VBT – Author Interview today!

Posted on May 19, 2012 by bootlegga

Today’s stop is at Hardcover Feedback – there is an interview and a giveaway to enter!

Hardcover Feedback blog!

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VBT – Review of Zombie Night in Canada today!

Posted on May 18, 2012 by bootlegga

Today’s stop is at Mama Knows Books’ blog – check it out and read her review of Zombie Night in Canada: First Period! She also has a copy of to giveaway, so be sure and enter!

Mama Knows Books’!

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VBT – Zombie Night in Canada: First Period

Posted on May 17, 2012 by bootlegga

Today’s stop is at Natalie-Nicole Bates’ Blog – check it out and enter the giveaway!

Natalie-Nicole Bates’ Blog!

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VBT – Zombie Night in Canada: First Period

Posted on May 11, 2012 by bootlegga

Today’s stop is at Black Hippie Chick’s blog – check it out and enter the giveaway!

Black Hippie Chick’s blog!

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Starting a Virtual Blog Tour

Posted on May 7, 2012 by bootlegga

Today marks the start of a Virtual Blog Tour (VBT) for Zombie Night in Canada: First Period. Over the course of the next month, I’ll be hitting 20 different blogs to promote it.

Some stops will be interviews, a few will review it, and some will be features, showcasing the book, its cover, the blurb and an excerpt. The VBT will be slow to start – with just three stops this week -but by the end of the month, I’ll be stopping at a blog almost everyday.

Today’s stop is at Reading Diva!

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Author Platforms and Marketing – Facebook

Posted on April 30, 2012 by bootlegga

This week, I’m going to talk about Facebook. Honestly, I’d like to say that I know everything there is to know about Facebook and leveraging pages and all that, but I’m going to admit I;m still learning myself.

- Facebook has three potential tools for writers – personal profiles, groups and pages. All three can be beneficial. Regular profiles are great to connect with family, friends, but most of all, other writers. Lots of well known authors are on Facebook, and the cool ones will accept friend requests from average joes like you and me.

- Groups are another great tool for writers. Find a few writing groups – either locally or nationally or based on genre (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc) and join a couple that are fairly active. Start posting – but not about your book/story/whatever – post about writing; be it tips or tricks, cool websites you’ve stumbled aacross (sorry, yours doesn’t count – unless someone there asks) or even funny images that relate to the group. Once you’ve spent some time and know your way around, you can mention your projects as the group allows (one I’m in only allows those posts on Thursdays), but like Twitter, you shouldn’t just spam the board with your stuff – engage other writers and cheer their successes, offer to review titles, etc. It’s the golden rule here – do unto others as you would have them do unto you…

- Most of the rest of this post relates to Facebook Pages – they are a great way to reach out to fans and advertise your work for free.

- Just like blogs, you have to post fairly frequently on Facebook Pages – but I’d argue even more than blogs. I’ll acknowledge that I neglect my own Facebook page at times, then go crazy and post a couple times everyday for a week or two. THAT’S NOT GOOD! You should be strong and steady, post once every day or two. Posts can be something simple like welcoming people who recently liked the page. One of the best ways I’ve found is to link your Twitter feed to your page – that way when you post on Facebook, it also sends out a tweet (or vice versa depending on your preferences).

- Also, just like blogs, the point of a Facebook fan page is to get conversation going. Of course it’s easy when you are Coca-Cola or some other globally recognized brand and hundreds of fans

- Facebook is also super powerful when it comes to multi-media, so use everything you can find. If you can’t (or are too lazy to) make your own videos and images, use Google and search for stuff you think your fans might enjoy. No matter the subject, there are sure to be hundreds of great things you can post to get conversation goong.

- One thing that I love about Facebook is the cheap and easy system it has in place for advertising. You can advertise for as little a $1 a day and reach hundreds, if not thousands of potential customers. An ad campaign I ran in March cost me all of $11 and made me about $20 in book sales. On top of that, thousands of people in Facebook saw my ad, and a couple dozen actually clicked it. Now, for most people, $9 profit isn’t very exciting, but to me, it points to scalability, and odds are if I could have afforded 100 times the budget, I could have made $900. I’ll admit that not every topic has that scalability, but I’d argue if you are advertising about a very popular topic, I think it would.

