Suspense. Adventure. BadAss Heroines
Hey there! Just a quick post to let you know that my interview with Kitsap Literary Artists and Writers for local access TV station BKAT is live on YouTube. You can watch it here:
Looks like I’m about to strangle the interviewer, doesn’t it? Well, you should watch it to find out if I do 🙂 Interviewer Mark Miller went a tad off script, which made things interesting, and I had a blast (even though I was fighting an epic case of allergies that day…)
Hey there! I mentioned I’d be back with some giveaways today, so here’s 3 🙂 (Contests end Monday, December 12)
Win a signed paperback copy of Vigilante Dead from Goodreads. (For some reason the widget isn’t resolving correctly on the blog, so you’re going to have to click on the link to go to the book’s page on Goodreads. You can enter the contest there. Goodreads will notify the winner.)
I’m also giving away the T-shirt pictured (size large) with the book cover on the back (see pics below). Just leave a comment with your email address and I’ll choose a random reader to win! (Must be in US or Canada to receive the book and T-shirt.)
So I get to include everybody with an internet connection, regardless of whether you live in the US or elsewhere, I’m also giving away winner’s choice of one of my back list titles in eBook or audio book format. (All of my books are available in audio except Vigilante Dead and A Killing Truth. Cargo is currently in production and should be available in audio by the end of the month, so you can choose that, if you’d like.) I’ll announce the winners (with the exception of the Goodreads giveaway) on Tuesday, December 13.
Good luck, everybody!
Hi everybody! I hope you all are having a fantastic August…I’ve been working hard on the next Kate Jones Thriller, Vigilante Dead, and will have some exciting news to share in the near future. Stay tuned 🙂
Until then, how about the chance to win 17 suspense/thrillers? Click on the link below for the opportunity to win exciting reads by Colleen Helme, Jinx Schwartz, R.P. Dahlke, Dianne Harman, and yours truly. Are psychological thrillers, action/adventure, or nuclear terrorism thrillers your style? We’ve got you covered! Or perhaps you’re in the mood for a cozy mystery, nautical thriller, or paranormal suspense? Look no further–this giveaway is for you! Click on the link below for your chance to win, and discover some fabulous, new-to-you authors!
What are you waiting for?
The other day I was asked by a fellow author what programs/websites/etc. I used in my promotional efforts (not including paid advertising), and realized that it might be a good post for the blog. I think that as indie authors, we just assume that other indies use the same stuff and know all about the latest and greatest.
So, in the hope that there might be something useful to you writers out there, here are 5 promotional tools I’ve been using:
BookFunnel: First off, I want to give a huge shout out to BookFunnel for making life soooo much easier. Bookfunnel is the website to use if you give out free books like ARCs (Advance Review Copies), or lead magnets for your email list. For a small annual fee, they will host your EPUBs, MOBIs, and PDFs, and—best of all—give readers download instructions. They take over when a reader has trouble getting the book onto their Kindle, Nook, other e-reader, or tablet. I’ve heard nothing but good things from folks who use the help function, and it’s freed up a lot of writing time for me. You can create as many expiring links as you need for your books, and they’re working on all sorts of cool stuff for the future. They have also been incredibly responsive when I had questions. Highly recommended.
Calibre: There are a few places online that you can use to create different e-book formats for giving out to reviewers or if you have a contest with an e-book as a prize–not the least of which is your KDP dashboard to download a MOBI, or your Nook, Smashwords, or D2D dashboard for EPUB files. But if you want to be able to tweak the end matter and links and have a way to keep track of your files, I would recommend using Calibre. Calibre is free, downloadable software that allows you to convert your source book file from a .docx, HTML, EPUB, or MOBI into whichever format you need. Pretty darned handy.
Bigstock/Pixabay: I’ve used BigStock for royalty free (but not free) images for years. There are scads of others, but for some reason I usually find what I’m looking for on BigStock. For free images, I use Pixabay. (Be aware that the top line of photos on Pixabay are sponsored images
that aren’t free.) You can easily find something to use, as they have an extensive, searchable database of free photos.
