David Meredith's Blog - Posts Tagged "promotion"
How to Find the Perfect (CHEAP) Art For Your Book Cover
You can’t tell a book by its cover… But most people DO!
Let’s face it, cover art is important. Especially as a new author, if you have a blah book cover you might be dooming your masterpiece to obscurity before potential readers have perused so much as the acknowledgements. Cover art is the very first thing that readers see. It’s the thing that determines whether or not they pick your novel up off of the shelf or click the enlarge button on the website. It is the first, greatest hook. It can also be incredibly expensive.
There is no shortage of sites that offer the whole package. “We’ll let you choose your cover art from over X000 selections and do all of the cover design for you! You can also sign up for our ultra-super-mega-primo promotional plan for an additional fee, so all you have to do is sit back and wait for the money to start rolling in!” they cry in big, bold print, “Millions of satisfied customers!” Unfortunately, even with thousands of prefab choices, your book cover will still be just that, a slightly tweaked, prefab template that will be incredibly similar to dozens if not hundreds of other books by authors who also used the same service. Most of these promotions don’t come anywhere close to delivering everything they promise and these too can be quite pricey, so what’s an aspiring author to do?
Well, of course the easy answer is to use and abuse your friends. If you have friends who are talented artists and are willing to help you, they can be an excellent resource. Be sure you explore every option and connection you might have among your friends, acquaintances and professional contacts. Be assured that other authors competing with you for readers are absolutely doing the same.
However, this is not always a viable option. Maybe you aren’t best buds with a budding Monet or Rembrandt. What then?
This is the dilemma in which I found myself when I was trying to get my debut novel, The Reflections of Queen Snow White, ready for publication. The first thing I did was go online and hunt for some art that I thought appropriately represented my concept. The actual site I went to was Elfwood.com, but there are other sites where budding, young artists can post their work (Deviant Art, is another major site for artists, but you can find a more exhaustive list here: http://www.website-creations.org/our%...). Now first of all, let me be clear – YOU CAN’T JUST GO ON THESE SITES AND STEAL ART!!! However, what you can do (what I incidentally DID do) is search for already completed art that is the same subject/theme that you are looking for and then contact the artist about acquiring the rights to use his/her work for your cover and promotions. Most artists are pretty open to making a deal with you, I’ve found.
Sometimes you can get artwork for free in exchange for just mentioning the author’s name and website/contact information in the acknowledgements of your novel (artists, just like authors, are struggling for recognition and exposure - anything that helps get their work in front of more eyeballs is a benefit to them and this is essentially free advertising), but more than likely they will ask you to pay something. However, what you will have to pay for rights to an already completed work (with perhaps a little haggling) will undoubtedly be MUCH cheaper than what you would have to pay for a commissioned piece. (Even among relatively unknown artists of any ability or talent a commissioned piece can run anywhere from $500-$800, and better established artists can charge MUCH more.) Artists posting their work on these sites are generally on these sites because they are new and emerging artists. They expressly want to gain as much attention for their work as they can and every book you sell, every review site that you are featured upon, will be that many more people who see it. Most artists don’t mind scoring a little quick cash either and you buying the rights to a piece of art they’ve already completed is essentially free money for them. They don’t have to make anything new. All they really have to do is draw up a quick half page contract detailing the price and exactly how you are allowed to use their work and then e-mail you a high definition electronic copy - easy for them, cheap for you.
So how can you be sure that you get exactly what you want? Well, I suppose the short answer is that you can’t really, but you can get pretty darn close. Something to keep in mind is that there is an AWFUL lot of art out there. Especially if you are willing to put some time into a thorough search, it is highly likely that someone somewhere has painted or sketched your basic concept already. Of course, having said that, much like self-published novels, there will be a great deal of mediocre tripe that you have to struggle through to discover the gems. A lot of the art you will find will be flat out garbage, but if you are open to doing some digging you can really save yourself a lot of money and still score some quality cover art for your book. I feel like mine turned out pretty well.
In any case, good luck to all of you in your writing/promoting endeavors and I hope I’ve helped shed a little more light on this one challenging area of self-publishing. Until next time!
(P.S.: If you are interested, the artist I dealt with for the above cover was Matt Hughes who operates out of Atlanta, GA. You can find more of his work at http://www.matthughesart.com/)
Let’s face it, cover art is important. Especially as a new author, if you have a blah book cover you might be dooming your masterpiece to obscurity before potential readers have perused so much as the acknowledgements. Cover art is the very first thing that readers see. It’s the thing that determines whether or not they pick your novel up off of the shelf or click the enlarge button on the website. It is the first, greatest hook. It can also be incredibly expensive.
