Time for Wrters to Work Harder On Your Own Reliable Resources

 

Reliable Resources in Greater Danger as Time Goes On

 

My Love Affair with Reliable Resources 

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson,

 author of poetry, fiction and the Modern History Press’s acclaimed HowToDoItFrugally Series of book for writers

 

I fell in love with reliable resources when I became a staff writer for my high school newspaper and realized the acquisition of a deep love for that concept surpassed my original attraction for my high school’s Thunderbol. (Was mostly interested in the smart(and cute!) ivy leaguer group of who guys hung out there!) And for very good reason. It turned out the cute boys ignored me, but that being “reporter” who could support my position help me when our editor (or staff advisor) wanted to edit (or ax) one of my columns I could save it by pointing to a reliable resource that supported my viewpoint.

 

I learned more about the value of reliable resources again sometimes around the time CNN introduced the highlight of my weekend TV consumption; I viewed their Reliable Resources as a class in class in constitutional law and began to see the how close the relationship  to my chosen career of  journalism which by then  had served me well through a couple decades of assorted occupations. It was a TV one-of-a-kind and it never occurred to me it wouldn’t remain a staple of the cable station that brought believable news my way during several occasions when I also became aware of dishonesty coming from places I had until then trusted and admired (the Nixon era, and Vietnam and Iraq wars come to mind). It kept me from losing hope for better things to come so I could focus onbuilding a business and raising a family. 

I was appalled when it was cancelled in 2020. I literally mourned for its anchor Brian Stelter who someone managed to survive under the radar with his online Reliable Resources Newsletter. Had I been more of an internet aficionado, his new journey would have helped me avoid years of negativity. Even in these bad moments,  things were getting better. Not perfect but good enough to start believing in Camelot again.

 

Flash forward to slowly growing to love my hometown newspaper. It wasn’t The New York Times, but it was sure enough reliable. I even saw value in it their new management made a highly critiqued move. Though many didn’t agree in when they started re-labeling much of what had traditionally been identified by its placement the Opinion page. That page became “Opinion Voices” and even their columnists were targeted with headlines that carefully delineated in one word, Voices. Yes, both bold and italicized. So did their new label, “guest contributors,” when editors felt that was needed—apparently to strengthen its stance on free speech because it helped readers more easily identify what the simple word opinion had managed to do for a long time across the breadth of trustworthy media.

 

I also follow ideas (and dangers to watch for) that come from PEN America. During her interim co-CEO stint and chief program officer, Summer Lopez, interim co-CEO and chief program office was among the first to warn of the then-recent revelation that a lawsuit by a sitting president was brought against Penguin Random House the world’s largest trade book publisher and two authors for publishing a book!

 

I’ve always been proud of PEN with its global membership of writers and literary professionals). I’ve even participated in some of PEN’s efforts to support young writers by sponsoring seminars, only one of the paths they use to support  our founding fathers’ determination to keep our country operating differently from the European countries they all hailed from. You know. FREE.

 

It turned out I had been ignoring the signals. I opened my daily newspapers to Lopez’s opinion piece dominating the LA Times Opinion page with the decree that reliable resources are in danger again. This administration seems to love the freedom afforded by our courts to speak our minds but tends to rely on diminishing other reliable resources like laws and precedence to govern. It’s clear enough: This lawsuit “against a book publisher” is a “dangerous escalation.”  I only hope that it doesn’t become the straw that broke the camel’s back. I hope that this time the back that gets broken is from that heavy load  known as “truth” hurled by writers themselves. All writers including authors of books and the powerhouse executives that publish their work. I hope they’ll all use the power of the pen to keep resources reliable before we lose the power of free press, free speech and, using Lopez’s words, “the freedom to write.”

 

MORE ABOUT THE “WRITERS-on-the-Move” COLUMNIST

 

Howard-Johnson is the recipient of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community’s Character and Ethics award for her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list of “Fourteen San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen” and was given her community’s Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts.  Carolyn writes nonfiction for writers, poetry, and fiction and has studied writing at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom; Herzen University in St. Petersburg, Russia; and Charles University, Prague, as well as several universities right here in the good ol’ USA. 

 

 

Remedies for Disappointing Marketing Efforts

A Consideration for Do-It-Yourself Book Promoters

 

 

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson, multi award-winning novelist, poet, and author
of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers

Every author wants their marketing efforts to be super successful.

