Connect with Authors Through Skype

One site that quickly gained popularity this year is the Skype an Author, a Wetpaint site, billed at the key to Virtual Author Visits in Your Library or Classroom. Set up by Sarah Chauncey of the Grandview Elementary School Library in Rockland County, NY schools and author Mona Kirby, it is getting attention from many sources, including the School Library Journal.

The site allows authors to set up pages describing their books and how they might do a Skype visit. Skype is the online audio/video free phone service; a Skype visits allows an author to see students and students to see the author.

Authors are asked to do one of two types of Skype visits:

• No Charge – Meet the Author Visit – 10 to 15 minutes
• In-Depth Visit – 30-60 Minutes – Charge to be determined by author

Why Should you Want to Skype?

(See what Catherine Balkin said in yesterday’s post. )

Set Up Your Page

I recently updated the Darcy Pattison page on the Skype an Author site.

Here are some tips:

Set up your Webcam

One final thing you’ll want to do before going live with the Skype an Author site is to test out your Skype/Webcam set up. I discovered, for example, that the lighting in my office is great for doing work on the computer, but awful for doubling as a video studio. Here is one videos to get you started on simple lighting. Look for other tutorials.

How to Apply Simple 3-Point Lighting to Amateur Film Making

Revise with confidence.

Online Author Chats – A New Learning Experience

Guest Post by Catherine Balkin

Author Appearances Down. I’ve been arranging author appearances in schools and libraries for about 20 years and, a few months ago, I was sitting at my desk, lamenting their recent slump. With the economic downturn, school and library budgets have been cut right and left, and fewer and fewer authors are being asked to visit schools, libraries, and university events. My little business was – and still is – suffering because of it. So are many of the authors and artists I represent.

Online Chats an Alternative to School Visit? Then a school teacher called and asked me about arranging an online chat with an author using Skype or iChat. At the time, it was a new idea and I decided to explore it. I started asking authors if they would be interested in doing them, and many of them loved the idea. I talked to other schools – many schools, in fact – to find out what they could afford for honorariums. Everyone I talked to liked the idea of online chats. The schools liked the idea of not having to pay travel and hotel expenses, and the authors liked the idea of fewer travel hassles. And because there was no need to travel, the authors were willing to charge less. The more research I did, the better online chats began to sound.

Problems with Setting up an Online Chat. Okay, a couple of snags presented themselves. Some school districts won’t allow access to free programs like Skype or iChat, fearing viruses. But enterprising teachers can use their own laptops or go to a public library or other public places that offer access to computers and the internet. And sometimes the images on the screen aren’t as sharp as we would like or there are time lags during a session – but a good computer makes a big difference with snags like these. They were definitely not obstacles that couldn’t be overcome.

Making Author Online Chats Work

So to help spread the good news that there was an affordable way to bring authors and artists and students together, I decided to raffle off online author chats. This raffle has been teaching me even more about the process and most of the raffled off chats haven’t even been held yet.

• One winner still working on the scheduling end of things teaches an online graduate course to library students all over the country, and she told me she plans to use either Skype’s conference call feature or Adobe Connect.
• Another snag that had been worrying me was the fact that the number of students the author could reach during a chat was limited to the number that could crowd around the computer monitor, but a conference online chat solves that nicely.

  The solution came from another winner – an elementary school teacher, who told me she plans to project what’s on the computer monitor onto a large screen using an ActivBoard so the whole grade level can participate.

This raffle has been – and is still in the process of being – a great learning experience. They certainly offer an alternative solution to budget minded schools. In these uncertain economic times, they are a brand new educational tool and a whole new way for teachers to present literature to students. And they allow us a way to continue to bring readers and writers together.

I have no doubt that I will do more raffles for selected authors and artists from time to time, especially when I add new authors and artists to the Balkin Buddies online list, so anyone who wants to drop his or her name into the future raffles hat, please feel free to contact me through the Balkin Buddies website . I also hope you browse through the site from time to time because I’ll be adding more information as I learn it.

Like author visits to schools, online chats are already proving to be a great way to connect kids in a very personal way to the books they read.

Revise with confidence.

For several years, we hosted high-school exchange students in our home. The surprising thing was the ongoing friendships that continued for many years. One European family, in particular, have been friends and it’s interesting to see the students finish college and begin careers. The son, especially, has an interesting attitude: he wants to be flexible enough to go where he needs to get a good job.

