publishing – Page 14 – Patricia J. Parsons

5 ways your social media platform might be turning toxic

Posted on 21 Nov 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

At least twice in just the past week I have acquired new Twitter followers who themselves boast over 10,000 followers. Imagine that! 10,000+ followers! I always surf over to see the profiles of my new followers and never cease to be astounded by these huge numbers. But before I click to “follow” back, I always hesitate in these instances. I always seem to have the same question for myself: “Why in the world would I want to follow someone (or some organization) with that many followers unless I’m looking for their information. They certainly won’t be interested in anything I have to say. Dear god, they’ll never be able to find it!” And I’m left wondering how anyone can possibly be in a balanced give-and-take situation when there are so many hangers-on involved.

In my day job, I’m a university professor. To be more precise, I teach in a communication studies department with a focus on public relations and corporate communication. Throughout my long career in the real world and in academia, I’ve specialized in two areas, one of which is strategy. In that capacity, I’ve helped hundreds of students develop successful promotional plans for non-profits and small businesses, and was an early adopter of social media, teaching our first undergraduate course in the new applications some years ago. It’s funny now that I’m looking at my own promotional work, I’m struck by a number of oddities in the world of social media – and authors.

My last post found me wondering if publishers really care about a writer’s life on Twitter, and thinking about that led me to contemplate the problems of social media ‘platforms’ in general. So, at the risk of alienating all of those authors and wannabe authors that I might be connected to online, here goes.

A social media platform no doubt supports sales of independently published books. Okay, I’ll buy that – but with a few caveats, the most important of which is that there needs to be some recognition of the point of diminishing returns.

I submit that a there is a point at which a writer’s online, social media presence morphs from supportive and beneficial to toxic. So here are some symptoms of toxicity that I’ve observed. You might be developing social media toxicity…

When you find yourself falling victim to group-think. It’s so easy to retweet mindlessly, to find yourself nodding in support of ideas that you hadn’t really given enough time to figure out on your own. I’ve noticed that except for the odd outlier, most reply tweets are supportive, and I even find myself falling into this trap, ignoring the tweets that I think are just plain stupid. And note that on Facebook and even Linkedin there is no “dislike” button.
When you have an over-inflated notion of how many books you should be selling based on your number of followers, friends etc. I have to hearken back to my last blog post where I began to find research to support the notion that online ‘likes’ don’t translate into behavior.
When you fall victim to that co-dependency problem. Codependency is known in mental health circles as a relationship addiction, excessive social or emotional reliance on another person who often has a problem. I’m suggesting that writers who toil in isolation often look for support among other writers who understand them, and this begins the cycle. Over-dependence can become toxic leading to inertia and the next symptom of toxicity…
When your social media activities become a major time suck. This can happen so easily. It’s like several of my students suggested the other day in class: they find themselves spending inordinate amounts of time on assignments as a result of keeping their electronics devices at their elbow and responding to every ‘ping’ as texts and tweets arrive. My advice: just turn them off!
And finally, when your admiration is seriously misplaced. I’m talking about the odd phenomenon of actual best-selling writers like Sheila O’Flanagan having fewer than 5,000 Twitter followers (and wisely following far fewer yet selling books in millions) while some indie authors who have sold a few thousand books having tens of thousands of followers. It might be worth the unknown writer’s (like me) time to follow the ones who have been on the real best-seller lists. Maybe we could learn a thing or two.

So, you might conclude that I’m just sour because I have a very few Twitter followers. But I’m not. I might have at one time when I thought that those followers might actually buy and retweet to actual buyers about my work. But that rarely happens in reality. It’s a bit like viral video: You can’t plan to use one for promotional and marketing because you have no way of knowing if a video you produce will catch fire or not.

I’m going to spend less time on my social media presence and more time on my writing. At least for now.

Backstory, Electronic Publishing, Publishing

When a publisher stops publishing: A writer takes control

Posted on 31 Oct 201331 Oct 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

So, it actually happens. In fact, it happens more often than you might think. And it has happened to me more than once, although I’m happy to say that not as often as it hasn’t! Publishers go out of business for one reason or another.

