Lizzy Ford's Blog, page 66

I'm pleased to host my first blog tour guest ever!  Lizzyland, meet MJA Ware, author of "Super Zombie Juice Mega Bomb," the perfect book to celebrate October!  In celebration of his visit to Lizzyland, MJA Ware has kindly offered to provide a lucky winner a free ebook!  To enter the competition: tweet or share using the buttons at the end of the article, leave a comment here, RT the link to the article I tweeted (@LizzyFord2010), or share the post when it appears on my G+ or Facebook wall.

When life gives you lemons, kill zombies — turns out lemon juice neutralizes the undead.

After a failed attempt at running away, bestfriends Nathan and Misty return home expecting to face angry parents. Instead,they discover the military has destroyed the bridges out of their rural townand everyone's fled–except a small horde of the living dead. The stress offlesh-eating zombies may be more than their already strained relationship canhandle.

Even with the help of the town geek and lemonade-powered Super-Soakers, there'snot enough time to squeeze their way out of this sticky mess. Unless the trioeradicates the zombie infestation, while avoiding the deadly zombie snot, themilitary will blow the town, and them, to pulp.

Their only shot is somethingwith a lot more punch. Something like the Super Zombie Juice Mega Bomb. Buteven if their friendship survives, there's another problem: Someone has to lurethe undead into the trap.

About the author

M.J.A. Ware, known as M.J. to his friends,lives in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains with his wifeand two daughters.  He wroteSuper Zombie Juice Mega Bomb because he felt there was a need for a zombie bookwith a broader appeal than just hard-core horror fans. A book that would notonly appeal to both adults and teens, but would be teen safe.

Whennot writing about aliens, monsters and ghosts, he runs a company where hedesigns award winning video arcades. He's currently polishing his latest novel, Girls Bite, a paranormalvampire story told from a guy's perspective.

Where to find MJ

MJ's Website

Facebook

Goodreads

MJ's Blog

Where to buy

 Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Smashwords

Apple

What better way to start our week of Twitter then with a video and article on how to build a following of exactly the type of fans you want for free. I'm sure a lot of you have seen offers on fiverr.com or other sites offering to get you "5,000 Twitter followers in 24 hours" but you knew it was too good to be true. You were right. Those types of offers use nothing but fake accounts made by bots. Those types of followers will never do anything for you or your career as an author.

What you really want isn't 10,000 or more followers, it's 1,000 or more targeted followers. If you're a science fiction writer and you create a twitter account to build your web presence, you probably want fans who read science fiction. There are numerous courses on the internet offering to teach authors how to use social media for a fee. While I'm sure there is good information to be found in those courses most of us have more desire then we have money. If that sounds like you, you're going to love these articles

I'll insert the video here and talk about it some more underneath it.

After watching that you should know exactly how you're going to find new Twitter followers now, next month and next year. The thing I love most about this method is that you can see real results in whatever spare time you have. If you only have 5 free minutes a night, you can steadily build your Twitter fan base with exactly the type of people you want following you. If I'm hoping to get people to check out my page on free books for the Nook, what better thing to look for then people using "romance" and "nook" in the same tweet. If they just read one romance book on their nook, why shouldn't they read mine next?

If you're a science fiction author but you don't know where to start, go to Amazon and check the top selling authors in the science fiction category. Once you've identified them, find their Twitter profiles and start following their followers who look like they're real people who read books. You're trying to avoid bots and spammers here but don't worry too much about following someone you shouldn't as you can always un-follow them as soon as you realize what they are. When you're done following #1′s followers, go on to #2, #3 etc. Following 50 people a day using this method would keep you busy all year and you probably wouldn't even make it all the way through the top 100 list.

As good as those two methods above are, they aren't even the best ones in the video. The methodology of following those who follow another author's hash tag or RT an author's tweets is unbelievably powerful. In the video I use the example of science fiction author Erin Morgenstern. I have no idea who she is; I just pulled her name off of the Amazon hot new author list. She has about 2,400 followers. If you're a science fiction author you want as many of those as you can get but what should really interest you are the people who re-tweet her tweets. While all 2,400 of those people think enough of her writing to follower her on Twitter, only a handful are so passionate about her writing that they share her with their friends by re-tweeting what she tweets. Once again, if these people are that passionate about an author in your genre, why couldn't they be that passionate about you? All you have to do is try to build a relationship with them.

