Karen Sandler

Tag: lifeboat

  • OnFireFiction, or Creating a Creative Cooperative

    In October 2012, I attended the annual conference of Novelists, Inc, one of the alphabet soup of writer’s groups (SCBWI, SFWA, MWA, and SinC) to which I belong. As I mentioned in this blog post, one of the hottest topics of discussion (and there were plenty of hot topics at that conference) was the concept of what came to be called an author “lifeboat.” The idea was for several authors with similar goals to join together in a mutual aid society of sorts in order to help one another promote. And although there were some fits and starts with the group I joined (because of shifting membership), we now have a vigorous  “lifeboat” of eleven authors:

    Awakening Final cover-sSo who are we? We’re all authors who started out publishing “traditionally” (i.e., in paper by NY publishers). We’re bestselling authors–NYT, USA Today, Waldenbooks. We pretty much know the publishing industry inside and out. And we’ve all branched out into independent publishing.

    Some of us still sell and publish traditionally (including me with my Tankborn trilogy and Janelle Watkins mysteries) as well as publish independently (in my case, I’ve got six indie romances up for sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc). Some have made the switch to indie-only and don’t intend to sign another traditional contract. But we all want to increase our success as authors.

    UnsuitablyPerfect_Bundle200As part of our process, we’ve branded our group OnFireFiction, and already have a Twitter and Facebook presence set up, with a website to come. We’ve got a cool tagline (From smoldering to blazing–OnFireFiction) and are developing a logo. We’ve already produced our first joint project: Unsuitably Perfect, a compilation of three full-length romance novels by me, Lisa, and Barbara. We have other compilations planned with other combinations of our member authors, as well as a couple of themed anthologies that will contain new content by all of us.

    How have we coordinated all of this, when only four of us live in the same state, and even those four are at least a couple hours drive from one another? We started with e-mail, then as mentioned in the previous blog post, we used a combination of a face-to-face meeting and Skype to help us get things off the ground. We eventually set up a YahooGroup for better communication, which not only allowed us to discuss issues like our logo, tagline, and brand name, but gave us a place to ask other members for retweets, Facebook posts, blog mentions and the like for special sales and new releases.

    The next question might be why–why work together when we could be considered competitors for the same readers? Well, luckily readers don’t just buy one book, nor do they read only one author. If they read one author they enjoy, they go looking not only for more books by that author, but similar books by other authors. With our compilations and anthologies, we’re hoping that readers will get a taste of what we have to offer and will go looking for more of our books.

    It’s early days yet, so it’s hard to judge how effective our team approach will be in increasing visibility and sales. But I will say one thing–it’s lovely to have all those shoulders to lean on, to have all those brains to pick. As a group, we encompass a whole university’s worth of publishing knowledge. We complement each other’s skills, and if one of us doesn’t know something, another most likely will. I’m much better at tech than marketing, for instance, so I’m glad to be the one to set up a Facebook page in exchange for hand-holding by one of the marketing mavens in OnFireFiction.

    So, what do you think? All for one and one for all? Or is every man (or woman) an island unto themselves? Would you rather promote yourself on your own? Or are you ready to jump into a lifeboat?

  • Discover-a-whatilbee?

    Hotel PoolSix authors walk into a hotel room (two of them virtually)…and find themselves in a Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Triberr/Goodreads/Shelfari/Hootsuite madhouse. All in the pursuit of discoverability.

    Back in October, I attended the annual Novelists, Inc conference in White Plains, NY. We all learned about something dubbed an author “lifeboat,” in which a group of authors support and promote one another through social media. Several authors, including myself, decided to form our own support group. Some of these authors I’ve known for years, some I’ve only met recently.

    After much back and forth via e-mail, we coalesced into a group of eight. E-mails and posts via YahooGroups flew through the ether as we got to know each other and each other’s work. In the workshop we’d attended, it was suggested that we schedule a weekend for all of us to get together to share our expertise with each other. We decided on this weekend, and six of us met–four of us physically and two of us virtually (via Skype). The remaining two (who had planned to join us virtually this weekend) couldn’t make it due to (1) illness and (2) family commitments.

    What was it like? Imagine deciding to take three days to earn a doctorate. Or maybe allowing three days to learn all of Bach’s sonatas when you don’t know how to play a piano. Or perhaps the most apt analogy would be to take the entire contents of the Internet and forcibly shove it into your ears in hopes you will actually understand what all that social media is for (cue the glazed, deer-in-the-headlights look).

    And imagine you’re doing all of this in glamorous, luxurious Manteca, CA. Garden spot of the Central Valley. Kind of the official middle of nowhere, and you really don’t want to what Manteca translates into in English.

    Well, not many distractions other than that glorious pool we did not dip so much as a toe into. We didn’t even sniff the chlorine wafting from the hot tub. But to quote what I posted on Facebook, here is what I learned this weekend:

    Lifeboat Dinner 4sWhat Triberr is and how to post there, how to use a list in Twitter to categorize tweets, how to grow my Twitter followers, how to tweet to Twitter and post to Facebook from Pinterest, that I need to include links in my indie-pubbed books to my other books, each platform will need a different file for different links, that reader street teams are pretty cool, that I can blog directly on Goodreads (and post a first chapter for readers to sample), that I can run contests through RaffleCopter.com and best of all, authors may be pretty crazy, but they are the best fun to hang around with.

    Thanks Deb Salonen, Barbara McMahon, Ginger Chambers, Lisa Mondello, and Rogenna Brewer.