Getting Ready to Celebrate the Release of My New Book--and Your Next New Book

Carolyn Series Page for her multi award-winning 
HowToGetItFrugally Series o Books for Writers

Getting Ready to Celebrate the 

Release of My NewBook--and Yours

 By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Excerpt from the soon-to-be released 

How To Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically, second edition

It seems that doing final edits for a book is a great time for identifying sections in it that might be useful right now and give the readers of Karen Cioffi’s #WritersontheMove blog a head start on releasing books this fall. This section from the second edition of the third full sized book in my HowToGetGreatBookReviewsFrugallyandEthically, is after all about preplanning.  This section from Chapter Thirteen from that soon-to-be released book works because--odiously--pre-planning is a good thing can never really start too early--and the essentials can always be used in a next book, and the next. But it’s never more important than at release time; that’s when we as authors (no matter how or who publishes our books) can do something most authors forget to do  to jump start their book sales. That’s a shame because that what primes is for a chance and some very good stuff--like a chance  at  best-seller stardom! Consider this little piece your “how-to” as well as your inspiration to get started. And please put my Amazon Series page address on your calendar to check out for late fall release. The full series can be found on my Amazon Series page for the now long-lived series of books, HowToDoItFrugally Series for Writers. 

Navigating Pre-Publish Opps and Deadlines

“Writing a book is a little like having a baby. If we authors weren’t optimists, we’d probably never tackle writing a whole book. If we were realists about the time it takes to raise it properly after we’ve typed ‘The End,’ we might stop right there.” ~ CHJ

First-time authors are almost always completely unaware of the secret behind those vital promotion processes  and/or underestimate the importance of the time gap between the time our books or ARCs come rolling off a printing press and appear for sale in bookstores. They have no clue that big publishers actually set their release dates (the date bookstores are given the greenlight to deliver books into the hands of readers) well beyond the time the book comes rolling off their presses.

They do this to accommodate an extended premarketing campaign and to take care of necessary marketing including getting reviews. If authors do know about it, they feel it is somehow dishonest to follow publishers’ universal practices. The supermedia has done us a big favor by demanding those deadlines, and the New York Big Five—our models—have done it for probably more than a century. They aren’t fudging. It’s the way it’s done. The essential time gap before their books are released might look something like this:

 

Example: Your print date may be 04/01 and your release date set for 08/01 or beyond.

 

Gasp! The thing is, we already have too much love put into the project to give up, too much invested not to pay attention to this example set by publishers. The other thing is, we have choices, and what seems like it’s going to be hard can be managed with preplanning. The great news is you already have a head start with that master-list of yours. Though it is a never-ending project it’s ready to use just as it is. Even if we should decide against participating in the supermedia regimen—or learned about it too late—authors need time to do any or all the pre-release essentials.

The traditionally published must know their publisher’s marketing plans in enough detail to support their efforts. We all must resist getting so eager for the release of our book we forego the time between knowing our books are ready and releasing them to the public. We want, need, desire the thrill of being a “published author” whether it’s our first or our tenth. That’s what we came for. But if we don’t wait (and work our fannies off in the meantime!) many of the thrills that go with that achievement won’t materialize. No matter how carefully your book has been crafted, pre-release neglect severely limits a book’s future sales. A few get lucky in spite of it; most don’t. First off, once you get an ARC into a reviewer’s hands reviews aren’t done, done, done. Post this list on your bulletin board: 

§ Review Chapter Eleven, “Getting Your ARCs Ready for Anything,” and remind yourself you will be using them for life of your book. Reviews are forever.

§ Review Section III: “Your Review-Getting Arsenal”

§ Do a search on “blurbs” and “Editing (blurbs)” so your file of blurbs is set up to save you time in your ongoing marketing plan. You are building a career, not selling a book.

§ Check Chapter Four , “”You Blurbs and Getting Past Book Bigotry.” Even if you have the best publisher ever!

§ Reread this Chapter (Thirteen), too. Of course.

§ And keep reading for Amazon essentials in the next chapter. They’re a big part of must-dos before that release date.

Much of your review-getting and turning-reviews-into-blurbs business must happen after you have reviews and before your precious book comes rolling off the press—whatever kind of press you or your publisher uses. Don’t miss any that have appeared on the pages of journals trusted by publishing influentials and in your e-mail from readers.

