MEET AUSTIN S. CAMACHO, THIS WEEK'S MAN OF MYSTERY AND MARKETING - and see him again This Coming Sunday & Monday!

Acme Authors Link Extends a Warm Welcome to

this week's guest, Austin Camacho, the author of four detective novels in the Hannibal Jones series -

Blood and Bone, Collateral Damage, The Troubleshooter, and Damaged Goods, plus two action thrillers, The Payback Assignment and The Orion Assignment. Active in several writers’ organizations, Camacho is a past president of the Maryland Writers Association, and teaches writing at Anne Arundel Community College. After a career as a military news reporter on the American Forces Network, Camacho is now a public affairs specialist for the Defense Department.

Austin has sold thousands of his novels as a Print-On-Demand author, a self published author, and as a writer published by a small press. He also wants you to succeed as an author, and he shares everything he has learned in a decade of self-promotion in his new book, “Successfully Marketing Your Novel in the 21st Century.”

PURCHASE LINK:

http://www.ascamacho.com/sfmyn.htm

And now...Some words from Austin About Marketing....

Basic Principles for Book Marketing

My latest book, “Successfully Marketing Your Novel in the 21st Century” is filled with the specific details of what has worked or not worked for me since I first published a Print on Demand mystery in 1999. I’d love to share it all with you here, but that would take me 240 pages. So instead, I decided to share three basic principles I use to guide my marketing decisions.


Planning

Step one: decide what tools and techniques you’ll use for promotion and write a marketing plan. Map out the timing of your marketing strategy. Study what the big publishers do. For example, why do they say the release date is in November when they have books to sell in June? It’s because reviewers want the Advance Readers Copies that far in advance. If your book looks like an ARC and they get it that far out, reviewers might mistake it for a big publisher’s book and review it. That’s how my Collateral Damage ended up in Library Journal. My book contains a sample marketing plan to help get you started.

Camouflage

First, your book needs to look like the others in your genre. Big publishers ensure this as a matter of course, and small presses usually do pretty well too. Their experienced book designers, artists and marketing teams create the standard look and feel. But if you’re self-published or a POD author, it’s up to you.

Why must your book look, feel, and smell like everyone else’s? Because readers decide to buy based on a large number of subconscious signals a book sends them. They’ve been trained by publishers to expect certain things. They’ve also been conditioned by those same publishers to believe that any book worth reading will be published by them. We know that’s not true, of course, but a book that says “self-published” to the consumer also says “amateur.” The same applies to booksellers. Your focus should be to make your book look as professional as possible, from the layout of the words inside to the cover art you choose.

And of course the author needs to look, sound, and act like a professional writer too, but that should not be camouflage. That’s what you are, right? So solicit blurbs and reviews the way the pros do. Approach speaking and signing engagements like the pros do. For example, I don’t think James Patterson makes those calls for himself, so I don’t either.

Evidence-based Marketing

Put simply – Don’t spend money on any marketing technique unless someone can show you proof that somebody has made money doing it. There are a lot of predators out there hawking radio interviews, blog tours, web site advertising, and who knows what else. But unless you can speak to a satisfied customer don’t plunk down your dollars. Besides, there isn’t much some publicist can do for you that you can’t do yourself.

Book trailers are the hot new thing, but I don’t know anyone who has told me they saw a spike in sales when they put on out on the internet. I won’t pay to have one produced until I do. However I was able to barter some writing work and exposure to get a tech-savvy friend to video tape me introducing one of my books. Then I posted it on about 30 web sites - for free. If you e-mail me thru my web site - http://www.ascamacho.com/ - I’ll send you the list.

Those basic concepts will take you a long way in marketing your fiction. If you have specific questions, about book signings, readings, internet marketing or anything else, leave me a comment and I’ll be happy to respond to them in a later blog.

Thanks, Austin.

READERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO RESPOND WITH QUESTIONS FOR AUSTIN. HE'LL BE HAPPY TO COME BACK ON SUNDAY AND ON MONDAY TO ANSWER THEM.