There is nothing more valuable to any author then fans like this. Fans who think your writing is so great that they have to share it with their friends are exactly who you should be looking for. These are the type of fans that help authors "explode" onto the scene.

The part about un-following people who don't follow you may be a bit controversial but it's the truth. Twitter says the following in their help center:

"…there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following. When you hit this limit, we'll tell you by showing an error message in your browser. You'll need to wait until you have more followers in order to follow more users—basically, you can't follow 10,000 people if only 100 people follow you."

I doesn't get much more clear than that. If you follow someone and 10-14 days later they haven't followed you back, don't feel bad about un-following them. I'm not saying you should un-follow them, just that you shouldn't feel bad if you choose to. Twitter is about building relationships, and if they don't want to follow you you're probably better off moving onto the next target. The twitter help center also says:

"We monitor all accounts for aggressive following and follow churn (repeatedly following and un-following large numbers of other users)."

Is that what we're doing here??? Not even close. Twitter is talking about automated bots which people use to follow and un-follow thousands of other users a day. THAT is what they will ban you for, not for following 40 people a day and every few days un-following those who have had over a week to follow you back but haven't. Twitter's help center also states:

"You can read more about these below, but if you don't follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren't using automated methods of following users, you should be fine."

Straight from twitter's mouth: keep it under 50 follows a day and you should have nothing to worry about. After a week or two start un-following batches of those who've you've been following the longest but haven't followed you back (I'll show you how to do that this week) and you will turn yourself into an unstoppable tweeting machine.

We will be covering tools to help increase your twitter productivity and what do to with all your new found followers later this week. If you enjoyed this article please let us know and use the buttons below to share it with others. As always, please feel free to post any questions you have and I'll do my best to answer them.

During the Week of 10/9 to 10/15 we will be posting several articles discussing twitter best practices, tips and tricks here at guerrillawordfare.com. We will have articles on:

Building a targeted fan base of followers for free

Free tools you can use to manage your twitter

How to automate some twitter content and thoughts on interacting with your followers

As always, these articles will be 100% free so feel free to share this link with anybody you know who is interested in building a twitter fan base.

The reason I wanted to post this is that I'm thinking of doing a fourth article on answering specific twitter questions so if you have any let me know and I'll answer them to the best of my ability next week.

I hope you all have a great weekend,

Matt

When I decided to increase my social media IQ several weeks ago I was obviously interested in learning everything I could about Facebook. While I could find sure fire twitter strategies, Facebook seemed to be a tougher nut to crack. One method that seemed to work for others was the use of Facebook ads with a very narrow focus. I did quite a bit of reading on the subject, and set off confidently to make my first ad.

I went to Facebook and picked a very small niche using the same demographics options that I talk about in the video. My target audience was about 28,000 people which I felt very comfortable with. I scoured the internet trying to find a coupon similar to the one I used for Google AdSense, but none of the codes seemed to work. Even the ones one pages made in 2011.

I found one sight selling $50 coupons for $19. $19 is cheaper then $50 but still seemed a little steep. Google then took me to Adcouponcode.com which sold $50 Facebook Ad vouchers for $7.95. It seemed like the site had good traffic (An Alexa ranking under 200,000) and you paid using PayPal so I felt safe grabbing one. I bought the coupon, applied it to my Facebook ad account and it worked like a champ. I'm not telling you to run out and start your own Facebook ads, but if you're new to Facebook ads and going to do it anyway, $8 is a lot cheaper then $50!!

The stated terms of the coupon were:

- This is $50 Facebook Ad Vouchers values.

- Work on new account within 15 days of creation.

- One Coupon valid for one Account.

- Expire in 90 days after redeem.

- Voucher Code is Valid for 15days from today.

With the "apply within 15 days" clause I would wait to grab a coupon until you're ready to start your ads. The video does a good job of going over the different options for configuring your ad demographics, pricing etc., so I won't cover those points too much here. I'll get straight to the VERY unimpressive (so far) results.

For Google AdSense we used cost per click (CPC) ads instead of cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) so we would only pay when someone actually clicked through to our site. For Facebook I went the opposite approach and used CPM on the premise that our ads were had such a narrow focus we should have a high success rate. Paying $0.37 per 1,000 impressions seemed like stealing! After 2 and half days, here are our 'fantastic' results.

