So what’s the bottom line on the conferences?

Just a few observations after my panel appearances at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference on Tuesday, June 11 and at the Greater Los Angeles Writers Conference Friday and Saturday, June 14 and 15.

Venues: Santa Barbara was much more upscale. It was held at a lovely hotel that overlooks the beach. GLA was obviously done on a budget at LA Valley College. The meetings were held in classrooms instead of conference rooms.

Linda Joy Myers, Marla Miller, me, Eleanor Vincent

Panels: However, I think the panels went well for both. In Santa Barbara I was a panel member discussing building a platform with a master moderator, Marla Miller, presiding. At the GLA I moderated three panels: memoir, platform, and poetry. Excellent experts were on all panels so we had lively discussions and lots of questions from the audience. Since the poetry workshop was a roundtable everyone participated in a give and take discussion throughout. In the end I think we provided useful information with lots of good takeaways in everyone of the panels I participated in.

Writers Conferences Are Not Good Book Selling Opportunities: Even though conference attendees were asked to support the presenter by buying their books – since that is the only way they get paid – that really didn’t happen. I sold one book at each conference – of course two more in sales than I would have had, had I stayed home. Writers are not book buyers. At least not when they are at a conference.

Bottom Line: What I gained instead was more people knowing about my book and me. Being a conference presenter afforded me a great networking opportunity, and it added to my platform. That’s all good.  

A couple of busy weeks

My writing life is becoming very busy these days.

This week I’ll be featured on three websites:

Today my post on revision and editing is featured on She Writes where I urge writers to Make the Decision to Do the Hard Work Before You Start to Write a Book. I learned the hard way during the time I wrote and revised my memoir, so now I’m following a long arduous edit and revision process for my novel.

On Wednesday June 5, I’ll have a post about writing as healing up on Southern Writes Magazine’s Suite T blog. Here’s the link though I’ll remind you again on Wednesday. In the meantime, go over and look at my book trailer on their Must Read TV site and listen to me read a five-minute excerpt from Leaving the Hall Light On, on Take Five, presented by Southern Writers magazine.

On Friday June 7, I’m so excited to be a guest on Laura Dennis’ The Adaptable (Adopted) Expat Mommy blog. She gave me some tough questions to answer, and I hope you’ll come over and join in the conversation. Sorry this one just was postponed to Friday June 14.

Next week is also very exciting:

On Tuesday June 11 I’ll be at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference on a workshop panel led by Marla Miller, with my memoir colleagues, Eleanor Vincent, author of Swimming with Maya, and Linda Joy Myers, author of Don’t Call Me Mother. This will be the first time all three of us will be in the same real room together. Please join us at the Santa Barbara Hyatt, 1111 East Cabrillo Boulevard, Santa Barbara, from 2 to 3:30 pm, when we’ll discuss Published Authors with Sturdy Platforms: How they built them and how you can, too.

On Friday and Saturday, June 14 and 15, I’ll be at the Greater Los Angeles Writers Conference. The Conference will be held at the campus of Los Angeles Valley College, 5800 Fulton Ave, Van Nuys CA 91401, between Burbank and Oxnard Avenues.

• Friday, I’ll moderate a panel discussion on Writing A Memoir That Readers Will Want to Buy – Other Than Your Family Members from 2 to 3 pm. I’ll also moderate the panel discussion on Why You don’t Need A Hammer to Build A Platform As A Writer from 5:45 to 6:45 pm.
• Saturday, I’ll moderate a Poetry Roundtable discussing New Trends and Markets from 10 to 11 am.

Another bit of excitement. As of last Friday, my memoir now has 94 five-star and 21 four-star reviews. I thank you all for your kind words, and I urge any readers who liked my book to post your review on my Amazon page. Just a sentence or two would be great.  Thank you in advance for that.

What makes a book sell?

I attended the Digital Author’s Conference this past Saturday, sponsored by West Coast Writer’s Conferences with special recognition and discounts to Greater Los Angeles Writer’s Society members. Coincidentally, both are headed by Tony N. Todaro.

Tony and his staff do a great job in getting interesting and informative speakers to their events. I found some of the information presented on Saturday so beneficial to my writing life I thought I’d share a little bit here.

One was a mention of a blogger I recently started following (at the suggestion of Marketing the Muse’s Marla Miller) Seth Godin. I have been marveling at how much meaningful information Seth can impart with just a few lines of short sentences, short paragraphs, and a lot of white space on the page.

And Elaine Wilkes, Ph.D. who spoke about ways to place our books everywhere and how to write emails and books that get results said this is the kind of writing that is selling best right now:

Short – even one-line – paragraphs.

Two or three word sentences.

Not every sentence needs a subject and verb.

Another thing she stressed:  Our books are judged by our:

Cover

Title

Subtitle that states the book’s benefit

Guess why? Buyers looking for books to place in their stores don’t have time to read book synopses.


Please see the right side bar for a link to Elaine's course on how to get your book into stores or click here. 

Okay you be the judge: does my cover, title, and subtitle pass her test?

That’s it for today. I’ll get into more of what I learned last Saturday in the next few days.

Women Over 45 Speak

Marla Miller's website Women Over 45 Speak posted a three-minute video of me speaking about how I reinvented myself after the age of seventy.

Please take a look. And if you're a woman over forty-five, go over to her website and make a video of yourself. The directions are right there on her site.

Is my marketing program beginning to pay off?

So, it looks like there’s been a little movement in my memoir, Leaving the Hall Light On, Amazon sales ranking this week. It went down from as high as in the one millions to the 700,000s earlier this week, and back up to the one millions again and down to the 300,000s today. Does that mean two books have sold? I have no clue what those numbers mean.

But hopefully all that has been going on in the last few weeks has spurred some sales: my talk at the American Association of University Women in mid November, Marla Miller (Marketing the Muse) highlighting my platform earlier this week and posting my July 19, 2010 blog piece about my journey to getting published yesterday, my showcase on The Hamilton Gallery with links to Amazon for book purchases, and another five-star review

up on Amazon yesterday. It’s really been a yeasty time.

Plus I’ve had more and more Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter connections, and I look forward to a piece about my work and book in a future issue of the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services newsletter. I’ll be interviewed for that a week from Monday.

I just find that I spend much too much time worrying about sales ranks and all the other social networking I’m doing to try to interest people in buying my book.

Maybe it’s a good thing that I’ve taken steps to be hired as a proposal consultant again. Working on a proposal for a couple of months could take my attention away from what’s on my personal network pages and give my life a better balance. 

Paul, four years old