DesignFeed: I’ve used Canva before, but I didn’t like having to cough up $1 for every image I wanted to use—and not just because I’m cheap frugal, although there’s that. Mainly because I don’t like giving my credit card number out to every Tom, Dick, and Harriet. But that’s just me. Luckily, I stumbled onto a cool new site called DesignFeed. Although still in beta, it’s pretty easy to use. All you need are some quotes from your book, an idea of what you want the background to be, and DesignFeed will create your chosen promo card in the correct dimensions for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest. They even give suggestions, in case you’re stuck. I don’t know about you, but for me that’s a huge time saver. And best of all, for the time being it’s free 🙂 Here are a couple I did for A Killing Truth:
Free Advertising: Although free and bargain books don’t garner the number of downloads/sales like they used to, when you’re having a sale it’s always a good idea to list with as many free promo sites as you can. Here’s one list to get you started. It’s been compiled by fellow author Martin Crosbie, who writes for Indies Unlimited. Not all of the sites he mentions have free options, but if you do your homework you should be able to submit to a large number of them for low or no cost.
And there you have it. Five tools to help you when promoting your books. Do you have any favorites? Share them in the comments below!
I thought since I hadn’t posted in a while (I’ve been concentrating on researching and writing the next Leine Basso book) I’d give an update on how things are going after the launch of The Body Market. The book’s been selling well and a couple of authors have contacted me privately to ask what I did differently, and whether I think those strategies worked. Since I love to analyze (not in any real scientific way, mind you) I sorted through all the things I did differently and those I didn’t and came to the same conclusion:
I have no effing idea which strategy worked the best.
Now, before you give me a ration of crap in the comments, let me clarify: if someone tells you that yes, this one thing they did caused Amazon’s bots to get behind their book, I’d have to call bullshit. Only Amazon knows how their site works, no matter what someone says. We can all try to guess what works until the moon explodes, but NO ONE REALLY KNOWS (and if anyone reading this does, in fact, know please leave a comment 🙂 )
Personally, I think it boils down to a combination of things: pre-launch hype, backlist, cover, genre, description (including using SEO keywords, and tags.), early reviews, press releases, advertising, social media posts, et al. You’ll notice I didn’t list pre-order, per se. That’s because while I expected Amazon’s pre-order option to work similarly to traditional pre-orders, e.g., all pre-order purchases rank on release day and give the book a bump of some kind hopefully onto a list or two, this did not happen with The Body Market. In fact, after all the work I did pushing pre-orders, the day after launch book sales on the ‘Zon dropped 70%.
Blech. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. I’d never had that happen on a launch before and I was pissed.
And I didn’t know who or what to be pissed at, except myself. Somehow, somewhere, I’d messed up, but I didn’t have a clue what I’d done wrong. I dropped the price of Serial Date, the first book in the series, to 99 cents and advertised the hell out of it the week of the launch (AwesomeGang, EreaderNewsToday, FB, etc.). The Body Market’s pre-order price was 99 cents, which I also advertised with both free and paid options, although not too expensively (in other words, no BookBub ads).
There was one bright, shiny moment on launch day: when a handful of advance readers who had agreed to read and review the book posted their reviews. They were all fantastic and I’m so incredibly grateful for their support. If not for them, I think I would have crawled into a corner, assumed the fetal position, and sobbed uncontrollably into a glass of wine.
I had one more ad coming out the Saturday after launch, a new release post with Free Kindle Books and Tips. I usually see a good rate of downloads whenever I run an ad with this site (not NYT bestseller numbers by any means, but enough to push the book onto some lists). This time, though, something was wrong. I clicked over to the page where the book was listed and realized I’d toggled the wrong genre. Instead of thriller/suspense, I’d somehow chosen history. I sent a message to the owner of the site, but by this time the email had gone out to subscribers and that first flush of purchasers, if they didn’t read the description and figure out the book wasn’t even remotely history-related, had more than likely skimmed past the book.
Okay, so at that point Mark pretty much had to talk me off the ledge (which, in retrospect, wasn’t hard to do since we live in a one-story house). I decided then and there that whatever happened to the book was just meant to be and that I had done everything I could short of dancing naked in the middle of Pike Place Market holding up a cardboard cutout of the book cover and offering free booze to passersby.
