Marketing – Page 5 – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

Professional Authors’ Groups

I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member
– Groucho Marx

Anybody know if there’s a 12-Step meeting for researchers? I need to get to one. “Hello, my name is Joseph. I’m a researcher.” “Hello, Joseph.”

A few weeks back I polled five-hundred authors with:

I’m looking into authors’ groups and organizations. Do you belong to any? If yes, your thoughts and opinions of it/them? And could you provide a link if you think them worthy?

Two-hundred-eighteen responded (just under half. I can provide percentages/numbers for other Researchers Anonymous members).

General

Most people aren’t part of any author groups. The reasons varied from 1) cost to 2) unclear usefulness to 3) Covid followed by various scatterings. The “cost v usefulness” quadrant was most heavily populated. Most professional groups had upfront costs and that’s where “usefulness” dominated, a “what do I get for my money?” mood. I suspect (no substantial evidence, more based on conversations and email exchanges) as the industry matures (ie, as the gulf between serious authors and “Hey! I got a book published!” writers widens) a similar gulf between “Let’s get work done” and “Let’s have a party!” authors groups will occur.
Online groups dominated the responses and most people prefer online groups because nothing is required to participate. Also, few find online groups helpful with Goodreads groups standing out as least helpful (one person offered the discussions were painful). Most people offered they directed messages from these groups are directed to spammish buckets and rarely read them. I asked “What do you use the group for?” The answer usually came down to “To promote my books.” When asked, “Why don’t you do more with the groups?” the answers often came down to “It’s just people promoting their own books.” Budda-boom!
The following responses are based on 1) clustered responses (a significant number of responses clustered around a definable (binary) result and/or 2) the results were interesting although not statistically significant. My tendency to go for a binary (YES/NO) is because I can measure neither expectations nor satisfaction level while I can codify positive/negative response regardless of where they are on the positive/negative scale.

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What’s Your Plan B? (or “After 100 Agents, what?”)

We don’ need no stinkin’ Plan Bs

“I plan on becoming an internationally renowned brain surgeon.”
“That’s great. Except you’re a straight D student, you have essential tremor, and anybody who really wants to become a brain surgeon would know enough to call it ‘neurosurgeon’. So what’s your Plan B?

Plan B. The fallback. The backup. The “what you do when what you want doesn’t happen.”

I’ve always had trouble with the concept of a Plan B.

It was as if somewhere in my teens I said to myself, “Let’s see… I can do well in school, go to college, get a degree and lead a totally mundane, boring, completely unfulfilled life. Or I can become a superhero…” and I saw that and said, “Screw that. The rest of the world can go on the straight and narrow,” and I took a left.
Of course, the path I chose meant I’d be misunderstood, have enemies, have to solve bigger than life problems, that kind of stuff, but even if I chose the simple path I’d be telling myself I was still doing those things. The superhero path also meant I’d be respected and honored and sought after, and again, I’d be telling myself those things were true even if I took the simple path.
So somewhere in my teens I figured, “What the hell?”
I took a left and never looked back.

For one thing, having a Plan B is distracting. Every time there’s a bump on your Plan A road, you take a moment or two to decide if this is when you should switch to Plan B.

Nobody seems to note that all those moments, all that decision making, all it really is is a loss of focus on your Plan A goal.

Remember, Plan B is your fallback. It’s what you settle for. It’s less than what you wanted. When Kennedy committed the USA to landing on the moon by the end of the decade, nobody stood up and said, “But if we never leave low Earth orbit, that’s cool, too!” The goal was The Moon. Anything else would be Not Moon.

Anybody notice the subtle shift I did there? I talked about the goal, not how to reach the goal. Any plan – A, B, C, H, Q, Fromblitz, whatever – is how you get to your goal.

Caveat Emptor – Have I Got a Deal for You!

Can they prove what they’ve claimed? (Simple strategies for recognizing scammers)

Note to folks who saw this on Facebook: I go a tad deeper here.

Interesting LinkedIn experience a while back.

