177 Search Results for thursdays with amanda


  • June 26, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: Who Schedules a Book Signing?

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    2013amanda2Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    I’m at a young writers conference this week, so to make for a shorter blog post, I’m going to answer this question that came in response to my post on The Book Marketing Process.

    “…does the author schedule bookstore signings and readings or is that something the agent/publisher does?”  – Sara

    First of all, signings and readings and in-store events aren’t what they once were. Authors who pursue these marketing options are many times lucky to see a dozen people show up. When you take into consideration the time it takes to plan and put on such an event, it’s clearly not a worthwhile strategy.

    HOWEVER, some authors have the “in-store event” gene, and they can do it quite well. For these authors, the planning and scheduling falls on them. They can ask their publisher to create posters that they can use to advertise each event. (The posters shouldn’t have dates and times, but rather a space for the author to fill that info in on their own…this allows the publisher to send a large amount of posters that the author can use for all his/her events). They can also ask for other simple promotional materials, but other than that, the publisher doesn’t play a role in this kind of marketing.

    The only time when this doesn’t ring true is when the publisher has decided to send an author out on tour. In this case, the publisher will schedule and pay for everything.

    So there you have it!

    Have you done in-store events? What was your experience

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  • June 19, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: The Book Marketing Process

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    2013amanda2Amanda Luedeke
     is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    It’s nice to think that there’s some kind of publishing instruction manual that you receive once you get a book deal. It’s even nicer to think that your agent or editor, are on top of every detail, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks and that you can proceed with confidence every step of the way.

    But as with any part of life, there’s no manual. First-time authors many times feel as though they’re fumbling through their book release, and try as we may, we agents and editors aren’t always able to stay ahead of the curve. Things get missed. Time slips away from us. And what’s even harder to admit is that this is the kind of business in which the squeaky wheel really does get the grease.

    In some cases, so, so much grease.

    Marketing departments operate in a similar fashion. They try their best to plan a head and give every book time and thought. But their focus is largely spent on only a handful of titles. These are the titles guaranteed to make the company money (meaning everyone will be able to keep their jobs and continue to take risks on new authors while continuing the careers of mid-list or low-list authors). So, these titles get the team’s focus. And the result?

    Marketing teams tend to be reactionary. Their days aren’t spent brainstorming strategies and researching the market. When not in meetings, their days are spent doing a few things for the big-release books and then responding to the dozens if not hundreds of

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  • June 12, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: Do Radio and TV Spots Sell Books?

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    2013amanda2

    Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

     

    A bestselling author wrote us to ask about the usefulness of TV and radio spots in today’s multimedia culture. The question was something like this:

     I’ve been approached by a number of radio and TV shows. They want me to go on air for an interview or guest spot. With radio this isn’t a problem, though I certainly am questioning the effectiveness of such a marketing strategy in today’s culture, but with the TV opportunities, they never want to help me with travel costs.  And I’m simply not going to spend $1000 in travel costs for nine minutes of air time when I know for a fact that my sales have never spiked after such an appearance. Am I wrong in my thinking here? What’s the value of this kind of old school marketing?

    TV and radio spots on well-known networks or shows seem to make publishers happy. They like the notoriety, and frankly, authors like it too. But you’re right. It can get very expensive and like most marketing, there isn’t a guarantee that your sales will increase. In fact I’d say that in nearly all cases of the author going on TV or radio to promote a book, the sales stay relatively the same.

    I blame this on a few factors:

    1. Readers are being more stingy with their book money, and
    2. This kind of marketing doesn’t carry the weight that it once did because we live in an age in which consumers are being targeted nearly every single moment of every single day.

    It’s that

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  • June 5, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: The Extroverted Writer

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    2014AmandaAmanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

     

    Well, I’m at conference (again!) and so this Thursday, let me leave you with an FYI that The Extroverted Writer is now available in print!! (Not everyone knew this!). 

