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Where Writers Win

ShariJStauch

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When you say that you "[do said:
social media", do you mean that you tweet etc on behalf of the writers who pay you? Because that's a really bad way for anyone to use social media. It's dishonest.

Of course not; people want to know the celeb, not me.
 

Thedrellum

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Looking at the Twitter feed for Where Writers Win, I'm a little confused as to how you are effectively using social media. Granted, Twitter is only a small portion of one's on-line presence (or can be), but it seems that you are spamming your feed, tweeting one link three or four times in a row. That sort of lack of awareness would cause me to unfollow immediately.

Honestly, it seems to me like some sort of coding/set-up mistake, as when my blog would post to both Twitter and Facebook, and then Twitter would post to Facebook as well. Regardless, it doesn't look elegant or effective.
 

Old Hack

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Of course not; people want to know the celeb, not me.

What do you offer with regard to social media, then?

Why haven't you answered my or Terie's question? What publishers sent clients to you?

I'd like to know this too. Shari, which publishers have sent writers your way? This is really important. Please don't keep ignoring the question. Thank you.
 

Terie

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Asked and answered... again.

Actually, it would've been a lot more polite and professional for you to simply tell us the answer. It's buried near the bottom of the page you linked to, under the subheading 'Discounts'. Pretty rude to expect people to go to so much trouble when you could've just typed up the answer yourself.

To make it easy for everyone else, here's the answer:

WhereWriterWin website said:
10% discounts are available to authors signing up through our publisher partners, including BQB Publishing, Koehler Books and Fig & the Vine.

(bolding mine)

Koehler Books (link to its parent, Morgan James's thread here) is a vanity press, and by the most basic definition, so is Fig and the Vine (which bills itself as a hybrid).

BQB looks like your bog-standard micro-press started up by writers with no prior publishing experience other than being on the receiving end of rejection letters. (Which isn't to take the piss out of writers who have recevied rejection letters, being as that's pretty much all of us. Just that it's not exactly a job qualification for 'publisher'.)

If those are the kinds of publishers who send their authors to you, that's just not saying much....not saying much at all.
 
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aliceshortcake

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Koehler Books (link to its parent, Morgan James's thread here) is a vanity press, and by the most basic definition, so is Fig and the Vine (which bills itself as a hybrid).

BQB looks like your bog-standard micro-press started up by writers with no prior publishing experience other than being on the receiving end of rejection letters.

Surprise, surprise...
 

CaoPaux

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BQB is a "hybrid", too, so vanities all.
 

Old Hack

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Asked and answered... again.

That's not a full answer, Shari.

On that link I found this@

DISCOUNTS: 10% discounts are available to authors signing up through our publisher partners, including BQB Publishing, Koehler Books and Fig & the Vine.

My bold.

Who else has recommended writers to you?
 

waylander

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Shari - if you are not playing with advance-paying publishers, I don't want to play with you.
Sorry, but I'm snobbish that way.
 

TomGrimm

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Why is it so difficult to find a list of people you're partnered with? I skimmed your website expecting to find a clearly labelled page to the effect of "here's some of our partners" and instead they're footnotes in a random paragraph near the bottom? Shouldn't this information be more front and centre? I know it's not exactly your main service, but as far as reassuring potential customers that people in the publisher world take you seriously, that'd be a good tidbit to make visible.
 

Cathy C

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But yes, the pressure is increasingly on editors and agents to have more ducks in a row at the negotiating table and one of those ducks is the marketing savvy of the author him/herself. As much as some (not all) editors, agents and authors don't enjoy that, they are often subjected to the dictates of the bean counters, and the limitations of their own internal budgets and staff. Not a stand or threatening - it's what agents and editors are sharing.

Umm... not really. Not at ALL, really. Marketing savvy is what the publisher's publicity department is for. The author really has no requirement to have any when they walk in the door. Please don't give aspiring authors the impression that they somehow need more than a great book to get a deal. It's simply not true. No website is required, no Twitter or Facebook page will get one author a deal ahead of another. It is now and always has been about the book.

Now, a person certainly MAY have savvy. The publisher won't beat on you for that either. I actually wrote an entire marketing plan for my first paranormal romance--on how to reach a male demographic. Getting male readers was a key to our success because a decade ago, urban fantasy didn't exist as a genre. The publisher helped where they could willingly. I also know agents who are active in marketing their authors. They have blogs and group signings with their clients and such. But again, there's no sort of requirement that the author participate.

Yes, internal budgets are always challenging to midlist authors, but there are ways to make the best use of the publisher's abilities while reaching readers in a splashy way. Websites can be a valuable tool to readers, to keep them up to date on appearances, new books and such. But websites are a dime a dozen today. I set one up on my current site, BlueDomino (which includes the software for design) for less than $300. It's a whopping $9.95 per month to host it and they keep all the software updated and current. I pay another little bit ($15/month) to a service to keep it updated with all our latest book info, but that's mostly because I don't have much time anymore. Too many books to write, plus a day job.