Got this solicitation:

Authors, YOUR BOOK, memoir, or story idea synopsis as a movie? Make it so! You should hire us, Hollywood award-winning Screenwriters and IMDb Producers to write you a PROFESSIONAL script. FREE QUOTE: 1) send us your email 2) tell us the name of your book OR your story idea from synopsis to … Producers PREFER PROFESSIONAL scripts from books, and don’t have time to read books. Producers do not read scripts from beginning novice script writers who are book authors. They can tell ASAP from first few script pages if an expert wrote the script! We are IMDb award winning PROFESSIONAL scriptwriters, and award winning IMDb film producers. Our scripts WINS include best scripts top awards at Cannes, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Hollywood, & OVERSEAS, etc., and 100s (YES! 100s!) of other BEST SCRIPT awards and BEST FILMS too. NEW Best Script AWARDs at the ECA and UTAH F.F., etc! We do not do book reviews. (We do NOT want other writers finished scripts to buy or option!)

I wrote back:

Could you provide the names of the scripts, the awards they’ve won, the movies made from them, please?

Got this reply:

you need to do your own due diligence on our awards and film accomplishments

Followed a few moments later by:

On IMDb, sites, and 100s of awards! I cannot send you all of them here. Clients need to do their own due indigence of course. If you want an A LIST scriptwriter who have LOTS of A LIST films that writer will cost you 100 thou and more as a WGA UNION writer. We are not that, because we want to work and have lower fees. But if you want a writer with TOP CREDITS, you would then need to pay VERY HIGH fees. Is that what you want? Then be my guest and look for a writer with A LIST credits. 🙂

First, the email address provided was gmail. Really? Sorry, someone offering to help you out and asking for money has to have something more substantial than a GMAIL account. Especially when they make the claims they do.

Second, anybody making the claims they make then saying “Go verify us yourself” is not to be trusted. If you want my business, prove to me your worth it. Saying you’re worth it and having the credos indicating you’re worth it are two quite different things.

Third, dear god don’t tell me (essentially) I’m an idiot for not accepting you at face value; the follow up basically says they don’t have lots of cred, they’re not WGA, and ends with “Is that what you want? Then be my guest and look for a writer with A LIST credits.”

Well, umm…yeah, I do want someone with lots of credibility in their industry, knowledge of their business, and a proven track record.

Idiot Moi! Right?

I ran my own business 25+ years. We put our list of happy clients, satisfied customers, recommendations and their results front and center. Did a prospect have a question about our track record? Here’s a client company and the contact in that company. Ask them directly.

Get Specifics
Beware of marketing claims that only contain generalities. Example: “Authors have seen substantial increases in sales using our platform.” The other one I like is “XYZ resulted in lots of pageviews, which resulted in substantial increases in royalties.”
Continue reading “Caveat Emptor – Have I Got a Deal for You!”

What’s your social networking philosophy, Joseph?

Well…umm…hmm…

Not sure I have one. But now you’ve made me think of it, here goes…

My response is based on a number of factors and mainly on human psychology and neuroscience.

The most open, accepting, gracious people on the planet hold something in reserve when meeting strangers. It’s natural. It’s in our neural wiring. We don’t know if the person we meet is friend or foe so we favor foe until we’re sure of friend. The neural wiring of this goes back through evolution to a time before humans were humans.
Continue reading “What’s your social networking philosophy, Joseph?”

How do you demonstrate you’ve written a well-told, interesting story in a tweet?

At the end of Metrics? We don’t need no stinkin metrics! (finale), I wrote “(anybody notice I haven’t covered “How do you demonstrate you’ve written a well-told, interesting story in a tweet?”
that’s a big question. let me think on it a bit and get back to you.)”

This is me getting back to you.

The first way to demonstrate you’ve written a well-told, interesting story in a tweet is to practice your craft (to which most authors go “Duh!“).

But think about it. You need to demonstrate your competency in both story-telling and -crafting in 250-260 characters (the link to your work’ll take up some characters) (want to see a kind-of master at this? Check out @ShorterThanFic. His tweets are both a riot and gems.)

A tweet demonstrating you’ve written a well told, interesting story is primarily a sales tool and great sales tools get past all the defenses consumers have developed to sales pitches and touch them at either their core or identity levels. They need to slow the consumer down enough to focus on the sales pitch’s content and not everything else going on around them distracting them from the pitch.

In other words, a good sales pitch aka a tweet demonstrating you’ve written a well-told, interesting story needs to get inside the consumer and make sure nothing else gets in for long enough for the pitch to take root and become actionable (== the person wants to buy your book or at least learn more about it).

This takes us back to blurbs. A blurb’s header is often a good tweet. I don’t recommend summing up your novel in one sentence. That exercise may be useful when submitting to agents and publishers but it usually takes the form of a statement and statements rarely have a call to action (an inducement for the consumer to purchase or learning more).

For example, some good tweets re The Augmented Man might be