Getting a signed copy of a book isn’t always easy. Though, sometimes, it’s incredibly easy. Behold, another unscripted account of how I managed to get a copy of a book signed by its author. In this episode, I discuss the long, arduous path to acquiring a signature by Caleb J. Ross.
Thanks to Gordon Highland for bringing this Charactered Pieces review to my attention. Generally my ego is a pretty good magnet for the rare praise floating around out there. And of course, super thanks to Dakota Taylor and Insomnia Press for the kind, kind words.
“Charactered Pieces is on par with…early novels by Chuck Palahniuk. The difference is, Palahniuk sucker punches the reader with his prose and knocks your teeth out, leaving you bleeding and cheering. Caleb is a little more sneaky. Charactered Pieces spikes your drink and has you in someone’s trunk before you even know it…One of the most moving and diverse pieces of work I’ve read in years.”
Read the full Charactered Pieces review here.
And if you are so bold, find links to buy Charactered Pieces here.
The people in my head often ask me, “Caleb, how are you seemingly in so many places online at once?” The simple truth is: magic. But not everyone is born with this gift (or curse, depending on which side of the superhero spectrum I’m internally agonizing over at the time). Over the years I’ve built up a failsafe system, though, so should Cash-4-Kryptonite stores suddenly saturate my suburb, I’ve got measures in place.
Here’s my method.
I’m an organization nut. I need structure to survive. Online, when new social media networks materialize daily, organization can be tough. It is important to establish a “content spring,” a source from which most of your content will originate. The goal being to focus content creation efforts in a single place to avoid feeling overwhelmed by so many points of entry. In a perfect world, with perfect organization, you would be able to syndicate your content throughout your social networks with a single push of the “publish post” button.
The most logical content spring is the good ol’ fashion blog. Blogging platforms have evolved considerably over the past few years, with most blog sites having enormous inbuilt configurability. For The World’s First Author Blog I use the WordPress platform, which is perhaps the most configurable of all blogging software. Expect most of this post to skew appropriately.
Step three will detail a few of the tools I use to get my content from the spring to..I don’t know, the ocean maybe, but before that, in keeping with my penchant for organizational nerdery, it’s important to map out exactly where you would like your different types of content to ultimately appear. Emphasis intentional: the idea of micro-syndication relies of focusing your content for specific audiences, even niche audiences within your own readership.
“But Caleb, I want ALL of the content to go EVERYWHERE.” Well, hypothetical dissenter, while total media saturation may seem like a good goal, resources, time, and an ethical aversion to spamming friends and strangers should keep you from acting on this impulse.
The goal of micro-syndication is to ensure that the right content gets to the right people. When you write a fantastic blog post about micro-syndication, your family and bar buddies on Facebook might not care. And all those Twitter bots that you think hang onto your every tweet, they don’t care either. But your readers and your marketing and social media friends might care a lot.
I’ll use myself as an example. I have a personal Facebook page, a professional author Facebook page, various Twitter accounts (primarily my @calebjross account), a LinkedIn profile, and a few other profiles and websites. When I write a blog post, I don’t necessarily want to bombard every contact. What to do?
UPDATE: I now use AlphaLinks for all of my text and image-based content syndication. AlphaLinks allows distribution to many platforms at once, including full blogging platforms like WordPress.com, Blogger, Typepad, and Tumblr. For video distribution I use OneLoad, which allows distribution to many video platforms at once, including Youtube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MySpace, and Metacafe.
Know which tools are available and how they can help. Here are a few I use daily.
For highly customizable distribution to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (and fingers crossed more platforms in the future), nothing beats Twitterfeed. By using RSS feeds (which come built-in with most blogging platforms) Twitterfeed allows the user to direct specific feeds to specific social sites. What makes this system great is that by using category and/or tag data from your blogging platform, you can fine-tune the distribution path of your content.
