see any of those posts. And it may be confusing or boring to read a long series of posts that don’t really say anything.
5. Promote one of your peers with a link
6. Make personal comments about what is going on in your life. This is one of the features that people find fascinating about Twitter.

If you have a long URL, you can use http://tr.im/ to short the URLs for your Tweets. http://tr.im/EQgw is the new URL for Charlotte Abbott’s aricle.

Build a large network of friends and followers.

Build your network slowly. Many people judge whether to follow someone based on the followers-to-follow ratio. Someone with 2,000 followers and only follows 35 is probably someone famous or has something good to say. But if the Twitterer has 35 followers but follows 2,000 people, may be just a spammer.

So you want to add followers a few at a time. Give people a chance to decide if they will follow you back. Keep a balance between your follower-to-follow ratio. In fact Twitter’s policy limits you to follow 2000. Getting more is calculated using the followers-to-follow ratio.

One of the best ways to find people of interest to follow is to check out a friends’ following list. Choose to follow 10 or 15 a day.

Another way http://wefollow.com/A directory of Tweeters by interests.

Twitter Tips

# hashtags is a way that the Twitter community uses to group tweets of a common interest. Type #Star Trek in the search engine will bring you a list of all Tweets about Star Trek. They also use the # to have regular events. Basically turn it into an online chat, such as: #FollowFriday or #FF or #GNO (which means "girls night out").

Lists is a new feature which allows you to create lists of members, whether or not they follow you or you follow them. When you open the list it will show you only the feed from those individuals. It can help tame some of the confusion.

Tweetdeck is a popular app http://www.tweetdeck.com that allows you to split tweets into topic or group specific columns for easier reading.

I use My Tweeple http://www.mytweeple.com to keep track of and manage my followers. It allows you to tell who is following you that you aren’t but should. Also helps you identify spammers. And gives you a lot of information about your followers/following.
Other similar apps are Twitter Karma at http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
or Friend of Follow http://friendorfollow.com/

There are a lot of different apps or add-ons. And Twitter is continually adding on new stuff.

Julie Lomoe's Book Tour

My fellow classmate from the Blog Book Tour Class is beginning her first book tour.

I want to let everyone know to join in on the fun.

http://julielomoe.wordpress.com/

RSS

Today I am working on adding some important features to my Blog.

The first one is RSS. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. Frankly I don't think it is at all simple. You have probably seen their little orange square logo, which I learn is called a chicklet.

Anyway, I've been reading the help section trying to understand this. It seems that Blogger formats the posts in RSS or Atom and then a news aggregator such as Feedburner automatically takes it and posts it on a Feed Reader. Yahoo and Google have readers. There is also a whole bunch more. Then you can use the Reader to read all the blogs you have subscribed to in one place.

To go back to Blogger. My posts are formated so that they can be picked up either as RSS or Atom (the other not so Really Simple Syndication.)

You need to turn it on. From the Blogger Dashboard, go to Settings then Site Feeds. There is one place where you are asked for your FeedBurner URL. So I click on the link and it takes me to Google which Feedburner is now part of. It asks me to go through the set up process so that it can burn my feed. I did.

I had already done this for On Wings of Murder, some months ago, and I discovered that no one has subscribed. Oh well. I put in the address they sent me. I also subscribed using the Google Reader to make sure it is working.

So now I have another confusing account to deal with.

Despite the fact that no one has yet subscribed to On Wings of Murder, it is still important to have as many of ways to link as possible.