On this topic, I am a neophyte, but once again, I’ve shared what little I know and hopefully readers will add more to the conversation.

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Author Platforms and Marketing – Blogs

Posted on April 24, 2012 by bootlegga

This time around, I’m going to be talking about blogs. I’m hardly an expert. but I’m more than willing to pass along what I do know…

- There are a number of choices for popular blogging tools; WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, etc. I like WordPress because once I get a domain name and host it myself, I own everything and don’t have to worry about some company pulling the plug on me and my work because they find me too controversial or get bought by another company, or whatever.

- If you don’t want to/aren’t able to host your own blog using WordPress, go to to Blogger and create one there. Blogger was bought by Google eons ago and it allows for amazing synergy between other popular Google products like Adsense (dollar, dollar bills yo!) Youtube, Google Plus, to name a few. There are also thousands of widgets you can use to connect to Twitter, Facebook and almost any other social networking site you want to.

- Tumblr is another very popular tool, but in my experience, Tumblr works better for images than blogging. That’s not to say you can’t blog with it, just that my own experience digging around the site showed me that lots of Tumblr users tend to use it to showcase images and videos more than blogging.

- The first rule of blogging is to blog. Yeah, I know it sounds silly for me to mention it, but how many times have you found a blog, started reading and then realized the last update was months ago? Or a year ago? Or even longer? I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of it on this blog and others. Post on your blog when you update it – daily, weekly, bi-weekly, whatever and stick to it. Even a shitty post that says – “I’m sick and can’t write any more than this” is better than nothing. Toss some tags on it and voila, you’re done. Then start brainstorming to come up with something for the next post, you lazy bastard. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best at it myself – for me the hardest part is coming up with things I think are interesting to blog about.

- If you get stumped and really cannot think of anything to say on your blog, talk to friends and fellow writers and see if any of them are interested in doing a guest post on your blog. Odds are, one or more of your friends in that writing group you are a member of would love a chance to do so. If all your friends are dealing with writer’s block too, fall back and punt – review a book, movie or something else in your area of experitse.

- The second rule is add widgets to your blog. Make sure there is an RSS feed so people can follow you – that is HUGE. Connect any other social media sites you’re on to it (Facebook, Flickr, Google +, Twitter, Youtube, etc). It took me a lot of tinkering and fooling around to figure it out myself, but for the most part, it’s fairly easy and most people willing to try can do it. If you have tried and are slamming your head against the wall and/or keyboard, search for help in forums or online. Youtube is a great place to find out how to do all kinds of stuff – and best of all because it’s a video, it’s easy to follow and understand.

- Once you get an audience, if you need money to pay for hosting, use Adsense (Blogger) or join a program like Amazon Associates. Toss some images/links into your sidebar/footer and voila, you too can get rich off the Internet. Okay, probably not rich, but you may make enough to cover hosting/domain costs. Personally, I think there is more than enough ads on the internet already and don’t want to put them on this blog – but who knows, maybe someday I’ll get exceptionally greedy and do it too! ;)

I hope that helps. It’s hardly anything revolutionary or encycopedic, but it is a good place to start from.

If you have any tips or tricks of your own to share, feel free to comment!

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I’m an international author now!

Posted on April 18, 2012 by bootlegga

I just checked my Amazon stats and found out that I’ve sold copies of Zombie Night in Canada in the UK as well as here in North America! Technically I sold copies on Amazon.co.uk, but I’m going out on a limb and saying it’s basically the same thing.

P.S. I know this isn’t much of a blog post, especially compared to last week’s post on Author Platforms/Twitter, but there is a very intense election going here in Alberta and it’s both highly controversial and incredibly fascinating.

