Keira Gillett Author

Fierce Middle Grade Fantasy Reads

Author

On the Road to Success – Book Marketing Fails

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This post is part of my goal to document how I got to where I am today as a self-published author. I’m always learning in this self-publishing journey. I’ll share successes and failures, in hopes that it inspires others who are in the midst of similar journeys or starting one. I don’t claim to have all the answers, or to even be right. I’m simply sharing my experiences in an effort to show that success isn’t instant, it’s being willing to try something, to learn from it, and having the guts to try again. It’s about adjustment and growth, and a willingness to fall flat on your face, but to get back up again.

I believe in my books and I believe in myself, so I thought I would try my hand at online marketing. Now it’s been two years since I started my self-publishing adventure, and I can honestly say that I have yet to figure out this whole book marketing thing.

I’ve dabbled, and I should probably concentrate my efforts in one spot, and keep at it until I have a breakthrough, but I keep trying many platforms in hopes of finding something that clicks – either with me or with readers.

I am not yet the master over any of these avenues, and maybe never will be. What successes I’ve had with these platforms has been relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, and on the surface it’s really disheartening. On the other hand, I know every little bit is helping – I’m learning, I am getting a little exposure, etc.

I often wonder if paying someone to do my ads and ad targeting would help me. I bet it would, but I’m a little gun-shy now after so many failed attempts on my own, and reading and seeing many people offer up “magic solutions” to “boost sales.” Whether you’re writing, or marketing, or anything else in life, the “magic bullet” isn’t a cure-all for success.

Facebook Ads

I’ve attempted them multiple times, usually after an author has shared that a key part of their success in sales is attributed to Facebook Ads. I read about what worked for them, and try to adapt it for my books. I create a campaign and I tweak, but so far I haven’t been able to duplicate their success.

Key takeaways: Boosting a post never works, and creating an ad sort of works. It might work better if I knew what interests to target. As a middle grade/young adult author, I want kids and adults to read and enjoy my books. Adults are the gatekeepers, and the ones with money. So how to reach them? How to get them interested? I have tried to maximize the number of people who’d see the ad by focusing on broader interests, and I have tried to target a key group of people by narrowing my targeted interests to specifics. Results in both cases are blah and Facebook loves to say it’ll reach a certain number of people and never come close to their own numbers, but hey I can boost and add more money to the campaign to reach the original number of readers they had told me I would!

One day in the recent past, I myself was a target of a Facebook ad (aren’t we all?), but this one in particular caught my eye. I had seen a lot of Kindle Unlimited ads, but this was more specific. It was for a totally free book. I used the button to the right of the ad to see why I was targeted and thought I could perhaps replicate that. So I created a graphic and targeted people interested in free ebooks/Kindle books, with an added focus of children’s literature. Result? My share to my Facebook friends resulted in an organic reach equal to the paid reach. Bust. (And yes, my book was actually free during the promotion.) No visible uptick in sales; sales stayed about the same as the previous free book promotion I had run.

One thing I haven’t tried, but will try, will be for my next local book reading. I plan to create an event on my page and then promote the event, targeting a radius around the event location. I will let you know if that works or not.

Amazon Ads

Who better to sell a Kindle book to someone shopping on Amazon or reading their Kindle than Amazon? Sounds like a marvelous idea! Results – meager would be stretching it.

Key takeaways: These ads don’t work nearly as well as I thought they would. Again the fault could be with me, but I haven’t really heard of an author using the Amazon ad network and gaining a lot of sales. It’s probably been done. I’ll have to try again after more research. My attempts weren’t that stellar, and it’s costlier to promote on Amazon than on Facebook. I also attempted once to advertise during a free book promotion. As far as I can tell I didn’t get any more sales with the Amazon promotion than I would if I had left it alone. At the moment, I’m more inclined to keep trying with Facebook, so I’ll focus my efforts there.

What has Worked

I saw a big boost in sales when I pitched to websites promoting free books to their subscriber lists. It took a little legwork, but it wasn’t difficult to do. I need to try a few of these again, especially the ones that turned me down the first time, like Bookbub, and to research around and find others to pitch. I had a very good experience with Reading Deals. I will reach out to them again when I am ready to do another round of free book promotion.

Last thing of note: My advice with any free/discounted book sales, no matter the marketing around it, keep them short, because the majority of your sales happen in the first two days and sharply, dramatically fizzle out after those two days.

As an author do you have any favorite promotional websites? How have you used Facebook to reach potential readers? What have been your biggest successes and fails in book marketing?

Good Gracious! Are Those Actual Parents?

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When writing Zaria Fierce I made the conscious decision to go against the typical relationships found in middle grade and young adult novels between parents or guardians, and the kids in their care. Absent/neglectful/cruel adults make it easier to send kids on adventures in books, but I wanted to see a bond between parents and their progeny that drew from my siblings’ and mine experiences in my family growing up.

