Authors Out of Carolina (or Anywhere Else, for That Matter)
By Guest | June 5, 2016 |
Photo by Nancy Anne L. Merolle via Flickr Creative Commons
Please welcome Kim Wright as our guest today. Kim is the author of Last Ride to Graceland, The Canterbury Sisters, The Unexpected Waltz (all Gallery Books), and Love in Mid Air (Grand Central), as well as seven books of nonfiction and the historical series City of Mystery. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Like, I suspect, most writers, figuring out how to promote and market my books has been an ongoing struggle. How much social media is too much? Is there a way to make book tours more palatable? What works and what’s a complete waste of time and money? When I fell into the Authors Out of Carolina group, which is the brainchild of a group of longtime friends, it seemed to offer a fresh new way to look at the marketing angle, and I wanted to share our experiences with other writers.
Connect with Kim on Twitter and with the Authors Out of Carolina on Facebook.
Authors Out of Carolina (or Anywhere Else, for That Matter)
Like most writers, I have a lot of friends who are writers. And, also like most writers, I have a knee-jerk reaction to the very idea of using my friends. But lately I’ve been rethinking the assumption that it’s somehow morally wrong to base your marketing plans around your personal relationships. Here’s why.
Through a strange piece of serendipity, four members of my local writing group have books coming out this summer: Last Ride to Graceland by me; The Fifth Avenue Artists Society by Joy Callaway; The Last Treasure by Erika Marks; and The Things We Wish Were True by Marybeth Whalen. We all have different publishers and thus different publicists, but we decided to pool our efforts, starting with a joint launch party.
We’re renting a nearby Victorian house and each theming a room to our novel, complete with snack. (In honor of my book’s Elvis connection, I’m doing banana and peanut butter Hunka Hunka Burning Love milkshakes.) We decided to call it a salon and invite everyone in town—Friends of the Library, book clubs, the historical society, retirement centers, and of course our own family and friends.
Advantages of the joint launch:
- It’s kind of a no-brainer that four writers can draw a bigger crowd than one. And people coming in for Erika might end up buying Joy’s book as well.
- Four themed rooms are more festive, and we’ll always have at least one writer reading in the gazebo.
- By turning the launch into a community event rather than a private function, we got a discounted rate on the rental, which we were furthermore able to split four ways. We can promote the event to local media with the “ick” factor reduced. It’s no longer about “Buy my book” but more about “Let’s celebrate local authors.” (And yeah, while you’re celebrating, you might also want to buy my book.)
Inspired, we pushed on. With a nod to Dorothy Allison, we came up with a group name—Authors Out of Carolina—took a group photograph, and created a joint Facebook page, too, with these advantages:
- With all four of us inviting our individual friends to like the page, we gained a much bigger following than any of us could’ve mustered on our own.
- Which meant that any time we used the page to announce events or news, either individual or collective, that post went out to a larger audience.
From there it was a natural call to tour together. Charlotte, North Carolina, isn’t exactly a literary mecca, but it’s smack central to several promising pods of booksellers, all within a two to five hour drive. We sat down one day over lunch with maps and calendars split the territory; I took the north around Durham-Raleigh-Chapel Hill, Marybeth took the coastal towns to the east; Erika handled the Greenville-Atlanta area to the south, and Joy contacted the western booksellers in the mountains.
Advantages:
- Our publicists treated us like we’d invented the wheel. Now they each only had to handle a fourth of the prospects.
- We figured the booksellers might LIKE idea of four writers traveling in tandem but as it turned out they LOVED it. With the same amount of planning and promotion, they stood to quadruple their potential sales. We had no trouble booking in-store events. Not just signings, which can be kinda lonely and sad, but full-throttle events.
- We were able to present ourselves to conference coordinators as a ready-made panel, with a list of topics we were more than prepared to discuss.
- From our home base of Charlotte some trips were one day, but for the longer ones, we could split the costs of hotels and gas. A big deal, since we were all traveling on our own dime.
- With the group name, picture, and dynamic, it was easier to get media coverage prior to our arrival.
- We’ve all found it easier to promote ourselves as a group. I have no problem talking up how funny we are, or how much pizzazz we’ll bring to an event. Because as creepy as it feels to brag about yourself, it’s easy to brag about your friends.
- And best of all, whatever awaits us on the road, we’ll face it together.
Our plans fell together with the kind of speed and ease that was frankly Biblical. Before we knew it, we’d booked twenty-three gigs.
I suspect this is a dynamic that can be replicated in lots of ways, wherever you live. It seems that you need to find other writers who 1) you like well enough to create good event and panel chemistry; 2) are writing in a similar genre so that people who come out for one person’s books might also be tempted to buy those of another; 3) are interested in investing about the same amount of time and money; and 4) are geographically close enough that you can either drive together to events or easily meet up there. You don’t have to do it all—perhaps you just want to share the cost of a spiffy venue for a joint launch or present polished panels to local conferences—but it seems beyond dispute that you can generate more opportunity when you work in tandem.
We’re treating Authors Out of Carolina as an ongoing experiment, and if you want to follow our ups and downs, like us on Facebook. We’re curious to see just where this wave of momentum might carry us next.
What are ways you have joined with other writer friends? Are there other promotion experiments you’ve tried? We’d love to hear!
