Category: ARG

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ARG self-publishing the descendant

The self-publishing experiment part 7: Publicity and marketing

You really have to take your hat off to some of the work done by successfully self-published authors, who’ve managed to sell bazillions (well, tens of thousands or more) of ebooks. For a comprehensive list of what’s possible, take a look at Jenny Blake’s spreadsheet for the self-published.

It’s important to remember here that you aren’t a traditional publisher, so you shouldn’t waste energy trying to behave like one. Trade (traditional) publishers mainly operate via business-to-business (B2B) marketing. That is, they both sell/market to the trade.

They also engage in a small amount of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing.

The trade (i.e. bookshops) relies on the fact that the publisher will be doing some or all of the work to shift a book; in fact this is an important factor in how heavily a book will be purchased and how prominently a book will be displayed by a bookstore. Big advertising campaign? Hello, truckload of books to display front of house, face out and discount promotion! No consumer marketing at all? We’ll take one copy, please. Spine-out only.

Hence all the fuss you see about new books in The Bookseller, Publishers Weekly and their ilk, is aimed at the trade.

As a self-published author, you don’t need to worry about any of that. You need to go directly to the consumer – your reader.

Indeed, in the digital world it is being suggested that traditional publishers too need to shift to a mainly B2C model.

Instead of telling you what you can do (I refer, again, to the excellent spreadsheet of book marketing), I’m just going to tell you what I’m doing.

    • Publicity – I’ll be emailing my list of Joshua Files readers with information about the new book – a techno-thriller aimed at older readers and set in the fictional world of THE JOSHUA FILES. (click on the logo above if you’d like to sign up!)

Introducing THE DESCENDANT on Prezi

  • Alternate Reality Game – THE DESCENDANT – was the basis of an Alternate Reality Game which Richard Howse, my agent Peter Cox and I developed for the launch of ICE SHOCK. There are about a dozen tie-in websites scattered across the Internet. In this ARG, a third story unfolds, one that bridges the experience of Josh Garcia just before ICE SHOCK and of characters in THE DESCENDANT. Buried somewhere in all of this is a new code I’ve developed especially for this publicity campaign…and the winner of the competition to crack the code gets the grand prize – a Kindle!

    The Descendant facebook page
  • Facebook – A dedicated page at fb.com/thedescendant will serve as the focus for discussion and news about the book and the ARG. Over a month I’ll post a walk-through of the ARG so that casual ‘players’ can drop in on the story without having to make the intuitive leaps by themselves. The first clue is available in the book itself…
  • A book trailer for THE DESCENDANT. Who knows if they’re important but I enjoy making them very much, and also use them in author events. More content for the facebook page and my website!

  • Press release – apparently Monday morning 7.30-8am is the best time to do a press release. That’s when journos are looking for material. Be sure that your book is listed as IN STOCK on Amazon, etc. Worst times are Thursday afternoon and Friday. Here’s the press release we wrote: Best-selling author self-publishes new technothriller with competition to win a Kindle Touch
    Optimize for SEO and submit to free press release services such as PRLog, 1888PressRelease and freepressrelease.com. Also to your own press contacts if you have them.
  • Advertising – there’s a tiny budget to try this out, either on Goodreads or a popular book blog via Blogads.
  • Giveaways – I’ll probably try this via Goodreads.
  • Starshipsofa.com – this lovely sci-fi podcast like to feature 10min excerpts of authors reading from the opening of their novel. So naturally I volunteered to read from THE DESCENDANT!
  • Review copies – I’ve lined up a small group of readers in the book trade and media to read the book. Hopefully some of them will like it and post a happy review!
  • This series of blog posts about my self-publishing experiment. Well, for now, self-publishing is still a novelty for authors who’ve been successfully published by the trade. It’s vaguely newsworthy. (Enough to get GP Taylor an article in the Daily Mail when he announced his first self-published book.)
  • Price promotion – ebook. The RRP of the ebook will be £1.99. (That’s right – bargain!). During all promotions though, it will be 99p. (Bigger bargain!)

An important factor in marketing is to track the effect of any action. It’s not always easy. One way is to separate the actions and measure sales during each activity. I’ll probably do the advertising at a different time to the ARG. Everything else is scheduled to happen during the first month of the book’s launch.

I’ll report back in about a month!

Meanwhile, next: Things you didn’t ought to do or Easy mistakes in self-publishing – a snagging list.