     

     

    And here are some places around the web, worth checking out:

    FRONT Business_Card_Vertical

    Estimating Kindle Sales from Amazon Rankings

    Are You Boring Your Social Media Followers?

    Nine Unconventional Writers Residencies

     

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  • May 29, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: Everything You Wanted to Know About PPC Advertising

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    2014AmandaAmanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    Some weeks ago, I talked about keywords and PPC advertising. My husband, who used to be Google-certified (before he switched gears to work in the hobby game industry!), agreed to answer whatever questions you could throw at him to the best of his ability. Remember, his knowledge base is a few years old, and I’m sure things have changed. But I’m also sure that his insight is valuable for any author thinking about doing a PPC ad campaign!

    1. Can you talk about what you did for clients?
    To sum it up, I managed PPC advertising campaigns for several different clients to achieve specific goals. But what does that mean? Here are some definitions:
    What is PPC?
    PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising are those ads that are at the top and/or to the side of the search results page on Google (Bing has it too, but I didn’t work with theirs very much). I created and managed these ads for my clients using the Google AdWords program.
    How does it work?
    Every time anyone uses Google to search for something, PPC ads are triggered based on the words they used to search, also known as keywords. A keyword then tells your Google AdWords account to show the ads that you have created that are linked to that keyword. Each time someone clicks on an ad, you are charged for that click based on the bid you have put on that keyword.
    2.  How much does a solid PPC campaign usually cost?
    It really depends on how competitive
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  • May 15, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: What Do You Want to Know About PPC Advertising?

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    2014AmandaAmanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    I often get questions about ads. When to do them. Where to do them. How to do them. And the biggie, do they even work? 

    For a short while my husband worked in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. He was Google-certified and everything. Since I just talked about keywords, which I believe to be a vital part of any ad campaign, I figured it may be worthwhile to shoot some questions at my husband and see what he has to say.

    SO LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW! I WANT YOUR QUESTIONS.

    If you’re a bit fuzzy on PPC ads, simply go to Google or Yahoo or even Facebook. Those text-based ads that you see on every page are generated by individuals who pay the host (Google, Yahoo, etc) every time someone clicks on the ad. Sometimes they pay $0.50 per click. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. And you’ll notice that the ads that show up for you aren’t the same ads that show up for others. This is because the ad owners have chosen who to target with their ads. They’ve tagged the ads with keywords. Once you do a search that matches, the appropriate ads start popping up.

    It’s a science, really, and like I said, my husband had to pass a test in order to be Google AdWords certified, and thus write and manage PPC ads for his clients. So he has plenty to say on the topic, even if his advice is three years old.

    What do you want to know about PPC

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  • May 8, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: The Art of Keywords

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    2014AmandaAmanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    When I first started working in marketing, I had one task. Read. Absorb. Learn all I could about…parenthood. Well, it was actually strollers and carseats that I was specifically supposed to learn about, but in order to understand the product, I needed to understand the lifestyle.

    And I was 25. No kids. No husband. No interest in the topic of parenthood whatsoever.

    I remember this time of life so0ooo very vividly because I was completely bored out of my mind. I had gone from a job that involved travel and presentations and sales to one that felt as though I were a trapped bird within a computer screen cage.

    Four months later, I was an Internet-smart parenting whiz. I knew the struggles and the panic and the don’ts and the things that they fail to tell you about childbirth. Granted I never actually put my knowledge to use, but that wasn’t the point. The point was for me to speak the parenting language. To learn the jargon and the trends and more importantly…to learn the needs. The desires. The wants.

    And that’s when my boss had me put together a keyword chart. This chart would be the backbone of all of the marketing and writing we did on behalf of our client (who happened to be an internationally-known baby gear manufacturer). It would give us the words to use in our online copy (back when wording was fairly heavily weighted in SEO) and would allow us to position our client as a company that “understands” parents and their

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  • May 1, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: The Future of Literary Agents in a Digital World

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    2014AmandaAmanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

     

    All this talk about hybrid authors and self-publishing, and there’s one question that is bound to surface:

    Are agents a dying breed?

