MARY E THOMPSON

it's a curvy road to happily ever after

Ann Everett

#FiveOnFriday Marketing Tips from Ann Everett

by

Please welcome Ann Everett back to the blog today! Need any marketing tips? She’s got five great ones for you!

Join HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

Sign-up–(the subscription is free)

Read–You’ll receive three emails every day with requests from sources in specific areas (e.g., travel, tech, general)

Respond–If any of the sources listed have something you can speak to, then respond directly to the reporter making the request. Authors who responded to a request have been featured on multiple news and talk shows from CNN to Fox & Friends, and mentioned in the largest outlets including Cosmo, Essence, The Saturday Evening Post, Woman’s Day, American Baby, Consumer’s Digest Magazine, the BBC, US News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, ABC.com, The Huffington Post, FoxBusiness.com, MSN Money, AOL and Yahoo.

Just make sure you don’t waste their time. Don’t respond unless you meet their criteria.

I have been interviewed by an editor for Good Housekeeping Magazine, featured on a blog with many followers, interviewed by two college professors writing a book, and contributed to a book of motherly advice.

Getting your name out there regardless if you connect it to your books, will bring people to your site, and they’ll see your books. The subjects I responded to concerned marriage, advice, and Amazon.

DO AMAZON GIVEAWAYS

This is an Amazon promotion often overlooked. To set it up, go to your Amazon author book page.

Click on any of your books, then scroll down past the reviews and you’ll see, “set up a giveaway.” Amazon will walk you through the procedure. Since you’re giving the book away, you’ll get no royalties, so what is the advantage?

Followers: You can require contestants to follow you on Facebook, twitter, or your author page on Amazon. I choose my author page because all those followers get a notice each time I have a new book released. Amazon does that work for me, and it will help get my book off to a good start.

Traffic: According to Amazon, Giveaways increase traffic more than 40% during the promotion.

Twitter Exposure: If you tweet #AmazonGiveaway, everyone searching for Amazon Giveaways will see that tweet and you!

Minimal investment: The only cost to you is the cost of your book. You choose how many you want to giveaway, so you control the investment. I’ve done one book per fifty followers and gave away five books. That netted me 250 followers with each giveaway. Keep in mind, you will make a royalty off each book because you’ve purchased them at regular price, so that reduces your cost. You can choose print or digital.

Audience: Readers who love your genre will search out those giveaways, therefore targeting the exact reader you’re looking for. This fine tunes your followers.

You can run a giveaway and a Kindle Countdown at the same time for the same book. If you do that, then your cost will be less because you’re not paying full price for the giveaway book, AND you’re making the higher royalty because it’s in KDP Select.

SET UP PINTEREST BOARDS

Pinterest is the largest driver of traffic of all social media with over 110 million active monthly users.

The first thing you want to do on Pinterest is sign up for a business account. That way, you’ll have access to analytics and your website will get verified. Once that’s done, the images you post will have a better chance of getting search results.

Use your author name as your username because that helps brand you, so use it as it appears on your books.

Just like every other site, you’ll enter a profile, headshot, keywords, etc.

Profile photo—165 X165

Board display—22 X 150

Pin sizes—236 pixels wide

You’ll also want to add an icon Pinterest button to your website, so visitors can check out your boards by clicking the icon and going directly to your Pinterest page.

Not a good idea to connect your Pinterest account to any other social sites. If it automatically posts on Twitter, the pin will only be a link and not an actual photo.

You’ll want to add a Pinterest bookmark to your browser and you can find those instructions here: http://www.pinterest.com/about/goodies

On Pinterest, you can follow pinners (members) or their individual boards. Now, about those boards. Maybe you love jewelry or fashion or cars or like me, everything Texas. You can make boards for all your favorites, but don’t forget to make a board for each of your books! More on that later.

Look at other pinners, even authors, to get ideas of what they pin.

You can use the search bar in Pinterest to find items/images. It is quickly becoming a popular search engine!  You can pin directly from the web, or if you have personal images on your desktop, you can pin those. When you pin a personal image, be sure and include your website URL in the description/comment section.

By clicking the Pinterest logo at the top of your Pinterest page, you can navigate to the Newsfeed and find everything pinned by people you follow. Click Analytics and discover how many of your pins are getting RE-pinned. On average, a Pin, is RE-pinned 11 times!

Board Ideas 

Here are the boards I have related to my books.

A board for each book with fantasy cast, quotes, covers, etc.

Images of wedding dresses

A collection of jewelry

One of my characters loved Boho-chic, so I have a board for that.

Beautiful Men

Beautiful women

Quotes that will make you laugh, cry and think

Recipes from my Sweet Thangs Cookbook

Books I love

Boot and hats

All things Texas

DIY

As you can see, your boards should be all about what you like. Go crazy! You can even have secret boards. Why? Well, if you’re a Stuart Reardon fan, like me, and have a hard time finding a photo of him suitable for public viewing, a secret board is a good thing!!

