I did an interview last month with Mariëlle S. Smith who writes about creativity and creative people. We talked about one of my favorite subjects, the balance between commerce and creativity, as well as some other things.
She posted the interview today on her substack – which is called Illuminate – and you can find it right here.
Today, I thought we’d talk about following an author – specifically following me, or my alter-ego Claire Delacroix – because things are changing. This once was a pretty easy task, but now there are options popping up like proverbial mushrooms. It seems every portal wants to host a paid subscription for me. Reviewing the options today is a good exercise for me, and may be informative for you. Every option has its benefits and its shortfalls.
I suppose the first big question is what you want to know from an author whose books you like. The simplest bit of information is learning when that author has a new book coming out, either in pre-order or available for sale. If you’re interested in a peek behind the scenes, extra content or more details, the retailers won’t offer that insight. Let’s take a closer look.
If you Amazon is your portal of choice, you can follow the author there. I’m not entirely certain that they send new release alerts for every new book – or when they send them – but that’s certainly an option. If you routinely visit their store, I suspect the algorithm will show you new and upcoming books from authors whose books you’ve bought before. I’ve noticed that it also prompts me to continue any series I’ve started.
You can also follow authors at BookBub. They will send a new release notification- provided their conditions are met. They did not send one for Kiss of Enchantment, though we had a long discussion about that. 😦 They also don’t send notifications for new boxed sets of existing work (like Dragons First) or new releases that are short (like Christmas at Tullymullagh). They’ll also notify you if the authors you follow have any books offered at a discount in a BookBub featured deal. Finally, they will let you know if the author posts any reviews of other books at BookBub.
You can follow authors at Books2Read. I assume this means you’ll get notifications of new releases from B2R but have never done that myself.
Oh! I need to update Claire’s latest release there. 🙂
You can follow authors at GoodReads. Presumably, this is much like BookBub and you’ll be notified when the author publishes a new book or participates in the GR community – by posting a review, for example. You have to be logged in (which means having a GR account) to see the follow button. The other good thing about GR is that my blog posts are on an RSS feed there – that means they appear on my respective profiles. Amazon used to do this but stopped.
You can also follow authors at Facebook, of course. (And other social media – formerly Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, among others but I’m not active on any other platforms.) Some authors are very active on FB, while I’m not particularly so. My blog posts are also automatically posted to my pages there, and when I get ambitious 🙂 I schedule posts about sales and new releases on my pages. The algo is very complicated there, so you may or may not be shown new posts on the pages of authors you follow. Your interaction (liking, commenting) will determine what you see in your feed, plus a lot of other variables. It’s not the most reliable way of ensuring you get information, but it can be fun.
Follow Deborah Cooke’s page at Facebook
Follow Claire Delacroix’s page at Facebook
I also have a private Facebook group called Knights, Dragons & Heroes where I organize review copies and chat a bit about what’s happening behind the scenes. There are questions at the door when you ask to join – if you don’t answer them, you won’t be allowed in. It’s that simple.
You can also subscribe to the blogs on my websites. Once upon a time, this meant that you would receive an email whenever a new blog post was posted and that was the sum of it. I’m seeing options here now that make me wonder whether subscribers are also receiving notifications of new pages being published, or even of pages being updated. Every book has a page on my websites, and every series has a page listing the books in order and linking to the individual books. Part of my publishing process is adding a new book for that page and new series pages as necessary, plus updating those pages.
There are also new options here at WordPress to limit visibility of posts to subscribers of the blog, or to paid subscribers. I don’t have a paid option on either of my blogs, but it’s interesting to see that pop up. For a long time, there’s been an option to password-protect a post, but these choices are new. It looks like I could make a post visible to subscribers only, but without a password. For the moment, my posts are public and free.
If you scroll down to the footer on either website, there are widgets. There are two options from WordPress – to follow or to subscribe by email. There’s a difference because the displayed totals are different. I think the Follow option with over 3000 people is a legacy feature. (WP has been my host for a long time.) I can’t see any of that on the back end. It might include people who have followed comments or replies, or people who are following from within their WP accounts. (?) The list I can see is the 700+ one of subscribers, so that’s the active list.
These urls will take you to the home page of each site – scroll on down to find that widget in the footer. Choose the Follow by Email option.
Perhaps the most reliable way of ensuring you get all of an author’s news has been to sign up for his or her email newsletter. This is getting complicated now, too – servers are making changes to the deliverability of email newsletters in an effort to cut back on spam. I’ve done all the things, but we’ll see what happens when this change goes into effect. (It begins February 1 and will be full implemented by April.) Subscribing to author newsletters is great, but for authors you really want to follow, I’d suggest you add a second option.