    Maybe. I mean some freakish thing could happen that changes everything and puts the final set of nails in the Literary Agent coffin, but the way things are shaping up, my answer would be “no.” We aren’t a dying breed, and here’s why…

    AGENTS AND SMALL OR INDEPENDENT HOUSES

    I’m no expert on the history of the literary agent, but it’s quite clear that the role was developed out of necessity. The typewriter, and later email, made it ridiculously easy for anyone to pound out a terrible novel and send it to the best editors the industry had to offer. Those terrible novels would fill up the queue, thus suffocating the really great publishable novels. Editors, whose time is valuable and limited…and who also have a tendency to spend much more time analyzing a manuscript than an agent does…eventually turned to agents to help weed through the bad and find the good.

    While we tend to think that indie and small houses are there for the unagented, the fact of the matter is that these publishers are more than willing to work with agents. In fact, they many times welcome it. They love when someone else has vetted the material before they even have to give it a look. And consequently, an agent can many times get a faster response from them than your typical unagented author. Why? Because there is a sense of professional responsibility.

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  • April 24, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: The Future of Publishing According to Me

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    2014AmandaAmanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    After spending the past number of weeks talking (and hailing) hybrid publishing (see posts here, here, here, and here), it begs a very important question…

    What is the future of publishing?

    As self-publishing continues to grow, as authors are offered more options to achieve their dreams, as traditional publishers continue to try and crack the e-publishing code, as start-ups focus primarily on e- and POD- publishing for their books, and as America’s reading habits evolve…where does that leave us?

    Where does that leave the book? The bookstore? The library?

    I’m no Predictor of the Future (well, okay, maybe I am a little), but I do have a few thoughts about where we’re headed…and I think it’s going to be an interesting ride.

    1. Eventually, it’s going to be fairly easy to get successful self-published books into bookstores. Someone, somewhere, with a ton of the right connections and enough money to give it a go is going to start a company that finds the best of the best in the self-publishing world and then presents those books to the buyers at B&N, Books-A-Million, Wal-Mart, etc. And because of this individual’s reputation and their product list of tried-and-true Amazon bestsellers, those stores are going to buy. And they’re going to shelve those books. This means that successful indie authors won’t ever have to partner with a publisher again to get their books into stores. They’ll just have to partner with an indie-friendly distributor. It‘s worth saying that there ARE venues that promise this kind of service,
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  • April 17, 2014

    Thursdays with Amanda: How to Become a Hybrid Author, Part 2

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    2014AmandaAmanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    Last week, we continued our discussion on Hybrid Authors by looking at what steps published authors should take if they want to become one. But what if you aren’t yet traditionally published? What’s the protocol for a self-published author who wants to cross over into the traditional publishing market?

    HOW SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHORS BECOME HYBRIDS

    There is lots and lots of advice out there as to how to hit it big time with self-publishing. From everything I’ve read, I’d say the common threads are:

    • Romance sells best
    • Covers matter
    • $0.99 to $2.99 is the ideal price range for ebooks
    • Authors do better when they start with a bang and release a bunch of books simultaneously
    • Authors keep their readers coming back by releasing new content every few months
    • Marketing becomes an author’s day job

    So there you have it. The super duper condensed version. I won’t waste your time by expanding on what can be found plastered all over author sites and forums, but instead I’ll focus on what’s appealing to publishers and what would make them bite.

    Publishers in New York aren’t easily impressed by sales numbers. Many times they say that ebook or self-pubbed sales aren’t large enough to warrant traditional publication. And then when those sales numbers are large and impressive, you many times find them saying that the author has fully tapped the market and there is nothing more the publisher could do.

    So there seems to be this sweet spot…this magical sales range that is large enough to warrant publisher attention and small enough

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