Marketing in an e-pub Universe

The following recently appeared in the Colorado Author's League newsletter, InPrint, but I believe other writers will find it of interest.

I recently created my first Kindle e-book: A YA SF tale called A Singular Prophecy. I’ve traditionally published many times, but like other authors I smell change on the wind and don’t want to face a digital publishing stampede ignorant and unprepared. I would like to make a killing, but don’t want to be trampled by behemoth publishers also deciding which way to bolt. Marketing, the weapon of choice for authors and publishers hunting for fame and financial success seems to be morphing in our hands, even as we take aim and prepare to fire.  Individual authors should take advantage of their small size and agility rather than closing their eyes and hoping for the best.

Helpful old school marketing strategies

Authors know about book signings, school visits, presentations at various venues, and radio and/or TV spots, but the effectiveness of these venues is waning. Local book signings and book launch parties can still be useful for practicing speaking techniques and reaching core audiences of friends and acquaintances. Signing tours, unless sponsored by a publisher, can be expensive in both time and money. Schools have less money for author visits, although writers can now save time and lodging with Skype appearances. For ex school teachers, like myself, these visits also provide a chance to meet our audiences in person and witness the birth of intellectual passion in young eyes.

Presentations provide exposure to a wider audience, but usually involve more travel and some expense. I’ve presented at science teacher conferences, reading conferences, science fiction conventions, and smaller venues like senior centers and gift stores. Sometimes authors get paid for such gigs, but often present to sell a few books and network. My science titles never seemed ripe for talk shows, but I have done some Bookends TV interviews for the local educational channel, benefitting some teachers and insomniacs.

Blogging & social media: New marketing keystones

Patricia Stoltey, author of The Prairie Grass Murders and The Desert Hedge Murders, is a silver domed veteran like me, yet she has embraced the new online media and is plowing furrows and planting seeds that will grow audiences for her next books. Stoltey took a year off to establish herself as a blogging presence. Her site, http://patriciastoltey.blogspot.com, is subtitled “Thoughts about writing, Colorado authors, social networking, and getting published.” She accepts guest bloggers, does occasional interviews, makes guest appearances on other blogs, and contributes to group blogs, such as Chiseled in Rock. “After doing a lot of homework,” she said, “I realized how important it was to build a network of online friends just as we work to establish a network of writers and readers through writers groups, book clubs, conferences, and conventions.”

Stoltey advises writers to use tools like Book Blogger Directory (http://bookbloggerdirectory.wordpress.com/) to find bloggers who read and review the kinds of books they write. Writers then need to follow likely blogs for a while, participating in discussions, and look for opportunities to get their books reviewed and make connections with like-minded readers and writers. In a sense, writers can create a network of contacts almost the way experience in the real world builds neural networks in the brain. Writers build virtual memories of themselves and their work that can grow quickly and endure.

I discovered another growing network developing specifically around e-books, like those produced for the Kindle. Candace Cheatham is Associate Editor for Kindle Nation Daily, a group that donates Kindles to classrooms. Students review YA books to receive credits to expand their e-libraries. Students look for low or even free titles to purchase or borrow, but if they like a book, the potential exists for a title to take off. (See http://kids.kindlenationdaily.com/)

Blogging, twittering, facebooking, and such work together to create these virtual networks. Managing all this social intercourse can compromise a writer’s sanity. I ran across another resource called “How to Set Up Your Social Media Listening Dashboard.” 

(http://www.risdall.com/listen/RMGSocialMediaListeningDashboard.pdf) This white paper outlines how to optimize your social media experience by learning how to effectively listen to these inputs and then employing a strategy of identifying objectives, strategizing action plans, using those plans, and finding ways to measure their effects.

E-publishing can be liberating

Experienced SF author, David Dvorkin, author of Time and the Soldier and Business Secrets from the Stars, has created e-book versions for 15 old and new titles—many out of print and languishing in files and hard drives. “I never intend to approach a traditional publisher again,” he said. “I’m filled with enthusiasm for writing again, and I’m more productive now than I have been in years. I know that the books and stories I write will be published—without the absurd delays imposed by the nature of traditional publishing’s small-minded dinosaurs.”

Dvorkin and his wife even created an e-book publication business by designing covers, editing, and formatting books for other authors. (See http://www.dvorkin.com/ebookpubhelp.html) Those who e-publish need to be aware that if they can’t design and edit books themselves they will have to buy those services. Inexperienced writers still need the filters of writing groups and editors until they can recognize their own professionalism.

Dvorkin recognizes that we live during a time of transition. He advises unpublished writers to pursue a traditional agent-to-publisher route for the time being. He also claims that five years from now he expects to offer this advice: “Pay no heed to the desperate traditional publishers in their business death spirals. Self-publish your work as an e-book.”