His girlfriend/fiance/now wife went to Scotland for experience in the hospitality industry; he went to Germany to learn that language and culture, then worked for a while in Russia. They were considering work in Australia.

In today’s economy, writers need to be flexible.This year, I’m taking risks, trying to break out of the slump forced by the economy.

• I’m trying new genres. I’ve tried at least three new genres this year and plan to play around with a couple more to see if I can find new markets.
• I’m trying to reach new people. I’m attending different conferences than I’ve ever done before, to meet new people in the industry and see if something will click.
• I’m triple-checking resources, looking for markets. What have I overlooked before? Where can I plug in that I’ve over-looked?
• I’m looking at my life circumstances and thinking about how it affects my work. What have I avoided because of other concerns, such as family? Am I in the same place or could I now consider those things? What have I always accepted because it fit my life – but maybe I no longer need to accept?
• I’m appreciating the writing outlets I do have and trying to serve them better. What are the editor’s needs? How can I make their life easy by giving them EXACTLY what they need?

Articles, books, bylines – here I come!

Revise with confidence.

Sell your novel! AND Your Other Writing

Where do you get marketing info that helps you decide when and where to submit?

• General Market books. The Writer’s Digest market books are the best known and have a reputation for delivering up-to-date information.
  • Writer’s Market Deluxe 2010

  
  

  • Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market 2010
  • Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market 2010
  • Poet’s Market 2010
  • Photographer’s Market 2010
  • Guide to Literary Agent 2010
  • Artist’s and Graphic Designer’s Market 2010
  • Songwriter’s Market 2010

  Screenwriter’s and Playwright’s Market 2010

• Specialized market books.

Sally Stuart’s Christian Writer’s Market 2010

• Twitter Read Mitali Perkins guide on Twitter and Hashtags. Find and “follow” editors or jobs boards; also, watch for “hashtags” that give you info about an editor’s or publisher’s needs. For example, check out @writersjobs and @hopeclark.
• Blogs or Websites. Wow, there are so many to point out here.There are publisher’s and agent’s websites and blogs. And Sites/blogs from those who keep a thumb on the pulse of things. Here are two simple examples. If you find something interesting, please put it in the comments.
  • Harold Underdown’s Who Moved Where Page.
  • Publishers’ websites or blogs. For example, Stone Arch Books did this post last September, and I got an assignment by following up on it.
• Websites with needs. Like a certain website? Check out their About or FAQ or Contact Us page to see if they list submission guidelines. In the February 2010 issue of WOW-Women on Writing, I”ll have an interview with Carla McClafferty, who writes trade nonfiction for kids and teens.
• Newsletters for Special Markets. Some of these will charge, others are free.
  • Travel writers
  • SCBWI Bulletin which includes a market column
  • Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets (fantasy, sff)
• Online Bulletin Boards.
  • Verla Kay’s Blueboards After seeing a notice from an editor for Scholastic Instructor, I had several assignments from them. Editors are people who hang out, too.
  • SCBWI Bulletin Boards.Less marketing info than there used to be, but sometimes you find something.
• Friends. Hey, your friends are getting work, right? Ask them for a referral.

Where do you get leads?

Revise with confidence.

Put your Book in Educator’s Classrooms

A friend and I recently sat down with two librarians to talk about what they like to hear in presentations. Their needs were different: one teaches in an elementary school and one in a high school. Yet, they agreed on several things. Educators are one market for most authors of children’s books, YA books and many adult books – here are 4 tips.

Recognize the differences in organizations.

There are many places a writer of children’s books might speak. In Arkansas, these include (but limited to) the Arkansas Library Association (ArLA), Arkansas Reading Association (ARA), and Arkansas Association of Instructional Media (AAIM).

Different members. It’s important to know the differences in their memberships. The ArLA is mostly public school librarians who are concerned about programming special events, balancing a collection and keeping funding when it relies on politics. The ARA has a large number of classroom teachers who are concerned about teaching reading to kids. The AAIM are librarians, who must follow the state standards for teaching library skills, as well as function as the technology expert for their school. Obviously, each will have special interests and you should know these differences when you develop a presentation.

For the ARA, classroom teachers appreciate take-home materials that they can instantly use in the classroom without any extra work: Make my life easy, please. For the ArLA, they want information to answer their patrons questions. For them, I did a session on “I Wrote a Book: Now What?” as a way to answer that question when a patron asked it. Here’s the free pdf handout of that session. For AAIM, go for technology: your website, a book trailer, Skype, etc. Anything that helps the technology-minded librarian help the classroom teacher with technology or library skills.

