Here’s how to #share on #Vine
(If you can’t hear this vine, click the unmute button in the top left of the picture.)
Jay Hash is a cool guy who generously gave me and my book and a shout out last night.
If you want to share a post, touch the little arrow button. The share window will give you Facebook, Twitter and embed options. Email the embed to yourself and you can use the link on a blog. Your blog must be enabled to handle an embed.
To find out more about Vine, the latest app news and updates and how to promote your business without feeling spammy, check out Six Seconds at OnlySixSeconds.wordpress.com
~ Have you caught the mind virus yet? Read, love, review
and spread the contagion that is This Plague of Days (and see the coolest teaser trailer in the world below. Great video!)
S I X S E C O N D S
I wrote a book about how to use the Vine App!
To make better vines (quick videos), go viral and, get creative and spread your word, read this book about Vine.
NEW UPDATES on my blog: OnlySixSeconds.
Another first on Vine! A contest and a reading from Self-help for Stoners
Here’s the 411: I’m reading a funny short story from one of my books on Vine.
I’m skipping an All That Chazz podcast this week for something new and different. One of my favorite things is the Vine app. One of my favorite short stories from Self-help for Stoners is “Another Day at the Office.” Over the next few days, I’m going to post the excerpt on Vine, six seconds at a time. A little crazy, but fun.
No one has ever read on Vine before, so I get to make my own rules. I’ll do a little at a time so I won’t flood anyone’s feed. Each post will have the entry number in sequence and the tag #SHFS.
The Vine Contest
The person who guesses closest to the number of vines I have to post to get to the end of the story will get a paperback copy of my crime novel Bigger Than Jesus. (Hint: “Another Day at the Office” is around four pages long in trade paperback size.) Good luck!
Comedian Steven Wright (among a metric ton of Japanese schoolgirls) have written whole novels on Twitter, so an author reading a short story six seconds at a time isn’t that outlandish. I don’t have any stop motion skills, but I still wanted to try something different with Vine. This is it! Enjoy!
You can buy Self-help for Stoners and all my other books here.
If you aren’t on Vine yet and you have an iPod, iPhone or iPad, click here to join the party. It’s free. Sign up. Then look me up (Robert Chazz Chute) and subscribe. Cheers!
Also, in case you didn’t know, I also wrote the first book about the Vine app. Grab it for just 99 cents by clicking the cover image. Please and thank you!
(If you’re really jonesing for a new podcast, you can always slip over to my Cool People Podcast and listen to the interviews there.) Have fun, everybody!
Throttling You: And some of this isn’t very nice
Find Part 1 of this post, Amazon Throttled, on ChazzWrites.com.
Skip to Part 3: Me, Full Throttle for another answer for finding readers.
Time to wrestle and tell the dirty truth.
What else can you do to find readers for your books and give them the best chance in the Marketplace of Awesomeness? And what sucks? Here’s my take:
1. Are blog tours really doing it for you? Are blog readers converting to book readers? They should…but I don’t think they do nearly as much as we hope. If they did, I’d have certainly sold more books by now. Blog tours can work, but it takes a lot of work to provide unique content to each blog. Do that if you’re going to tour and hit the largest blogs first. (Also, once it’s posted to one blog, don’t repost it on your blog. Bad SEO.)
2. We complain readers focus too much on Free and reap the benefits without commitment. Oddly, we’re hoping to win over the world without paying a dime. We don’t have advertising budgets. It’s time to get real and set a budget and pay for help selling your books. Yes, we all want it to happen organically without extra work or money. We all just want to write. That’s not the way to bet. Grow up, stop wishing and spend money to make money.
3. Don’t do another author interview on yet another small blog unless you’re going to make it different and/or funny. Go for funny because those interviews all sound the same and yes, I know, we all drink coffee. I win for most caffeinated. What else you got? I’d rather hear about your choice of lingerie than endure another answer to the question: “How did you start writing and where do you get your ideas?”
4. Don’t do another blog post about how “content is king.” It’s either self-evident or it doesn’t really mean anything. I need more meat than that to click the buy button on your next marketing book.
