Beyond the ‘Zon: Breaking Out and Building a Diverse Income Stream

Presented by: Alexis Anne

What if I told you Amazon wasn’t the only place to sell your books? And that sometimes you can sell better in other countries? Or that there are other ways to reach new readers other than flinging yourself into the Amazon and social media void? Three years ago I was fed up with being just another author in a sea of authors trying to be seen. That’s when I got a piece of advice that completely changed the way I looked at my books, helped me break out, and grow a diverse stream of income over several book retailers. Stop focusing on Amazon.

The most obvious marketplace is the Amazon.com store in the good old United States. It’s the biggest, filled with the most voracious readers, they sell more books. But it’s also the easiest place to get lost in sea of books. So…

Who else is reading? Where is the ebook and indie market just starting to catch on? It’s easier to “break out” and be seen when you’re one of the few authors instead of one of thousands. There’s also more places to sell your books than to Kindle readers.

In this workshop I’ll walk you through the different retailers, their strengths and weaknesses, emerging markets, and how to rethink targeting your book to readers.

Workshop in a Box: Markicity 101

Presented by: Jessie Edwards, RWA Marketing and PR Manager

Congratulations, your book will soon be in the world for readers to enjoy! Now is not the time to sit back and relax, though–how will readers know your book is available to be enjoyed if you haven’t told anyone about it? In this workshop, we will discuss a basic overview of where to start in terms of marketing and publicity, or “markicity.” We’ll take a look at your most important marketing and publicity tools, community-building strategies, pitching–your book and you, how to determine what to spend your time on, as well as some tips for working with a traditional publisher to enhance their efforts.

What is Markicity?
Most Important Marketing Tools
Website
Email newsletter
Building Community
How important is social media?
Networking
Reader groups/street teams
Pitching you vs pitching your book
Reviews
Trend pieces
Blogs
Hiring a publicist
Events
Working with a traditional publisher on publicity + marketing
Timeline
Expectations
Helping your publisher help you

The 4-D Wheel was originally created by world-renowned sex therapist Gina Ogden as a tool for helping her patients rewrite the stories of their problems by considering the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of their issues while physically walking a circle around a four-quadrant wheel. What started as an intuitive practice has now been supported by neuroscientific findings about neural networks and the way our brains are “wired for story.” When we change the stories we tell ourselves, we can foster change in our bodies and minds.

What does this mean for your characters? By approaching their conflicts from 4 dimensions, we can deepen their conflicts, and better understand the motivations that stem from them. By having your characters rewrite the stories around their past pains–their hole-heartedness, their voids–you can bring them to a more satisfying happily ever after.

BIO:

Sionna Fox is an author of sweet/hot HEAs, die-hard romance fan, and lover of things nerdy and twee. She has a small problem with washi tape and planner stickers, and tagging her in anything involving foxes, llamas, or women in suits is a surefire way to her heart.

Canva is an online graphic design tool that can help you create book teasers, promos, covers, slides, and more. Learn how to make this software work for you—for free!

Topics include:
• the best templates to use for everything from social media to series pitches;
• how to work around some of Canva’s awkward defaults;
• a free plug-in to color match any element;
• branding with colors, transparencies, logos, & images;
• using your own free graphics instead of their paid ones;
• overlays that make your text pop;
• and much more!
Bring your computers to this practical workshop, good for everyone from beginners to advanced content creators.

BIO:

Jennifer Hallock spends her days teaching history and her nights writing historical happily-ever-afters. She has lived and worked in the Philippines, but she currently writes at her little brick house on a New England homestead—kept company by her husband, a growing flock of chickens, and a border collie mutt puppy who likes to chew computer power cords.

By the popular vote of our members, our meeting on Sunday June 24th will be craft and business working groups! PLEASE bring your pages to be critiqued, your query letters to be workshopped, your marketing plans for your upcoming book launch, your newsletter and FB ad questions, and of course all of your knowledge to help your fellow writers. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

This fascinating session uses basic negotiation theory and dispute resolution principles to create a framework for intensifying your novel’s conflict. We’ll start off with an explanation of the six archetypal approaches to negotiation. Then we’ll consider the characters and situations where we can most effectively and realistically deploy each of these approaches. Last, we’ll use specific examples from popular fiction to illustrate how certain negotiating styles and combinations can prolong and heighten conflicts between your characters, while others can help bring about a satisfying resolution.

BIO:

An insightful, detail-oriented lawyer with a passion for creative problem-solving, Alisha Bloom is the founder and principal attorney of Versant Legal, a boutique law firm that provides outside general counsel services to companies of all sizes. Drawing on more than fifteen years of in-house and law firm experience, Alisha specializes in contracts, software licensing, dispute resolution, and HIPAA and healthcare compliance. She also provides literary attorney services, assisting creatives and literary agencies with licensing and protecting intellectual property. In addition, she teaches mediation as an adjunct professor at New England Law and is a trained community mediator.

In her previous career as an economic consultant, Alisha analyzed intellectual property damages and the impacts of mergers on competition. She received Columbia Law School’s highest academic honor and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University, also graduating with honors. When she’s not lawyering, she writes award-winning contemporary romance under a pen name and reads three books a week.

Do you constantly feel like you don’t know what to post on your Instagram? Do you sit in front of a stock site with no direction on the image to choose? Do you find yourself trying to set up a shot with your phone, only to have a weird shadow or a blurry subject matter?

In this presentation, Katana Collins will teach you how to plan out a month’s worth of social media content. You’ll see detailed outlines of how Katana strategizes her posts to match her ideal reader. You’ll learn how to weave in stock photography to your posts, how to create engaging captions to increase your engagement on Instagram and Facebook. And you’ll get a hands-on demonstration of how to be a better photographer with easy tips and tricks to style and take professional-looking photos on your PHONE (not a professional photographer? No problem!). You’ll leave the workshop with a printed outline of steps for the month and photographs in your phone, ready to post (Yep… if you feel up for it, we’ll be setting up photographs for everyone to take! Katana encourages you to bring copies of your own paperbacks to photograph in the flatlays!).

But most importantly? You’ll learn how to do schedule all these images and posts in only ONE day of work. One day of work for an entire month’s worth of social media. It frees you up to write. It frees you up to live.

BIO:

For as long as she can remember, Katana Collins always had one of two things in hand—a pen or a camera. And now, after twenty-nine years, she is lucky enough to have two of the best jobs ever—writing sexy romances, and also photographing sexy boudoir portraits. After writing for years, Katana finally found her niche with hot paranormal and sexy contemporary romances. When not writing, reading or photographing, you can find Katana in Brooklyn with her husband and two dogs where she drinks copious amounts of coffee and red wine and actively volunteers her time and photography expertise to local animal shelters.

The most compelling romances feature characters who have specific, concrete goals, things they want or need to achieve (or things they desperately want to avoid). The same can be said for smart romance authors: successful writers set goals, both for their writing and for the shape of their careers. So, what do you want to accomplish in 2018? Finish a manuscript? Join PRO or PAN? Write 100 words a week? Create a newsletter? Publish 5 books?

No matter what stage of your career you are at, thinking about your goals for both the coming months and for the distant future will bring much-needed focus to your writing, marketing, and publicity efforts. During January’s meeting, we’ll brainstorm about goals for our own writing and for our romance writing careers in 2018, and then set specific, concrete, measurable, and achievable steps we need to take to make those goals happen. For those who are interested, we will set up small accountability groups in which we can share our writing and career goals and encourage our fellow writers to follow through on their own.