So Zaria is adopted, an only child, has lovely parents, and is well adjusted. Queue the *horror.*

What will you write about without all that teen drama?!?!? Wait! Adopted?

Adoptive parents can be absolutely wonderful people. They’re not all mean. Just like step-parents aren’t all nasty despite the rampant evil stepmothers throughout fairy tales and literature… or aunts, uncles, grandparents, foster parents, and other guardians… take your pick. Fictional kids can be like real kids and come from happy homes. I wanted my heroine to experience the same.

As for the relationships, I modeled Merry Fierce and Zaria’s relationship off of my relationship with my mom. Mom Gillett is a cool mom if I do say so myself. If I wanted to play hooky, she’d play hooky with me. If I wanted to be checked out for a lunch date, we’d do that. If I wanted to desperately attend a midnight premiere for Harry Potter while on a family road trip she somehow made it work. In high school, she let my best friend stay with us while her dad was out of the country. We traveled the world together and are the best of friends. (Love you mom!)

When it came time to write, I poured that love into Merry’s and Zaria’s relationship.

And I don’t stop there.

  • Colonel Fierce is hard-working, attentive, loving, strict, and obliging.
  • Emma Johansen (Christoffer’s mum) is kind, concerned, intelligent, and loving.
  • Samuel and Naia Mickelsen (Aleks’ parents) are attentive, supportive, and kind.
  • Aleks also has a good relationship with his  grandparents. Ava on one side and Remigus on the other.
  • Mrs. Storstrand (Filip’s mom) is strict, fair, and loving.

The adults are all good people and yet the kids still get to go on adventures all over Norway to reach Gloomwood Forest. See parents don’t ruin all the fun! So how do the kids do it? Aha! Good question. Discover the answer in Zaria Fierce and the Secret of Gloomwood Forest. It has to do with a mysterious egg-shaped object.

What other books have you read where the adults are good people and have good relationships with their kids or wards?

The Great Debate – Vocabulary in Books for Kids

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When I wrote the first draft Zaria Fierce and the Secret of Gloomwood Forest I didn’t think about the vocabulary I was using. It wasn’t until the first round of beta readers got a hold of the novel that I started to question word choices because they questioned word choices.

Do I dumb down? Do I elevate? What’s the middle ground? Is there a middle ground?

You read online, and everywhere you look there’s warnings this way and that way about doing one or the other. Too verbose and it’ll turn kids off. Too dumbed down and it’ll bore them. You can’t please everybody. So what to do?

I thought back to my own experience.

I’ve always been a reader. In high school I took the SAT’s twice. My first verbal score early on in my high school career was around the middle range. I took it again my senior year, where I only studied for the math section, but got a much higher verbal score. I credit the very high verbal score from that round of testing to the sole fact that I was a voracious reader, and that I was reading both kid books and adult books. Books have to build vocabulary and establish a common vernacular to make such a positive change in test scores.

I looked to children’s movies that I loved. Disney loves to turn out verbal comedy. For example, the use of the phrase ‘your lugubriousness’ when one of the imps in Hercules addresses Hades. Adults might think this word play is just for them, because they have the vocabulary to understand, but I think it makes an impact on kids, too. Kids are smarter than adults will sometimes give them credit for.

I read a few blogs in the book blogger community which discussed vocabulary in their favorite books as kids. Some were surprised to find during rereads that the books contained really big words. This spurred me to check too. I looked at how some of my favorite children’s authors wrote and saw that the bloggers were right. The books did contain big words. What a relief!

I also knew a large chunk of readers would probably access my book on an e-reading device with a built-in dictionary. I was confident that vocabulary would be a minor footnote. A word should never get in the way of the story, but an author should never forget that a story is comprised of words. There’s no need to be fearful of using the words you know.

This is why I left the most of the words which were questioned alone, and changed out only a few for better words. Changing this word for that word came down to clarity for the reader, and/or poetically what was right for the story. 

When it comes to my current writing projects, I start in much the same way as I did for that very first book. I just write. The first draft is its own animal, which is wrestled into submission. Editing is the right time for me to debate on word-choice. It’s where the magic happens!
Where do you fall on the great debate? Where should vocabulary stand when it comes to storytelling?

Becoming an Author Changes How You Read Books

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When I completed the first book in the Zaria Fierce Trilogy I noticed something odd. I was reading differently. I know it’s a bold statement to say writing a book changes how you read books. But is the concept really all that farfetched, or is it all too obvious? I’ll let you decide.