Tip: Join a couple organizations and hang out on their listservs to see their concerns; think about how to meet those needs.

Keep abreast of education terminology.

Have you heard of “Bell ringers”? These are short questions or prompt designed to make students think. They are designed to be written on a board, or posted somewhere, so that when the bell rings, students immediately start working on an answer to the question. This practice allows teachers to check roll, do other necessary daily paperwork, and spread writing tasks across the curriculum.

Write your Bell Ringers. So, have you updated your teacher handouts to include Bell Ringers? Are there questions that students can think about BEFORE a teacher reads your book aloud? Are there ideas in your novel that deserve thought and discussion? Look for these and develop a list of ten Bell Ringers and include them with your education materials.

Tip: Listen when teachers are talking and ask them to define education terminology and apply it to your marketing for you book.

Keep abreast of education standards.

It’s important to know what standards teachers must follow. Even with the new national standards, only 80% of a state’s standards must follow the national standards. It’s always good to check the state standards. Also, check standards recommended by national teacher organizations: math teachers, social studies teachers, English teachers, etc.

For example, libraries now have to do more technology and are changing from research libraries (since students do most of that online) to libraries full of popular literature for kids to read what they love.

Tip: When you have a new book come out, do the grunt work and check the standards and make a list that your book meets. Yes, they’ll buy your book if it’s popular with the kids, if it’s great literature, if it wins an award. But they’ll be even more likely to buy it if you make it easy for them to use it in instruction.

Remember the audience.

Teachers and librarians are overworked, underpaid, compassionate and committed.

Tips: Make their life easy. Remember to make a personal connection by giving them a behind-the-scenes look at your life and work. Tell them thank you for your hard work and give a personal anecdote about your positive experiences with educators. Respect them and their hard work.

Lesson Plans for My Books

Download Lesson Plans (zipped pdf file) for my Picture Books.

Revise with confidence.

4 Perspectives on Authors and Social Media

Here’s a range of answers:

1. Yes. Social media experts say that your online presence can help with website traffic, engagement with readers, brand awareness (your name is your brand if you’re an author), revenue, brand reputation, and product feedback.



2. No. Drawing upon 25 years of online experience (YES! It’s been around that long!), Janni gives a savvy response, not just to social media, but also to your reputation online, the etiquette of being online and other variables.
   
3. Be careful. Editorial Anonymous picks up the etiquette theme, reminding us that what’s online is, well, public.
4. Social Media Tip. And here’s a little known fact: most online media picks up information from local sources or other online sources (like I’m doing now). You know how the publisher is always telling you to ask your local newspapers to write about you and your work? Turns out this is very wise advice. It even has a name now: Starter Publicity.

ERRATA NOTE: For those who receive our RSS by Email, you were missing the video of yesterday’s talk about scenes. I didn’t realize the video wouldn’t embed in the Email: I expected at least a link. So, here’s the link to the Good Will Hunting, Harvard Bar Scene to study for writing in scenes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s&feature=player_embedded

Revise with confidence.

How many book reviews should you expect for your book? Not many, it seems. Publisher’s Marketplace Lunch Deluxe reports in today’s newsletter that the top books receive only about 20 reviews:

Here is our annual proprietary tabulation of the most reviewed books and imprints of the year (based on full-length reviews in the nation’s top circulation newspapers.) Cutbacks on review space and the closing of a few prominent papers are clear in the statistics–full-length newspaper reviews declined more than 14 percent last year, as we tabulated 6,725 reviews in all (compared to 7,855 in 2008, and 8,465 in 2007).

The top 10 books received about 20 reviews (19-23) and number 50 on the list received about a dozen reviews. So, if you’re getting about a dozen reviews in newspapers, you can count yourself lucky.

Revise with confidence.

What Genre Should you Write?

I was talking to a friend about a new novel he’s working on. He’s not sure what genre it falls under and what genre he should aim for. Of course, there are two answers to this:

Just write. One way of looking at it is that he just needs to write it and let the marketing people worry about genre. This advice comes from those who believe the author’s vision and voice can transcend genre.

Target a genre. This advice comes from those who believe that to build a career, you must build an audience; and the easiest way to do that is to write in a certain genre and consistently deliver a book the audience wants. Once you have a consistent audience, then write a break-out book that will lead you to a larger audience. For example, literary agent Donald Maass advocates this approach in his book, The Career Novelist, which is now available on his website as a free pdf download.

