vampires – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

SFFMP 172: Making It as a Newer Author, Marketing YA Fantasy, and are Vampires Still “In”?

March 6, 2018 SFFpodcast Uncategorized

Like many new authors, Caroline Peckham‘s first series, a YA fantasy adventure, The Rise of Isaac, didn’t sell as well as she’d hoped. For her second series, she did a lot of market research and switched to a more popular type of YA fantasy, vampires in a contemporary paranormal setting. She also adopted some more effective marketing tactics and had a successful launch last fall. She’s since released a second “V Games” novel and is editing a third, and the series continues to do well, months after the initial launch.

Here are a few of the details that we discussed on the show:

Some of the challenges of marketing young adult fiction as a self-published author.
What made Caroline decide to switch from one type of YA fantasy to another.
Concerns about finding readers when one’s target audience doesn’t have credit cards and doesn’t shop on Amazon.
Why Caroline has had more success targeting adult audiences who happen to enjoy young adult fiction.
Whether vampires are too crowded a niche to get into or there are still opportunities.
How Caroline first found reviewers by seeking out readers in her genre who had reviewed books similar to hers.
Finding reviewers on Goodreads and then moving them over to an easily manageable Facebook group.
Why Caroline makes her ARC reviewer Facebook group public rather than private and lets people who find her through the platform in to get free review copies.
Using the Werble App to create animations that can be used on Facebook to help with promotions.
Pricing a Book 1 at 99 cents or 99p in KU to keep it higher in the rankings and bring in readers for the rest of the full-priced series.
Which social media platforms Caroline uses and why she didn’t do much with Wattpad, despite it being a popular destination for younger readers.
Caroline’s experiments with Facebook advertising and how she found out that the clicks she got weren’t converting that well.
Whether vampire stories seem to do better in the US or the UK.

You can visit Caroline on her website or Facebook, and check out her books on Amazon.

| Open Player in New Window

Click to download the mp3.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast via RSS.

Like us on Facebook.

caroline peckham, kindle unlimited, vampires, ya fantasy, young adult

SFFMP 126: Breaking Out, Five Figure Months, and Writing in Someone Else’s World

April 4, 2017 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

Fantasy author Justin Sloan joins us this week to talk about why the traditional “just write the next book” advice may not always be the right tactic for every author in every stage of his career. He also discusses how he broke out and went from small successes to big ones when he started reaching out to other authors for collaborations. He ended up working with Michael Anderle and co-writing a series with him in his popular Kurtherian Gambit world. Since then, he’s started selling a lot more books, and he just quit his day job to write full time.

Here are a few more details of what we covered:

Why Justin thinks some of his series have done significantly better than others.
The challenges of writing series in lots of different subgenres of fantasy instead of sticking with one.
How he reached out to other authors and was very proactive in finding people to collaborate with.
How he got into co-writing a series with Michael Anderle in Michael’s world, and what it’s meant for his career.
Whether face-to-face or phone meetings are necessary for co-writing or it can all be done through email and Google Docs or some such.
Managing the finances and accounting when writing with several different authors on different projects.
Why Facebook can be such a powerful marketing tool and what to post on your page.
Posting snippets of up-coming books to get readers excited before the release.

Please visit Justin’s website to learn more about his work and grab some free books, or like his author page on Facebook to see what he’s doing there.

Justin is also the co-author of the Creative Writing Career Podcast. Check it out if you’re looking for another show to listen to.

| Open Player in New Window

Click to download the mp3.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast via RSS.

Like us on Facebook.

collaborating, fantasy, genre hopping, Justin sloan, michael anderle, urban fantasy, vampires

SFFMP 38: Writing 5,000 Words an Hour and Selling Zombies and Werewolves with Chris Fox

July 7, 2015 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

On today’s show, we chatted with Chris Fox about marketing zombies, werewolves, and vampires, and also about how he writes incredibly quickly. He holds down a 60-hour-a-week day job as an app developer and doesn’t have a lot of time to devote to fiction, so he’s learned to be productive, logging 5,000 words in an hour. He’s even written about it in a book designed to help other authors: 5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter.

Here are some of the highlights from the interview:

Using the start-up mentality for indie publishing
Investing in your product (including scouring DeviantArt for hours to find just the right artists!)
How audiobook sales (from Audible) can help Kindle sales on Amazon
Is it helpful to use popular tropes, such as werewolves, zombies, and vampires? Or do readers have expectations that can be hard to meet if you’re doing something slightly different?
What advertising Chris has done and what’s been effective
Why it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend much time and money on marketing when you only have one or two books out
Utilizing a mailing list to make promoting future books easier
How Chris is writing so darned many words in an hour
Addressing the argument that writing faster means writing poorly
Using voice recognition software effectively as a fiction writer

If you’re looking for more information on marketing, you might want to visit Chris’s site and check out some of the articles he’s written for writers:

If Chris’s fiction sounded interesting to you, give his first book, No Such Thing as Werewolves, a try.