Before writing Zaria Fierce and the Secret of Gloomwood Forest, paying attention to how I read was not anything I thought to analyze. I simply read and enjoyed. Even while writing Zaria’s first adventures to Norway, it wasn’t something on my radar, but I noticed while editing and readying the book for publication that my reading habits had changed. I wasn’t just a reader anymore, simply reading to enjoy a book, I was an author, too. I was reading books and dissecting what other authors did.

Now, that I’ve published my first trilogy set out into the world, I notice the changes in how I read even more. Witty turns of phrases catch my attention like landmarks on a road trip. I always loved a clever phrase as a reader, but as an author I am admiring the craft and skill involved, how easily it slid into place and flowed with the rest of the text.

I marvel at how sentences are engineered. For instance from a newspaper article came, “his words popped sporadically like popcorn.” What a clear visual and sound impression. I can hear it and see it – a little man jumping around to emphasize thoughts as they came to him.

Another thing I do is question word choices describing actions. Can someone’s gaze climb over someone’s appearance? Certainly the movement is clear, but eyes don’t have limbs to climb with, so does it work? And if for instance would the word traveled be better? Can a gaze travel over someone’s appearance? If it is better, why is it better? The gaze still doesn’t have limbs… but it can move, by changing where it’s looking.

I especially appreciate correct words in a story instead of their mistaken counterparts like compliment vs complement and homed in on vs honed in on. (Not that I didn’t appreciate them before, but now I feel more sympathetic toward malapropisms in text. I hated finding those in my own writing. They creep up far too often, and an author can’t claim distractions or interruptions for all of them! Though we will try.)

I read a lot of grammar blogs. More and more as the time passes. I want to stay sharp, learn new tricks, catch errors that might be missed, and hopefully polish my writing with their nuggets of wisdom. So yes, I still enjoy the story, and I might think about all the same things other readers or authors might when reading. But, I’m now analyzing how the words got on the page and learning wisdom on how to write at each author’s feet.

Brushing Off Your Copy Editor Skills

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For fun I read grammar blogs, writing blogs, and copy editing blogs. I know, I’m weird, but I have an excuse – I write! A lot! I learn from these blogs and use my findings to rid my stories of items that sticklers love to stickle.

One example that comes to mind right now focuses on the words poor, pore, and pour. The blogger, who is an editor, talked about why he/she didn’t like self-published books by citing the above set of words as an example on quality writing. The self-published author the blogger focused on had incorrectly used the word poured to indicate a character studying a text. The correct word should be pored.

I filed that tidbit away and when I next opened the draft of my book, I checked for the words. Wouldn’t you know it? I too had used poured wrongly in the context of a sentence. A quick change and now I was good to go. And of course, fixing these errors on your own doesn’t mean you can skip hiring a real editor to edit your work, – which I did when I was finished with my edits, – but it does keep potential errors from escaping detection. If you know it, you should fix it.

What grammatical errors bother you the most when you read?

For me it’s the wrong word in place of the right one, and not necessarily homophones like poured/pored, but the unintentional malapropisms that aren’t spotted and are left in place, where the two words are vastly different and don’t mean the same thing at all. Not even books from big name publishers are 100% free of these errors, but they do occur less frequently due to vigorous editing.

Over to you!

The Oxford Comma – Do You Love It or Hate It?

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Even though it’s a little punctuation mark, the Oxford Comma stirs a lot of debate, and not just from grammarians. The Oxford Comma is a serial comma, or in other words the comma in a list of items denoting the second to last and last items from each other. For example:

Sally and Henry went to the store for eggs, bacon, sausage, milk, and cheese.

In journalism where every character counts, I’ve learned that the Oxford Comma is not generally used. This is because it’s believed that the sentence still makes sense without it. This stance is why some would prefer the above sentence to read:

Sally and Henry went to the store for eggs, bacon, sausage, milk and cheese.

My old boss would disagree, even though he understood the style choice. His background in technical writing put significant importance on the Oxford Comma. In his work, the serial comma was used to clarify instructions and keep everyone working together. It simplified reading, making it easier to know what the writer intended.

I personally love the Oxford Comma. I grew up using it (probably because that’s how my English teachers taught me). I’m on the side of the debate that thinks the comma makes a sentence cleaner, clearer, and polished. See what I did there? One of my beta readers thinks the same as I do. In fact, it’s her favorite punctuation.

I read an article recently about a legal case where the Oxford Comma was up for debate. The case was won because the serial comma wasn’t used in legal documentation for a Maine law on overtime protections for workers, in this case delivery drivers. In fact, according to the article, Maine legislature ignores the Oxford Comma. I wonder if that will soon change.

Who knew grammar could win you a case in court? So let that be a lesson in why you should dot every “I”, cross every “T”, and put a comma after every item in a list.

Over to you – what’s your stance on the Oxford Comma? Is it friend or foe?