As described in Chapters Ten and Eleven on ARCS, many of those big publishers use print-on-demand (POD) technology to produce review copies well before the first copies of their offset run come off the press. (It seems POD is an innovation that is too useful for anyone in the publishing industry to ignore!), but both you and they may choose other ARC iterations, too. Here’s the thing: No matter what they do, that time before your book’s release—way before—is time you must navigate. This is not a time to mourn what could have been. Take a sabbatical from anything that might interfere. Enlist help from friends. Sculpt that time using what you knew before and what you know now to realize that goal most of us wish for—surreptitiously or right out loud—to meet our hopes and expectation for our book.

MORE ABOUT THE #WRITERSONTHEMOVE CONTRIBUTOR 

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of the multi award-winning series of HowToDoItFrugally books for writers including the flagship book of that series, USA Book News’ winner, The Frugal Book Promoter  now in its third edition. It was originally written for UCLA Extension's renowned Writers Program where she used it as a text for nearly a decade. She believes using the time before a book’s release is the most productive time for assuring its future. Two of her favorite awards are Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment given by members of the California Legislature and “Women Who Make Life Happen,” given by the Pasadena Weekly newspaper. She is also an award-winning poet and novelist and she loves passing along the tricks of the trade she learned from marketing those so-called hard-to-promote genres. Learn more on her website at https://HowToDoItFrugally.com. Let Amazon notify you when she publishes new books (or new editions!) by following her Amazon profile page: https://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile. Her The Frugal Editor is now in its third edition from Modern History Press. Let it help you edit your work-in-process. The third book in the series, How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically will be released this fall.

On Grabbing Great Blurbs and Editing Them

The Best Marketers of All

 

       On Grabbing Up Great Blurbs and Editing Them          

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

I am in the throes of editing the second edition of my popular and very complete How To Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically and couldn’t help excerpting some of this for WritersontheMove visitors to have now before they start their holiday marketing campaigns. That book will be released late fall by Modern History Press.

 

     The process for excerpting isn’t something most of us were taught in school. It seems such a nonissue that many have no idea how to do it and don’t realize they need to figure it out. Without a few guidelines, it can go miserably astray. Some won’t try excerpting at all because they are unsure of themselves. I’m not sure which is worse for the success of an author’s book.

Blurbs may be so neglected and misunderstood because there is confusion about what they are. I have heard them called endorsements, testimonials, praise, quotes, blurbs, and sometimes bullets because they are frequently printed on the back cover of books set off by little BB-sized dots and most of us relate them to reviews because that is where we authors usually find them.

When my husband solicited blurbs from VIPs in the Asian community for his first book What Foreigners Need to Know about America from A to Z, he was going to skip the process. He had me to…mmm, nag him. He ended up with endorsements from the ambassador to China from the United States and his counterpart, the ambassador from China to the U.S. This, by the way, illustrates why authors (anyone?) shouldn’t listen to naysayers who think approaching influencers with requests for blurbs is futile. I just happen to think excerpting them from reviews and capturing them from fan mail is easier. Just know you can do it and you can do it effectively.

Authors who misuse or underuse excerpts from their reviews are at a disadvantage. Not only are blurbs or one of the best tools in your marketing kit, but review excerpts are often your only chance to use the credibility of a prestigious review journal as part of your panoply of credit boosters.

The excerpting process is easy and a lot of fun once you know how to do it. Let’s say you have a review that includes some praise or even a word that made you happy or you could use to illustrate point you’d like to have your audience know about your book Perhaps (yikes!) it doesn’t include your name or title! Or maybe it just plain makes memorable reading. Perhaps the rest of it wasn’t all you’d like it to be. Here’s how to proceed: 

§ Put on your marketing bonnet and reread your review thinking “soundbites” as you read. Or select the phrases that remind you of the praise you see on movie posters or ads. Many of them are excerpts or clips from advance reviews of that film.

§ Choose gems that make you glad you wrote the book. Some will be short. Even one word. Shorties are used as blurbs for everything from restaurants to sports cars because they emphasize the raves that are…mmmm, over the top when publishers and authors use them about their own work. These no-nos are usually strong adjectives like awesome and first-rate. But you can use them as blurbs because someone else thought so!

§ Don’t neglect some of the praise that points out the benefits readers get when they read your book.

§ When you must leave something out of the sentence you choose to keep short or because it is inappropriate, let ellipses (three little dots…) take the place of those missing words.