The backstory: Just like most serious writers out there, I had always gravitated toward traditional publishers. They have the experience. They have the expertise. They have the money. Well, maybe this last one is not a given. In any case, until recently, it was probably the only route to being taken seriously as an author, although it has to be said that in some circles this is still the case. Nevertheless, on almost a dozen occasions, I went through the long, drawn out process of querying, waiting, submitting, waiting, reviewing, waiting, editing, waiting and so it goes. Eventually the books saw the light of day and I moved on. But what happens to your property (your book that you slaved over for a chunk of your life) when your publisher ceases to publish? Notwithstanding the legal issues of who owns copyright (you should), here’s one of my stories.

In 2008 I finally found a publisher for my memoir about being the mom to an elite ballet dancer who happened to be a boy in a hockey-mad country. The publisher was a small one with a years-long publishing record and the publisher loved the story. When the book was published in the spring of 2009, I hosted the book launch, bringing my son, the ballet dancer, and one of his female partners from the National Ballet of Canada back to Halifax to entertain my captive audience. Of course they came to see him dance, but had to listen to me talk about the book! It was all very exciting.

Another Pointe of View: The Life & Times of a Ballet Mom didn’t really do very well, and the publisher was not into electronic publishing at all, so it was never available as a downloadable e-book, effectively cutting off a significant and increasing proportion of the potential readership. The publisher sent me 100 books that I did not order, and they sat untouched in my office. (I’m sorry, but I’m not one of those people who are prepared to sell books out of the trunk of a car. Nor do I think that people interested in ballet stories are likely to buy them that way. But that’s just me.)

For the next two years I tried to get the publisher to send me a royalty statement: even if a book sells not a single copy, the author is entitled to see the statements, and in fact the publisher was bound by our contract to send me one periodically. The truth, however, was as low as the sales might have been, I knew that there had been sales since several people mentioned to me that they had bought it and had enjoyed it. So, imagine my surprise when I received a letter one day in 2011 indicating to me that I owed the publisher $1800.00!

The letter was from a woman who indicated she had been hired by the publisher to wind down operations – this was the first I had heard. She told me that the owner of the company was ill and would be retiring thus freeing the authors from any further obligations to the publisher except for this unpaid bill for 100 copies of my book (how it amounted to that much money I’ll never know). M y response was as follows: I most certainly was not going to pay any money for books I did not order – she could have them back if she was prepared to send money for the shipping; nor was I going to pay money to a publisher who had not once provided me with a royalty statement and was therefore in breach of contract. I asked for all rights to revert to me and I wanted it in writing. That letter came and not another word was uttered about money owning. I guess threatening to have my lawyer in touch with them did the trick.

So there I was with the book that I might as well have published myself. So, what do you do with a property that returns to you?

The newly designed cover for 'Ballet Mom' created for me by Tugboat Design — The newly designed cover for ‘Ballet Mom’ created for me by Tugboat Design

I decided that the evolution in publishing over the past several years provided me with a significant opportunity to revisit the book and see if I could garner a new audience for it. At this point the remnants of the publisher were unable to provide me with the final, edited manuscript in editable form, so I took the uneditable form and had it converted, then began the process of updating the work.

I decided that the book might find an audience these days with the e-book readers. I hired a book cover designer to come up with a more eye-catching cover, and then finished formatting the manuscript for electronic downloads. Then I published myself it via Kindle Direct and began letting people know that it’s available.

It’s funny how things have changed over the past several years. With Twitter and Facebook and other online possibilities, I had a request for a copy for review within a week from an international dance magazine who evidently had not heard of it before despite my publisher’s so-called promotion based on the marketing plan that I had delivered to her.

I think that my next step will be to make updated hard-copies available as well, thus making the ones currently available from online sellers (and from which authors receive not a single cent in royalties once a book is out of print) outdated and unwanted.

But what did I learn from all of this (and what could I offer as advice to other writers?)?

Don’t trust your publisher to market your book for you. (I already knew this, but the experience brought it into sharp focus.)
Publishers go out of business and leave you high and dry.
Authors need to keep a certain amount of control over their properties, even when signing contracts with traditional publishers.
If you have a well-edited manuscript (read: professionally edited), you can feel good about indie publishing.