There is no shortage of sites that offer the whole package. “We’ll let you choose your cover art from over X000 selections and do all of the cover design for you! You can also sign up for our ultra-super-mega-primo promotional plan for an additional fee, so all you have to do is sit back and wait for the money to start rolling in!” they cry in big, bold print, “Millions of satisfied customers!” Unfortunately, even with thousands of prefab choices, your book cover will still be just that, a slightly tweaked, prefab template that will be incredibly similar to dozens if not hundreds of other books by authors who also used the same service. Most of these promotions don’t come anywhere close to delivering everything they promise and these too can be quite pricey, so what’s an aspiring author to do?
Well, of course the easy answer is to use and abuse your friends. If you have friends who are talented artists and are willing to help you, they can be an excellent resource. Be sure you explore every option and connection you might have among your friends, acquaintances and professional contacts. Be assured that other authors competing with you for readers are absolutely doing the same.
However, this is not always a viable option. Maybe you aren’t best buds with a budding Monet or Rembrandt. What then?
This is the dilemma in which I found myself when I was trying to get my debut novel, The Reflections of Queen Snow White, ready for publication. The first thing I did was go online and hunt for some art that I thought appropriately represented my concept. The actual site I went to was Elfwood.com, but there are other sites where budding, young artists can post their work (Deviant Art, is another major site for artists, but you can find a more exhaustive list here: http://www.website-creations.org/our%...). Now first of all, let me be clear – YOU CAN’T JUST GO ON THESE SITES AND STEAL ART!!! However, what you can do (what I incidentally DID do) is search for already completed art that is the same subject/theme that you are looking for and then contact the artist about acquiring the rights to use his/her work for your cover and promotions. Most artists are pretty open to making a deal with you, I’ve found.
Sometimes you can get artwork for free in exchange for just mentioning the author’s name and website/contact information in the acknowledgements of your novel (artists, just like authors, are struggling for recognition and exposure - anything that helps get their work in front of more eyeballs is a benefit to them and this is essentially free advertising), but more than likely they will ask you to pay something. However, what you will have to pay for rights to an already completed work (with perhaps a little haggling) will undoubtedly be MUCH cheaper than what you would have to pay for a commissioned piece. (Even among relatively unknown artists of any ability or talent a commissioned piece can run anywhere from $500-$800, and better established artists can charge MUCH more.) Artists posting their work on these sites are generally on these sites because they are new and emerging artists. They expressly want to gain as much attention for their work as they can and every book you sell, every review site that you are featured upon, will be that many more people who see it. Most artists don’t mind scoring a little quick cash either and you buying the rights to a piece of art they’ve already completed is essentially free money for them. They don’t have to make anything new. All they really have to do is draw up a quick half page contract detailing the price and exactly how you are allowed to use their work and then e-mail you a high definition electronic copy - easy for them, cheap for you.
So how can you be sure that you get exactly what you want? Well, I suppose the short answer is that you can’t really, but you can get pretty darn close. Something to keep in mind is that there is an AWFUL lot of art out there. Especially if you are willing to put some time into a thorough search, it is highly likely that someone somewhere has painted or sketched your basic concept already. Of course, having said that, much like self-published novels, there will be a great deal of mediocre tripe that you have to struggle through to discover the gems. A lot of the art you will find will be flat out garbage, but if you are open to doing some digging you can really save yourself a lot of money and still score some quality cover art for your book. I feel like mine turned out pretty well.
In any case, good luck to all of you in your writing/promoting endeavors and I hope I’ve helped shed a little more light on this one challenging area of self-publishing. Until next time!
(P.S.: If you are interested, the artist I dealt with for the above cover was Matt Hughes who operates out of Atlanta, GA. You can find more of his work at http://www.matthughesart.com/)
How to Get Picked Up By Quality Book Promotion Sites & Scoring Those Early Reviews Using Twitter
First of all a disclaimer: I was not paid for these comments by any of the entities mentioned, nor was I provided any good or service of monetary value in exchange for my comments. The opinions expressed below are my own.
