Deadly Secrets by Terry Odell

Amazon.com

Powell's Books

First news: Deadly Bones should be out by the week­end. It will be all dig­i­tal first, but I’m also work­ing on the Cre­ate Space ver­sion for those who pre­fer print. You can read the first chap­ter on my website.

I returned home from the NINC (Nov­el­ists, Inc.) con­fer­ence with a brain that had reached over­load after the first day. This con­fer­ence was geared toward the busi­ness side of writ­ing, and it was an eye-opener. We had speak­ers from Ama­zon, from Goodreads, from Barnes & Noble. We had agents. We had cover design­ers, book for­mat­ters, and suc­cess­ful authors, both indie and tra­di­tional. Every­one shared things that they thing work (or don’t) and there was a good amount of disagreement.

I could go on for days recap­ping indi­vid­ual ses­sions, but I thought I’d hit some of the eye-opening (for me—I’m sure lots of peo­ple already know them) tid­bits for starters.

In no par­tic­u­lar order of importance:

Dis­cov­er­abil­ity came up fre­quently. How do read­ers find you?

Social Net­work­ing is impor­tant, but focus on the social. If you’re try­ing to pro­mote a prod­uct, you’ll more likely turn peo­ple off.

Twit­ter pro­file pic­tures should NOT be a book cover. Use a pic­ture of your­self so peo­ple can con­nect to you as a per­son, not a prod­uct. (Yay! I do that one right)

Reach out­side your own cir­cles. One approach was the Goodreads give­away, where peo­ple who don’t fol­low your blog or know you from Face­book, etc., can find you. (In case you haven’t noticed the side­bar wid­get, I’m doing a Give­away of Deadly Secrets right now.)

The for­eign mar­ket is open­ing up, but now it’s very hard (and expen­sive) for an indie author to tap into it. Agents are good at this, but right now, few, if any, are will­ing to han­dle only one aspect of an author’s book. They want all the rights.

Videos, trail­ers, etc. Most view­ers only last 15–20 sec­onds when they’re check­ing a video. If you’ve got one, make it short, and make that open­ing count.

Pin­ter­est: dif­fer­ent opin­ions on this one. Some peo­ple loved it, oth­ers not so much. It can be a major time suck, because you have to spend time find­ing things to pin, repin, and what­ever else one does on Pin­ter­est. There are copy­right issues as well. Also, it’s great for visu­als, like shoes, or cook­ing, or craft, but not really a place for books. (So I’m hold­ing off on that one.)

There was a fas­ci­nat­ing pre­sen­ta­tion on Search Engine Opti­miza­tion given by David Wind. Key­words and meta­data. I didn’t under­stand most of it, but I have the hand­outs and will be going over them—probably along with a web guru. What looks great to some­one surf­ing the web doesn’t look the same to these bots. While we don’t like spam bots, we need to attract the search bots. These are the pro­grams that pick up key­words from a web­site so if someone’s look­ing for a Col­orado roman­tic sus­pense author, maybe they’ll get my site in their hits.

Two tid­bits I took away for imme­di­ate use (and I’m talk­ing going right up to my room and fix­ing my web­site immediate).

1. The bots don’t see all caps. So, if your book titles are in all caps (as mine were), the bots won’t see them.

2.The bots see only text, not images. So if your web­site is full of graph­ics and pic­tures of your books, you have to make sure there’s text (alt tags) so the bots have some­thing to read. So many of us sim­ply upload an image from our com­puter, and what appears on a mouse roll-over is what­ever name we gave the file when we saved it. How­ever, David told us to go in and fill that alt tag with key­words. I started doing that imme­di­ately as well, at least on my home page images.

That’s it for this post. I’ve hit a lot of con­fer­ences in a short period of time and I still have pages and pages of notes from all of them. As authors, what have you found that works for you? As read­ers, how do you find authors? What makes you give that new author a try?