And most of us spend an inordinate amount of time chasing big coverage in big media. That’s our dream. Trouble is, it is often a failure.

So, as a book marketing consultant, I tell my clients a little story from my early consulting days. I met June at a writers’ conference about two years after she had hit the big time with a featured four page spread in a slick, trade magazine including being its cover girl. There she was posing apparently nude but with a bathtub full of bubbles protecting her reputation—bubbles, her book, and her iPhone and were her only props. It was tastefully done. It was the perfect theme for the news cycle of the day about the advantages for working from home—and being a happily independent self-publisher. She had been the envy of many authors. Two years after that magazine was issued to tens of thousands business people across the US, she still had entire box-fulls of some 2,000 copies of the title she had published hanging around her garage. She had been absolutely sure they would sell quickly after this marketing triumph. She was for sure one disillusioned cover girl.

I gave her a 50% discount on her consultation and found myself coaching her at no charge for a year as she slid into an “I’ll-never-write-again funk.” She made a mistake familiar to authors. She reached for the stars. She did so when it seemed logical and right. She had learned to write a knock-out query letter and knew the standards for submission. She even did post promotion touting her success at events designed to help other authors. Her story was a trove of wisdom for those who long for independence.

BUT SHE ALSO VIOLATED A BASIC MARKETING RULE. GREAT MARKETING IS RARELY A MIRACULOUS COUP. MARKETING THAT INCREASES BOOKS SALES AND BUILDS CAREERS IS PROPELLED BY ENTIRE CAMPAIGNS AND REPETITION. CAMPAIGNS GROW REACH LARGE NUMBERS OF READERS  AND REPETITION REMINDS READERS TO ACT ON WHAT THEY’VE SEEN.

Here’s the saddest part.  She could have done much better with less expenditure of time and more successes that would have could have fed that repetition machine. Here the kind of media that might that might have helped her reach her sales goal as well inspire her with more positive marketing experiences--enough to keep her going for another book and then another.

Let local media keep your campaign going as your success stories proliferate including awards, local events built around holidays, local politics--whatever you can associate with different aspects of your book. 

§  Don’t neglect free media.

§  Don’t forget media from your alma maters—from newsletters to their quarterlies to their e-magazines, high school, community colleges where you took night classes...and above. 

§  Don’t ignore querying for reviews, or exclude the less prestigious ones.

§  Don’t underestimate yucky commercial stuff you find in your mailbox. Read them. Get creative. One or more could be a goose that lays the golden egg.

§  Don’t disregard throwaway newspapers found in a rack outside CVS, printed on paper that isn’t slick, edited by professionals who need tons of content to fill many pages on a weekly basis.

§  Actively seek marketing opportunities other than media. Most are great for building the kind of readers who become supporters. Have them sign a guest book complete with e-mail addresses. Then ask them to tell others. Find them at places like these:

~Seminars and readings at retailers that match your reading audience—boutiques, bars, coffee shops, yogurt shops, anyone located along the main street of your home town. Events using your personal mail list can increase their much-needed profits by 10% a day. Get them to agree to stock your book while you continue to make others aware of where to buy them, even in your e-mail signature. Have you heard of point-of-purchase sales? All they have to do is perch you book near their cash register with a little stack of your business cards and when someone looks, touches, or comments, keep the conversation going.

~ Local and not so local fairs and trade shows. 

~ Let your library’s event director know about your release. They need panelists. Volunteer for to do or help with their book displays and window arrangements. 

~ Pitch newsletters or weeklies for seniors and medical communities.

~ Don’t underestimate the reach of online entities like blog tours, articles for newsletters. You can produce your own to encourage loyal fans and readers, but a very wise Dan Poynter once told me that we reach a greater number and variety of readers—and save lots of time—when we offer content for others’ websites and blogs in exchange for nothing more than a glorious byline and bio.

~ If you are enamored with being on a big morning talk show (a danger sign by the way!), explore the local cable channel that runs your city’s meetings and determine what theme, topic, or genre of your book or your own backstory would interest their audience.

All of the editors, readers, and business leaders you meet are your future supporters. Keep accurate contact and mail lists. Using them frequently is as important as knowing how to write s smashing query letter or media release. 

Somewhere lying fallow in a musty library there is sure to be an old marketing tome—perhaps once a textbook—that would tell you about the “rule of seven.” People must be exposed to a message at least seven times before they act on it. 