I don't mind you selling a service. If an author wants you to design a website for them, that's fine. But please don't use fear as a tactic to sell your product. That will quickly backfire with members of this site. It's seen as troll-ish and unethical. Go forth and prosper. Just be honest with your clients and it'll all be good.
 

Deleted member 42

Were I charging writers for Websites, social networking training, and SEO optimization, I woud expect better performance than your sites show:

http://writerswin.com/ Page rank of 3

http://ron-mcmanus.com/ Page rank of 0

http://gangstersgarden.com/ Page rank of 2

http://thomasandjudyheath.com/ Page rank of 0

http://aprilgoyer.com/ Page rank of 1

http://maryarno.com/ Page rank of 1

http://jacquelinegum.com/ Page rank of 3

http://maryhutchingsreed.com/ Page rank of 3

http://thecareerlattice.com/ Page rank of 3

http://efcopublishingco.com/ Page rank of 0

Charging $1450.00 for that is obscene. Charging 685.00 for social networking services with the kind of footprint these sites and the Wherewriterswin site demonstrate is at best naïve hubris.

You don't even seem to be able to identify spam comments.

Aside from attempting to use AW to pimp your services, I see no indications of any sort of publishing, networking or Web development expertise.
 

Old Hack

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As I understand it, page ranks are measures of a website's popularity or notoriety.

When a website is linked to from other sites, it moves up in the rankings. If it's linked to from other sites which have high rankings, it moves even further up in the rankings.

AbsoluteWrite has a good ranking: so when sites are linked to from here, their ranking goes up a tiny amount more than if I linked to them from my site, for example.

This affects where sites turn up in searches, and so on.

If I were paying someone else to sort out my website for me, and they promised SEO services too, I would expect them to have very high-ranking websites of their own. The proof of the pudding, and all that.
 

christwriter

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I have two cents to pitch in. Mostly about this:

Of course not; people want to know the celeb, not me.

Uh. Yeah. No. People don't want to know "the celeb" AKA your customer. YOU want them to want to know your customer, but throwing fifteen zillion tweets about an awesome new author is just going to annoy the crap out of anybody with you on their dashboard.

If you want to promote something, your first goal should be to be interesting in your own merit so that people will pay attention to what you have to say. You SHOULD want people to get to know you, so that when you say "Go check this person out, they're cool" you know that most of your followers will do that, because somebody as cool as you won't lie to them.

If you can't build an interesting platform that keeps people engaged and clicking on your content, and you aren't interested in doing so, why should I trust you to teach me how to build one?
 

Deleted member 42

Medi, what do "Page rank of 0," or "Page rank of 3" mean?

It correlates to some extent with the order in which a site will be listed in search results, with higher numbers suggesting that a site is more likely to be listed.

Page rank is most closely tied to how effective a site is in terms of incoming links, and is thus used as a measure of popularity and relevance. Recent changes (Panda especially) to how Google calculates page rank have made Page rank more accurate and harder to game via tactics designed to "optimize" a site than it was even a year ago.
 

Deleted member 42

This is the kind of thing I see new writers asking about all the time. They end up spending huge amounts of money only to learn too late that it does nothing to actually sell books. And this is why there aren't any mainstream publishers listed on the WWW site.

Yep. More and more I tend to think a lot of authors would be fine with a business card site (a single page site with contact information and a very brief one-or-two sentence bio/about statement, and information about where to buy the books).

If a writer wants to blog and tweet and post to Facebook, more power to 'em.

But they might be better off spending less time and money on branding and Web presence, and more time writing.
 

AphraB

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Cathy C

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For those of us going :Wha: I found this on "Google's Toolbar Help page

PageRank

See Google's view of the importance of a webpage

Pause your cursor over the PageRank button to display the importance of the webpage you're viewing, according to Google. Webpages with a higher PageRank are more likely to appear at the top of Google search results. To learn more, see the Technology Overview.

Enable or disable the PageRank

Watch a video on how to enable PageRank
Click the Toolbar's wrench icon.
On the Privacy tab, select (or deselect) the "PageRank" checkbox.
Click Save.

And, how to do it if you're using Chrome (like me)
 

Deleted member 42

Where do these numbers come from? Can I look them up myself?

Sure: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Or you can use the Google Toolbar, but it brings a lot of kruft I don't want. The link above uses the same check as the Google Toolbar.

Where they come from is Google's series of internal algorithms. The basic Page Rank equation is public, but it has changed since Larry Page invented it in grad school.
 
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