Whether or not his specific prediction and timetable pan out, writers will do well to stay alert and attentive. “The times,” some old dinosaurs sang, “they are a-changin’”—especially for writers hungry for literary and commercial validation.

Time and the Soldier

I love science fiction because it pushes the envelope in many ways. As a genre, it tends to focus on big ideas, sometimes at the expense of characterization, but the best writers find ways to turn “what ifs” into great stories.

TIME AND THE SOLDIER, a 2011 book by veteran SF author, David Dvorkin, brings new twists to a classic time travel scenario. His tale starts in 1945 with a secret, Manhattan Project-style operation that discovers the rudiments of time travel just before the end of World War II. Dvorkin takes soldiers good at surviving and killing, mixes them with equally focused and determined women, and sends them “downstream” into the future on a complicated, 150 year journey that tests all their skills and determination. That journey also tests their humanity and severely stretches the bonds of love between them. At times, the reader may not know quite who to root for. In the end, we have to root for our own flawed humanity and what we might create in some unknowable future.

Learn more about Dvorkin at www.dvorkin.com. His science fiction titles have included three Star Trek novels. He’s also an author of mysteries, horror, and some non-fiction titles. If you happen to haunt SF Cons, he turns up regularly at MileHiCon in late October in Denver.

Art, History, and Linda Osmundson

One nice thing about author signing events is the opportunity to meet fans, friends, and fellow writers.  At my Firehouse Books talk on March 10 Linda Osmundson provided several of those connections. Linda is the author of HOW THE WEST WAS DRAWN: COWBOY CHARLIE’S ART, an interactive children’s picture book. As an artist myself, I appreciated how she deftly used Charles Russells’ art to capture the interest and attention of youngsters and focus their attention on the synergy between great art and exciting history. The book was a hit with my grandkids.

Linda also took an interest in my fossil hunting adventures and how I used art to capture a much older “Wild West.” She did some homework and looked up details of some of the places along the Front Range where the general public can visit dinosaur trackways and find the evidence for Colorado’s ancient seashores. See her write up for The Lyons Recorder at http://www.lyonsrecorder.com/index.php/lifestyle/about-town/2534-roads-traveld-with-linda-l-osmundson

Also, keep your eyes open for her next book, due out soon: HOW THE WEST WAS DRAWN: FREDERIC REMINGTON’S ART. Find her on the web at www.LindaOsmundson.com.

Self-Publishing interview

For those interested in the trials and tribulations of self-publishers, Lisa Schultz and Andrea Costantine interview authors on Friday about their experiences. Today is my turn. To see a discussion about my experiences with A SINGULAR PROPHECY follow this link: http://selfpublishingexperts.com/

Enjoy!

Confessions of a time traveler

March 10, 2012 at 1 pm I hope some of my readers and friends will visit Old Firehouse Books in Old Town Fort Collins. I will confess about my time traveling adventures over the years—especially as they relate to two recent books: The Dinosaurs’ Last Seashore and A Singular Prophecy.

The Dinosaurs’ Last Seashore, inspired by my fossil hunting excursions with W.I.P.S. and my love for the writings of Loren Eiseley, follows the journey of a time traveler in search of the “creatures that changed the Mesozoic world.” I enjoyed creating the Cretaceous seashore illustrations for this book, especially the cover art, which is a depiction of what Baculite Mesa (east of Pueblo) might have looked like 67 million years ago. Fellow W.I.P.S. member and Baculite Mesa researcher, Malcolm Bedell, now owns the original of the piece below—a gift from his wife Susan.

I will also read from, and describe the genesis of, A Singular Prophecy, a YA SF book I have mentioned before in this blog. A young paleontologist, Ryan Thompson, makes the fossil discovery of a lifetime. Just a bit of wish fulfillment there.

I dedicated this book to my mother, Hilda, because her tale of a Fortune Teller’s prophecy loomed large as a motivator for my career as a writer and illustrator. If you have time on Saturday, March 10, or at the Fort Collins Rockhound’s 51^st Annual Gem and Mineral Show on March 25, please stop by and say hello. You have nothing to loose but your preconceptions of the space/time continuum. 

Margulis and the Five Kingdoms

 I mentioned Lynn Margulis to Jane Schellenberger, editor of Colorado Gardener magazine, and she agreed that Lynn was a person to know about. Consequently, my article, “Lynn Margulis: champion of the microcosmos,” will appear in the spring issue of the magazine. I created an illustration to accompany the piece that incorporates Margulis’ image with a graphic designed by her son, Dorion Sagan, which represents the Five Kingdoms of life on our blue planet.