Hmmm…maybe…um, nah. Seattle’s too damn cold.
Then, a miracle happened. Somewhere, somehow, something clicked and downloads started to do a kind of a crazy zig-zag on the report page. One day, sales tripled, the next day they sank back to post launch. The next day sales tripled again, but then the weekend hit and sales tanked. By this time, I was feeling all zen about the launch and I figured, hey, sales were sales and I should concentrate on the next book, forget about it all, immerse myself in the world of Leine once again, do what makes me happy. Basically, I adopted a fuck it attitude and let it go (cue song from Frozen)
The following Monday sales increased seven-fold and have been growing ever since. As I write this, the whole series is selling well. I rooted around to see if The Body Market somehow made it onto any big lists on the ‘Zon, but I couldn’t find it anywhere other than the usual suspects like Mystery, Thriller & Suspense>Crime and Thrillers>Assassinations, so I’m stymied. Now, I’m not naïve enough to believe the rate of downloads will last, but I’m supremely happy knowing the series is reaching more readers than ever and can’t wait to see how far the 4th book in the series will go. I wish I could point to one thing I did right, or even a few things, but hell if I know. I’ll probably do a lot of the same stuff for the next launch, but don’t expect it to follow the same patterns. The timing will be different, for one thing, so who knows what’ll happen?
I think that whole unknown is what intrigues me about this business. Predictable, it’s not.
So how about you guys? What are your launch strategies? Are you doing anything different? If so, what’s working and what isn’t?
EXCITEMENTE! Frabjous joy! and all that 🙂 THE BODY MARKET is LIVE! A HUGE thank you to everyone who pre-ordered a copy and an extra-special shout out to the Advance Reader Team–you guys ROCK! (want to be a member? Send an email to dvb@dvberkom.com and I’ll hook you up :-D).
It’s been pretty cool to watch the book hit etailers around the world–pre-orders are a great way to launch (yeah, even when you’re patience-challenged like myself 🙂 ) The book has sold way better in a bunch more countries than is usual for one of my launches, and I have to give the credit to pre-order availability. It’s definitely a keeper.
Anywho, if you missed the super-special low-price offer on the pre-order, don’t despair! There’s still time to download your copy before the price increases! (although, admittedly, not a LOT of time…) There’s even a bonus short story at the end featuring a character from the book. Prepare to be surprised…
Here are the links–feel free to bandy them about with abandon on any social media sites you might frequent. And, as always, an honest review is greatly appreciated 🙂
Amazon: http://bit.ly/bodymkt
Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/bodymktBN
iBooks: http://bit.ly/thebodymktiBooks
Smashwords: http://bit.ly/bodymktSW
KOBO: http://bit.ly/bodymktKOBO
Have a GREAT weekend!
Come and join myself and 6 local Washington authors as we party at Paperbacks Plus in Port Orchard from 1:00pm to 5:00pm today! We’ll be signing books, giving away prizes, and who knows what other kinds of trouble we’ll be getting into. Libations and chocolate provided. If you can’t make it, you can join us on Facebook for an online party!
See you there 🙂
Today is the launch of a new feature on the blog where I plan to spotlight artists from all different mediums: vocalists, actors, musicians, painters, etc, as well as authors. It’s called the Spotlight Series (original, huh? 🙂 ) and over the course of the next few months I intend to showcase creatives from all sorts of disciplines (and nope, I don’t have a set schedule for when I’ll post them–just like most of the blog’s entries, it’s pretty much gonna be a random event). Yay, random!