My newsletters focus on new releases and sales, but I divide them by sub-genre. You can subscribe to all of them or just one. They go out once a month on a scheduled date, but there are short alerts for important events like a new book on sale. They’re all send from my domain email (deborah@deborahcooke.com) so you’ll want to whitelist that address (i.e. add it to your email address book) when you subscribe.
Claire Delacroix’s Knights & Rogues
(the first Wednesday of the month)
Deborah Cooke’s Dragons & Angels
(the second Wednesday of the month)
Deborah Cooke’s Heroes & Happy Endings
(the third Wednesday of the month)
Note to self – it’s time to update the welcome automations. I usually do that each January.
Recently, I started to explore some portals designed for subscriptions. They offer both free and paid options. I’m not really sure of the future with any of them but am exploring. You can get a monthly update from me at Substack or Patreon for both of my author brands. I just opened the Ko-fi account and will probably do the same thing there – it already has a ‘buy me a coffee’ option, which I think is cute. Ream offers free and paid subscriptions and is more geared to serialized fiction.
You can follow me at Kickstarter and be notified whenever I launch a new campaign. You’ll also be notified when I back someone else’s campaign. Within Kickstarter itself, you can follow a campaign to be notified when it launches or reminded before it ends. If you back a campaign you will get campaign updates when they’re posted. You can also look at the publically posted updates on any campaign.
My YouTube channel is thus far only for videos of new print editions, but you can follow that, too.
The final place (at least that I can think of today) that you can follow me is at my new online store, Deborah Cooke’s Books. The store has a blog and you can subscribe to updates. There’s a field in the footer, much like the one here on the website, where you enter your email to subscribe.
So many options. So many places. And I’ve probably forgotten a few!
Why does it matter? As mentioned above, newsletter delivery may be affected in the next few months as these new systems settle into place. I’d make sure that I followed any author somewhere other than his or her newsletter, just in case.
I also think that we’re on a path for authors to take more ownership of their connections to their readers and build closer connections that the authors themselves control. Finally, many authors will be redirecting their website urls to their online stores in the next few years. They may be making content available exclusively to newsletter subscribers, subscribers at portals like Patreon or in their online store. Amazon, BookBub and Books2Read will be out of the loop on those kind of releases.
So, if I really wanted to know what an author was up to, I would follow his or her online store, follow his or her blog, and subscribe to his or her newsletters – and maybe follow in one other place, just to make sure. 🙂
Happy new year and welcome to 2024! Here’s hoping this year is the best yet for you and yours.
I haven’t blogged much in recent years about writing and publishing, mostly because I’ve been so busy doing both. While it’s really satisfying to have the rights back to all of my work, becoming my own publisher has meant a lot more admin work. I still think about writing, publishing, and the balancing act of being a working writer, but haven’t composed many essays about it of late.
Today, it’s time for a change. 🙂
Last week I was interviewed by Aime Austin for her podcast, A Time to Thrill, last week and we had the most interesting discussion. Maybe it’s due to C-19 and staying home from conferences, but I haven’t had such a good chat with another author in a long while. I don’t have a publication date for the podcast, but one of the topics we kicked around a lot was author branding, delivering to reader expectation – or providing a consistent reader experience – and “the same but different.” The balance between creativity and commerce has always been one of my favorite writerly topics – how much should books by any given author be the same and how much should they differ? It’s a balancing act, and a question with no right answer. There might not even be a right answer for any given author, but a choice that changes over time.
What has changed is the market, as it always does.
I sat down to write something on this topic today and, on a whim, had a peek at my old blog posts. I wrote several posts about this in 2009, probably to coincide with my being the Writer-in-Residence at Toronto Public Library. They’d been unpublished for a while, but I’ve republished them and will give you links at the end of this post. They were written when I was still traditionally published, before indie-publishing really got started, but many of the questions and issues remain the same.
The core concept is that readers want to know what they’re going to get when they pick up a new book by an author whose work they’ve enjoyed before. That’s fair. How much is the same and how much is different will vary, from expectation to expectation, from reader to reader, from author to author, even from series to series. I tend to define it pretty broadly, but there is always an audience for books that are very very consistent. This was the key to category romance – that ALL the books were comparatively similar in structure, tone, and content – so that an avid reader would likely enjoy all the books published in that imprint each month. There certainly are indie-built authors who have established a strong author brand based on delivering books that are very consistent, in terms of trope, tone, characterization, etc. and there are readers who love this. My own sense is that this niche has grown. Maybe after two years of a world-wide pandemic, we’re less interested in unpredictability. (?)