The two main parties are both conservative (not unusual for Alberta) but differ vastly in political platforms and ambitions. The reigning party, the Progressive Conservatives, are a right-centre party and promote spending on education, health care and infrastructure, while their main opponents, the Wildrose Party are a hard right party and close to the Tea Party in ideology – ie. they are fiscally and socially conservative. The key tenet of their platform is to balance the provincial budget at all costs. Technically, there is a small deficit, about $2 billion, but the province created a Sustainabilty Fund years ago to cover such spending. As such, the province isn’t borrowing a penny despite this ‘deficit’.

This is where most of my online time has been spent over the past couple of weeks, reading, researching, tweeting about the election and various parties. After the election, I’ll turn my focus back to this blog and everything else.

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Author Platforms and Marketing – Twitter

Posted on April 10, 2012 by bootlegga

When I started writing, I had a vague notion that I would need to promote myself and do some marketing, but until I self-published my first novel last month, I had no idea just how much I would have to do.

Don’t take this as complaining or whining, just surprise at how much time I spend doing it, and odds are, I could do more or even better with some actual training.

I’m bringing this up only because a writer I know recently finished his book – Tomahawks & Zombies – and wanted to know what I did to promote my own writing. Up until that point, I never really thought about how much or what I did, I just did it.

I sent him an email and he replied, “Wow, that’s a lot of info to digest.”

Very true.

So here’s what I do – and recommended to my friend as the bare minimum (if you can do more, do more);

- Make sure your Twitter background is an image of your book. If you have more than one, change it up every month or two to keep it fresh.

- Add some popular hastags to your profile. I use #zombie #horror #yeg #canada #author #ebook etc., whichever one is applicable to you and your writing – it’ll make you easier to find in search engines

– Start following people like crazy (I think the limit is 50 people per day) when you first start – search for people using the hashtags you use yourself or scroll through friend’s follow/following lists and follow anyone you think worthwhile.

- Don’t just tweet (or DM) about your book. I know you love it and think everyone else should love it too (as well as buy a dozen copies), but if you only tweet about your book(s), people are going to tune you out. Don’t be one of those annoying authors! FYI, I tweet only once per week MAXIMUM about my book. Sometimes I don’t even do that.

- If someone follows you back send out a tweet thanking them. If someone retweets you, thank them. If someone mentions you, thank them. Likewise if someone sends out a #SO, #WW or #FF (shoutout, writer wednesday and follow friday). You can find out when someone mentions you in your connect tab on Twitter. I check every morning (and sometimes in the afternoon time permitting) and send out thank yous to everyone who did. Courtesies like that make you friends and people who care about you – and maybe somewhere down the road – will care about your book(s) too.

- Retweet interesting posts/photos/articles etc you stumble across on the internet or from people you follow. If someone posts something funny or interesting, you can even just reply with an emoticon or an LOL/LMAO. If you really like it, favourite it, because otherwise you’ll probably never find it again once your stream gets going.

- If you have a blog and/or Facebook page, make sure Twitter is linked to either/both. It’s fairly simple even for the technically challenged. Use Google and you’ll find tons of sites (I like Youtube personally) telling you how to do so.

Welcome to the wonderful world of author platforms and Twitter!

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Triberr vs. Klout

Posted on April 4, 2012 by bootlegga

Talk about interesting.

Last week, I joined Triberr and the spike in hits on my blog and mentions on Twitter has been huge.

In case you don’t understand how Triberr works, here’s the lowdown.

You join a ‘Tribe’ or two, usually by invite only, and then Triberr grabs the RSS feed of your blog and posts your updates into your Tribal area, where members of that tribe look it over and decide whether or not they like it. If they do, Triberr sends out Tweets mentioning your post – including a link.

So, I signed up and then joined a couple of tribes after I was invited.

I was pleasantly surprised when a number of people read and retweeted last week’s post on Twinkies and their relative scarcity here in Edmonton (and by extension, western Canada). That’s pretty cool, in and of itself.

So today I logged into Klout to find that it now thinks I’m influential on ‘Dessert’.

How funny is that?

A guy who wrote a book called Zombie Night in Canada is somehow influential on dessert. ;)

Score:

TRIBERR 1 KLOUT 0

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