Ouch. 132,170 impressions for 25 clicks and 6 new friends. And this is AFTER I read books on Facebook marketing! After seeing these results I'm glad I used a coupon instead of paying full price for these results. 6 new fans is nice, but not at $3 each. I've since lowered my CPM bid to $0.10 each so I go broke a little slower than before.

One thing to notice is that even though my niche was very specific and only 28,000 potential users, I got over 130,000 impressions in under 3 days. How? Because it shows the ad to the same person multiple times. That's not bad for branding, but our conversion results were horrible. I'm not giving up on Facebook ads, but at this point I have to ask the question "Are Facebook ads worth it for authors?"

A lot of people have had great success on Facebook for local results where you can target down to specific zip codes, but when your targeting specific categories or interests across the world it's tough to pull users away from what they came to Facebook for. People come to Facebook to talk to friends and play games, not be sold things. My ads tried to take advantage of that and offered a free eBook for a quick "like us". There are definitely some things that I could and will tweak, but I still have doubts as to my ability to get the results to a point where I would feel comfortable with my cost per friend acquired. Even if I improved my results 300%, that's still over $1 a friend. That seems a bit steep when our best case scenario is that they eventually buy a $2.99 book which makes us $2.00. I think Facebook ads are awesome for a lot of businesses, but I'm not sure ours is one of them. I hope I'm wrong and I figure out what the missing ingredient is. Either way I'll follow up later with results from a sample size larger then 3 days and discuss more about specifics of ad designs and goals.

Even with the beat down I received I still wouldn't talk someone out of giving it a try, especially at the $8 real money for $50 credit rate. If we end up getting 32 new fans for our $8, that's a quarter a fan. Even a notorious cheapskate such as myself is comfortable with that price considering these are people who are guaranteed to be interested in our books. If you do give it a go be sure to let me know how it goes.

Woohoo!  We uploaded the revised version of "Damian's Oracle" to Smashwords last night. I didn't change much of the content, simply had Christine scrub it and fixed a few of the plot/character issues my awesome readers helped me find! "Damian's Assassin," on the other hand, is going to have an infusion of a few more scenes when it's re-released next month.

"Damian's Oracle" is under review at Amazon, and should be available again today sometime for the Kindle.  As usual, it'll take between 1-2 weeks for Smashwords to push the new version out to the BN store and iBooks! In the meantime, here's the Smashwords link: Damian's Oracle.

And so commences the Autumn of Gods! We have some cool stuff planned to celebrate the War of Gods releases this fall, to include upcoming book giveaways, a Damian's Oracle book trailer, and more!  Stay tuned!

We're starting off our "Social Media Palooza" series of articles with a simple one: making a Facebook fan page and setting up an iFrame app. I'll insert the video here and then I'll talk about a few strategies and caveats below.

I know most of you probably already knew what a fan page was and how to create one, so I went through that in a hurry. What was probably less well known was the concept of an iframe app for your Facebook fanpage. iFrame apps have been getting a lot of talk recently as people are getting better and better at using them. Basically, an iFrame app lets you make a mini webpage inside of a bigger webpage.

After I shot this video, I went to Lizzy's Facebook page and tried to pretty up her default page. If you check it out here, you'll see I added a teaser to encourage people to like her page.  The page contains the text "click the like for specials," her latest book trailer, a real short blurb about her, four book covers, a link to Lizzy's twitter, a link to this site and a form for people to join our mailing list. THAT is a busy page. It was a pain in the butt to do, but it's done.  When we make sites for her series, I'll have a nice template to start with that just needs a few tweaks.

After I made the page, I made it the default "Welcome" page for those who haven't yet liked Lizzy's author page. I then saved a second copy of the page that appears as soon as someone likes the page.  This second page contains everything the initial welcome page contains – with the addition of a link to Lizzy's free books.  So if someone new goes to our site, they see the default welcome page. Once they click "like", the page reloads with the link to the free books added.

Note: After the initial time someone "likes" your page, they will automatically go to your "wall" tab every time they visit your fan page. There's apparently nothing you can do to change that. What you can change is the default setting where people will end up if they happen upon your fan page and haven't liked it yet.

Your design doesn't have to look anything like ours. I just wanted to touch on the capability of rewarding people who "like" the fan page by providing bonus content (YouTube videos, new book covers, links, chapter/excerpts, etc.) that will likely be of interest to them. This is a great incentive for people to like your page. If nothing else, fans will recieve your announcements and you may hook them with something at a later date. If you come up with a great idea, let me know!

