I’ve been blogging for quite a while now, beginning at my other blog way back in 2003. I posted my first book a chapter at a time over there, where thousands of readers read each weekly chapter. When I published the book, I looked forward to great sales and promotional help from those thousands of readers. Sadly, I got little. True, they’d already read the book, so why buy a copy? But still.
I’ve pondered that result for years and wondered what I could do to get a following that felt more invested in my books to the point where they would take an interest in spreading the word – a “street team” in book marketing gobbledygook. Rolling out the “Friends of Frank” program was my effort to achieve that end.
But lately, I’ve been having second thoughts, and now I’ve decided to put that program on hold, at least for the time being. The good news is that I’ll still be posting a chapter a week here at the regular Tales of Adversego blog, and will start by making the already posted chapters visible here as well.
The immediate reason for icing the FoF program is that I’ve been having site problems. People aren’t getting the new blog post alerts, and the sign-in for someone registering as a FoF has sometimes conflicted with their earlier registration to leave comments. Partly, that’s because my original site designer put the FoF sign-in form “below the fold,” way down in the right hand column where it’s easy to miss. I apologize for any annoyance this may have caused.
I’ve now found a new web designer who can sort out these problems, but while deciding what to ask them to do, I gave a rethink to the FoF concept itself. Should I keep or kill it?
Part of the answer was obvious: only about 40 people have signed up to become a FoF, and most of them were dedicated fans already. So all I’ve accomplished to date is to erect a barrier that makes it less likely that blog readers will become enthusiastic fans.
So here’s my hope: that by posting each chapter of Book 5 and sharing my weekly back-story thoughts; taking suggestions and working good ones into the book; and otherwise inviting you to peek in on the creative process, you’ll be inclined to do three, extremely helpful things:
- buy the book for $0.99 when it comes out in final form, which will help the book get off to a good Amazon rank start
- post a review, which will help give the book credibility and make it easier to list with promotional newsletters and
- spread the word to your friends
You can be sure that the final version will be worth a second read, as much will change between the first draft you see on-line and the more complex and polished version that will finally go live at Amazon.
So with that, I’m about to start shutting down the FoF tabs and exposing all chapters to date. One last apology, this time in advance – those of you who do receive new-post alerts may get spammed as the book chapters cross over. If that’s the case, I hope that the fun of catching up on Book 5 will be worth the inconvenience.
Wot! Frank has no friends (apart from the 40 of us die hards), who would have guessed it. From my reading of the series so far, I have never read of a more dynamic, gregarious, charismatic, and all round great guy to be around – not!
To be perfectly honest, knowing the types of dire straits that he gets into (who, but Frank, gets his motor home blown to smithereens, has his dad jump off a bridge into a raging torrent, etcetera, etcetera) I am not sure that I would be happy to be seen in public in his company – the sidewalk could explode at any moment.
But Andy, don’t give up your excellent stories, I enjoy them immensely and can’t wait for the latest chapter.
Whilst typing this, I have been trying to wrack my brain to remember any friend of Frank, apart from possibly George and even he is a tenuous example of a friend. But then I suppose that there is always hope that he may meet someone, on his wavelength, with whom he can share his hopes, dreams, fears and possibly his life, meals and the odd drink. Maybe becoming a grandfather will change his luck, if he survives that long – he does come up against some serious adversaries.
Anyway I am sure that going up against Russia will be a walk in the park!
@minrich, thanks as always for your words of encouragement. To be fair, I have sold somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand copies of my books (I should know the exact number, but haven’t kept track), and several times that many have been downloaded for free. But not many of those many folks have checked out my site (despite the fact that there’s a link at the end of every book). And I haven’t otherwise tried to promote the site or the blog, either – probably something I should think about.
Sad to say, Frank is a committed hermit. He has his daughter and the occasional female interest, and that’s enough for him. I don’t see a close friend in the future, but the occasional side kick is certainly part of his equation.
And now I’d better quit typing here and get back to polishing this week’s chapter, so I don’t keep you on tenterhooks for too much longer.
I shall wait until it comes out and buy it. I would prefer to read it all at once.
Thanks, Lucinda
Seems you are still searching for that elusive formula of success like so many of us in this world. Four books is a major accomplishment in and of itself. I couldn’t say one way or another what the best path is either and you’re the one with the empirical evidence and the track record. Must seem like the proverbial rock and a hard place. The heuristic I’ve found for writers is a million words, you know, like the ten thousand hours, five years, 20,000 instances and so on. But who knows in the end. I recently read that plain dumb luck also plays a huge role. Right place. Right time. Right subject. Right story. Right character. Look at Weir’s The Martian, that was in the slush pile when I picked it up on Amazon, sorta crude and not a lot of polish but the story gripped me. I recommended it to a few friends and the next thing I knew it had catapulted into movieland with a box office star totally without warning. A first book that’s a home run has its own problems. His publisher milked his second book with a $16.00 price tag usually reserved for iconic favorites which garnered far fewer sales. Gibson suffered when he hit instant fame with his first book, Neuromancer and while he wrote and sold a lot of books afterwards I never felt he hit his stride until The Peripheral.
A new web design and a revamp would be nice. Not hating, just not bonding with it. For me, I wasn’t familiar enough with it to move around easily until I finally caught on to the logic.
As for the difference between dedicated fans and blog readers, I think it is a simple enough thing. Beta readers are prized for their observations and suggestions and keeping the author honest and grammatically correct. Your readership base while not reflecting itself in outright sales (how can you tell) is something to foster like the good old SEO mailing lists are always touted. If people show up here in any significant numbers to read chapters then they are potential boosters. One never knows when that plain dumb luck will strike.
Carry on, you’re doing fine.
I think I tried to join FOF quite a while back but it didn’t seem to work at the time, so I may have been one of your technical failures. In any case I much prefer to do my reading from a public RSS feed using Feedly, which wouldn’t have worked as a FOF. I was therefore very happy to see the later stuff opened up today, and I just binge-read all the chapters that were previously restricted. I will of course be buying the final published kindle version to go with all the earlier stories of Frank.
One request for your new web guy — currently the site cannot be zoomed on an iPad. Since you don’t serve ads in the right colum there’s no reason for keeping zoom locked out, and it would be nice on the eyes to be able to spread the text column to the width of the screen like many sites still allow.
Thanks!
Andrew, my apologies for making reading difficult up until now – obviously an unfortunate glitch for me as well, and I think I learned a double lesson from it.
And thanks very much indeed for mentioning the zoom issue – I’ll certainly add that to the fix it list.