By Walter T. Anderson
Hello there.
I have three books, a collection of short stories and two collections of horror poetry and people ask me, “How did you get the word out? How did all those people find your books?”
The answer is not easy. Number one: All my work sells in The States and in the U.K. Number two: I live in Japan.
Below is a list of what I do (not in order) to help spread the word:
• A website. In this day and age everyone who's selling anything across borderlines / countries, needs a website. Free is okay but a dot com is far better.
• Join Yahoo or MSN groups. Find the group you could be interested in and sign up. Post messages, not an advert for your book! The advert comes in the sig file.
• Join chats when possible; get to know those in the group you have joined.
• The magic press release.
• A Newsletter - very important.
• MLM - multi level marketing.
This month let's talk basics. Let's talk about your web page, contents and ranking, writing groups and the magic press release… Oh, before we begin, a free website is a great place to start your online presence, but the long URL is too hard for most people to remember and also not many people are willing to type out: http://www.the-free-site.com/section-name/section/your-page-choice.html it would be wise to get a free redirect URL. Try http://www.active.ws/domains/ they give you a free domain with the ending .ws
This is excellent, for more reasons than one. It is free, your email never receives spam from them, and the bottom of your homepage has a rank button, a hit button, a guest book, and search, all listed for you. For an example check out my homepage later and you'll see what I mean, http://www.walteranderson.here.ws
“Must have a website, dude,” I say.
“A website,” you say, “I got me one of them.”
“Great,” I reply. “What's it's ranking?”
“Ranking?”
“Not many people will search through 50 goggle pages for your site.”
“How do I get a better ranking?”
• Read up about meta-tags
• Keywords. Look at the top rated pages for the same subject you write in. If you have IE5, click their page and view the keywords. MSN 6 doesn't allow this. Or, more ethically you could just download good keywords.exe, type in your keywords and let the program hunt the web for good matching keywords. I typed in horror, and got these keywords (this is only some there were too many pages to copy and paste all: Horror, mainstream, small press, print, printers, evil, Satan, million books, fan fiction, pulp fiction, harry potter, fan fiction, science fiction, night terrors, good charlotte fan fiction, fiction, mannyac fan fiction, gundam wing fan fiction, guiding light galaxy of terror, terror, truth or fiction, sg 1 fan fiction, reign of terror, fan fiction on the net, terror alert, tg fiction, manny fan fiction, war on terror, pulp fiction quotes, terror squad discography, terror alert level, tower of terror, terror squad, twin towers terror pictures, urban terror, support the war on terror, night terror
Now we have some keywords. Next…
• Meta. Very important. Submit.com has a free meta-tag generator. Follow the easy to follow steps and you'll end up with something like this: <META HTTP-EQUIV= "Expires" CONTENT= "Mon, 03 Nov 2004 12:54:23 GMT" >
<LINK REV= "made" href= "mailto:walteranderson@occultmail.com" >
Followed by your keywords, then <META NAME= "description" CONTENT= "The official homepage of Walter Anderson, featuring his short stories and novels ... and my god have mercy on your soul..." >
<META NAME= "author" CONTENT= "Walter Anderson" >
<META NAME= "ROBOTS" CONTENT= "ALL" >
Also important is the title of your page. Include as many of the keywords as you can, but don't over do it. <TITLE>Homepage Walter T Anderson, the master of the Macabre, terror and nightmare. Fear him, Horror is his life. Murder, death, violence, gore, gore and more Gore. Horror, mainstream, small press, print, printers, evil, Satan, million books, fan fiction, pulp fiction</TITLE>
• Add previews to the site. If you have a book, load up at least 3 chapters. I have the first chapter of my novels online.
• Offer a newsletter, but entice people to want your newsletter, there are so many newsletters out there, competition is hard. My newsletters always contain a short story or horror poetry. To get people interested in considering my newsletter, I offer the first 3 short stories in a .pdf file. If they grace my presence with their email address (and a name is nice) I reply with the attachment of the .pdf as a thank you gift. It is easy to stop getting my newsletters. Every newsletter should contain a link your readers to leave.
• Groups. There are two types of groups: Online and offline. Groups are great for networking.
• Off line groups. Some offline groups, people sit around half the day, every single day talking about writing and drinking coffee - these people write mostly when inspired or basically feel like it. If you are the same as me and write because you must, then this type of offline group is not good for you. It will burn up your time. ***To break out of the “I don't feel like it” outlook to writing, force yourself to sit down and write (and I mean FORCE) and make it a habit*** Some writers pump out a book in 4 - 6 months, let it sit 3 months and then rewrite and self-edit another 3 months. BANG. A year has passed and the writer has a product he is excited about.
• Online groups. For those of us living overseas = perfect. So far I have only meet great people on these groups. There are two main groups (I don't know about newsgroups, but the ones I have seen have so many rules it ain't worth your time and effort to join up), these groups are great because the messages can be read online or via email. The two best places for groups I have found are Yahoo groups and MSN groups. One to try would be THWN (The Horror Writers network) and another good group is Embark-to-madness, both are Yahoo groups.
• Online groups sometimes offer a weekly or regular chats (THWN). This is a great place to meet and talk (via fingers or mike) and get to know these people you message often. You can even start your own group as I have done (Embark-to-Madness). In the chats often someone pops along to help with networking, sometimes there's a special guest and sometimes you just chat.
• The magic press release (for non-US citizens).
7-1) Expensive
7-2) Not often looked at
7-3) Hard to write
“Why bother?” -- Because there are free services out there, looks professional to have a press release on your site. If you can afford $110 pop over to Authorsden.com and use their wizard. There is no guarantee that it will get glanced at, let alone read. For me, these services are not required yet, but if you live where your books are sold then it would better to pop into the local small press paper and talk to them. You never know.
For those of us who want to try the “magic press release” there is a software program called PR (press Release). It helps you write a press release, make a copy of it and pop along to http://www.eworldwire.com/index2.php or one of the better services online is http://www.pressignite.com/
Both sites offer good deals for local or national.
The cheapest place I have found to get these and other useful software is at http://www.software.here.ws/
There's also, online classifieds, safe groups (I send out Internet press releases to these groups of which I am a member), there's IP Marketing (many people don't like this they consider it a kind of spam). Most of these groups you can find searching MLM. Most sales from my first novel, “Blood of the Wolf” came from safe lists. Even MLMer's read books.
The most important thing is to build up a reader base, it is also the hardest thing to do.
A newsletter helps. This will be discussed next month along with the full html code you need to produce nice newsletters. PS: Stay away from zinester or any other newsletter service that doesn't allow you to see who your email contacts are. It is good for these companies to hide the email contacts ‘cause then you'll likely stay with them instead of changing. And you'll lose members when you change (trust me, I have. I call it a learning experience). Also next month, I'll show you where to get a software program that sends out your newsletter to hundreds of people without losing your Internet connection or IP. This is a great product if you have many contacts. I have many readers on my newsletter, and using Yahoo I have to (split my contacts into different groups) send it out 5 times.
Till next time,
Stay dark and dangerous and learn all about me and my books and collections on my website.
Walter T. Anderson.
If you fear the Devil in my words -- stay away .
Collection of Madness http://www.lulu.com/content/19392
Re-Entry of Evil http://www.lulu.com/content/17253
Blood of the Wolf http://www.lulu.com/content/17378
http://groups.msn.com/MacabreToknight For horror promotion.