The hand metaphor emphasizes that all life on earth is related on a fundamental level. The thumb represents the kingdom of bacteria, linked with a host of other microbial species that spread across the base of the hand. Scientists now believe that two Domains—larger classification units than Kingdoms—separate the Archaea (Archaebacteria) that may represent the original colonizers of the planet, from the Eubacteria, that ultimately gave rise to all the rest of modern life forms. The little finger represents the still microscopic, but more complex menagerie of Protoctista, that includes amoebae, ciliates, slime molds and other creatures you may have encountered in science class when you looked through a microscope. The other fingers represent the more familiar kingdoms of fungi, plants, and animals. Together with the inorganic parts of our “third rock from the sun” they form the Biosphere—a construct durable in its foundations, but fragile in the crystalline complexity of global interlocked ecosystems and the snowflake towers of human civilization.

Copernicus removed our illusion of being at the center of the universe. Darwin removed our illusion of being a special act of creation. Margulis stripped away yet another layer of ego, by pointing out that humans and all complex life forms are just microbial high rise condos. Good scientists have a way of keeping us humble, as long as we make the effort to listen.

A Tribute to Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)

      Lynn Margulis, a woman who fundamentally changed our collective understanding of biology in her lifetime, died November 24, 2011, at the age of 73. I never knew her personally, but followed her work for many years. She received a PhD from Berkeley in 1965 when I was still a sophomore at the University of Michigan. She changed some major paradigms in biology during her lifetime—an amazing feat of intelligence, insight, and courage. She wasn’t afraid to look around her while climbing the professional steeple of biological proficiency and compare what she was learning to what was known in other fields of study. She thus became controversial to mainstream biological orthodoxy. When asked once if she minded being categorized as controversial, she said that she didn’t consider her views controversial, she considered them to be right.

     She may have been hard to live with, both professionally and personally. She married science educator and astronomer, Carl Sagan, in 1957 and had two sons, Dorion and Jeremy. The couple divorced in 1963. Margulis met Thomas Margulis while living in the Boston area and married him in 1967. They had a son and daughter, but divorced in 1980. In an interview with University of Chicago Magazine in 2004 she said, “I quit my job as wife twice. It’s not humanly possible to be a good wife, a good mother, and a first-class scientist. No one can do it; something has to go.”

     Margulis served as a distinguished professor in geophysical science at the University of Massachusetts for many years. She lived in Amherst next door to Emily Dickinson’s house and felt a connection to this 19^th century poet. Her son Dorion, with whom she co-wrote several important books, said that she was an amateur Dickinson scholar. Her daughter, Jennifer Margulis, said Dickinson “just spoke to my mom” through her work.

     Margulis looked at life’s “big picture” and at some of the smallest organisms on the planet and recognized interconnections and synergies that others had failed to notice.

     For example, complex, eukaryotic cells of everything from protozoans to professors are actually a community of simpler, bacteria-like cells that fused into functional associations over the course of deep time. Mitochondria, the energy organelles in all eukaryotic cells, were once independent microbes, as were chloroplasts in plant cells and other organelles, like flagella.

     She helped James Lovelock with his Gaia theory—a supposition that the entire biosphere functions as a unit (Gaia) such that its various components work together as a kind of global thermostat, keeping the Earth in a condition favorable for life to survive. The theory, like all good scientific theories, was constructed to be testable. So far, most of its major tenets have survived intact.

     Margulis also believed that evolution, as often as not, occurs in mega-leaps when organisms acquire the genomes of other creatures wholesale. Her book, Acquiring Genomes, outlines the arguments in detail. The short version is that some organisms, in the attempt to eat others, acquire a kind of permanent indigestion when the prey organism becomes incorporated as part of the predator. Together, over time, they can become something new—and sometimes revolutionary.

     If you get a chance also look up the following titles:

     Five Kingdoms (written with Karlene V. Schwartz) (W.H. Freeman, 1998 3^rd addition): a visual tour of all life’s forms, arranged in five great kingdoms.

     Garden of Microbial Delights (Written with son, Dorion) (HBJ, 1988), a tribute to, and recognition of the fact that the world is essentially microbial and us macroscopic creatures are a decidedly late afterthought.

     In March, 2012, my book, Biodiversity and Food Chains, should be available from Infobase publishing (Chelsea House). I speak about Margulis and her work in Chapter 6, as well as that of James Lovelock. I hope another generation will come to know and appreciate her work.

     Lynn, the world needs more people who don’t just believe they are right, but have the intelligence, will, and perception to design testable ways to prove they are right and change the world in the process.