What’s Been Happening with Werecat?

Werecat: The Rearing came out on May 28th, and I have jumped head first into the ocean of on-line media to spread the word.

It seemed like a fitting time to share all of my efforts in one place. It’s hard to gauge the impact at this point, but I thought it might be of interest to other authors. Comments are welcome!!

The Basic Stuff: I created a Facebook Author Page, which has gotten 66 likes so far (go little FB page, go!).

I prettied up my GoodReads Author Page a bit, joined a trio of Groups (LGBT Fantasy Fiction, The Backlot Gay Book Forum  and Paranormal, Fantasy, Dystopia and Romance Writers), and am trying out GoodReads ads for Werecat. To date, 23 people have added the book to their bookshelves, there’s 7 reviews, and there’s a little chatter about the infamous “cat sex scene,” which my critique group wisely told me I had to keep in the manuscript. 🙂

I’m periodically tweeting news about the book and got picked up by various Paper.li weekly round-ups. The latter has definitely driven traffic to my website, about 100 visitors in a two week period. Through Twitter networking, I joined the Triberr LGBTQ Authors & Books Tribe, which has been great for cross-tweeting blog posts and working with other authors on promotional projects.

Promotions: I have an e-Book giveaway running at the Bibliophilic Book Blog through June 30th. It’s driven some nice traffic to my site, but entries to the giveaway are low. So it’s an odds-on ticket to a free copy of the book. 🙂

Authors Elisa Rolle and Red Haircrow have been kind enough to run new release and author interview posts respectively on their blogs.

I ran a 3 book giveaway at The Romance Reviews earlier this month and have headline ads running at the site, which is a nice give-back from TRR for authors who link to them.

I’m working on a bunch more stuff for July and August in collaboration with other authors.

Reviews: Werecat has gotten reviews from Cathy Brockman’s The Cat’s Meow, Sean Norris’ World of Diversity Fiction, Hearts on Fire Reviews, and author Michael Joseph’s review blog.

This is where you really take a chance as an author: sending out review copies and hoping for some positive press when the tastes of readers are so subjective. Gratefully, Werecat has been received mostly with praise. Of the industry reviews, it’s gotten an average of 3.75 stars. The GoodReads average is slightly higher right now: 3.86. Amazon and BN.com reviews are a stellar 5 stars, but there are fewer reviews.

I don’t intend to be the kind of author who gerrymanders review sites to promote my books. But it is within my ethical code to encourage you: if you read Werecat, could you take a couple of minutes to post a rating/review at Amazon, BN.com, GoodReads and/or wherever you buy and talk about books? It’s a huge help to authors with indie publishers like me. 🙂

So what happens next: I’ve got commitments from 6 more review sites to run a review of Werecat sometime over the next few months.

If you’re wondering how I found places to query, here was my process: I created an Excel spreadsheet of review leads by honing down the lists at the Book Blogger Directory. That meant visiting I would guess over 100 sites to make sure they were still active, and that they looked professional and had reviewed books similar to mine. My target sites were LGBT, paranormal, romance, sci fi/fantasy and best of all a combination of one or more of those themes.

This was a very time-consuming process. But really it was the only way to do it. Sometimes one blog would mention another I hadn’t heard about, so I would check it out and add it as appropriate.

In total, over four weeks, I came up with 40 prospects to query. Four ran reviews within about two weeks. Six more say they’ll do a review sometime over the next two months. One said they were not interested. I haven’t given up on the remaining 29. Everything I hear about the on-line review biz is that they’re flooded with requests so it takes some time.

Otherwise, I will be hopping over to some author blogs from time-to-time, continuing to network on GoodReads, and always welcoming new ideas about spreading the word. 🙂

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