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ARG self-publishing the descendant

The Self-Publishing Experiment part 1

Gareth Stranks's early design drafts for THE DESCENDANT

It seems that for the past six months, all anyone in publishing is talking about is ‘self’ or self-owned-‘indie’ publishing. A few successfully self-published authors are being signed up by traditional publishers. The self-published best-seller Joe Konrath writes a damning indictment of the industry: Do Legacy Publishers Treat Authors Badly? JK Rowling sets up a publishing venture (Pottermore) to promote and sell digital versions of Harry Potter (clever, clever agent for holding on to those rights!). Household-names like Jackie Collins and GP Taylor are self-publishing.

Mega-successful children’s author and screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz, wonders aloud “Do we still need publishers?” and delivers a paean to the tradition of publishing, which also manages to be a stinging rebuke. His comments have some agents and authors on the twittersphere tut-tutting and using the word ‘arrogance’, whilst others quietly retweet and admire the frankness and cojones of an author who has both benefited from having a traditional publisher whilst also making them many times the money he ever earned. If what Anthony Horowitz says is true, then only someone very successful could dare to say it.

Self-publishers document their process and sell how-to books on Kindle. Hundreds of thousands of blog words are devoted to asking theoretical questions: how might the new world of publishing look? Will there be any pie left over after Amazon take their piece?

About fifty per cent of the authors I’ve chatted to in the past few months are thinking of dipping a toe into the self-published waters. Why? Partly it’s down to falling advances and marketing budgets. This means that some manuscripts are being bought for less than an author can afford to write for and will be lightly-marketed, so may be unlikely to sell beyond the advance.

To some, that might give the perception that authors may as well invest their own cash into publishing the manuscript and reap all the potential profits.

Partly too, there is the attraction of the new.

Whoever called e-book publishing a ‘bubble’ is right in one sense; it’s something that a LOT of people are going to want to try. If/when the majority discover that it’s difficult, time-consuming, and elicits too little money; that’s when the bubble might burst.

Most traditionally-published authors I know will probably not try the exercise whilst we’re still in the experimental, bubble-type phase. It’s risky, there’s a cash cost and a substantial opportunity cost to doing the job properly; i.e. treating the manuscript exactly as you might a traditionally published book.

Like most, I would not have thought of trying anything in this phase of the publishing revolution.

But it happens that The Joshua Files is coming to a final chapter, in the UK at least. The books have earned  me some unexpected foreign rights royalties and income from Public Lending Rights and Authors Licensing and Copyright Service, which could be spent on bootstrap investment for a new imprint, owned by my husband and I.

Like many authors who do a huge amount of their own marketing and publicity, I’m extremely curious to know if I can marshal the necessary skills and expertise to execute the whole project. Mr. Harris and I have also started and run a successful technology business (The Oxford Knowledge Company).

Most of all though – I have a spare Joshua Files-related manuscript, first written in 2005 for an adult readership.

THE DESCENDANT has already formed part of the back-story of The Joshua Files. The novel was the basis for the 2009 Alternate Reality Game used to promote ICE SHOCK. It’s unlikely that any publisher the book would publish as fast as I’d like; i.e. roughly around the same time as APOCALYPSE MOON.

You can only dangle so much speculation and theorization in front of a scientist before they’ll rush to the lab to try the experiment.

And dammit – I’m a scientist!

So over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing the details of the experiment, just like a scientific paper. Materials & Methods, Results and Conclusions.

Next: Self-publishing and the barriers to entry, or Why publishers are good at publishing and you are not, and what you can do to narrow the gap.

 

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ARG raves writers

Welcome, Pottermore, to the world of enhanced books!

Excellent news re Pottermore. Why should fans of a series be the only ones to play in the creative sandbox? Authors might want to noodle around there too. And it doesn’t have to detract from the creativity of fandom. Some fans enjoy defining a text by their own reading, to put it in the kind of language used by cultural studies mavens like Henry Jenkins. Equally, some fans want to probe further into the author’s own vision of a world.

Like Jenkins I’m as interested in the cultural as well as publishing implications of Pottermore. I was slightly startled to see Youtuber Alex Day (nerimon) respond within hours with his video What the F**k Is Pottermore? (over 200,00 views since posted, as of today).

Was this some kind of new backlash against an author trying to control how fans play in the sandbox she created? Or just a disguised version of the all-too-familiar Potter-envy, which has resulted in a tedious stream of law suits, and critical sniffiness, such as this think-piece by a author A.S Byatt?