For example, I have my main homepage feed:
www.calebjross.com/feed (“feed” may be a variety of RSS extensions. The WordPress default is “feed”)
Which I send to my author Facebook page as well as my Twitter account (both accounts I use almost exclusively for reader/writer information).
However, sometimes I create content on my homepage blog that isn’t very writerly, content that perhaps is better meant for those friends, family, and bots. In that case, I simply categorize the post as “un-writerly,” which creates this feed:
www.calebjross.com/category/un-writerly/feed
Twitterfeed has been set up to publish only posts from this feed to my personal Facebook page. Neat.
YouTube Playlists combined with Shortstack and the YouTube SEO Playlist plugin
With videos, my content spring is YouTube (I could host videos on my own site, but why the hell would I do that?) Now, take the concept of categories and tags described above and apply to video playlists. As I upload videos to the Caleb J. Ross YouTube channel, I assign them to playlists organized primarily for the purpose of syndication.
The next step is simply finding tools to aggregate the videos. This is where the Shortstack app and the YouTube SEO Playlist Wordpress plugin come into play. Using the YouTube SEO Playlist plugin I am able to have videos from specific playlists automatically populate on my website. Head over to any of my book pages (Charactered Pieces: stories, for example) or my Author Video Blog page. Notice that only Charactered Pieces: stories related videos appear on the book page and only episodes in my author video blog series appear on the Author Video Blog page? That syndication is entirely automatic.
This very same concept has been applied to my author Facebook page, using the Shortstack app. Notice the dropdown menu used for selecting playlists. Awesome.
Another syndication solution to consider is Ping.fm. This service allows a single social network message to populate to 30+ different networks. It sounds pretty great until you realize that most of the networks are small, lesser-known properties (myYearbook, StreetMavens, Yammer, and others). I haven’t used Ping.fm yet (this post will be the first I attempt to distribute using the service). If anyone out there has used the service, I’d love to know your thoughts. And in keeping with the ease of syndication theme here, the WPing.FM plugin is available to further streamline distribution by connecting WordPress with Ping.fm.
Tumblr and the Tumblrize WordPress plugin
Tumblr is an enormously popular blogging platform, thanks in part to its effective merging of twitter-like following capabilities, Facebook-like social group curation, and traditional long form blogging capabilities. Because the network is so huge, it’s important for an author to be there. Luckily, the Tumblrize plugin is here to auto-populate posts from a primary blog to a Tumblr blog. And I know, all you SEOs out there, that I run the risk of duplicate content. For now, I’m testing that risk.
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Micro-syndication is important, but what about ensuring that the content you create is easily accessible to the right visitors on your site itself? I call this…wait for it…on-site syndication (I provide naming things consulting services at a fair rate). Traditionally, on-site organization has simply been part of a greater conversation called site navigation. But I think it deserves specific attention.
One of the most effective examples of on-site syndication/curation is my use of category pages to organize particularly important blog post categories, effectively creating a type of micro-site with each category. Check out my SEO for Authors category (screenshot below), Book Marketing Tests & Studies category, or the World’s First Author Podcast category for examples.
A few weeks ago I conducted a pretty in-depth study regarding the effectiveness of a Goodreads.com book giveaway in which I found that 93% of entrants had never heard of me and 88% planned on reading my books. Couple that with 51% of entrants signing up for my email newsletter, and the giveaway was well worth the two books I sacrificed.
Science must be repeatable, right? A couple of weeks ago I ended yet another giveaway.
I listed a 2 copy giveaway for I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin to take place between 3/14/2012 and 3/31/2012. During this time the giveaway received a total of 378 entries. After the giveaway was closed for entries, I sent a 9 yes/no question questionnaire to 222 entrants. 156 entrants could not be sent the questionnaire, either because I know them personally or because they entered the previous giveaway. I figured sending to these 156 entrants might spoil the results. The questionnaire contained the following questions:
The response-rate for the survey was an amazing 41% (compared to 29% for the previous giveaway. I wonder why). The industry open-rate for Art/Artist newsletters is 17.54% [1]. This isn’t exactly a parallel comparison, as open-rate is not the same as response-rate, but it’s a close enough comparison to provide some valuable insight. The response rate is also likely inflated because of the following factors (these are the same factors as the previous giveaway, so if you’ve read those, you’ve read these):
What are your thoughts? Have you conducted a similar survey? What did your results indicate?
