Using a Mailing List

As time has gone by I’ve been hearing more and more how important a mailing list is.  I disregarded its importance as I felt that emailing people was more of a nuisance to both me and the people I’d be emailing, and I didn’t see how it would be effective.  I figured that if someone was interested enough to give me their email address, they were already looking at my work, and they didn’t need me to bother them with reminders about it.

            However, I heard about mailing lists being important enough that I finally looked into it, and I began to see the value.  First, it’s really only helpful if you are regularly coming out with material.  So if you have a mailing list for you as a writer, then you need to regularly be coming out with books or other written materials.  If the mailing list is about a series, then you need to be regularly coming out with written materials for that series.

            The problem with the former is that your list will likely be made up of people who became interested in your writing because of one specific book.  So you’re going to need to stay within that genre in order to keep their interest.  If your newsletters become about a subject they’re not interested in, they’ll unsubscribe, even if you’re just taking a short break from that type of writing.

            So it’s best to focus on a particular series and collect names and addresses of people who want to follow along.  For me, that’s been Relic Worlds because not only is it a series, but it’s a series with a lot of ancillary elements.  There are short stories, games, a comic book, etc.  There’s something to talk about every month, and more material to release, so the newsletters have material and aren’t just empty ramblings of me saying, “something more is coming sometime, I promise!”

            I’ve found that there are two methods to build the mailing list that work the best, conventions and giveaways.  At conventions, you’re trying to get people to look at your books, but they’re not sure whether they’re ready to commit to buying or even reading them yet.  So a mailing list is a good way to get a taste without a commitment.  It’s also a way to remind them that you exist, as opposed to a flyer which will likely get thrown away once they’re home, no matter how interested they are in your product.

            Giveaways are the way to do it from home.  You need to get a prize people will want, and it’s a great idea to get something that matches what you’re selling.  In my case, I gave away a Kindle Fire and I included one of the Relic Worlds books.  That way they not only get a prize they want, they also have a means for which to read my books, and a starter.  But the real prize for me was all the email addresses that people had to give in order to enter the raffle.

            Now, I don’t want lists of people who won’t be interested in my series.  That wastes everyone’s time.  Even once I have their email addresses, when I send them a newsletter, they’ll just unsubscribe because they’re not interested.  Or, worse yet, they won’t unsubscribe and I’ll continue to send them information that’s useless to both them and me.  So I promote it on sites where I think my readership will go, and I make sure keywords are always included that have scifi, adventure, books, etc.

            I use Shortstack as my sweepstakes provider.  They help collect all the email addresses, and provide a means by which to make a good looking sweepstakes page.  I might switch this out as I wasn’t extremely impressed with their service considering the cost.  But it wasn’t bad.  They’re at: http://www.shortstack.com/

            I use Mailchimp to create and send the newsletters.  They’ve been fantastic.  They’re at: http://mailchimp.com/

Book Talks

I’ll be traveling around the Midwest and Texas in October giving talks at Rotary clubs and libraries.  I’d put the tour list here, but it’s long, and would take a lot of time for me to look up all the addresses and/or contact information, and no one goes to these events based on this blog, so I’m not going to take the time to list them now.

            Instead I’m going to talk about why I go to these clubs and give these talks.  I have found Rotary clubs, and groups like it, to be an invaluable tool for independent non-fiction promotion.  The organizers of these clubs need to find a new speaker every single week, and they’re trying to find subjects interesting enough to keep their members coming back.  Having a true story to tell is a blessing for them, as long as it’s an interesting one.  While I struggled for years to get bookstores to let me do signings, clubs that need regular speakers have been more than willing to accept me.  And some have even contacted me and asked me to come to their organization to speak, saving me the time of having to go to them.

