Kelly Crigger's Blog - Posts Tagged "publishing"

Winston Churchill, a soldier and writer long before he was a politician, said “there is nothing more exhilarating in life than to be shot at with no result.” That somewhat captures the veteran mindset: someone who has had his or her life almost taken by someone else (on purpose) but survived. Many veterans have been to the edge of the abyss and stared death in the eye only to come back a changed person. The ones who choose to tell their tale are truly special.

Veterans have seen and done things the average person hasn’t which has given them a perspective on life and death that’s hard to explain. When they find their voice and an outlet to share their incredible experiences, the outcome can be moving and can even help others.

Reading a book by a veteran is many times enlightening because it’s a book about life written by someone who is comfortable with death. The ability of the veteran author to capture what it’s like to stride through life looking everyone in the eye because there’s nothing to fear from humans is cathartic. They have a unique ability to find the words we all want to say like Army Lieutenant Matt Gallagher who described the people of Baghdad as “too tired to hope, but too human not to” in his book Kaboom.

The vernacular of the soldier is unlike anyone else’s. Veterans have a way of stringing together the most obscure, yet direct words and phrases to make a point. In the Army, fuck can be a measure of anything: length, strength, temperature, intelligence, or anything troops can dream up. Something can be long as fuck, strong as fuck, cold as fuck, dumb as fuck, or the coup de grace when describing a boned up person, place or thing; wrong as fuck.

Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines also do dumb things in combat that end up being the funniest stories you’ll ever hear. Humans always find something to do that is inherently risky and has the potential for loss of life. In the military the risk is galactically higher because of 1) live ordnance 2) heavy equipment and machinery and 3) the previous two being under the control of relatively young people. I spent 24 years in the Army and not only saw troops doing dumb things, but was that guy who did them. I landed a parachute in a tree, stood underneath an artillery gun when it went off, nearly rolled a Humvee down a mountain, nearly blew up the same Humvee, let off a trip flare in front of a bar, and ran the most dangerous weapons range ever. Capturing these moments in words was therapy for me and a good laugh for the reader.

There are too many great veteran authors to list, but some who have survived combat to write amazing memoirs and novels like Homer Hickam, Colby Buzzell, James Michener, Kurt Vonnegut, Gary Linderer, and Matt Gallagher will be featured on my website BooksByVeterans.com. If you are a veteran and have a story to tell, let me know. The barriers to being a published author are not as difficult to surmount as you might think.

Writing is only half the battle in publishing. Marketing is the other. In book publishing, a crappy book can sell tons of copies if it’s marketed well, while a masterpiece that isn’t marketed can go completely unread. In today’s digital world, information is brought to you at blinding speeds by literally billions of sources. Getting your right book in front of the right person at the right time in the right way with the right message is the only thing that separates bestsellers from bottom dwellers.

As an example of what I’m talking about, I wrote a book called Curmudgeonism, which was aimed at middle aged men and veterans. I did a bunch of marketing that had very little impact on sales, but then I did an interview with a small Florida paper called the Palm Beach Post and sales skyrocketed. Same when Blackfive.net posted a review of the book. I realized right away that these were the right types of outlets for my readership and continued targeting them. Here are a few marketing tips for new authors:

Getting your book in front of celebrities or people with a big social media following is always good, but don’t rely too much on social media like Facebook and Twitter. The shelf life of a tweet is 3 minutes and facebook has made it very difficult to get your posts seen in the average person’s timeline unless you pay for it by boosting posts. Instagram is more effective at generating sales than Twitter and Facebook. YouTube is even better, especially if you can create a character that people want to watch on a regular basis. Just look at how Nick Palmisciano from Ranger Up uses video to sell products.

Look into blog tours like Worldwindtours.com, but don’t get your hopes up too high. A virtual book tour is great to get 20-30 reviews of your book onto the web and generate SEO, but they rarely result in big sales spikes because the audiences they reach are not large. Focused marketing is what you need. It takes time, but do some research on the best sites for your book’s audience and reach out to them.
Become the expert in your field by getting excerpts of your book into similar media outlets. After Reed Kuhn wrote Fightnomics, he aggressively reached out to MMA websites and magazines and within a year was firmly entrenched as The Fight Scientist and widely regarded as the subject matter expert in that field. Reed provided statistics and excerpts from his book to hook potential readers wrote articles as a guest columnist that touted him as “the author of Fightnomics.”

More than anything, don’t get frustrated and recognize that generating sales takes time. Marketing is hard, but remember…Fifty Shades of Grey was originally self-published and self-marketed and look where that is now.

You've written your first book, loaded it on Amazon, launched an effective marketing plan, and now sit back and dutifully wait for the sales to roll in. Only they're not. Or at least they're not coming in as much as you had hoped. It could be the consumer isn't having a positive experience with your Amazon page because of that old cliche, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him buy a book. Or something like that. Convincing a customer to check out your book on Amazon is hard. Convincing them to buy a copy once they get there is just as hard, so authors need to maximize their book's page to complete the sale. Here are six things every author should do to strengthen their Amazon page and complete the sale.