After more than a few (a few+2) questions regarding the paperback availability of my first story chapbook Charactered Pieces, I’ve decided to do something with the distribution rights I’ve been squatting on for a couple years now. Why the squat? Laziness, mostly.
Re-available for your tactile reading pleasure, Charactered Pieces: stories is now back in print. Right now, it’s only at Amazon, but the rest of the internet stores should catch up within the next couple of weeks.
Spread the word. Tell your friends that the too-orange book with the weird hermaphroditic foot penis thing is now holdable in their very hands. Get the paperback version here: http://www.amazon.com/Charactered-Pieces-Caleb-J-Ross/dp/0615622135/
The always wonderful Kristin Fouquet offers some kind words about As a Machine and Parts over at La Salon Annex:
Reminiscent of Metamorphosis and Flowers for Algernon, Caleb J. Ross takes us inside the mind of a man who is transforming. This man, Mitchell, experiences a slide from human to machine. This transformation coincides with the deterioration of his relationship with a much older lover, Marsha…Although I place As a Machine and Parts on the shelf alongside Charactered Pieces and Stranger Will, I will continue thinking about this book for some time.
But perhaps my favorite line, just because I’m glad this particular referent story hit home with another writer:
As writers, we must always wonder what is derivative and how many words we can truly call our own.
Read the full review. Then, buy As a Machine and Parts. And while you are at it, round out that Amazon free shipping deal and grab Fouquet’s incredible, Twenty Stories and Rampart & Toulouse.
I’ve long read of the marketing effectiveness of giving away books using the Giveaways option at Goodreads.com. And though I’ve conducted one giveaway in the past (for Stranger Will) I’ve not yet been able to confidently attribute any gains in readership or sales due to that giveaway. With this attribution gap in mind, I set out to conduct a giveaway for As a Machine and Parts, that would allow me to more precisely measure the value of a Goodreads.com user. My conclusion: a Goodreads.com user stands a great chance of becoming a reader.
I listed a 2 copy giveaway for As a Machine and Parts to take place between 2/3/2012 and 2/15/2012. During this time the giveaway received a total of 398 entries. After the giveaway was closed for entries, I followed up with all but 46 entrants (because I either knew them personally, which could skew the results, or the user was not accepting personal messages) with a survey of 8 simple yes/no questions that touch on topics such as prior recognition, intent to read/buy my books, intent to connect on social networks, and the desire to connect with me, as an author, in real life. The actual questions asked in the survey include:
These percentages are interesting because it means that 75% of people who filled out the survey did not download either of the free ebooks. Either people love filling out surveys or they’ve simply forgotten to download the books.
These percentages, when compared to the download percentages above, are interesting as they may elude to a few possibilities: 1) Goodreads.com users may be averse to adding ebooks to reading lists, 2) Goodreads.com users may not always add a book to their lists as soon as they receive the book; perhaps they wait until they actually begin reading it, 3) something else entirely. This seems too big of a discrepancy to ignore, so if anyone has any thoughts, please let me know.
The response-rate for the survey was an amazing 29%. The industry open-rate for Art/Artist newsletters is 17.54% [1]According to Mailchimp. This isn’t exactly a parallel comparison, as open-rate is not the same as response-rate, but it’s a close enough comparison to provide some valuable insight. The response rate is also likely inflated because of the following factors:
What are your thoughts? Have you conducted a similar survey? What did your results indicate?
Footnotes
| ↑1 | According to Mailchimp |
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