            I haven’t been charging for these events as I want to get into as many as possible.  I make money by selling copies of my books at them, and sometimes I make a couple hundred at a single event.  It’s not enough to live on as the work required to set it up and to travel there winds up being inefficient.  However, it spreads the word of the book and of me as an author.  I often make friends and contacts who later join me on social media, and they see what else I’m writing.  Like most things in independent publishing, it pays to have a number of titles so each individual event doesn’t wind up being your only trick.

            I approach these organizations by looking them up, finding out who would be in charge of booking guests, (if I can’t find that, I just find the president or whomever is in charge,) and I email them.  I tell them what the story is and I provide a link to the web page where the information is listed.  I also mention anything that is sellable about the story.  (In the case of Two Gun Hart I tell them that it’s the first time a lot of information about the Capones has ever been revealed.)  And I make sure to mention anything that’s relevant to their area, as sometimes clubs prefer stories with a local connection.  (Oddly enough, most of the ones in Iowa wouldn’t have me as a guest unless I could show a local connection.)

            This doesn’t work so well when it comes to fiction because typically the best you can do is say you have a story you’ve made up.  The problem is, everyone has a story they’ve made up, and they don’t know why yours is extra special.  And besides, people at events like these usually want to hear about something that’s true.  They’re fascinated by true stories and will gladly invite authors with great true stories to their events.

Star Trek Beyond was Actually Great... And May Save the Franchise

All right, I stand corrected. Well, sort of. Star Trek Beyond was great, but I wasn't completely in the wrong for criticizing it during its promotions.

Watching it, my eyes watered. Not because it's sad, but because, at long last, I was watching a Star Trek movie. JJ Abrams admitted he wasn't a Star Trek fan, and those first two movies showed it. But this time it was clear that people who care about the franchise were in charge of it, at least the writing part.

This time it was about the crew coming together to solve the problems. It's what Star Trek was always supposed to be about! They are overwhelmed by what they're facing, so no amount of fighting is going to win the day. They have to intellectually figure something out to save the day, and they have to do it together, each one bringing their own special knowledge and talents.

But I still hold to the fact that the promotion campaign was crap. In fact, it hurt the film. While it opened to a positive weekend, it did worse than the other movies. Why? Because they promoted it as a hip action film rather than a smart, emotional one. It detracted the audiences that would want to see it, people like me. I only grudgingly went because I heard several people who hated the Abrams films said they loved this one.

Somehow, Hollywood still thinks it will get a larger audience by following formulas of pop culture. But if they just trust good material, they'll get larger audiences. I believe this film will have legs, and will bring Star Trek back as long as they follow the team who created this film rather than those who marketed it. I'm waiting with baited breath for the next one, and the series, if they're going to be this smart about them.

RPG Storytime

Separate from my writing, (and often taking my time away from it,) I’ve been running a couple game channels.  The first was a war game channel where I show miniature war games and other things from that community.  I wanted to expand into other games so I built a channel called Bandwagon Games where we have all sorts of board games, computer games, miniatures games, etc.

            But the one I’m most excited about is a show called RPG Storytime where I feature role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, which is the first one.  The stories are created from games that have been played, and summarized using miniatures.  This particularly appeals to me because it embodies my three favorite things to do: gaming, storytelling, and making movies.

            It’s also a good tool for promoting.  As I’ve discussed last week, people connect more to video than they do to words.  Despite the fact that I’m a writer, or perhaps especially because I’m a writer, I have to admit this fact to myself.  Movies connect with multiple senses, such as sight and sound, while books force us to imagine things.  This is, of course, the strength of books, but it’s also what makes it harder for us to connect with the audience.

            RPG Storytime allows me to tell a story visually and to promote to a new audience, the gamers.  This works particularly well for my science fiction writing as those are two audiences that are closely related.  Nonfiction readers aren’t so much into games as much… Well, they’re sometimes into the war games, especially if they’re into military history.  But for the most part, this is a promotional opportunity for my sci fi and future fantasy writing.

