My New Novel: Meet The Characters!

As we get closer to F#@! BOMB's release date, I've been posting little teasers about the book on the page for my upcoming Facebook Book Release Party. Each day, I've been sharing a "Meet The Characters!" blurb, where I introduce readers to the various personalities in the novel. This way, they'll know who everyone is when they read my book.

I'm trying not to give too much away -- just enough information to get people excited and to whet their appetites for my story. Hopefully, many readers of this blog will join the online party on March 30, 6-8 p.m. ET, but if you can't make it, here are a few of the "Meet The..." posts which I've shared so far. I'll include more in future posts! Meantime, be sure to check out F#@! BOMB, as well as LOVE NOTES and REVENGE OF A BAND GEEK GONE BAD, all on Amazon.

MEET THE CHARACTERS!

NAME: Sadie Abramowitz

ROLE IN BOOK: Narrator, female protagonist

AGE: 18 going on 19

OCCUPATION: College freshman majoring in English; plans to be a journalist and writes for the school paper, The Falcon.

TALENTS: Writing, singing, cooking

FLAWS: Eats to calm her emotions, has a bad habit of pushing people away

ABOUT SADIE: Sadie is smart, sassy, hard-working... and very overweight. Her size has caused her to withdraw from her peers and when we first meet her, she's a loner whose best friend is her mom. At college, Sadie befriends Griffin -- a track star, who is also one of her former high school bullies -- and he encourages her to get in shape so she can walk a marathon. As she trains for the event, she not only improves her health, but learns to come out of her shell, make friends and trust people.

MEET THE CHARACTERS!

NAME: Griffin Greenberg

ROLE IN BOOK: Sadie's best friend, coach and lead male protagonist

AGE: 18 going on 19

OCCUPATION: College freshman majoring in Bio; track star, marathoner and Olympic hopeful

TALENTS: Running, coaching, teaching younger kids

FLAWS: Has a quick temper, often acts without thinking, was a bully in high school

ABOUT GRIFFIN: Handsome, charismatic Griffin has always been a star. Being the oldest of four children and a talented runner, people have always looked up to him. Family is very important to him, as well as being Jewish. His father has his son's whole life planned and expects Griffin to run in the Olympics and then become a doctor. However, Griff has keeping a secret: he's gay. He's very reluctant to come out because he's afraid of how the reveal will impact his charmed life. Once he befriends Sadie, he slowly comes to terms with his sexuality and what it means to actually "be himself."

MEET THE CHARACTERS!

NAME: Veronica Miller

ROLE IN BOOK: Sadie's eccentric roommate

AGE: 18-19

OCCUPATION: College freshman majoring in art

TALENTS: Painter and sculptor; her specialty is creating 3-D pieces using "found objects," such as hair, dog poop or chewed-up gum. Is also extremely perceptive and has a talent for seeing through people's b.s.

FLAWS: Sometimes grunts instead of speaks, yells when frustrated, is extremely opinionated, swears like a sailor, is honest to the point where it's hurtful.

ABOUT VERONICA: Having been beaten down by Life, Veronica takes no sh-t from anyone. She favors a classic punk style with piercings and multicolored hair and is basically the exact opposite of Sadie. At first, Sadie thinks her roomie is psychotic, but Veronica often tells her some painful truths when Sadie most needs to hear it. *Side note* -- I originally meant for Veronica to be a minor character who'd provide some comic relief, but she ended up becoming rather integral to the story. She's also one of my favorite characters I've written so far!

Publishing A Novel: Cover Model?

It's been a little over three months since BAND GEEK came out on Amazon and I'm thinking of doing something very drastic: I'm debating whether I should change my book's cover.

I'm very, very torn about this because I spent a lot of money to have my cover professionally designed. Moreover, I absolutely LOVE the cover. The designer, Damonza, did an amazing job and came up with something that's fun, mysterious, cool and interesting. It's received many compliments from readers and is definitely different than many of the young adult book covers that are out there:

The problem is, I don't think that this cover is attracting the audience I really want to get: teen/20-something girls.