One caveat is as of October 1st, Facebook makes any iFrame app - that links to external content – use a SSL connection. If you have no idea what that means, you're not alone. It just means that Facebook now mandates the same type of security that banks and other online shopping places use and your pictures, videos etc. need to use HTTPS instead of HTTP. When you embed a YouTube video, do the same thing you've always done, just look for a little "use HTTPS" link right below the code it gives you to copy and paste. Check that box and it modifies the link for you.

If you want to use a picture in your iframe app, you need to host it somewhere that will let you access it using SSL. There is a 100% free site which let's you do this easily at freevps.us/img/ . Pictures and movies will suffice for most people, but if you want to add the functionality that only a HTML file will provide then you're going to have to create it and host it someplace with SSL or pay to have someone do it for you. It should just be a one time charge. Either way, post your new fan page here when you're done so I can check it out!

Hopefully the tech terms didn't end this post on a sour note. Even if you don't feel like dealing with any of these issues, the video shows how quick and easy it is to make an iframe app for your fan page, and offer something to entice some "likes." As always, feel free to post any questions or comments.

This morning Lizzy and started off with our usual Sunday morning bagel and then we got to work.

We started off by making a welcome page using an iframe app on Lizzy's Facebook fan page. It's the tab called "Welcome" on her page. We'll probably be modifying the look of it this week but I wanted to get one started.

Next we started our first Facebook contest! You can see it on the contest tab of Lizzy's fan page. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, because we used one of the very few companies which let's you run free contests, but now I know exactly what to expect. I have a great idea how to make the next one look snazzier. The contest ends Tuesday at midnight and the winner gets a free autographed copy of "Katie's Hope," so go signup!

Finally, what good are cool things on Facebook if nobody sees them? We just signed up to run our first ever Facebook ad! I found out a few things doing this that I think you all will absolutely LOVE. Stay tuned for future posts on this!

I wanted to write this quick post not only to announce the contest but to let you all know that over the next few weeks and months you'll be seeing A LOT of articles from me on social media. I've been writing a lot about SEO because it's under utilized, I have a good understanding of it and I thought I could help people. After well over 100 hours of research and experimentation, I now feel like I have a good understanding of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook and I want to share what I've learned with you all. I'll be releasing a series of posts on social media, similar to the SEO articles.

Some of the things on tap are:

Making a face book fan page and iframe app

Best practices for building a targeted twitter fan base

Facebook contests

Building your Facebook fan base

I'll post my first article and video later this week but there will be a ton more of them coming. If there's anything specific you would like to learn more about or topics you would like to see covered feel free to contact me.

The release of the revised "Damian's Oracle" and new cover (already featured on our ebooks page!) is scheduled for Tuesday, 04 October! For those who bought through Kindle: we'll submit a request to Amazon to forward a notice to everyone to download the updated version. There is no charge for this, and hopefully they're prompt about it!

Additionally, once I stop slacking, I'll finish working with someone on a book trailer for "Damian's Oracle" and post it in a week or two!

To recap this fall/winter's activity with the War of Gods series:

04 Oct: Re-release of "Damian's Oracle"

November: Re-release of "Damian's Assassin"; release of paperback trilogy ("Damian's Oracle", "Damian's Assassin", and "Damian's Immortal")

December: Release of "Damian's Immortal" (ebook version)

I hope you're as excited as I am!!!

I haven't posted much to my blog in awhile, but I wanted to let everyone know where I am in Lizzyland!

***As a reminder: in December, I'll begin charging for ebooks EXCEPT for everyone who signs up for my mailing list in 2011.  This is my way of saying thank you to those who found me early and stuck around!  So, sign up!***

Fall/Winter 2011 updates:

"Damian's Oracle": I have the revised version and am working through it. Hope to have it out in about a week! Special Feature: chapter from M. Edward McNally's "The Sable City"
"A Demon's Desire": October's book!  It'll be completed this weekend and shipped to Christine.  On schedule for release around 10-15 Oct.  Special Feature: chapter from Heather Marie Adkins' "Abigail"
"Damian's Assassin": on schedule for release in Nov.  Special Feature: chapter from Jack Wallen's "I Zombie I"
"Damian's Immortal": on schedule for release in early Dec. Special Feature: chapter from Julia Crane's "Coexist: Keegan's Chronicles"
Elle Trilogy: a new, YA fantasy trilogy that'll be launched in late Dec.  I haven't chosen the official name for the trilogy or the first book yet.
Two short stories and an autobiographical essay that'll be appearing in upcoming anthologies.  I've not yet decided what the two stories will be about.
Book trailers: We may have out another 2-3 book trailers this year!  More info on these later!