            I plan to eventually turn some of the stories I’m making through RPG Storytime into books themselves.  The hope is that those people who connected with the videos will want to buy the books as well.  There will likely be people who wouldn’t have given the book a try, but because they got sucked into the Youtube videos, which were free to watch, they may have that emotional connection to want to get the books and read more.

If you’d like to see RPG Storytime, webisode 1 of the Dungeons & Dragons storyline is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuO4eWuagZ0

People Connect More to Video Than to Words

            It’s a painful thing to admit as a book writer, but there’s a reason why movies and television are more popular storytelling formats than any type of written material.  The reason is simply because visual mediums appeal to multiple senses; primarily sight and sound.  They more easily and effectively manipulate our emotions.  And, perhaps most importantly, they can be enjoyed in groups.  While reading a book or a short story is an intimate moment between reader and writer, visual productions can bring together multiple audience members at the same time and cause them to all feel the same thing at the same moment.

            An example of this is John Green of the Vlog Brothers on Youtube.  He speaks poetically and quite well about how reading is a shared experience between author and reader.  However, even he has to admit that his fame came not through his books, but through his program with his brother.  It was once the audience could see him, hear him, and get a sense of his feelings through his expressions that they connected with him, and wanted to know more about what he was writing.

            Books that have been made into movies always do better than before they were put on film.  Even though the movies ruin the endings and every secret in these books, people become curious about what’s in the book in addition to the film.  Not only is there a lot of free advertising, but once people have heard voices of the characters, even though it’s stolen away their ability to make their own voices, more readers flock to these books because they’ve had a more visceral connection.

            I’ve embraced this fact and started a few Youtube channels of my own.  They have, regrettably, been as unsuccessful as my writing and I struggle to get views.  But I do find it easier to get people to take a chance with one of my videos than it is to get people to take a chance on my writing.  Even trying to get people to read a free short story is a daunting task.

            I’ve become convinced that a healthy mix of these two mediums is the best chance for success.  The difficulty is in juggling my time with these two art forms.

Let Disney Take Over Star Trek

Someone posted something a few months ago about wishing Disney could take over Star Trek.  At first I cringed, but then I realized that’s from how I used to view Disney.  However, ever since they have handled the Marvel storylines so well, and are building up Star Wars in a nice way, I’ve grown a trust for them.  And frankly, Star Trek needs the same handling.

            By that, I do not mean to put Abrams back in charge, or to make it more like Star Wars.  These were two problems with the reboot.  Abrams himself admitted he wasn’t into Trek, and he made it more like Star Wars, which is what it should not be.  It’s a mystery adventure, not an action/war series.  It would work best if done with more of a focus on exploration of the unknown, and problem solving.

            However, my cousin Michael said it best a number of years ago when there were several Trek series on TV.  He said the network should bring Voyager back immediately, and have all the series intermingle with one another.  Basically, he was predicting the universe building that Disney is doing today almost 20 years before they did it.  And he was right.  Star Trek has a lot of potential for several series happening simultaneously and interconnecting.  The overall storyline should move forward based on the actions of multiple crews and ships.  You could even have series and movies about factions other than the Federation.  Wouldn’t a Klingon series be fun?  Or how about being on board a Romulan War Bird during the original series when they were more like submarines?

            There’s a lot one could do, but so far, it’s been very shortsighted.  And with the new Star Trek about to be released, I have little hope for its future.

I had been optimistic at the end of the last movie.  Even though it was a pretty bad movie, I was looking forward to the crew finally beginning on a five year mission of discovery.  Maybe now they would finally make it about exploration, Roddenberry’s original vision.  And with the departure of Abrams to do what he really should have been doing instead, the series might actually get good.