Two of the comments by Alex Day struck me. First, he seems to resent to being referred to as part of the ‘digital generation’. Maybe like me, nerimon senses that this is yet another spurious term trying to pin down something which marketeers don’t actually understand. Those crazy digital people! Yes. That’s right. Fear us, we are strange and pixelated!

Secondly, he suggests that if one feels strongly enough about which Hogwarts house you might be in, if such a thing actually existed, you should be able to decide for yourself.  Official or not, you shouldn’t need the official website to dictate. (Alex feels loyal to Ravenclaw. When I did the test on Facebook, it picked me as a Gryffindor. But I’d have chosen Ravenclaw too, probably.)

In Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters, Henry Jenkins addresses whether authors should try to control the extent and manner in which which fans interact with their creation. Jenkins coined the term ‘textual poacher’ for such fans, and he’s written extensively on the phenomenon of fan fiction, in which readers/viewers appropriate published or broadcast material for their own creativity.

Where do I stand? Well, for once I have a foot in both camps.

Like a few other newish YA authors (e.g. Cassandra Clare, author of The Mortal Instruments books), I began my writing career as a ‘textual poacher’. Back in the late 1990s my good friend Reba Bandyopadhyay and I started the first online Blake’s 7 fan fiction zine.*

Without the literary multi-gym of fan fiction, I would probably never have become a published author. Writing Blake’s 7 fanfic developed me as a writer, it also introduced me to some wonderful friends.

So I’m in favour of the fan-created world. Long may it live!

On the other hand, now I’m an author too. And the world of The Joshua Files doesn’t stop at the books. There is a whole other novel in the form of the Alternate Reality Game, The Descendant. Who killed Josh’s godfather, PJ Beltran, and why? Where is PJ’s teenage daughter, Gabi? The answers these questions are answered in the form of over 50 videos, blogs, secret messages in Habbo Hotel and a code in the UK and US editions of the second Joshua book, ICE SHOCK.

Then there’s Josh’s new secret blog, which provides glimpses into his life before and after the fourth adventure DARK PARALLEL. Fans are beginning to comment on Josh’s blog, to interact with him. But fans have also created their own versions of Josh’s blog, and have inserted themselves as new characters in the investigative drama that is The Descendant, they’ve made their own video trailers.

I think this is more than cool – it’s essential to real growth of a story. A story really only takes off when it has been poached. Hence all the versions of Robin Hood, the Merlin story, etc. Now we have modern day equivalents – the new Star Trek movie franchise kicked of by JJ Abrams is a professionally-produced AU (alternative universe) Trek fanfic.

But authors should be able to play too! That’s what Pottermore is – the author’s own personal sandbox, or as Youtuber Mickeleh says in his response to nerimon (What’s Pottermore? I’ll Tell You) – it’s JKR’s “own personal bandcamp”.

Join the author there if you want, if not, don’t. Mind you, it will be the only way to buy HP ebooks.

However! Chin-stroking commentators who write that it’s the end of publishing as we know it, fundamental paradigm shift etc, may have missed something.

Pottermore is a closed shop – a site for HP fans only where they can only buy HP-related products. That’s fine when you have hundreds of millions of readers.

If you don’t, if you are, oh I don’t know, lemme see, almost anyone else on the planet, you probably still need to sell your books, e or paper, in a place where other books are sold.

Never underestimate the power of cross-buying, impulse buying and the all-powerful bookseller’s tool, 3-for-2. Or indeed, Amazon’s witchy ways of figuring out what customers like to read.

Pottermore is like a cheese shop that only sells gorgonzola. Great if you love gorgonzola, but a fan of cheddar, cheshire or brie isn’t likely to wander into there by mistake and give it a try.

Like, I suspect, all other authors in the world, when my books go digital later this year – next week for ICE SHOCK – I want them sold at all the outlets possible. Breathe easy, Amazon et al. There’s only one Harry Potter.

*Reba has read everything I have ever written and from the beginning commented as seriously on my Blakes7 fanfic as she does now on Joshua Files and the manuscript for Ultra Secret New Project. I promised to base a character in Joshua Files on Reba, so Joshua readers will be visiting Reba at her observatory in Joshua 5…

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2012 ARG raves

2012 – Farewell Atlantis. (we hardly knew ye).

Jackson Curtis is the spitting image of Jackson Bennett
Jackson Curtis is the spitting image of Jackson Bennett

How very postmodern of Emmerich et al to make the hero of the 2012 movie an author of a novel set in a post-2012 world…

I like it.