While browsing online and on Kindle, I realized that most of the best-selling YA books have something important in common: they have people on the cover. There will either be a close-up of a girl, a shot of a cute guy or a shot of a couple. I doubt that this is what makes these books best sellers; a great story and writing is, of course, necessary, but I do think that the packaging helps. For instance, a really cute book that I recently read is Lacey Weatherford's Crush. As you can see, there is a smokin' hot guy on that cover; he really does get your attention! And based on many reviewers' comments, this is what made them purchase the book. Don't get me wrong; it's a great story and many readers agree with me, but many also admit that it was the cute guy who drew them in. Weatherford must be aware of this, too, because her soon-to-be-released sequel, Smitten, has yet another close-up of the same hottie.

I shouldn't be too surprised by this because now that I think about it, most of the teen books that I've read do have people on the cover. Judy Blume always had a pensive or happy girl (or boy in some cases) on the front of her books. The Sweet Valley High series featured shots of the twins, Jessica and Elizabeth, or their friends. The Alice series always has Alice the character front and center. Even the Harry Potter books have kids on the covers. In fact, the only seriously popular YA books that I can think of off the top of my head that DON'T have cover people are The Hunger Games and Twilight. But they cross over into other genres. BAND GEEK falls right into the contemporary fiction/romance slot where cover people dominate.

People seem to be enjoying BAND GEEK; it's getting great reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and most of the bloggers who reviewed it during my last book tour gave it positive write-ups. Right now, it's at 4.5 stars on Amazon and 4.09 stars on Goodreads, for which I'm very proud. But despite the good press, it's not selling as well as I'd like and I suspect that I chose the wrong type of cover for my coveted audience.

As of now, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. If I switch up my cover, I'll have to once again plunk down a hefty chunk of change and I can't guarantee that a new cover will indeed boost sales. On the other hand, if a change DOES work, it could be worth it. I don't know. But I do know that with my next book, there will definitely be a face on the front.

Please read and review REVENGE OF A AND GEEK GONE BAD.

Last Day Of My Blog Tour!

It's the final day of my blog tour and it's ending with a nice review of BAND GEEK up at Sweet Southern Home. Thank you, Carrie, for hosting me! Readers, be sure to comment on her post so you can have a chance to win a prize of a CD and earrings!

To be honest, this all-review book tour has had mixed results for me. On the one hand, it's been GREAT because BAND GEEK has gotten so many wonderful reviews and I've enjoyed getting that feedback. I now have more reviews up on Amazon and Goodreads, which will only help me in the longrun, and the positive comments have bolstered my confidence in my writing. I truly, truly appreciate these bloggers for taking the time to read and then write about my book (some even posted reviews on multiple sites for me). Indie authors need all the help they can get when it comes to marketing and I think it's great that these bloggers are doing so much to help writers. At the end of this post I'll again link to all of the sites that hosted me; I encourage all of my readers to check out these blogs because they're written by some very thoughtful and intelligent people. A BIG THANKS once again to Goddess Fish and everyone involved!!!

Unfortunately, sales of my book are still slow. I've blogged about it, posted links on Twitter and Facebook, and have even included links on sites like Stumbleupon. And yet it's been kind of dead this month and I'm not sure why. I'm wondering if perhaps I needed to offer a different kind of prize in my blog tour, maybe something other than a CD and earrings? I thought that my gift is cool -- something handmade and different, but I see that a lot of other authors on blog tours are offering things like Amazon gift cards. Perhaps the next time I should follow the pack a bit more and do something that will encourage more people to check in and comment on the blog posts -- even if I am using some bribery, LOL. Oh well, live and learn, I guess. What do you guys think? What sort of author "prize" makes you want to participate in a tour?

The good news is that these bloggers' reviews will be up on their sites and Amazon for the longhaul so this can only help my book. It's helping me as a writer, too, because I've gotten many different perspectives on BAND GEEK. It sort of felt as if we were part of a round-table discussion! So while an all-review blog tour may not guarantee sales for an author, it certainly offers many other positives.

Once again, here's a list of the blogs who participated in my tour:

YA Book Addict

Unabridged Andra

Andi's Young Adult Books

My Neurotic Book Affair

Buried In Books

Musings From An Addicted Reader

Sweet Southern Home

Long And Short Reviews

Rogue's Angels

The Life (and lies) Of An Inanimate Flying Object

Paranormal Book Club

Please read and review REVENGE OF A BAND GEEK GONE BAD, 4.6 stars on Amazon!