Sadly, I believe we jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.  I really began to believe this when I saw they had replaced Abrams with the director of The Fast and the Furious.  Their tone deafness was particularly prominent when they began bragging about this fact.  They went on to have fast paced action scenes for all of their trailers, and had a whole campaign about hearing Rihanna’s latest track on the newest trailer.  (They didn’t say anything about the plot or the characters or where the series was going.  No; Rihanna is more important to them.)  All along, they have de-emphasized the only positive element of this movie; the fact that Simon Pegg wrote it.  This, and only this, is the reason I’ve considered watching it.  But the producers have done such a complete job of glossing over that fact, and put so much emphasis on the elements that make it look like another Fast & Furious movie that I simply can’t look.

I’m sad to say it, but I’m done with Star Trek.

That is, unless they can do something better with it.  CBS has a new series coming out, and they’re right about a couple things.  First, it really should be a series.  There’s too much potential to be locked away as just individual movies.  And second, an idea they’re mulling is to have each season be a different crew, which taps into the potential of multiple storylines.  However, I happen to know that they really don’t know what they’re going to do, and are going into this venture blindly rather than with a passionate vision like the one Roddenberry had.

The Makers of the New Ghostbusters Are the Ones Who Caused the Controversy

A lot has been made about the new Ghostbusters, mostly in terms of its switching genders of the lead roles.  Those who have disliked it have been called sexists, and those who do like it have been said to be ruining their childhoods.  Both are absurd statements... well, mostly.  There are chauvinistic trolls, but the majority of people had a true gripe about this reboot.  But why did this in particular get so much extra attention?

I have a very specific reason why the creation of this movie annoys me, and I think it gets to the heart of why it stood out for a lot of other people, too.  There are a number of movies and TV shows that have female protagonists that came out, and only the true assholes complained that the star didn't have a dick.  The rest of us didn't mind because the story and the characters looked really good.  Even when something was rebooted with a female lead, like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, most of us didn't bat an eye.  But when Ghostbusters came out and said we're making this again with all female leads, those of us who hadn't had a problem before were suddenly annoyed.

Why?

Because that's ALL the studio said.  They didn't explain why they felt it warranted a remake, or what they could add.  They didn't explain the story or who the characters would be.  They didn't even try to make excuses.  They just said, "Look!  It's Ghostbusters!  And they're all women!"

The problem with this is that they were using two things to manipulate audiences:  The brand name, and feminism.

Rather than doing what the original film did and coming up with an interesting, original story with unique and enjoyable characters, they cynically took a brand name with monetary value and threw it at us, pretending to be paying homage to the original.  And to hide the fact that they really had nothing but a desire to profit off the brand name, they threw a bunch of women up front and said, "See?  We're progressive!"

This goes to the point I'm making about them using feminism to their own greedy ends.  Feminists shouldn't be defending this movie, they should be appalled by it.  There are few examples more blatant than this one of a company using their cause for their own gain.  For months the studio kept saying, "Look!  We've got women in this!" without saying anything else about it.  There was nothing about the plot, what the characters were like, what made them interesting or unique.  Just a bunch of "you have to like this movie or you're a sexist!"  They're still using that marketing campaign during this first weekend of release.

It's sounding like the movie itself is okay, but not particularly good.  The biggest problem I'm hearing is that it's basically soulless and cliché, even from people who like the film.  This is not a surprise at all considering the fact that the film is so much more about making money on the brand than making a good film.

The studio is still tone deaf to the problem, also.  They heard the complaints and their solution was to make another movie with all male leads.  This shows their absolute obliviousness.  The problem has nothing to do with the gender of the lead.  It has everything to do with them making a huge deal about that one thing and not caring about the rest.  If they truly wanted to pay homage to the original Ghostbusters, they wouldn't do these reboots, and they wouldn't even try to do a Ghostbusters 3.  They would do what the original writers and producers of Ghostbusters did; they would come up with a new, original idea with interesting and enjoyable characters and they would take a chance on it.  Is it risky?  Yes.  Does it have the definite value of a brand name?  No.  It's what real artists and comedians do; like those who made the original, and really only, Ghostbusters.