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
This is brilliant and inspiring. Plus it sounds like you’re having a blast, which is important!! Joy breeds more joy. thanks for sharing this.
This is a truly inspiring post. Thank you so much for sharing. It opens up a new dynamic to book promotion, which helps grow the process and adds fun at the same time! Thank you!
Rebecca Rosenberg
Glad it was helpful, Rebecca!
Thanks, Susan! We’re hoping it makes the (sometimes grim) task of promotion easier for all of us!
It makes me look forward to doing it myself, which is accomplishment on your part, Kim.
This sounds like a fantastic and creative idea! Best wishes to you all in the experiment. May it be prosperous to all and spawn even more ideas!
“We’ve all found it easier to promote ourselves as a group. I have no problem talking up how funny we are, or how much pizzazz we’ll bring to an event. Because as creepy as it feels to brag about yourself, it’s easy to brag about your friends.”
This. And it sounds you’re enjoying yourself thoroughly too.
Several years ago, in WA, a bunch of us in my critique group all proposed a panel on doing work-for-hire. It was well received and we had a great time putting it all together. I’ve since moved away (to SC) and have a new critique group (still a fledgling) but I hope we can do something like this in the future. It sounds much more fun than doing an event by myself. Last year I participated in the Harvest Home Tour, a fundraiser for the library, and although I didn’t get a chance to meet the other authors (we were in separate houses), it was still a lot of fun.
I love everything about this article! I can absolutely attest that so much of this venture came about organically and I echo Kim’s excitement as we continue with this fabulous “experiment” and we look forward to what’s ahead!
Hello from an author in the Mountains of North Carolina! I love your enthusiasm and spark and idea!
Wow, what a great way to maximize your resources. I just had dinner with four writer colleagues who all live in New England, within 100 miles of one another. Perhaps we could replicate this. Thanks for sharing. And congratulations on publications.
Thank you for your article. It inspired me to add my first comment to Writer Unboxed (after following it for an entire year)! Last year, I joined forces with other authors who have written about Alzheimer’s/dementia (same as me) and while it at first seemed counterintuitive to promote together, it has been nothing but GOOD. We realized people who read one book on a subject they’re interested in usually go on to read more, so why not have our books all in one place? As authors, we are NOT geographically close, nor have we ever met in any other way than Skype, but have become friends! In addition to our #AlzAuthors presence on Twitter and our new Facebook page, the 4 of us recently created a blog to help support people looking for info about dementia — https://alzauthors.wordpress.com — and for the month of June (Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness Month) we’ve invited a different writer to write an essay for the blog for each weekday. Maria Shriver’s essay is scheduled for this coming Wednesday. We have now overflowed with essays into July! What sounded like it should be “competition” turned out to be a fantastic “collaboration.” There IS strength in numbers…
That’s an interesting twist. Good to know that it works when writers are working around similar themes even if they aren’t geographically close.
Great article! Thank you!
My agent has a few clients who have recently joined forces, though because they live far apart, they do it in cyberspace, supporting each other via podcasts, blogs, and social media marketing. I noticed they started pushing hard about a month before the books came out, and all of them gained over thirty reviews the week they debuted. It was really great to watch.
Living in eastern NC myself, I have lately thought about this very thing, teaming up with other writers in my area. Only drawback is that my friends’ genres do not mesh with my own. (I write commercial/literary women’s and YA).
You mentioned that you met in a local writing group. I tried two different writing groups locally, and was shockingly disappointed with both. I am not quite sure how to go about hooking up with other writers in my area who are serious about their writing other than through this means. Goodreads? Facebook? The library? I am very hesitant to cast a wide net and toss it out into the abyss, for obvious reasons.
Any suggestions?
We actually crossed paths in several ways – Marybeth called me and invited me to lunch before my first novel came out six years ago. We’ve also
connected through conferences, Facebook and a monthly “salon” I hold at my house. In short i don’t think there’s only one way to connect with other writers and writing groups, as you say, can be an utter crapshoot. One thing that was key for us -even though, based on the comments, is clearly not necessary for every group – is that we actually hang out together. Go to lunch, walk the dogs, get the kids together to play. So there’s a pretty solid basis of friendship that gives us a good group dynamic. But it all started when Marybeth tracked me down through Facebook.
The Greater Dallas Writers’ Association started much the same way, and I am still friends with Laura Parker, who wrote numerous romance novels and has more recently moved to romantic suspense as D.D. Ayers. We were neighbors and good friends, and as the organization grew, we all became good friends. We live quite far apart now, but we can still promote each other on social media when a new book comes out or we get a terrific review.
What great ideas for group promoting, and I loved your comment, “Because as creepy as it feels to brag about yourself, it’s easy to brag about your friends.” I have always felt that way and talk up other authors like mad at events, on my blog, and on social media.
Just to say how excited and proud I am to be a part of this group! I truly hope others are able to do the same in their areas because it is SO much more fun than doing all of this on your own!
This is such a great idea! I love the thought of throwing a group launch, its like a book potluck! As an introvert, hosting or being the center of events (baby showers, birthday parties) always feels so daunting and draining. This would be a wonderful way to turn something stressful into something fun.
Thanks for sharing.