Try something new, she said... (On finding ways to promote my books)

 

An early TikTok video. There's plenty of room for improvement. 😊

For the last couple years, I've been a member of the Book Boss Author Community run by Angela James. It's been a great experience, both for networking with other authors and for expanding my own knowledge base. This fall, I took Angela's Book Boss Strategy Intensive, a 4-month course in business planning for authors. That experience, more than anything else, has helped me shift my mindset. Writing is not my hobby. I'm running a small business and books and their related content are my product.

Those words are at once freeing and loaded with responsibility. I still tend to throw things at the wall and see if they stick, but I'm (hopefully) more intentional about it. 

At the end of the Strategy Intensive, we all created a business plan. Angela gave us individual feedback on our plans, and her advice to me was to try new things. I'd basically built a marketing plan that was based on what worked for Soulmates, the first book in my Soulmates series, even though the 2nd and 3rd books in the series hadn't done as well.

Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to point out what should be easy for me to see. 

So, determined to Try New Things, in early January I joined a Bookfunnel promo and dropped the price of Soulmates to free for a 5-day period. The book has been out for 2 years and it's the first time I've done a free promotion, and OMG did it go well. I had about 2000 downloads over the 5 days, with almost 30 new reviews so far - and those reviews are like gold. I also had sales and KU downloads for the next two books, along with a handful of new reviews for each. 

I can't run a free promo all that often, but I was very pleased with the experience. January's going to be my best month since Redeemed's release in April.

Bolstered by that experience, and in a fit of "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks", I dove into TikTok. Angela made a how-to video for the Author Community that demystified the process, so I made a couple of short videos and la voila, I have a TikTok account. (You can find it here.)

While it's been fun so far, and making the videos exercises a different part of my creative brain than writing does, I'm just now realizing how much I don't know. I did join an Author TikTokers FB page and dug up a video on TikTok from the 20Booksto50K conference I went to in November, so I have resources for learning. I'm also beginning to appreciate the time commitment involved in creating new content every day. The little buggers are short, but it takes time to put them together.

Still, my oldest kid called me yesterday morning and told me that he and his friends love my TikTok account. His friends think it's cool that his 60-year-old mother is living her best life, and you know what? Encouragement like that motivates me to push on. 

Blogging is also an attempt to try something new, and I'm pretty happy with how that's going, too. Thank you all for reading along, and drop a comment if you have questions or want to share promo ideas. We can all learn from each other!

A Plotter's Delight

This is me, plotting...

So last week I sent Aqua Follies off to my agent, who will hopefully read it and love it and offer me tons of helpful comments to improve it.

And then she'll sell the hell out of it.

That's the plan.

I love it, and have high hopes for my little story about the coach of a synchronized swimming team who falls in love with a handsome trumpet player. The thing I liked best about working on it was digging into the 1950s. Once I got beyond the "Happy Days" clichés, I learned a lot of really cool stuff.

But that's not what this post is about. This is about what happens next. I set a goal of writing two novels this year, and a couple of novellas, and when I finished Aqua Follies I was really, really, really eager to put down my editing toolkit and just plain write.

Eager, but uncertain. I wasn't sure what direction to head. I blogged about that uncertainty HERE in my Spellbound Scribes post this month. I knew I wanted to work on something that reflected the diversity I see in real life, and I suspected it would have another historical setting. I also wanted to do another m/m romance. 

I'm so excited about the idea I came up with I can barely stand it. It's a two novel set, and the working titles are The Lyric Assassin & The Clockwork Monk. The first book is about Emma who's, well, a lyric soprano, and also a spy. She idolizes her older brother Trevor, and he plays a key role in this story. In the sequel, their roles will reverse. He'll be the POV character, and she'll be a main player. 

As soon as I finished dancing with glee for having come up with this concept, a funny thing happened. I wrote a few pages, just letting Emma speak, but I couldn't go any further until I had a better handle on the plot. Part of the reason may be that since the threads are going to wind from one book to the next, I needed to lay as much out as possible before I could really get started.

I spent the end of last week and all weekend brainstorming, and by Sunday afternoon - while the Seahawks were driving us all crazy - I'd hammered out a beat sheet for Emma's book. Even better, by using the template in Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, I'd been able to figure out how many pages, scenes, and word count each section should have.

Like, I know where I'm going. I'm not crazy like a cat behind the wheel of a car.

This will be my fifth full-length novel, and maybe that has something to do with it. Like many writers I tend to struggle with the middle. The set up is easy, and I know how I want it to end, but figuring out how to get from A to B can be a crap shoot. The coolest thing about developing the beat sheet was making a list of all kinds of possibilities for how to cover the big middle sections. I know I'm going to need X number of scenes, which will take X number of words, and the hero and the heroine have to buzz around each other while her brother's causing trouble and bombs are going off.

Oh hell yeah. It's gonna be fun.

Now I now some of you make THIS face when people talk about plotting...

But I'll tell you what. This is the best I've felt at the start of a project. Things may still turn to worms, and for sure some of my brilliant inspiration will end up in the discard pile, For now, though, I am ready to write.

So where do you fall on the plotter-to-pantser spectrum? Would a beat sheet give you hives, or do you write a synopsis of every chapter before you start?

Inquiring minds & all...

Peace,

Liv