Publishing A Novel: Finding Your Audience

First up: My blog tour continues today with an excellent review of BAND GEEK up at Musings From An Addicted Reader. Head over to the site to comment -- and get a chance to win a free copy of my CD FLUTE PATH and a pair of my handmade music earrings!

I'm grateful to be getting so many positive reviews, of course, but one thing that I've noticed is that my audience isn't turning out to be the audience that I'd planned to get.

When I wrote BAND GEEK, it was with teens in mind. It's a story about high schoolers and definitely has a teenage sensibility. My heroine, Melinda, is naive, somewhat bratty at points and is still learning about the world. In some ways, she's very mature, but in others, she's way behind her peers. I figured that a 14, 15-year-old girl could relate to her and attempted to write Mel as realistically as I could.

To my surprise, a lot of adults have picked up and enjoyed the book! I suppose this shouldn't be that shocking to me; after all, I love young adult literature and read it often. I just didn't expect so many people who are in my age-range to be interested in a high school story. But I think that it's appealed to them because going to high school and being a teen is something that EVERYONE can relate to, whether you're still a teen or not. It's kind of a universal experience and readers are either dealing with that time in their life right now ... or are reading my novel with a sense of nostalgia.

I think it's also easier to get different types of books today, thanks to the Internet. Not that it was difficult before; bookstores stock every genre and it's not like I grew up in the Dark Ages (though sometimes it does seem like it as I can't even imagine being without my cell phone these days). But when I went to the bookstore with my parents, I'd generally hang out in the YA section while they looked around at what they wanted. If I wanted to get books from different genres, I had to find them in the bookstore or library. Nowadays, you just click on a couple of links and there you are. It's not a huge change, but it does making shopping for books quicker and easier -- and you never know what surprise book you may stumble upon in an online search.

What I've learned from this is to not market your work to just one audience. For my next novel, I'll pick a prime group of people whom I think may be interested and market to them, but I'm going to broaden my horizons, as well. You just never know who will want to read your story!

Please read and review REVENGE OF A BAND GEEK GONE BAD, now just 99 cents!

Marketing An Indie Book: What ISN'T Working For Me

When an author self publishes a book, one of the most challenging things that he or she will have to deal with is actually marketing that book. And you know what? This is something that many traditionally published authors now have to deal with, too. Publishing houses will put a lot of money into publicizing a well-known author, but many newbies still have to do the bulk of their advertising and marketing on their own.

Since I'm still very new to the indie author game -- BAND GEEK hasn't even been out for two months at this point -- I'm still experimenting with marketing techniques and am finding my way. The great thing about publishing an indie book is that I can always change course and try something new .. and don't have to worry about angering a publishing house. The only one who has something to lose or gain is me.

So far, I'd have to say that my most successful marketing technique has been signing up for KDP Select and then using the five free days. My last run was very successful and I saw a significant bump in sales (about 500 percent!!!) over the next couple of days. The bump was short-lived, though, so I'm looking at other avenues that have worked -- and haven't worked for me.

Social networking has been somewhat successful, as was my Virtual Book Tour. With the book tour, the days that I saw the most sales were the days where either a review of my book was posted or I wrote a guest blog post. I didn't see quite an increase on the days where a blog simply posted my book's summary or an excerpt.

Which leads me to report what HASN'T worked for me -- and that's static advertising. I've invested some money in a couple of sites where they simply post a photo of my cover, a blurb and a link to my Amazon purchase page. But that just doesn't seem to attract readers.

Now that I think about it, I almost never click on ads that appear on blogs or other pages that I use, like Facebook. I mostly ignore them -- and I imagine that this is true of many other readers, too. But when you post something ACTIVE -- like a blog entry or interview or review -- it gives viewers something more than just your book's cover. It lets them know about you, the author, and gives them a reason to invest in your book.

From now on, I'm going to stick with active marketing; I have another blog tour coming up in the new year, and this time, it's going to be all reviews of BAND GEEK. Hopefully, these reviews will be positive ones and will get the attention of even more readers. That would be a nice way to kick of 2013!

Please read and review REVENGE OF A BAND GEEK GONE BAD.