Here’s a fun site to make beautiful posts for social media. They have 1000’s of templates. http://www.easil.com

INCLUDE BOOK BACK MATTER

Make sure you have sample chapters or excerpts from all your books in the back of each book published. Along with buy links. This is constant marketing working for you every single day!

DO PUBLIC SPEAKING

In high school, I was a twirler, and everyone knew when I dropped the baton.

I’ve sung solos, and everyone knew when I hit a wrong note.

But as a speaker, no one in the audience knows what I’m going to say, so they don’t know if I’ve messed anything up or not! That’s the beauty of public speaking…and it’s a good source of marketing. Because you’re not marketing your books…you’re marketing yourself.

All you need is WANT AND WILLPOWER. I find my program info from reading blogs, books, and doing searches. Once I have that, it’s easy to put together a power point presentation.

I generally sell some books, but more importantly, I get other speaking engagements, friends, followers, and it adds to my credibility to answer some of those HARO requests!

Meet Ann Everett

Award winning and Amazon Best-Selling author, Ann Everett embraces her small town upbringing and thinks Texans are some of the funniest people on earth. When speaking at conferences and to writing groups, businesses, book clubs, and non-profit organizations, she incorporates her special brand of wit, making her programs on marketing, self-publishing, and the benefits of laughter, informative and fun.

Her short stories have appeared in The Green Silk Journal, Snag Today, and Story Teller Magazine.

A top reviewer on thenextbigwriter.com, she lives on a small lake in Northeast Texas where she writes, bakes, and fights her addiction to Diet Dr. Peppers.

She’s been featured on:

Proud of East Texas with Joan Hallmark, KLTV-TV, Tyler, Texas

East Texas Live and Mid-day, KETK-TV, Tyler, Texas

KTSS-TV, Hope, Arkansas

The Authors Show with Don McCauley, Internet radio show

The Chandler & Brownsboro Statesman, Chandler, Texas

The Daily Tribune, Mt. Pleasant, Texas

Tyler Morning Telegraph, Tyler, Texas

InMagazine, East Texas

Ten things you won’t know about Ann by reading her bio:

She’s been married to her high school sweetheart.
She loves shopping at thrift stores.
She doesn’t remember her first kiss.
She hates talking on the telephone.
A really sharp pencil makes her happy.
She secretly wants to get a tattoo.
A charter member of National Honor Society in high school remains one of her proudest moments.
She’s thankful wrinkles aren’t painful.
She sucks at math.

Ann’s Books:

Tizzy/Ridge romantic suspense trilogy

Laid Out and Candle Lit

You’re Busting My Nuptials

Tied With a Bow and No Place to Go

Contemporary romance companion books

Tell Me a Secret

Two Wrongs Make a Right

Say You’ll Never Love Me

Non-fiction

Strong Verbs Strong Voice: A quick reference to improve your writing and impress readers (Amazon best seller)

Body Language: A quick reference for character action and description

Sweet Thangs: Southern Sweets from Two Sassy Sisters

Find Ann on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, and Goodreads!

Chirp by Ann Everett

by

Oh. My. God. Ann Everett is right on target sharing her thoughts on writer’s block with us today. Please say hi!

WRITER’S BLOCK—FACT OR FABRICATION???

Writer’s block, (noun) the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing.

Frustrated young writer having writer's block
Frustrated young writer having writer’s block

There are authors who refuse to acknowledge Writer’s Block calling it instead fear, self-doubt, distraction, or procrastination.

You say tomato. I say toe-mot-o!! Call it what you like, every author experiences it at some point in their career.

I recently recovered from a serious bout that lasted six-weeks! That’s not to say I wrote nothing during that time because I did…. just not what I needed to write, which was the final chapter in my current book. Bummer. Yeah, I’d written over 90,000 words of a good story and couldn’t end it!

I’d heard that if you can’t end a story, you probably didn’t know where the story was headed from the beginning. Okay. Sounds logical. But the problem with that is, even when I work from a rough outline, I’m not always sure where the plot will take me!

This was my first attempt at writing multiple POVs so I had a lot of threads to tie up. I have two main characters and their love story. A secondary romance which involves a brother and girlfriend. Also, a private investigator’s story line as he searches for the main character.

After a few weeks of obsessing, where it was on my mind 24-7, I decided to just write… something… anything… total crap. I had to start somewhere, or I’d never finish it.

I belong to an online writing site, which I recommend to all authors, so I knew if I posted even ca-ca, I’d get help. After my readers there weighed in on what they liked and didn’t like, I rewrote, reposted and rewrote again. Now it was only semi-poop, so I was making progress.