But most importantly I learned that…

You can breathe new life into old work.

…and that’s what I’m going to do with several other books, published by traditional publishers before the electronic era whose rights have reverted to me. Stay tuned!

Book covers

The book cover debate: Here we go again

Posted on 18 Jul 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

Almost two years ago to the day, I wrote a backstory about my book cover adventures. Then back in May of this, I wrote about the beginning of my newest book cover adventure starting with the news from my editor at that, as he said in an email, “Time and budgetary restraints being what they are, we’re unable to ask our designers to come up with a cover completely from scratch. Rather, it falls to you (and to me)…” And that’s what got me thinking about the differences (or lack thereof) between traditional and independent publishing. At that time I lamented that if I have to design my own cover, what in the world are publishers paying those designers to do exactly?

So, I went on to the web site where this publisher buys stock photos and drawings to search through thousands of images using a variety of relevant search terms. I narrowed it down to a few, modified them in Photoshop, added the appropriate cover text, ran the design by my in-house consultant (my husband) and sent the mock-up along to my editor. A month or so later (he apologized for taking so long to get back to me – evidently during conference season it’s hard to find their marketers. It occurs to me that if you’re at conferences selling books, then you are a sales person. If you are a marketer, I thought that you worked on marketing strategy including cover design – but I digress), he emailed me telling me that my cover mock-up was clever, but they didn’t think it really represented the book very well. Never mind that I don’t think a single member of the ‘marketing team’ has actually read the book.

Then he sent me a stock photo that they thought was appropriate. It. Was. Not. And it wasn’t clever. And it wasn’t interesting. And it wasn’t an image that a single one of my intended readers (this is targeted non-fiction this time) could identify with or would even click on to get further information – and make no mistake, that’s how books are bought these days, particular this kind since they are not designed to go to book stores.

life without end — My first-ever book published by a now-defunct Toronto publisher. Twenty-four years ago, designers actually designed clever covers. It’s time for them to start again.

As any writer of book-length work realizes, the old maxim “You can’t tell a book by its cover” is becoming more and more irrelevant. You might not be able to tell a lot about what’s behind that cover just by seeing the image and text, but in my view (a) you ought to be able to, and (b) that cover really does need to be dynamite these days.

I recently read a marketing study where eBook covers had been changed and sales tracked before and after the change. Just as you might expect, improving the cover increased sales. Although this is not an eBook (but there will be an electronic version naturally), sales will accrue through online channels. This means that the potential buyers will be moved to either explore further or not by what they see on that cover. The truth is, though, that no one has the definitive answer to the question of what makes a truly good book cover design. That’s because each book is unique. So where does that leave us?

Just by coincidence, or perhaps serendipity, The New Yorker online published a piece today titled The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover. The writer Tim Kreider says,”… publishing houses hire professional designers for books’ covers and allow their authors very little say over them…” Clearly he doesn’t know about smaller publishers who seem to have less than no money these days for design. He did however describe his own recent experience in which he seemed to have embarked on a similar back and forth between him and his publisher on the design of his book cover. When he suggested that the cover he liked the least was always the one they seem to like the best, I was on his side again. However, he seems to think that well-designed book covers are on their way out, blaming the electronic book trend for this phenomenon. Book covers, he believes, are dull and getting duller. I happen to think that book cover design is going to be even more important as we move ever deeper into electronic purchasing and electronic reading.

I will say that I was completely in agreement with him at the end of the piece when he and his publisher finally agreed on the cover design for the new book. He describes it this way: “…a result nobody would voluntarily have chosen but which everyone could acquiesce to, if only out of exhaustion.”

I am sorely afraid that this is what will eventually become the cover my new book. And it had better happen fast because it’s on the publisher’s fall list.

Again the question: What makes a good cover design? No one really knows these days. While I await my editor’s next move (back to the drawing board he said yesterday after he finally, a month later, responded to my email detailing why I thought his suggestion was lame) I’d be interested to know what draws you into a book that no one has actually recommended to you. Is it that cover?