If you still aren’t convinced, here’s how to combine the possibilities. Don’t think Time, Vogue, or CBS (unless it’s local CBS in a small town or region). Think obscure. Think big charities and organizations. Jim Banning, Editor-in-Chief of AAA’s Westways says the term hidden gem is a one of the most “cringe-worthy” clichés he comes across in descriptions of his free periodical. And he has first-hand experience of its value. The editors of AARP’s (American Association of Retired Persons) and the Sierra Club’s magazine editor would agree with him. They send out hundreds of thousands of magazines to their members/clients. The beauty is they’re slick, professional and did I say have a rather large distribution list? Their readers are not monolithic. If accepted an article you wrote (and pitched) would carry a credit line with its title and website address. You might also suppose they don’t hear from new authors with a great story to pitch nearly as often as The New Yorker or Playboy that might not be as impressed by your name or the title of your book—yet.

An appearance in one of these  niche periodicals expands the fairy dust around us that builds careers. But mostly their positive and frequent acceptance keeps us writing (and reinvigorated) on even our bluest days.

 

MORE ABOUT TODAY’S “WRITERS on the MOVE” CONTRIBUTOR

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a multi award-winning author of fiction and poetry but is best known for her how-to-books for writers. Find all of that series in one place on Amazon, but it’s her poetry that addresses the ills of cultures across the world. Imperfect Echoes is her Writers’ Digest honored book. Self-published in the tradition of poets since the advent of the Gutenberg press, it defies #bookbigoty as well other biases we are experiencing after a period—decades—of progress on that front. Find a review by Jim Cox, editor-in-chief of The Midwest Book Review, and its Amazon buy page at Https://tinyurl.com/ImperfectEchoes.

Letting Taylor Swift’s Genius Guide Holiday Choices

  

                                                                                  Vintage Vroman’s Bookstore Chirstmas Stars (Pasadena, CA.)

A Book-ish Nudge for Making Books Work for Christmas

                 

Letting Taylor Swift’s Genius Guide Holiday Choices

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson, multi-award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, 
and the HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers

          I used to think Taylor Swift’s “Last year I gave you my heart” the most unlikely Christmas song of all time. Kind of a downer, you know?  I changed my mind when I started noticing how she markets, her interest in doing good, her focus, her assertiveness. And she sure had a knack for turning a less-than-upbeat situation into song.

So as Christmas approached, I started thinking about those marketing chops of hers, how I could take her advice even though I am way past the fawning fan stage of life. She didn’t give up on romance; instead she would find a new love who would understand the true spirit of giving and was figuring out how to make it work even better. So, lucky you! I’ve reduced it in number, mostly related to some holiday publishing I’ve done in the past—complete Taylor-inspired improvements 

OLD HOLIDAY IDEAS WITH NEW TWISTS

Magdalena Ball, CompulsiveWriter.com founder and editor and I—reached across hemispheres to write our own little book called a chapbook to use instead of costly holiday greeting cards but it can be adapted to work for any business or profession. For authors it will be applying a part of their own working lives to their own holiday marketing/public relations campaign. It’s called…

Publishing a book and, yes it can be used by anyone who wants to try it.  Magadalena and I used Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Digital Platform) feature to publish a book. What an idea! The “author” of this book can make a small project of it, let it grow, or plan a large one and run with it.  Start collecting photos, poems, old adages that apply to your theme—your own special holiday,  friendships, businesses, whatever. Assemble them into a Word file—one for every person on your list or a more general one. Depending on the size they can turn out to be everything from a booklet to an inexpensive coffee-table type book.  C’mon. You have nearly a year to add to your first draft and it’s all free except for the copies you end up ordering for your own needs and they are wholesale. You only need about twenty-five pages to meet Amazon’s minimum page count. Here are some time-saving and value-added ideas:

 

~To make some more personal, I sign, date, and maybe add a little Santa sketch I can draw in five seconds flat.
~To suggest a handmade quality, you can add a permanent book mark made of grosgrain ribbon or velvet ribbon.
~ As an Amazon prime member I occasionally  let Amazon sent e-books to people I thought of last minute using their gift-message feature. It was nearly instantaneous and it saved shipping costs. 
~Books could be used as charity gifts using personalization…or not. Titles, themes, and dedications can be changed for special editions. Inexpensive Avery-type bookplates could be enclosed or three-dimensional stickers could be ordered for special needs. Books in quantity enough for residents of local senior centers. Consider getting permission to including a sugar free holiday cookie.
~Thanks to Taylor, I promise not to forget a special thank you to whoever tosses the daily news onto my front porch this year, maybe put a bow on it made with the plastic bags they deliver our news in each day as a little joke.