5. Don’t ask me to read another interview with one of your characters. I might be interested in that, but only after I’ve already read your book, not before. I’d love to know what happens to the main character in Fight Club after the book hits “The End”. However, before I knew what that book was, he’s just be another guy struggling with macho bullshit issues and a sleep disorder.
6. Will you please just take my advice and get Kit Foster to help you with your book cover? Get a graphic designer to help you. Do not do this yourself. Don’t even do it yourself if you’re a graphic designer. Please! Sweet baby Jesus, I’m begging you! Help me help Kit help you! Great book covers do not suck. Bad book covers hurt you. We all judge books by their covers.
7. Revamp your website. Get a custom banner. (Kit does those, too. Look at the top of this page.) Also: White field, black type, no exceptions. Your pretty pastels and all those flowery serifs are repelling me from your site and making me squint so, perhaps unfairly, your book doesn’t get a shot.
8. Be bolder with your next book. Come up with a new angle. There are no truly original stories, but you have to find something fresh to sell us. Have you read a single description of a romance book that doesn’t sound like hundreds of other romance books? Do something different and experimental. Whatever you do: Stand up and stand out! Start thinking audiobooks, for instance. (But it’s still way too early to bother with setting up an app for your book. People aren’t using the medium that way in any numbers.)
9. Work harder with your editorial team. Expand your beta reader bunch. Make it cleaner. Don’t wait for perfection, but excellence will do nicely.
10. We write to be read. Shyness is not helping you. Do something to promote your books every day. Do not whine that this is necessary. If you aren’t going to promote, you may as well write for your desk drawer. That’s okay, if that’s what you want. (I sincerely doubt that’s what you want.) And stop tweeting book links without imagination.
11. Use video more. We are visual creatures, so use YouTube more on your website or try Vine. If they’re quick, video blogs are interesting. (WordPress allows you to do audio blogs pretty easily, too.) Reach people in new ways. Buy Six Seconds, The Unauthorized Guide to How to Build Your Business with the Vine App by Robert Chazz Chute. (I told you it didn’t pay to be shy.) The Vine app is an example of a new way to reach new readers. It’s video Twitter and the time to jump in early is slipping away. Join now.
The Unknown Man Edition
In this edition of the All That Chazz podcast: Oscar fallout; scary health scares; great big kid love; Higher Than Jesus wins a cover design award; Six Seconds is released and I do a challenging (some dicks would say embarrassing) reading of chapter 7, “The Unknown Man”, from my crime novel. When I wrote the character of Chillie Gillie, I gave him a lisp. It reads well, but I had no idea how hard he would be to read aloud. You can be entertained by the story or laugh at my unintentional humour as i struggle through Chill’s dialogue.
This podcast is sponsored by Kit Foster of KitFosterDesign.com. In case you didn’t love Kit Foster’s work enough already, you should know that it was his work on Higher Than Jesus that earned Venture Galleries’ Cover Design Award for Hardboiled Mystery! Thanks again, Kit! Check out Kit’s portfolio. He does web banners, too, so everyone can benefit from his services.
The big announcement this week is that my quick guide to using Vine is launched! The book is Six Seconds, The Unauthorized Guide to How to Build Your Business with the Vine App. Vine is the Apple app to make short videos. I write about how to make stories, art and humour to promote your services or products in a fun way without feeling spammy. It will be available on more platforms than Apple soon, I’m sure. Think of Vine as video Twitter and get in early to make the most of it. Vines are so much fun to make, it’s an end in itself. However, I think the app has great potential for business. Finally, a fun way to promote your work and enliven your Twitter stream with easy to make video! Six Seconds is 18,000 words, brief and funny for just $1.99. Get it here. If you love it, please review it. Thank you.
Enjoy all the awkward lisping and thanks for listening!
~ Chazz
Six Seconds is launched. Learn about Vine with this fun guide
Finally, a fun way to drive traffic; promote your business, your website, blog or podcast; enliven your Twitter stream with quick and easy video. Click the cover to find out more.