I ran a free KDP promotion for my book, Aaru back at the end of March. It was a three day promotion, and I offered my Kindle eBook on consecutive days through Book Cave, Book Sends, and Books Read Freely as well as a Facebook ad campaign through my FB writing website. I'll say in advance, I have always been skeptical of paid services for anything IndyPub related because there are so many bogus promotion sites out there that just want to take your money without much demonstrable benefit. However, these sites came highly recommended, so I was willing to give them a try just to see if any or all of them were worth my time.
Over the course of the promotion I got just under 3,000 downloads and the novel hit #2 for Kindle New Adult & College Fantasy, #4 for Kindle SciFi, #4 for Kindle Paranormal/Urban Fantasy, and it peaked at #93 among all Kindle Books. Also, I'm still getting a pretty steady stream of KENP reads every day since, which was not the case before this promotion.
Needless to say I was pleased with the results, so good on the above sites for actually delivering on their promises! However, I was further impressed, because even though these are paid services, it appears they are also legitimately selective about which works they choose for promotion. The service they provide is not actually targeted toward authors. Instead, their business model is focused on building membership among readers by providing quality eBooks at a heavily discounted rate or for free. This is great for authors in the sense that if your book is selected, you are likely to see some rather robust download activity on Amazon (especially if the eBook is free) and increase your exposure and readership. However, the downside then is that it is also fairly competitive to get picked up. After reading a large number of comments on Goodreads regarding authors' struggles with getting accepted to these types of services, I think what I did most right (without any conscious planning or skill at all before hand to be perfectly honest - Huzzah for stupid, dumb luck and happenstance!) was I didn't try to run the promotion the day, the week, or even the month the book came out. The result was it had many more than the above sites' minimum of required positive reviews.
Aaru came out in July 2017. The promotion was March 2018, so I had eight months to promote on my own and get reviews. By the time I submitted to the above sites, I already had over 80 reviews on Goodreads and in the 40s on Amazon (with star-ratings of 3.84 and 4.2 respectively). All three of the companies mentioned got back to me with approval within less than an hour of submitting, and I think their excitement was based upon the book's preexisting appeal demonstrated through a fairly large number of positive reviews. So just get a bunch of reviews first. Easy right?
I know getting reviews is a major challenge for many authors. Goodreads is inundated with Indy authors begging people to review their work, and I would guess from personal experience, begging not very successfully. Book Review blogs can be a great resource, but Googling individual blogs is time consuming. The blogs that pop up on the first few search pages are deluged with review requests so unlikely to take on many new volumes, and a large number are inactive. Even when you can find lists of review blogs, they are often out of date and suffer from the same problems already mentioned. So, what to do?
Let me now outline a method for scoring reviews I have heavily used for my first two books with what I think is a fair degree of success, (Aaru has over 100 GR reviews and ratings and my first book The Reflections of Queen Snow White has over 350). If you stick with this method for the long haul and do it regularly, it will save you time, frustration, and (assuming your work is actually good and publisher ready - vitally important caveat) you will achieve much better results. I have done some advertising for Aaru on FB with mixed results, but the bulk of my returns in terms of getting those initial reviews was probably 95% or better through the use of Twitter and E-mail.
First, make sure your query is tight (concise request with vital book statistics, professional sounding blurb). Have a standard query letter for the book you want reviewed that you can copy, paste, and send quickly. Once you get in a rhythm you can get quite a few queries out in a relatively short period of time. Then log into Twitter. (NOTE: I prefer doing this on my laptop where I can have multiple windows open at the same time.).
On Twitter, search for bookish terms (for example "book reviewer," "Book blog," "Book Reviews", "vlog", "book blogger" or anything else similar). Then click on the "Latest" tab and scroll down the list of recent book review posts. By clicking on the links to new book reviews, it will take you to the reviewer's website or blog. Virtually all of them have submission guidelines and contact info (usally an e-mail address, contact form, or link to other social media) listed on their sites. This will then allow you to send requests to the reviewers who are most likely to accept your work AND to those you know are still active because they are posting review links to Twitter in real time, which cuts out virtually all the orphan blogs and prevents wasting time sending queries to inactive reviewers. Do this every day or two for a couple of hours - maybe send a dozen/couple dozen requests a day or more. If you do this regularly, and your work is good, you will also get a fairly steady stream of reviewers interested in checking it out.
I wish you well with your work and hope this helps!
Follow me on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/DavidMeredith...
or Goodreads!