1. Write a killer summary. Take your time on this and treat it as a piece of creative writing in itself. Your summary is the first thing readers usually look at so it has to be snappy, intriguing, and hook a reader. It shouldn't be too long or too short or give away too much while convincing someone to spend money on you. That's not an easy thing to do, so take your time to craft a killer summary that makes it impossible for readers to walk away.

2. Your author biography should mirror what you're selling. When I wrote Title Shot, Into the Shark Tank of Mixed Martial Arts, I wrote a biography that highlighted my writing accomplishments in MMA so I sounded like a guy who had been there and done that and was qualified to write a book about getting punched in the face. But when I wrote a completely different book called Curmudgeonism, A Surly Man's Guide to Midlife, I rewrote my biography to one simple line: "Kelly Crigger is an angry troll who lives under a bridge, eats goats that wander past, and throws their bones into the canyon of despair." This simple bio made it perfectly clear who I was and why I was the right guy to write a book about surly curmudgeons.

3. Have reviewers lined up and ready on release day. No one will buy a book with no reviews. No one. Before release day, send the manuscript out to as many friends as possible and have them post a review as soon as they can. Is this loading the deck? Yes, but the alternative is to wait for customers to post reviews months after the book is released while your sales ranking tanks. Having reviewers lined up and ready on release day (and not all of them 5-star) is just good marketing.

4. Add editorial reviews as soon as they come out. Amazon is very good about posting editorial reviews on your book if you forward it to them. No matter how big or small the outlet is from the new York Times to the Prairie Gazette, if someone writes "this is the greatest book ever" send that to Amazon and have them add it to the page. Peer reviews are a big selling point.

5. Respond to negative reviews. Someone once loaded a 1-star review of a book I wrote but their comments weren't directed at the book itself, but my co-author. It was a personal attack on Zak Bagans, so I took umbrage with the person and fired back. After a few back-and-forth comments I actually turned to person to my side and they became an apologetic follower. Now I'll be the first to admit there is a fine line when it comes to this. There's a razor thin difference between engaging negative people and feeding insolent trolls. Pick your battles wisely.

6. Don't let Amazon pigeonhole your book into uber-competitive categories. It's better to be #1 in a small, obscure category like Dead Languages Written by Assholes than #200 in Popular Fiction. Being at the top of any list is good, so make sure Amazon is putting your book into categories it can do well in.
Besides your book's page, make sure your author page is up to speed as well. Make sure Amazon is crediting you with the right books, you have a good photo loaded, a good bio written, and updated social media like twitter scrolling across your page.

Loading your book on Amazon is a must if you ever want to make a sale, but too many authors don't spend the time to maximize their Amazon experience. Remember, the Amazon page is the last step toward making a sale. It's your shop window. Don't bring the customer to your doorstep only to have them leave underwhelmed without buying anything.

This article first ran in Vetrepreneur Magazine in November, 2015 and is reprinted here with permission.

Everyone has a routine. I wake up every morning and check about ten websites that I like including my own facebook author page. One day a fan asked a question; “Hey Crigger, didn’t you say this once?” and posted a link to an obscure website that had copied one of my articles nearly word for word and claimed it as their own. Pissed doesn’t begin to describe my attitude as I strangled my Mickey Mouse coffee mug. I sent a letter describing my pissed-offedness that may or may not have ended with the words, “I’ll stab you in the face!” The article was removed immediately.

This incident taught me a valuable lesson: the more creative you are the more you have to protect your creativity. Businesses copying the truly creative people of the world and profiting from that work as if it were their own is a disgusting trend in the business world. Anything and everything that can be copied will be, right down to a comedian’s jokes. If you google Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia, you can find a harsh video of Rogan confronting Mencia about word for word comedy plagiarism.

“The digital age brings content to your doorstep in the blink of an eye and when combined with unscrupulous people it creates a situation where copying someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is too easy,” says Ranger Up CEO Nick Palmisciano. Ranger Up is a mid-sized business that makes military and patriotic apparel, but its success has had a downside: its profitable designs put it in the crosshairs of rival companies who don’t have a moral objection to copyright infringement. The blatant illegal activity keeps Palmisciano on his toes to find and expose copycats. “On average, we send four Cease and Desist letters a week. We have to protect our intellectual property or we have nothing left. Are we copied less than some other similar sized brands? Yes because people know we will move on them when they steal from us.”

Ranger Up’s experiences usually end well once the violator has been identified, but not every case does. Many times the offended party never finds out they’ve been copied or once they do, they don’t have the knowledge, time, or resources to take action. In this digital age the likelihood of getting caught is much higher, but the risk of someone taking action is actually lower. There’s no incentive to not copy someone else’s stuff when the worst you can do is tell them to stop or call them out publicly, which has little to no effect.

“We don’t really have the resources to go after all the copycats,” says Tiffany Oden, owner of the small boutique business, Quinn’s Closet, which operates solely on web-based platforms like Etsy and Facebook. “I catch people copying our dresses long after I’ve made and sold them, but what can I do? I’m a two-person operation.”