And now, on to the inaugural Spotlight…
The first artist in the Spotlight Series is someone I’ve had the good fortune to work with: voiceover artist, actor, and vocalist Kristi Alsip. She recently narrated the Leine Basso thriller, BAD TRAFFICK, and totally nailed the main character’s voice (see sample below). Leine Basso is a former assassin and I wanted her voice to be strong and confident, but not to come off as a hard-ass. Plus, the narrator needed to be able to do several accents (Russian, British, male, female, etc.) and Kristi was definitely up for the job. I was delighted to find out that in addition to doing voiceover work Kristi fronts two bands and acts in and directs a mystery theater company. I love acoustic rock, blues, and soul (her band, Crawford’s Daughter covers several of my favorites) and I would probably be at most if not all of her gigs if I lived near Chicago. Here’s her bio:
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Kristi Alsip is a vocalist, actor, and voiceover artist from the Chicagoland area. Kristi earned her B.A. in theatre and human services from Millikin University and spent several years on the Chicago theatre scene. Most of her creative energy the last 15 years has been spent fronting bands, although she still makes time to act and direct in the murder mystery company, The Mystery Shop. She formed her own rock/blues/soul band, Crawford’s Daughter (the name derived from a random line in the film ‘Mommie Dearest,’) and is also a lead vocalist for the group Moonlight Cocktail which covers disco, Motown, and current tunes from artists such as Bruno Mars and Adele.
Kristi spent several years doing commercial voiceover work and was amused to find herself frequently getting sent up for the “Peri Gilpin type” (Roz from ‘Frasier.’) She has been heard in regional and national radio spots for Walgreens, Killian’s Irish Red, The Plane Dealer, Scrubbing Bubbles, and McDonalds. Just last year, Kristi began to branch out into audiobook narration and has lent her voice to several publications. Until now, most of her credits are of the memoir and self-help genres. Kristi recently completed work on her first book of fiction, the mystery thriller Bad Traffick (Leine Basso series) by DV Berkom and had an absolute blast!
Kristi currently resides in the Chicagoland area and is blissfully fortunate to share her time with the love of her life, Frank, and her two ridiculous Wheaten Terriers, Draven and Angel.
D: When did you first realize you wanted to be an actor/singer?
K: I was always a movie buff even as a little kid, although I didn’t get into typical ‘kid’ movies. I loved horror films and anything with Jack Nicholson. At about 7 or 8, I really got into singing and gravitated towards soul, rock, and blues. (I had a Shawn Cassidy record player with attached microphone and wore the hell out of it!) At the time, I especially loved Diana Ross, Olivia Newton-John, and Barbara Streisand. In an attempt to look like them, I begged my mother to let me get a home perm. Unfortunately, I ended up looking like Roseanne Roseannadanna on SNL. Super glamorous.
D: What prompted you to get into voiceover work?
K: About 14 years ago, I was doing a play in Chicago and the director was also working as a voiceover agent. She took me to dinner one night and asked if she could represent me. I recorded a commercial demo, began auditioning, and learned as I went along. Last year, I branched out into narrating audiobooks.
D: What’s your favorite part of working in a creative field? Least favorite?
K: I would have to say my favorite part of working in a creative field is having the opportunity to take all the experiences you gather and emotions you have as a human being and do something productive with them. Growing up, I was a little shy, so getting to get out there now to express myself is both challenging and rewarding. My least favorite part would be the auditioning process.
D: Where do you see yourself in five years?
K: Working/recording from home, continuing with commercial and audiobook work as well as booking more gigs with my band Crawford’s Daughter. My next goal is to get back into acting and branch out into film. I’m in the beginning stages of collaborating on a screenplay, so we’ll see what transpires.
D: What would you like readers of this blog to know about you?
K: I have an INCREDIBLY fantastic support system of family and friends that are always there at shows and gigs and ready to purchase audiobooks the minute they go on sale…which I think is pretty great considering I’m the only one in my entire family tree that sings or acts or is in any kind of creative field. I always joke that I’m the apple that fell off the family tree into another yard. 🙂
D: Thanks for being here today, Kristi! Good luck with everything, especially the screenplay 🙂 Here’s a sample from Kristi’s work on Bad Traffick:
***Leave a comment with your email address for a chance to win a free download code for Bad Traffick from Audible!
<><><>If you know someone who you think deserves to be highlighted (even if it’s your fine self), I’ll be accepting suggestions for the Spotlight Series through the end of June. Just email me at dvberkom8[at]gmail(dot)com with information about the artist (whether it’s you or someone you know). It’s at no charge to the artist and will give them some exposure they might not get otherwise, and I get to meet interesting people and have cool stuff on the blog. Total win-win!<><><>
