Ravi Mangla asked me some questions.
Marketing & Promotion
Not too long ago a writer friend of mine emailed asking me what kind of marketing and promotion I do for my ebooks. Apparently his own ebooks weren't selling very well at all. This happens, of course, but the majority of his books are published by "real" publishers and yet his ebooks barely make up about a tenth of his overall sales. Anyway, my basic response to what kind of marketing and promotion I do is, well, not much at all. I don't troll message boards (which, in my opinion, is a waste of time as 99% of those message board users are just writers trying to sell you their books) and I don't constantly post links to my ebooks on Twitter and Facebook. Sure, when there's new book available, I'll post a link here on this website and on Twitter and Facebook, but that's about it.
I believe the best marketing and promotion a writer can do is simply to write a really great book which a few readers read and then tell their friends about, who then read the book and then tell their friends, and so on. That's old school marketing and promotion there, folks.
Plus, in addition to having a great book, it helps to have equally great cover art and product description. I myself am very fortunate enough to have several of my books blurbed by very well known writers, which I'm sure definitely helps sales. Because let's be honest here -- your average reader doesn't care who the publisher is. In fact, they probably couldn't name two of the major six publishers if their life depended on it. So if you have a great cover and strong product description, you basically manage to rise to the same level as books published by major publishers, at least on the surface from a reader's perspective.
And, of course, price point plays a major factor. All my novels are currently $2.99, which is the lowest price I can set to start earning 70% royalties. Would I eventually like to raise that price point? You bet. I'd like to try $3.99 and $4.99 (I don't think I would go over five bucks for a novel) but haven't really found the guts to start experimenting yet. Because right now my ebooks are selling pretty decently and I don't want to do anything to jinx it.
Right now I'm selling on average 35 ebooks a day, which comes to just over 1,000 ebooks a month. Are they great numbers? They're certainly not bad, though of course I wish I was selling more. And who knows -- maybe they'll go up, but they're just as likely to go down too (another writer I know was selling a lot of ebooks a few months ago but now they've trickled down to very little, and it's impossible to say why). I don't think so, though. Again, I believe the best marketing and promotion a writer can do is to write a really great book, and I hope to continue doing that. Man of Wax will be released very soon, with the second book scheduled for next spring, then the third book scheduled for next fall. Then, once the trilogy is complete, I plan to package them all together as a one big ebook.
So that's basically what I do for my marketing and promotion. As you can see, I don't really do much. That's not to say I'm not open to trying new things. I've hosted live readings here on my website in the past, and I'll continue to do that from time to time. I've done a blog tour before, and maybe I'll eventually do one again (speaking of which, Jeremy Robinson will be stopping by tomorrow). Would my sales be better if I tweeted links to my books every day? Maybe. But right now I think I'll just keep doing my thing and hoping for the best. Either way, I find I now have more motivation than ever. And that, my friends, is a very good thing.
Q&A @ FFC
I owe a lot to Gay Degani and Flash Fiction Chronicles. After all, if it wasn't for either, my essay "Hint Fiction: When Flash Fiction Becomes Just Too Flashy" probably never would have seen the light of day. But it did, and ... well, you know the rest. Anyway, Gay was kind enough to ask me a few questions about writing and self-publishing and my new collection over at FFC, so take a look.
Talking Zombies With Nate Southard
The Dishonored Dead just recently came out, and as my friend Nate Southard recently had a zombie novel come out, we thought it would be fun to interview each other about our books. Below is my interview with him. You can check out his interview with me over at his website.
RS: So tell us a little bit about Scavengers.
NS: Gladly. Scavengers tells the story of five men from Millwood, a small Indiana town that survived a zombie outbreak through equal parts isolation and dumb luck, who are sent to the neighboring town of Rundberg in search of much-needed supplies. Of course, the last anyone saw of Rundberg, it had been overrun with the walking dead. It’s probably a suicide mission, but desperate times and all that ...
I originally told this story in my 2005 graphic novel A Trip to Rundberg, but I wanted to expand and improve it. I think I pulled that off.
RS: What is it about zombies that interests you? Is there a certain fascination with them? And is there anything about Scavengers that is different from most zombie stories?