You can do a lot actually. If you run a web-based business then the first thing you can do is contact the sales platform about the infringement. “Website providers have mechanisms in place to protect intellectual property that most companies don’t know about,” says Trevor Schmidt of Hutchison PLLC in Raleigh , NC. This low cost mechanism should be the first step in protecting your product. Every platform from Etsy to Facebook has a copyright infringement clause in their terms of service so if you can demonstrate that another business is stealing your property they have the obligation of taking it down.

Step two in the escalation process is to reach out to the offending company personally. “A lot of people have success reaching out to the business owner,” Schmidt says. “Initial contact is frequently effective before getting an attorney involved. If two owners can come to an arrangement and come to a business solution that benefits both sides then that’s the best way to deal with the problem.”

If that doesn’t work then it’s time to call in the people with law degrees, like Schmidt, which usually involves a couple of official letters. The first letter informs the offending party that you, the victim, are under counsel and intend to take legal action, which can also be categorized as a cease and desist letter. The second letter will either address any counterpoints the other side made or ratchet up the pressure to ensure the infringer knows you are serious, and the third is a court summons, but it rarely comes to that, according to Schmidt. “There’s little to be gained for either party in going to court unless there is a lot of money at stake.”

In the case of trademark infringement, a company can file a UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) complaint to object to the registration of a domain name. But be warned…none of these actions prevent the offender from offending again. Businesses who rely on intellectual property must be ever vigilant to ward off the thieves and frequently it’s a game of whack-a-mole, as Palmisciano has learned over the years.

“As bad as these pieces of lowlife scum are, the more damaging thievery comes from rival brands that take successful design concepts and modify them just enough to avoid litigation,” he says. “The most frustrating thing in this business is watching creative people put out great products that they worked hard on, and then seeing uncreative remoras tweak those ideas and call them their own. It’s unearned success, but such is life.”

Everyone has a routine. For some people that routine is to get up and see what they can steal from the creative people of the world and get away with it. Those creative people need to make action part of their routine and not let it happen.

Nothing turns away a reader faster than overwriting. Using four sentences to say what you could in one slows the writing down and in the end, makes your story cumbersome and unmemorable. A golden rule of fiction is to keep the story moving forward, so resorting to flowery prose, unnecessary metaphors, and long descriptions weakens the story and ultimately makes it harder for the reader to stay interested.

Besides using too many words to make a point, going off on tangents will also lose the reader and no matter how good the rest of the story is, you won’t get him back. "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel is notoriously long winded and although I loved "The Deceiver" by Frederick Forsyth, his later novel, "The Afghan," had so many lengthy flashbacks and side stories that I could never remember what the main storyline was or why I was reading it.

If you’re writing fiction then it’s a given that you need to bring the reader into the scene. Smells, sounds, sights, feelings in the air…all these things are necessary to create a sensory image for the story to take place within. But there’s a fine line between creating the backdrop for a scene and making it so agonizingly long that civilizations rise and fall before the reader can get through a chapter. Here’s an example from my own novel that ended up getting cut because it just wasn’t necessary.

“As much as Ki-Hwa adored staring at the great ocean, gazing out toward the horizon every day left her despairing; memories of the life she’d known seemed as evanescent as foam in the wake of the Kinai Maru and trying to decipher what lay ahead was as like trying to predict hold long the embers of a fire would smolder. Some nights, looking up at the rabbit in the moon, she wondered whether her mother or perhaps Jung-Hwan was looking at it too, wondering where she was. Still, she seldom felt anxious and when anxiety did manage to grip her heart, reason shooed it away. She was homesick but crying was pointless, especially since she wasn’t sure what to cry about anymore.”

Run on sentences can kill a story’s tempo and pace. If a reader has to go back and read a very long sentence more than once, then you’ve failed as a writer. There’s nothing wrong with using periods and breaking up a thought into 2-3 sentences. Here’s one very long sentence from a book I couldn’t finish:

“Understand that I was very excited by the spectacle and not until my ride home, as I began to settle into my bones, and feel the limiting contours of perception close back in like the nursery curtains that stifled the views of my youth, did it occur to me that I had, for the first time in my life, found a way out of this, my own skin.”

Overwriting can also take the form of trying too hard to sound smart. Here’s an example from a book where a woman is trying way too hard to describe the experience of going to her first professional MMA fight:

“My experience echoed precisely descriptions handed down to us in the writings of Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, and Artuad in which ia disturbing ritual – often violent – rendered each of their senses many times more acute, as if the dull blunt body were momentarily transformed into a tuning fork, alive, as Schopenhauer put it, “to sensations fine and fleeting.” Some have called the feeling ecstasy. I believed in this spectacle-provoked plentitude of sensation as one believes in Pangea and plundering Huns.”

In the end, fiction is a fickle beast that is very hard to tame, but overwriting is not the way to do it. Keep the story moving forward, take it easy on the prose, limit tangential story lines, watch the run-on sentences, and don’t try too hard to sound smart. These are only a few tips. There are many more, but I don’t want to overwrite. ;)

Curmudgeonism: A Surly Man's Guide to Midlife