Check out the first chapter of ‘Farewell Atlantis’ by Jackson Curtis, the fictional novel written by the lead character. Kudos to the creator of the 2012 Movie Experience for bothering to write it! It’s not the first time such a thing has been done. Remember the manuscript that sexy Sawyer was reading on the beach in the first series of LOST? Well, that novel – ‘Bad Twin’ made the bestseller list in the USA!

Quite an interesting novel opening! Also – search for the title ‘Farewell Atlantis’ on IMDB and you’ll see that there’s already an entry. It’s not what you think though…

Makes me wonder if I should tidy up the 85,000 word manuscript for “The Descendant” and give it away for free like Cory Doctorow did with ‘Little Brother’.

Maybe one day. What do you think, blog readers? Would you like to read about cute action guy Jackson Bennett and his encounters with Melissa DiCanio and the Sect of Huracan?

Seriously I love all of this blurring-the-lines-of-reality stuff. If this kind of thing has existed when I was a kid I would have disappeared into a fictional world and probably never emerged.

(Well I kind of did that anyway with BBC TV’s Blake’s 7.)

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2012 ARG

Get ready for 2012 – the movie

Oh drat - it's raining meteors.

I’ve decided to devote a whole week of blog posts to the Big Movie Event this week – the release of Sony Picture’s 2012 movie.

I’ll be taking some time each day to play on the many 2012 apocalypse websites that have been created by the imaginative team behind the ‘2012 Movie Experience’ (basically, an Alternate Reality Game or ARG, not unlike the one we created for Joshua Files – THE DESCENDANT.)

And on November 13th I’ll go see the movie and post my review. Yesirree.

Like The Joshua Files books, the central theme of 2012 is the mysterious end-date of the Mayan calendar – 21 December 2012.

Only, 2012 is a Massive Great Disaster Movie from the king of the disaster movie genre, Roland Emmerich. (THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, INDEPENDENCE DAY). Whereas The Joshua Files is a puzzly, twisty, young adult fantasy technothriller about one teenager’s role in an ancient secret to protect the world from a global catastrophe in 2012. The final book, Joshua#5, will be published in 2012. So I’m not going to say whether it ends up in a big disaster scenario or not. Except that that wouldn’t be terribly original, would it? Not after 2012 – the movie.

So – 2012 the movie! Will it be any good? I hope so. If Emmerich blows the whole 2012 doomy gloomy excitement for Joshua Files, I shall be Very Cross. Let’s hope that that it will be STONKING.

Good indicators are the video trailers (both the 2012 cinema trailer and a new one which shows a brilliantly exciting escape scene as John Cusack and his fictional family escape spectacular doom in LA. ) and the fabulously serious and kooky 2012 Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that has been running since the launch early this year of the website of The Institute for Human Continuity.

(If this all sounds eerily familiar it’s because I have already blogged about this back in March 2009 Let’s Play 2012 Movie Virals.)

The IHC site was set up to inform people of the serious dangers of 2012 and to enter people in the 2012 Survival Lottery to be one of the lucky survivors. Coolio! I myself entered the lottery. Still don’t know if my number has been picked. Fingers crossed!

The whole 2012 thing is of course terribly controversial. If we’re being serious about it. I doubt that Emmerich et al are about any more convinced than me that there’ll be any actual disaster on 21 December 2012. It makes an exciting premise for an adventure story though.

But some people really believe this! And some people were actually taken in by the IHC site. Not that it was real, but that it was part of a global conspiracy to blah blah blah. You know, the usual They Are Out To Control Your Life crowd. For example, check out this earnest debunking of the IHC website. It isn’t real? You don’t say. We couldn’t tell.

It can be hard to distinguish fact and fiction on the Web. For example, one of the sites we created as part of THE DESCENDANT ARG,  the Joshua Files Alternate Reality Game, is archaeologyconspiracies.com As part of the game, I wrote an entirely fictitious article about how the ancient Sumerians had knowledge of advanced biochemistry. Now archaeologyconspiracies.com is getting lots of traffic – around several hundred visitors per day. And the number one story on the site is guess what? Yep – one former biochemist-turned-novelist’s crazy and totally invented story about ancient Sumerians burying a code in amino acids. Yet there’s a clear disclaimer on the site which says that it’s part of the Joshua Files ARG – THE DESCENDANT. Are people reading that? Hmmm.

Fact vs fiction. Sort it out! (For some fact vs fiction guidance re 21 December 2012, see mayan2012kids.com.)