NS: For me, zombies represent a certain level of hopelessness in horror that I find especially chilling. Once the dead stop staying dead, there’s no return to normalcy. You can fake it for a while, sure, but sooner or later reality will crash through. You don’t see that sort of finality with some of your other genre touchstones.
On more of a guilty pleasure angle, they make excellent fodder. You could have told Die Hard with zombies and had a body count in the hundreds. No one would have batted an eye. I think it’s important not to fall back on that, though. It’s a lowest common denominator type of story, and I know I don’t want to read one of those.
As for what makes Scavengers different? At first, I just wanted to tell a small town catastrophe piece. I grew up in rural Indiana, and sometimes imagining having to escape impossible odds is the most fun you could have. I was a little tired of urban zombie stories.
I also wanted to toy with the idea that mankind deserves to survive. So many of these body muncher stories have that big reveal of “We are the monsters!” I Am Legend. Night of the Living Dead. Mankind is the real enemy. I wanted humans to deserve survival. A disaster didn’t drive these people apart. Instead, it pushed them together. I like that.
And don’t worry. I know I Am Legend is a vampire story.
RS: Well, at least not the Will Smith remake; those were like a vampire/zombie hybrid.
Anyway, Scavengers is being released by Creeping Hemlock’s zombie imprint Print is Dead. What came first — your expansion into novel form or did they contact you first and from there you came up with the idea? Also, what was it like adapting the novel from an already published graphic novel? (For some reason I’m put to mind of Max Allan Collins writing the novelization to the screenplay based on his graphic novel of Road to Perdition, though I know this is completely different.)
NS: Oh, the adaptation came first. I’d been toying with the idea for a little while, and then Night Shade released a call for zombie novels. I decided to go for it, but I made the decision about three weeks before deadline. In that space of time, I busted out two or three drafts, sending large chunks at a time to my pre-readers. Months later, I gave it another rewrite, this time giving it the time it deserved. A few months later, Creeping Hemlock announced their submissions call, and I jumped on immediately.
I had a lot of fun adapting it. The graphic novel moves so fast, it’s probably more of a short story than a novel. With the adaptation, I was able to not only expand the story of this desperate mission, but I could look back into the characters’ lives to see what they’d been up to at the time of the outbreak. It made for a great writing experience. Then again, I rewrite like I’m addicted to it. I could probably write this story seven different ways and still be happy.
RS: Any plan to write any more zombie novels or short stories?
NS: I wouldn’t say I have plans, but I can’t see myself never working with them again. There are still plenty of fun stories I can tell with the Scavengers characters, not to mention all the possible takes on zombies. Once I’ve got a zombie story that needs telling, I’m sure I'll jump right back in.
RS: Any favorite zombie novels or graphic novels or movies you care to mention?
NS: The Walking Dead is pretty amazing. It has its ups and downs, but Robert Kirkman never devolves into bad writing.
As for novels, I’d have to go with Simon Clark’s Blood Crazy. It’s a different twist on zombies, and it’s pretty epic. The best part is that it never explains why these events (which walk the line between horrific and bizarre) are happening. They don’t matter as much as the terror of the new world.
RS: Man, it’s been years since I read Blood Crazy but I remember loving it. And I’ve only read the first volume of The Walking Dead so far, but I really enjoyed it, too. Thanks for answering some questions, Nate, and good luck with Scavengers!
Purchase the trade paperback of Scavengers at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or the e-book at the insanely low price of $2.99 at the Kindle Store.
Interview And Review At We Zombie!
Bill Nelson reviews The Dishonored Dead and interviews me at his website We Zombie! Here's the first paragraph of the review:
What happens when you reverse the roles of humans and zombies, add an upside down government along with mother earth’s hidden energy? You get a remarkably inventive, fresh story line with a plot that keeps on surprising you at every turn. Robert Swartwood’s eBook, The Dishonored Dead, kept me on edge and turning pages the entire way through – just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, Swartwood introduces a new twist that blows your mind. I spend a lot of time reading books in the zombie genre, and I’m always amazed when I run across a totally new idea that extends the realm of the genre.
In the interview, I talk pretty in-depth about the novel, like how it came about and how it almost never was and the challenges of keeping the dialogue consistent throughout the book (i.e. replacing "living" with "existing").
Also, over the weekend I spent about an hour coming up with this website where you can now read "In the Land of the Blind" -- the story which was the inspiration for The Dishonored Dead -- free.