§ Sometimes you need to substitute for purposes of clarity or brevity. If the blurb says, “If there is any justice in the world, this book is destined to be a classic,” delete the words  this book and replace them with the name of the book: Put the squarish brackets around the part you insert yourself so it reads “…if there is any justice in the world, [Jendi’s poetry book Two Natures] is destined to be a classic.”

§ Use them liberally. Use them everywhere. Put them between quotation marks. Indent them if you wish. Always credit them to the reviewer or publication where they were originally used.

Note: You want to avoid sacrificing the original intent of the excerpt you choose while using minor and approved editing techniques to meet your purposes.

§ So you have the reprint rights or a review journal like Midwest Book Review notifies you when your review has been posted that you have permission to reuse it—a very nice service that benefits both Midwest and you. Don’t lose it. Put it in a special file and stow it in a folder dedicated to your book’s title. To avoid confusion later and make using any one of them a quick copy-and-paste process, include the accreditation at the end of each blurb you extract.

§ It is handy to know that copyright law allows us to quote without permission for certain purposes and in certain amounts if you write commentary, satire, criticism, academic material, or news reports. The number of words you can use without permission depends upon the size of the copyrighted work as a whole. Guidelines differ from genre to genre. Find specific guidelines at the Library of Congress’ website or let a research librarian help you. For novels and full books of nonfiction, Amazon uses twenty-five words as a guideline for novels, and I trust they have great copyright attorneys advising them.

Note: Those who want to learn more about copyright law as it applies to authors will find help in Literary Law Guide for Authors: Copyrights, Trademarks and Contracts in Plain Language by Tonya Marie Evans and Susan Borden Evans with a foreword by my deceased friend and book marketing guru Dan Poynter.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of the multi award-winning series of HowToDoItFrugally books for writers including USA Book News’ winner for The Frugal Book Promoter. An instructor for UCLA Extension's renowned Writers Program for nearly a decade, she believes in entering (and winning!) contests and anthologies as an excellent way to separate our writing from the hundreds of thousands of books that get published each year. Two of her favorite awards are Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment given by members of the California Legislature and “Women Who Make Life Happen,” given by the Pasadena Weekly newspaper. She is also an award-winning poet and novelist and she loves passing along the tricks of the trade she learned from marketing those so-called hard-to-promote genres. Learn more on her website at https://HowToDoItFrugally.com. Let Amazon notify you when she publishes new books (or new editions!) by following her Amazon profile page: https://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile. Her The Frugal Editor is now in its third edition from Modern History Press. Let it help you edit your work-in-process.

Avoiding the Dreaded Adverb in Dialogue and Everywhere Else

 

Let Tom Swift Inform Your Writing 

 

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson 

 

The last in a series of articles celebrating the release of the 3^rd edition 
of the multi award-winning The Frugal Editor

Ever heard of Tom Swifties?

 

Maybe you're too young to be familiar with the classic Tom Swift adventures for boys. Or maybe you're a girl who never read a Tom Swift book nor cares to.

 

Tom Swifties are one-line jokes lampooning the style of Victor Appleton, the author of the original Tom Swift books. People started making jokes about his overuse of adverbs and the unnecessary taglines he wrote into his dialogue. Like the Polish jokes, they were so much fun that that a whole series of them became available for pun aficionados (though they deservedly disappeared—mostly—as people started avoiding anything that smacked of cultural bias.)  The author of Appleton’s classics, of course, laughed all the way to the bank and I was never able to determine if he overused them intentionally or if his popularity survived at least in part because they seemed unintentional and that only lent another dimension to their laughability. But that's a lesson for one of my marketing seminars, not this article on writing.

 

Tom Swifties were popular and funny back then. This is now. I haven't dared to go to the new books in the series, but I assume that this outdated writing has been eliminated from them.

 

An example from one of the Swift books will suffice to let you know what to watch for. (Thank you to Roy Peter Clark for this example.)

 

"'Look!' suddenly exclaimed Ned. 'There's the agent now!…I'm going to speak to him!'” impulsively declared Ned.'"

 

Regardless of what you think of Appleton’s style choices, you will want to minimize tags when you write dialogue and adverbs in most everything you write!

 

Even authors who swear that adverbs are always very, very good things to use and are reluctant to give up their clever taglines can see how, well, …awful this is. In fact, I have to reassure clients and students the quotation is real! Some of the writing that comes to the desks of agents and editors looks almost as bad. Here's how you can make sure yours doesn't:

 

1. Use taglines only when one is necessary for the reader to know who is speaking. Learn new dialogue techniques to make that job easier from books like Writing Dialogue by Tom Chiarella and the third edition (only recently released) of my The Frugal Editor.