Booklets like these can be used for a variety of non-seasonal promotions. I have a motto: No real, live person should ever leave one of my classes, seminars, book signings, or writers’ conference presentations without a “keeper” in their hands or pressed into their notebooks.

 

PS: Let’s all plan to give 20% more books as gifts this year. If lots and lots of authors did this, it might mean fewer layoffs than originally planned for publishing and their related industries like libraries.

PPS: “Christmas in July” is not just a retailing gimmick. It  is the time to pitch holiday stories and promotions for your business, your book, or your profession to magazines and other print media. I know because I worked for Good Housekeeping magazine after starting a writing career at a daily newspaper and had a hard time adjusting my internal clock to such a lengthy deadline. Think both pre- and post-holiday needs. Think worldwide. Think national. Think local. As ideas come to you, add alerts to your calendar. Don’t be chintzy with the details. Busy minds get forgetful. If you’re great at public relations, you’ll also send one of those self-made books we talked about to the editors who accepted and wrote your feature story idea after its publish date as a thank you. 

 MORE ABOUT WRITERS ON THE MOVE BLOG’S CONTRIBUTOR

Carolyn Howard-Johnson brings her experience as a publicist, journalist, marketer, and retailer to the advice she gives in her #HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers and the many classes she taught for nearly a decade as instructor for UCLA Extension’s world-renown Writers’ Program. All her books for writers are multi award winners including the first edition of The Frugal Book Promoter, now in its third edition. Her The Frugal Editor, also in its third edition, won awards from USA Book News, Readers’ Views Literary Award, the marketing award from Next Generation Indie Books and others including the coveted Irwin award.

 

Too Late for This Christmas? Tip for Writers: Amazon offers a new service absolutely free. In addition to an author’s regular buy page, it is a special page that lists all e-books in a series. Don’t think of it as a page for a genre fiction series only.  The publisher of my HowToDoItFugally Series did this one for my series of books for writers at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTXQL27T, but it’s available for indie authors, too. Either way, the service is absolutely free! Amazon also produces the triptych images for these pages free. For Most Everyone on Your Christmas List: How about a last-minute book of Christmas poetry from Magdalena Ball’s and my holiday entry in their Celebration Series of chapbooks, paper or e-book. Find it at https://bit.ly/BloomingRed or see the whole series here. The series also includes chapbooks for Women’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and, yep...Christmas.

The Magic of Words as Opportunity

Deadlines and Other Powerful Words

 

 

Opportunity Writ Large…Again

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson, multi award-winning author of the 
HowToDoItFrugally Series of Books for Writers

 

Deadlines. 

I’m not going to give you advice on meeting deadline because I’m in the middle of a booklet for my HowToDoItFrugally Series when I should be nearing the end. I’ve always believed in leaving early for social occasions, and to catch planes. And I’ve never had trouble with deadlines before. Now—suddenly—I’m feeling…inadequate and a little fearful of mentioning the word.

So here I am facing my November deadline for Writers on the Move. I just, well…sorta stole a little segment from the booklet I’m writing to share with subscribers and visitors to Karen Cioffi’s blog as well as her talented slate of regular contributors. 

It’s the story of how I came to write a booklet I’m working on. It’s little about deadlines, too, I guess. You’ll have to read between the lines.

Anthropologists tell us we humans have been storytellers since we first gathered around fires for warmth and companionship, long before we entertained the idea of writing. Stories were our entertainment. It’s also how we learned the easy way—from others’ experiences—rather than from our own shortcomings, our own seemingly insurmountable challenges, and our own oopsies. Having said that, when we do learn the hard way, sharing helps us see the value of applying humor to ourselves.

In important moments of working with my first editor, I found myself using the words saying or adage and immediately felt ill-at-ease about my vocabulary skills. I eventually acquired the more acceptable all-purpose word, apothegm when one was suggested in an editing class I was teaching and thereby expected to know about such things. It is somehow both more specific and more adaptable than sayings…and, yes, less humiliating. But it still didn’t let me bore down on the specifics I needed to communicated with editors--nor for my classes and the new book I was writing to use as a text in a class on marketing books. There were available books and texts galore out there but nothing that included public relations for authors, or promotional ideas or getting media attention for books. 