The challenge for me as a writer is that I love the variety of stories and of characters, and don’t want to write a similar story each time I begin a new book. I want to explore something new each time. I need a new adventure each time I put my fingertips on the keyboard. On the scale of the-same-but-different, my books would chart further down the line to “different”. Frankly, I think this is the point of being a writer. Of course, there has to be some consistency, which is why I write in linked series. Plus I know that for me, repeating a success, even if that means a better delivery to reader expectations (and more sales) is a path to burn-out. I’ve learned that I need to play to continue to create.
It may just be my nature since, as a reader, I prefer this strategy, as well. If I look at the books of Agatha Christie, a favorite author of mine, her body of work in the mystery genre divides into two broad categories: the mysteries that are often considered the foundation of the cozy mystery sub-genre, featuring her continuing detectives, most often Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and the standalone stories that aren’t linked to anything and often have a different structure. (Yes, I know she also wrote romances and plays.) And Then There Were None is a fascinating book and one very different from her other mysteries. I think it would be very sad if she hadn’t stepped outside the boundaries of reader expectation to write that book. Even within her mystery series, there are outlier books like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which introduced me (but not Hercule Poirot) to the fascinating tactic of an unreliable narrator. This book definitely didn’t deliver to reader expectation, as she was kicked out of a mystery writers’ club as a result of its publication. It’s one of my personal faves. As a reader, I want authors to write beyond their established brand. It only makes sense that I want to do that as an author, too.
As mentioned above, I’ve written about the question of striking this balance before as it’s been an ongoing challenge for me. Here are two posts from 2009: Branding and An Alternative Branding Strategy. Here’s one from a couple of years later, in 2011: Author Branding.
Since those posts were written, indie publishing has appeared on the scene and grown like mad. There have been a lot of other changes in publishing, too. Let’s look at two big ones. Though they have always been a factor at online bookstores, the importance of algorithms to the performance of individual books in the marketplace has grown exponentially. Part of this is due to more sophisticated algos, part to targeted advertising, part to changes in consumer behavior including more online shopping. We talk a lot in writing circles about the ‘one-click-auto-buy’: that’s driven by authors consistently delivering to reader expectation, by reader confidence that the book will be exactly what they want, and it’s a solid formula for success in a digital marketplace. That decision to build on success with the shape of the content is a choice on the part of the author, whether deliberate or the result of his/her own ideas, and is increasingly common because it works. This means, in a way, that some audiences are developing very firm ideas of “how these books go”, which just reinforces the trend toward similarity.
Secondly, the evolution of AI means that more and more genres and sub-genres of fiction will be generated automatically by software. I believe the first to fall prey to this change will be those niches where there is little room for variation and the structure of the book is tightly defined by expectation. If we can specify how the book has to go and what should happen when, then the generation of new books that match the pattern can be automated. In these niches, readers are often voracious and there’s a demand for more new content all the time. AI will likely service that need. (Are we there yet? Probably not quite, but it’s likely the technology will be there soon. I’ve been fascinated by the development of AI-generated imagery, which has improved by leaps and bounds over the past six months.) On the flip side of the coin, human writers in those niches may be the first to find themselves losing audience to AI.
There’s a great quote from Neil Gaiman that I always come back to when I think about author branding: “There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better – there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.”
He’s not talking about what happens on what page, or what story elements are always included, let alone what tropes. His work is filled with variety and creativity, and his books, independent of genre or sub-genre, are always excellent reads. I find that success in variety very inspiring.
So, I’m continuing to write my Deborah Cooke and Claire Delacroix stories. The great appeal to me of going indie was the opportunity to follow the stories wherever they led, regardless of what I’d written and published before, and to tell the stories that I only I could tell. I know I have to play in order to keep writing. That means I’ll continue to struggle to strike that balance between consistency and variety, but I hope you’ll enjoy the books that result. Maybe some of them will be “keepers” that you return to over and over again, precisely because they surprised and delighted you by straying from the expectation of “how these books should go”.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of you – and every good wish to you and yours for 2023. Thanks for following me this year and reading my books – I’m looking forward to LOTS of new stories in the new year. Stay warm and safe and be happy this holiday season. 🙂
Deborah Cooke & Her Books 