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
I ran a free KDP promotion for my book, Aaru back at the end of March. It was a three day promotion, and I offered my Kindle eBook on consecutive days through Book Cave, Book Sends, and Books Read Freely as well as a Facebook ad campaign through my FB writing website. I'll say in advance, I have always been skeptical of paid services for anything IndyPub related because there are so many bogus promotion sites out there that just want to take your money without much demonstrable benefit. However, these sites came highly recommended, so I was willing to give them a try just to see if any or all of them were worth my time.
Over the course of the promotion I got just under 3,000 downloads and the novel hit #2 for Kindle New Adult & College Fantasy, #4 for Kindle SciFi, #4 for Kindle Paranormal/Urban Fantasy, and it peaked at #93 among all Kindle Books. Also, I'm still getting a pretty steady stream of KENP reads every day since, which was not the case before this promotion.
Needless to say I was pleased with the results, so good on the above sites for actually delivering on their promises! However, I was further impressed, because even though these are paid services, it appears they are also legitimately selective about which works they choose for promotion. The service they provide is not actually targeted toward authors. Instead, their business model is focused on building membership among readers by providing quality eBooks at a heavily discounted rate or for free. This is great for authors in the sense that if your book is selected, you are likely to see some rather robust download activity on Amazon (especially if the eBook is free) and increase your exposure and readership. However, the downside then is that it is also fairly competitive to get picked up. After reading a large number of comments on Goodreads regarding authors' struggles with getting accepted to these types of services, I think what I did most right (without any conscious planning or skill at all before hand to be perfectly honest - Huzzah for stupid, dumb luck and happenstance!) was I didn't try to run the promotion the day, the week, or even the month the book came out. The result was it had many more than the above sites' minimum of required positive reviews.
Aaru came out in July 2017. The promotion was March 2018, so I had eight months to promote on my own and get reviews. By the time I submitted to the above sites, I already had over 80 reviews on Goodreads and in the 40s on Amazon (with star-ratings of 3.84 and 4.2 respectively). All three of the companies mentioned got back to me with approval within less than an hour of submitting, and I think their excitement was based upon the book's preexisting appeal demonstrated through a fairly large number of positive reviews. So just get a bunch of reviews first. Easy right?
I know getting reviews is a major challenge for many authors. Goodreads is inundated with Indy authors begging people to review their work, and I would guess from personal experience, begging not very successfully. Book Review blogs can be a great resource, but Googling individual blogs is time consuming. The blogs that pop up on the first few search pages are deluged with review requests so unlikely to take on many new volumes, and a large number are inactive. Even when you can find lists of review blogs, they are often out of date and suffer from the same problems already mentioned. So, what to do?
Let me now outline a method for scoring reviews I have heavily used for my first two books with what I think is a fair degree of success, (Aaru has over 100 GR reviews and ratings and my first book The Reflections of Queen Snow White has over 350). If you stick with this method for the long haul and do it regularly, it will save you time, frustration, and (assuming your work is actually good and publisher ready - vitally important caveat) you will achieve much better results. I have done some advertising for Aaru on FB with mixed results, but the bulk of my returns in terms of getting those initial reviews was probably 95% or better through the use of Twitter and E-mail.
First, make sure your query is tight (concise request with vital book statistics, professional sounding blurb). Have a standard query letter for the book you want reviewed that you can copy, paste, and send quickly. Once you get in a rhythm you can get quite a few queries out in a relatively short period of time. Then log into Twitter. (NOTE: I prefer doing this on my laptop where I can have multiple windows open at the same time.).
On Twitter, search for bookish terms (for example "book reviewer," "Book blog," "Book Reviews", "vlog", "book blogger" or anything else similar). Then click on the "Latest" tab and scroll down the list of recent book review posts. By clicking on the links to new book reviews, it will take you to the reviewer's website or blog. Virtually all of them have submission guidelines and contact info (usally an e-mail address, contact form, or link to other social media) listed on their sites. This will then allow you to send requests to the reviewers who are most likely to accept your work AND to those you know are still active because they are posting review links to Twitter in real time, which cuts out virtually all the orphan blogs and prevents wasting time sending queries to inactive reviewers. Do this every day or two for a couple of hours - maybe send a dozen/couple dozen requests a day or more. If you do this regularly, and your work is good, you will also get a fairly steady stream of reviewers interested in checking it out.
I wish you well with your work and hope this helps!
Follow me on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/DavidMeredith...
or Goodreads!
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