2012 updates: I have about 8 books* planned so far for 2012.

*I'm still putting together the Special Features for the 2012 line-up, but they'll likely include sample chapters from books by the following talented indie authors: PJ Jones, Alan Nayes, and Talia Jager.

"Kiera's Moon": Ok, ok.  So Kiera's getting a sequel.  The readers demanded it, and I shall deliver it. Ha!  No date or title yet for this one.
Rhyn Trilogy: "Rhyn's Redemption" in March; Gabriel's book in November.  (Yes, Gabriel is getting his own book!)
Damian series: "The Grey God" in May.
Elle Trilogy: book two, probably for release in June/July timeframe
Single-titles: futuristic time-travel paranormal romance; Book-on Demand; and probably "Rebel Heart," which I originally slated for this fall but probably won't get to!

Young adult author Julia Crane just released a new book in her Keegan's Chronicles, entitled, "Conflicted."  Over email we were discussing her plan to use her free Google adwords credits to post some ads for the launch to help get the word out. One question she asked is should the link in her ad send traffic to amazon where they could buy the book or to her site. With her permission I've copied my response email to her here for everyone to read.

When we first started in January we put Lizzy's book (Yes, there was  only one then!) on smashwords. A day or two later I went around  googling for sites that had free ebooks, and then submitting her book  to them using smashwords as the link or uploading a file. This worked ok but after about a week her book was doing ok on smashwords but our  website had no visitors. I know at the end of the day it's all about  the books but I really wanted to build Lizzy as a brand.

It was also maddening to me that I couldn't track what was working for us as well as I would of liked. I'm not smart enough to be a scientist but I use their methodology every day. I form theories (aka guesses) about what might work, perform experiments, monitor results, try to tweak for different results and publish my findings here for our  peers to read. The "sit around and watch the total downloads" approach was

not working for me. Lizzy realizing her life long dream of becoming an author was and is far too important to leave to chance.

In a stroke of common sense, I decided to play middle man. For the next  book she wrote I made a "splash page" like the one here for Keira's Moon.

I have a picture of the cover, description of the book and a link to

download it for free at smashwords. Short, simple and easy. I didn't use popups or anything else I thought might offend visitors. Is it possible that someone will not want to click one more time and will leave in disgust? It's possible. Even if I knew for a fact that it was costing me 1 out of every 100 visitors I would still do it, beacuse I'm more concerned about the long term then the short term.

Almost all of the traffic The Kiera's Moon splash page gets is from from free eBook sites and the page has a "bounce rate" of 46%. That means 46% of enter into our site on that page leave without going to another page. Some people would say that a 46% bounce rate is alarming, that I needed to change

that page beacuse it is driving away almost half our visitors to it. Those people would be wrong. I made the page to make it easy to click the link and go to smashwords where they can download her book. I'm fine with that, I just want to play middle man so I can track where readers are coming from so I know where to focus my effort.

What's REALLY cool about the 46% bounce rate though is that 54% of the people who land on that page from another site VISIT OTHER PAGES ON OUR SITE BEFORE THEY LEAVE. That's huge. All I try to do is funnel traffic from A to B as easily as possible but I still get over half of them checking out our site, looking at Lizzy's other books etc. We convert people looking for a free book into Lizzy Ford fans. They realize she has other books which they download, they sign up for the

mailing list so they can be notified when she writes other books. The whole system is so beautiful I'm starting to tear up as I write it.

Not playing middle man was the biggest mistake I've made with the site, fortunately I realized it almost instantly. I would set-up a nice looking simple page with a picture of the cover, description, a nice review if you have one and buttons to send them to buy it on amazon. I would have your ads go there instead of straight to amazon. Could this cost you a

sale or two? Possibly, but it will expose people interested enough in an eBook to click on your ad to the awesome brand that is Julia Crane, young adult author!

What are your thoughts on this?  Anyone find success one way or another?