What Genres are Selling to Publisher

Either way, out of curiosity, I also went to Publisher’s Marketplace and looked up stats on what actually sold this past year in various genres. Of course, not every deal is reported at Publisher’s Marketplace, but it should give you an idea of popularity of different genres.

This is how deals were made in December in each category, followed by how many for the year of 2009.

• Adult Fiction
  • Horror- 0, 22
  • Inspirational – 5, 112
  • Mystery/Crime – 14, 145
  • Paranormal – 4, 15
  • SciFi – 4 ,117
  • Thriller – 1, 83
  • Women’s/Romance – 29, 396
  • General/Other Fiction – 31, 356
• Children’s Fiction
  • Fantasy – 1, 13
  • Middle Grade – 17, 178
  • Picture book – 12, 198
  • Young adult – 34, 329

In the adult fiction, women’s/romance and general/other are the hot propertities. Notice also the strong showing of mystery/crime and SciFi. Paranormal seems on the outs.

In children’s fiction, young adult wins out. But equally strong are the picture book and middle grade categories. Picture books are said to be “soft” and hard to sell; not according to these stats! I also wonder how many titles were reported in the YA and MG genre which could have been reported instead as Fantasy.

(Interesting that PM lists fantasy novels, but not SciFi for children and vice versa for adults. Thanks, Harry!)

Revise with confidence.

Memoir of a Successful Book Trailer in Six Words

by guest Lisa Gottfried of DigitalWeavers.com

NOTE: Lisa did the editing for my retreat video. She spoke at the San Rafael conference and I was interested enough to try her services, for which I paid. This is an invited guest post and she speaks here as a professional working full time on video promotions.

Thanks to the editors at SMITH magazine, the popular mini-memoir book “Not Quite What I was Planning,” is full of incredible pieces, all only six words long, some uplifting, some intellectual, some tragic, some incredibly accessible, but all what I would consider to be successful.

It got me thinking about the economy of communication and how that translates to book trailers. If I were to edit a book filled with only links to book trailer videos, which ones would make the cut and which would not? Could I narrow down the critical elements of a good book trailer into six words? Here’s what I would write.

Memoir of a Successful Book trailer by Lisa Gottfried

Economic Focused Editing; Authentic Emotional Entertainment

If these ideas can be met and done well, no matter whether an author has a budget of $200 or $2,000, a book trailer can be successful, i.e. move a viewer to get excited about the book, share the trailer with friends, write an on-line review of your book. Let’s look at the six key ingredients to a successful book trailer.

Economic – 30-90 seconds

On-line audiences are interacting with their computer, not passively watching a TV. You either get the message across in a short time, or your viewers are moving on with the click of a button. We all know this.

But keeping communications brief and to the point is an art form. The length of a book trailer should be thirty to ninety seconds. You might get away with two minutes, but an eight-minute trailer needs the eyes and ears of a good editor, no matter how famous the author.

Big v. small publishers

I’ve been looking for new markets for my work and paying attention to smaller publishers while I”m at it. With so many imprints consolidated under one umbrella, it’s harder than ever to find appropriate markets.

Take Penguin Young Readers Group, for example: it’s imprints include Philomel, Viking, G.P. Putnam, Dutton, Dial, Grossett & Dunlap/PSS, Puffin, and Razorbill. If you sell to one of these imprints, then you “belong” to that imprint and can’t sell to any of the others. From a corporate standpoint, this makes sense; the marketing & publicity staff is the same for all imprints, only the editorial staff operate independently as an imprint. There may be some marketing person who mainly does Dutton books, but they don’t identify themselves as working for Dutton, but for Penguin Young Readers Group.

From an author’s point-of-view, though, when you sell to Dutton, in effect, you’ve cut out seven potential markets. You better really like dealing with Dutton!

So, the smaller publishers look inviting in some ways. No, they don’t get quite the publicity and the market share. But you may get more personal attention because editors/marketing handle fewer books; you may stay in print longer because they need your book in their backlist more than a big publisher does; you may get more editorial development because they want to keep you and not let you stray.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both big and small publishers. When you’re looking through the new Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market 2010, be sure to give each and every listing a careful look. Find the company website, read a few representative titles, be open – you may find a home easier and be much happier at a smaller publisher.

Revise with confidence.