In the meantime, apothegms were leading me to all kinds of synonyms with slightly different meanings. They included more precise as well as well as subliminal interpretations for each: 

§  mottoes and catchphrases might suggest an unwanted commercialism.

§  proverbs imply a biblical passage; words of wisdom also connote religiosity or a philosophy that might or might not be appropriate for the title in consideration.

§  platitude smacks of cliché, something most of us work mightily to avoid.

§  maxims tend to be about rules of conduct. If an editor suggests you use them to introduce chapters and your book isn’t a “Miss Manners” book, explore the kind of apothegms they had in mind before spending good writing time researching quotations that probably won’t suit the tone of your book.

§  axiom, dictum, adage, and even the word sayings, itself! 

     As I started thinking of them as synonyms, it occurred to me to use a variety of the ones I was runningacross at the beginning of each chapter and as I found them, the book started feeling like a book rather than a collection of essays. When I couldn’t find what I needed, I started writing some myself. It felt like magic. Earlier this month, Terry Whalin published an article on this blog about grabbing down opportunity when it appears to you, and it occurred to me that was a bit of related magic. Sometimes we don’t recognize opportunity when it comes and perches itself on the bridge of our noses. The article made me realize that one simple word like apothegms isone of those opportune moments--one I nearly missed.

Soon I realized that very few authors use these, ahem!…sayings to make a book work as a full book and that maybe if I wrote a short book of vocabulary words related to the needs of authors, the content could help them apply this technique to their books. Different words might work differently for them, but each could be an opportunity for one of my fellows out there.

 I had found a way to make the interior design that would make my book more interesting than a theme paper. It wasn’t a new idea, by any means. But it had become an opportunity that kept growing. 

I had to self-publish because I was on deadline for my first class that fall. I started introducing each chapter with an apothegm or one of its semi-synonyms, depending on the topic of the chapter. One opportunity kept leading to others. Thinking of apothegms as opportunity, it’s a wonder they haven’t become an essential technique combined with the merest suggestion of interior design in seminars and presentations at writing conferences!  (If you are interested in reading Terry’s article, leave a comment at the end of this article and Terry, Karen, or I will send you the permalink a to make it easier for you to access!)

 

But back to my story. This one “accidental” piece of knowledge worked in favor of my flagship book, my UCLA Writers’ Department students, and is still making itself useful for me nearly three decades later. If you’re familiar with my how-to books for writers, you’ve probably already run across the motto or tagline I came up with early in the pursuit of clarity to replace my old sayings habit: 

 

“Careers that are not fed die as readily
as any living organism given no sustenance." 
~ CHJ

 

I still try to find somewhere to slip that one into all my how-to books for writers and promotional material. But it’s limited. It only works when I want to convince authors that they’ll need a “to know more about a lot of things they never suspected they’d need or wanted desperately to avoid.” It’s also an example of how the work you put into apothegms for one book might be recycled to benefit many books—even many promotional projects like handouts.

And here’s the icing on the cake. This (unfinished!) book has lead to another promotion I haven’t tried before. WinningWriters.com will be giving it as a gift to all those who enter their 2025 #NorthStreetBookPrize contest. If I’m lucky the contest entrants will tell others about it. Opportunity meeting opportunity. Speaking of opportunity! I mustn’t forget to add  WinningWriters’ clever pre-promotional idea to the next edition of my The Frugal Book Promoter. That would be its fourth edition. It seems a single word has more power than even I who love words could have imagined.

PS: Once finished, this booklet full of writer-related words, each a powerful opportunity, will be available from Modern History Press early in 2026.

 

MORE ABOUT TODAY’S WRITERS’-ON-THE-MOVE BLOG CONTRIBUTOR 

                                                                  Badge created by Carolyn Wilhelm for the HowToDoItFrugally Series of Books

 

Howard-Johnson is the recipient of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community’s Character and Ethics award for her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list of “Fourteen San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen” and was given her community’s Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts.  Carolyn writes nonfiction for writers, poetry, and fiction and has studied writing at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom; Herzen University in St. Petersburg, Russia; and Charles University, Prague. J. She is especially thankful to Karen Cioffi for letting her share stories like this with her #WritersontheMove audience.