The Realities of Launch Week

It is still the launch week for If It Was New York, Summer 2009 and I'm seeing all of the positives and the negatives of my marketing process.

The first place I always go when I want to get some traction is Reader's Favorite. All of my books (except the last Kindle Worlds novella) have bee reviewed by the service and it works well to get a review out there, even though most of the reviews are not posted directly to Amazon by the reviewer. I'm still waiting on this review--if I get one at all. Hopefully I do, but I will probably still be waiting a few weeks for it.

Next, I posted about it on Twitter which is always iffy--I can't post too many tweets about it because I'll get unfollowed, but not enough and no one sees it. Balance. It's a good thing.

Then there's BookBub. No, I'm not talking about getting into the email blast, I'm talking about on their website. I set up an author profile awhile ago because it was recommended for all authors, even if they are not intending to buy a BookBub email placement. So I did, and I set up this book before the release date so that BookBub would notify my followers about it on the day of release. And they did, because I got the lovely email that would have sold me on checking it out had I not written myself. The catch? I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who received that email blast.

New Release email.

Continuing with BookBub, I got curious and decided to check where I was on the New Releases page. In the poetry category, my book landed on page four.

Page Four.

I'm a bit disappointed by this, but I then I looked at page one. I was competing what a bunch of poets I read, including Laurie Halse Anderson (I thought it was a memoir, not a poetry book, but whatevs...) and two of those wildly popular Instagram poets, Tyler Knott Gregson and Amanda Lovelace. Occasionally I let myself believe I'm their poetic equals, then I have to remind myself they have publisher backing, which still counts to reach higher sales numbers in the publishing world, thought Lovelace did publish her first collection on Amazon before Andrews McMeel got a hold of it. The verdict? Not jealous, but inspired to make it to a better position next time.

The Top Dogs.

My next avenue is all of those things are never seen, such as approaching book bloggers and trying to get people in one of the Goodreads groups to request a free copy, which I've had some mild success with in the past. But book bloggers usually require free paperbacks (of which I'm not satisfied... but that's a complaint for another day) and/or payment, so we'll see. I've decided to skip trying a NetGalley listing this time around, mostly due to the cost, but also because the places where I can buy a listing from don't actually list poetry as one of their genres. I thought about trying the Reedsy Discovery site as well, but again there's a fee and it's new, so I would need to see some positive outcomes before I take a $50 chance.

If you haven't picked up your copy of If It Was New York, Summer 2009 yet, please check it out on Amazon and other retailers.

Unfolding Life Now Available at Barnes & Noble

It might have been a slow roll out, but Unfolding Life has finally made it into another store for purchase! You can buy the ebook for $2.99 or the paperback for $9.99 from Barnes & Noble.

It's been an up and down week with this roll out. First, formatting is a nightmare and I hate it and I hate everything about every word processing program I've ever used. That said, the B&N ebook (and any future epub versions) may not look the same as the Kindle version. Although all of the content is there and readable, when I previewed it with Adobe Digital Editions each haiku was on a separate page. But the page counter only when up to 11 (the Kindle version has 67 pages) which means page breaks in the original file may not have transferred to the epub conversion. Ugh. As long as no one mistakes it for a single poem with 90+ stanzas, we're good.

The up side of this new adventure? The Reader's Favorite five-star review which I received awhile back was automatically there on the B&N book page when I first looked at it. Because of the rules about editorial reviews and how they can be posted, this review hasn't appeared on Goodreads or Amazon in full. It's always nice to click on your title and see that it has a five-star rating.

And then there was camp. It's going really well. My fingers are flying across the keyboard when I work on it. I did slack off during the holiday weekend, but I hope to be on track by Friday. This story is really interesting to explore. Let's be honest, if it wasn't, I would have given it up already. I can't wait to see what happens at the end.

Happy writing!

Aren't Stars Beautiful?

The ones in the sky... sure. The ones that make up five-star reviews, even better.

The past five days have been pretty great over here in my little world. Not only did I get a five-star review for Melody of Love, I just received a five-star review for Unfolding Life this morning. Beautiful, beautiful stars.

Both of these reviews come from Reader's Favorite, so they won't be factored into my overall Amazon star rating (or probably my Goodreads rating either), but the exposure is more than I thought I would get, especially for the haiku collection. Now it's time to affix my little digital seal to the covers so I can brag without actually bragging anymore than I am right now.

As great as these reviews are, it's all about looking forward keep the momentum going. I'm itching to get started on multiple projects, but my to-do lists just aren't cutting it. So I printed out calendar pages to clearly see the time frames for all of the tasks I have to do: first drafts, revisions, covers, etc. It will also give me a better picture on when and how to start marketing each project. It might be old school to use paper, but I know that the visual aid will provide more help to keep me accountable for my distractions--mostly TV binges. But that's just research for scriptwriting, isn't it? 😉