Now that the Frankfurt Book Fair and the press conference announcing HELLstalkers is over, it is time for my co-writer and I to move into the next phase of the project – building up the online presence and promotion before the December 1st launch of the first book in the series, The Cerberus Protocol.

We’ve taken some definitive steps over the last week that will help us immensely in this area.  The first of which was to hire a graphic designer and an artist.

You see, both Jon and I believe that the project has legs; that it will continue to expand into other mediums if we provide the impetus it needs to do so.  While we are happy with the mobile phone publication deal, we strongly believe that there is potential for a print deal, a comic/graphic novel deal, a possible film or tv adapation, and even a video game based on the project.  While strong sales will probably net us a print deal even if we did nothing to secure it, the other mediums are more graphically oriented and we wanted to set ourselves up properly to take advantage of that as time goes by.

To do that properly, we needed someone who understood design to help us plan and create the series’ online presence and we needed an artist who could take our vision and translate it into a slick graphical content to promote that online presence.  Luckily, we found what we needed in two guys we’ve known for a while.  The fact that they also happen to work together on a daily basis simply allows us to cut down on the “feeling each other out” stage and get right down to business.

Our new teammates got right down to work, creating both a basic logo concept (the image of the Collider’s core with the word HELLstalker beneath it) and the military patch worn by the HELLstalker unit members that will be a common image in our promotional ads and displays.  For the next few weeks, we’re going to be working with them to modify our website design, look, and feel – putting in custom background images, designing the cover art for the first book in the series, preparing banner ads and promotional fliers that utilize QR codes to help spread the word about the launch.

At the same time, we haven’t simply sat back on our laurels when it comes to marketing other potentials deals to spin off this one.  We would certainly like to sell the series to a major US publisher, to begin with, and given how long it takes to bring a book to market we could sell the series today and still not interfere with the exclusivity we promised to our small screen publisher.

One of the first things we did was take advantage of the things we’ve been learning about QR codes to create a special post directed at editors on the website PublishersMarketplace. com.  As my page at PM is consistently one of the top 20 blog pages viewed on the site, we decided to embed the entire proposal for the series into a QR code and invite editors to download it with their mobile phones.  This has the added advantage of using a new and different type of technology to get the editor to give it a try and also supports what we say in the marketing section of the proposal about our intended use of cutting edge tech to promote the series once it is published.  We’ve also setup a tracking program to know who is downloading the proposal so we can gauge how effective the process might be.

If you’d like to take a look, you can see the post HERE

PM also allows you to list projects that are available for acquisition in their Rights Offering section, so I put up a post there as well that also utilizes the QR code, which you can see HERE

As time goes on, I’ll keep posted on whether or not they work the way we hope.

(To view the proposal, use your mobile phone QR code reader, take a picture of the image, and active the link.  Doing so will download the file directly to your mobile phone for easy viewing.  If you don’t have a QR reader, simply do a Google search and download one for your phone.  Most of them are either free or less than a $1.00)

Originally developed by urban record labels to help get the word out about music groups that had not yet hit it big on the national level, street teams are groups of fans who “hit the streets” to generate excitement about a band, a group, or a project. In the last several years, the concept of using street teams has been widely embraced by the entertainment industry, record labels, corporate brand managers, and new media companies worldwide. 

The street team concept works just as powerfully when it comes to promoting your latest book or series. The central idea is to turn exclusive groups of your fans into enthusiastic promoters. In exchange for spreading the word about your books and helping to build your audience, you reward them with exclusive content and opportunities that are only available to members of the team. In this way you provide an incentive for them to continue their promotional efforts on your behalf. What you end up with is an effective grass roots promotional machine totally focused on spreading the word about you and your work.

Putting together a street team is a relatively easy task that any writer can do and the widespread use of social media and the mobile web make them more effective than ever at spreading the word.

First, you need to create some means of recruiting and communicating with the members of your team. When I created the Street Knights, a street team for my 2005 novel HERETIC – Book one of the Templar Chronicles, i set up a special sign up form and mailing list through aweber. This inexpensive service let me create a professional looking sign up form that was simple to insert into my website and then allowed me to manage all of my communications with the team through a weekly email newsletter. Other ways to accomplish this include using Twitter Google Groups, Yahoo Groups and other free discussion group sites. I personally prefer the amount of control and tracking that aweber provides, which gives me a better handle on how effective my team is being.