2. Almost always choose "he said" or "she said" over anything too cute, exuberant, or wordy like "declared" and "exclaimed."

3. Cut the "ly" words ruthlessly, not only in dialogue tags but everywhere.

4. Learn how to make this adverb-cutting exercise improve the images in your prose or poetry using simile or metaphor, also covered in The Frugal Editor. 

 

Until you do a little more research on the adverbs, take Nike's advice and  "Just do it!"

 

---

Carolyn Howard-Johnson, multi award-winning author of The Frugal Book Promoter: How to Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Do It Yourself Editing Secrets, both now in their third editions from Modern History Press. The former is the winner of USA Book News "Best Professional Book" award and the Book Publicists of Southern California's coveted Irwin Award. The Frugal Editor is both a USA Book News winner and a Reader Views Literary Award winner and won the Next Generation Marketing and the coveted Irwin awards. Learn more at www.HowToDoItFrugally.com. Thank you, #WritersontheMove, for the opportunity to wind down my marketing plan for the release of new edition of Frugal Editor with this article! Gotta make room for a couple of new books in that series coming in 2024!

 

Amazon Adds New Marketing Aid for Their KDP Print Books

From Carolyn Howard-Johnson,
Author of The Frugal Book Promoter, 3^rd Edition

This may be the shortest post I’ve ever done for this #WritersontheMove blog. But why wait when there is good news afoot. And why stretch it out? I’ll try to keep it simple, too. 

Amazon just announced the best new feature they have instituted for the benefit of authors in a very long time. It’s for print books only—paper or hardcover. It will help Amazon authors with a pre-release feature that is very nearly as valuable as the preorder campaigns big publishers are using for their books. 

Think Rachel Maddow’s Prequel. I just ordered it. Her hardcover of that title is promised on October 17^th at a bit of a discount. It seems to me that her book has been available for preorder for what seemed an immeasurable chunk of time. If it’s a good enough marketing tool for Maddow, indies, and those published by a publisher smaller than Penguin sure enough should want to use a similar marketing technique for their books. Whether you have your manuscript ready now or plan one for the future. The announcement from Amazon makes it clear that the new plan isn’t quite as broad as it is for Penguin and other biggies, but there are intimations that, too, may be on the horizon. Until then, we will now be able to set our own release dates for print up to 90 days in advance.

Here's what self-published authors (Amazon-published authors) of print books (including hardcover books) can now do and it came straight from Amazon to my mailbox: 

 

“We're excited to announce that starting today (Oct 5, 2023), you have the option to decide when your book’s detail page [I call that page our “buy page”] becomes available to readers on Amazon for your KDP paperback and hardcover books. When creating a new print book, you'll see an option to release your book now or schedule a release date. If you choose to schedule a release date, you'll be able to select a date 5 to 90 days in the future for your book to go live on Amazon. On this date, the book’s detail page will become visible at 12:00 AM GMT for readers to purchase your KDP book on Amazon everywhere you have territory rights.”

 

This will let Amazon-publishing peeps...

1.    Have a big hunk of time to use the Amazon link for their book’s buy page on much or all of their pre-marketing campaign—up to ninety days.

2.    That allows us to spend time focused on engaging readers and marketing our books instead of doing the rushed release so many authors tend to do now.

3.    You can order author copies early so you’ll be covered for your very first launch party or book signing.

4.    You’ll have that comfort level of knowing the copies you order are on their way. 

Reminder: Please note, scheduling a release date is not the same as setting a preorder time for your readers to buy your book—yet. KDP says, “KDP doesn’t offer [that] for print books at this time. To learn more about release date options, supported formats, and requirements, visit our Help page: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/GZUV7SNV728WT4QE .”

MORE ABOUT TODAY'S CONTRIBUTOR

Carolyn Howard-Johnson brings her experience as a publicist, journalist, marketer, editor, 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. The books in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books published by Modern History Press include the third editions of The Frugal Book Promoter and The Frugal Editor which won awards from USA Book News, Readers’ Views Literary Award, the marketing award from Next Generation Indie Books and the coveted Irwin award. That series includes books on other topics for writing as varied as writing book proposals and editing tricky homonyms.