Two more rewrites, and six beta readers later, I’m happy with the ending. So let me share what the problem was and how I fixed it.

The wrong POV. I’d started in my heroine’s point of view and it didn’t work. I didn’t know why, I just knew it didn’t. So, I switched to the hero. Still not right. And me, still clueless as to why it felt wrong. Finally, I opened with the stepmother’s POV because this chapter is the big showdown where her search for the heroine comes to resolution.

Why didn’t I think of that from the beginning? Because I’d only been in her POV two times during the story and for me she didn’t seem the natural choice. But those betas’ got me on the right track! They wanted to know what was in her head before the confrontation took place… and it worked! Dang! I am so lucky to have such good betas’ willing to be brutally honest in telling me when something stinks.

There are many tricks you can use to overcome writer’s block. Walk away from the computer. Exercise. Listen to music. Brainstorm with fellow authors. Change your writing habit.

Many times I get stuck with the first line of a chapter. If I can get an opening, I can go from there. So when that happens, I randomly flip through novels stopping here and there to read a few sentences.

Here’s an example of what I mean. After doing the flipping pages exercise, I came across a line about a dog thumping his tail against the floor. That sparked my brain, and I started my chapter with… By now, all over town, tongues were wagging.

Another trick I use to break the stress is to look at my email spam folder and take words from there and write about them. Usually a stupid or silly paragraph or two. What else can I write with choices like Christian Mingle, male enhancement free trial, free lobster, vaginal mesh patch recall, power bills, and burn fat?

Boy, if using those words can’t lighten a mood, then nothing can!

Whatever you do, don’t wallow in self-pity. Just put words on a page. Even if they are stinky!

Remember:

Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all. ~~Charles Bukowski

Man, why didn’t I think of that weeks ago?

Here’s a short excerpt from Chirp, the book that gave me the case of writer’s block. It is due for release in December.

Nothing seemed disturbed. Actually, the place appeared neater than he’d ever seen. Housekeeping wasn’t one of Dessie’s strong suits. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he noticed more changes. When did his grandmother get a big screen TV? And computer?

A sappy love song played from the other end of the house. He grabbed the baseball bat Gran kept in an antique milk can by the hutch, then edged down the short hallway and stepped to the open bathroom door.

A girl who didn’t look more than fifteen lay in the tub with her eyes closed. Mostly nipples and areolas, her small breasts flattened against her chest. Bubble clouds floated over her spindle-thin body.

Shame thickened in his throat. He shouldn’t be staring at her, but he couldn’t turn away. He didn’t know if it was the shock of seeing a stranger here, or that the intruder was a teenager. Whatever it was, he found his voice.

“Who the hell are you?”

*****

Blaze recognized Rance Keller from the stack of pictures Miss Dessie kept in a leather box on the mantle. But he looked different in the flesh. An unkempt beard and mustache surrounded full lips. Long dark hair fringed beneath the edge of a knit beanie. Menacing blue eyes stared back.

Blaze rose from the water, reached for the towel hanging on the rack, and wrapped herself, tucking in the corner to secure it.

“Did you escape?”

He blinked like it was a stupid question, but it wasn’t. Letters she’d read said he’d been denied parole twice because he wouldn’t admit guilt.

“I’m asking the questions. Who are you?”

“Blaze Bledsoe.”

He half-grinned as if her answer was a punch line, then snarled. “Blaze? I don’t think so.”

“Well, I don’t care what you think. That’s my name and I live here because Miss Dessie said I could.”

“New owner. New rules. Get your shit and get out.”

His lips barely moved, and she thought of all the villains she’d seen on Perfect Crime, but despite his demeanor, he didn’t scare her because Dessie had shared plenty of stories about him.

She dried off, folded the towel and laid it on the commode, then pushed past him into the bedroom where she took panties from the dresser and stepped into them. Next, she pulled a faded Madonna tee-shirt over her head. “No.”

“This is my house and you’re trespassing.”

His voice was low-pitched, and when she faced him, his mouth clamped into a thin line. A muscle in his jaw worked. She reminded herself this was a man just out of prison, yet she still didn’t feel threatened. Not after Dessie’s tales of how he’d cared for injured animals, and his eagerness to help with any chore. Blaze folded her arms under her breasts. “It’s almost one o’clock. I have work tomorrow. We can talk in the morning.”

At first, he said nothing, just scanned the full length of her body, and she felt more naked than she’d been minutes ago. He locked his eyes on hers, and his gaze darkened. “I’m twice your size. I can throw your scrawny ass out the front door and you can’t do anything about it.”

“I know. But you won’t.” Turning down the covers, she switched off the lamp, and crawled into bed.

ann-everett-photo-and-covers

Stay in touch with Ann on her website, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, and Goodreads!