Once you’ve gotten your street team up and running, you need to give them things to do and ways to spread the word.  Here are just a few examples:

• Using twitter to tweet about you and your works, blog posts you’ve written interviews you’ve done, or even retweeting your own tweets
• Emailing friends they think might be interested in your work
• Commenting on blogs that interview you or support your writing through reviews
• Referring people to your blog, podcast, or vidcast
• Supporting your social media efforts (supporting you on Digg, StumbleUpon, Friendfeed, etc)
• Reviewing your work on their blogs
• Regularly leaving comments on your website
• Participating in your forum
• Adding a banner, badge or button to their website, MySpace page, Facebook page, etc
• Reviewing your work on Amazon.com and B&N.com

And tha’ts just a start!

Remember though, that this is a two-way endeavor and you’ve got to offer something in return for their efforts.  I usually try to offer some variety of things to my steet team members in an attempt to offer something for everyone.  Some of the things I’ve done in the past have included:

• Using their names as characters in my books
• Offering exclusive content – such as character dossiers, character diaries, and special short stories written just for the team
• Running a contest for signed limited edition books or actual physical manuscripts
• Instant Messaging avatars of the characters or series logos
• Myspace background images
• Wallpapers
• Screensavers
• Promo packs of stickers, bookmarks, flyers, etc
• Html banners
• Members certificates
• Opportunities to get ARCS or limited edition copies before anyone else can
• Free books

The happier your street team members are the harder they will work on your behalf.  And asolid grass roots promotional push can mean the difference between a book rising on a tide of word-of-mouth sales and sinking after just a few short weeks on the shelves.

If you have questions about using a street team, feel free to ask in the comments section or post in the forum.

Video Tutorial

One way of expanding your writing career is to make your content available on multiple platforms. In this video tutorial I take you through all of the steps necessary to make your content available for purchase on the Amazon Kindle – from properly uploading the electronic files to the Amazon Digital Text Platform site to classifying and displaying them in the Amazon store.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, podcasting is a blanket term used to describe a collection of technologies for automatically distributing audio and video programs over the internet via a publish and subscribe model. Podcasting enables independent producers to create self-published, syndicated “radio shows,” and gives broadcast radio or television programs a new distribution method.

In the podcasting model, the publisher publishes a list of programs in a special format, known as a “feed”, on the web. A user who wants to see or hear the podcast subscribes to the feed in special “podcatching” software (a type of aggregator), which periodically checks the feed and automatically downloads new programs as they become available. Typically, the podcatching software also transfers the program to a desktop or portable media player.

Podcasting is growing at a ferocious rate. A Google search run on Sept 24, 2004 turned up 24 hits on the word podcast. The exact same search run on November 14, 2005, roughly one year later, turned up 99,700,000 hits. Doing one today turns up 140,000,000 hits! In the last few years the ever-popular iTunes has begun offering a wide array of podcast shows (including my own!)

While a handful of amateur writers have podcast their unpublished novels, not a single major publisher had allowed a work currently on the shelf to be podcast and that, to me, seemed like a ready-made opportunity when I decided to podcast my novel back in 2006. I envisioned podcasting as a way to reach a wider group of potential readers and to generate greater buzz about the book once it has hit the shelves.

I set out to get myself some help in the form of sponsors for the experiment and was blessed to have been joined together with a team from The Podcast Network and the now defunct Horror Channel. Without their assistance, my podcast never would have gotten off the ground.

When I started the podcast of my novel HERETIC, I had a few thousand listeners. By the time I was finished some forty weeks later, I had over 100,000 listeners in 83 different countries. Talk about promotional outreach! While I’m assuming some of them were readers who had already encountered Knight Commander Cade Williams and his Echo Team in the pages of the book, I know that the vast majority of them were not. The potential impact of podcasting on a current books sales should be obvious.

Also of interest to me was the fact that my listeners came from eighty-three different countries. Folks as far away as Israel, Hong Kong, South Africa and Bulgaria (just to name a few) were tuning in to listen to the tale I’d created. With the ability for readers across the world to order books at the click of a mouse, this, too, was an obvious benefit. The more people interested in future adventures of Cade and company, the more books I’ll be able to write featuring them. It’s a winning situation for everyone.

Since I did my initial podcast, there have been several writers who have turned the podcasts of their unpublished novels into sales to major houses. Scott Sigler’s three book deal to Crown Publishing is one example. J.C. Hutchin’s deal with St. Martin’s is another. I’ll be featuring more information (including a full ebook devoted to how to produce your own podcast) on Rock Your Writing Career in the coming months