Showing posts with label booktubing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label booktubing. Show all posts

Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Book Expo Australia, 2015

This weekend just past, I went to Book Expo Australia, and I must say I got a lot out of it.
To quote from the web site:
"Book Expo Australia is a dedicated event for the reading public to engage with authors and publishers."
I believe it's unusual in that rather than being mainly targeted at the publishers, this book expo is targeted more at the readers and authors. Here's a summary of what was on:

  • Booths in a very large hall, for authors, publishers, and everyone in between (or "alongside"). It was nice to catch up with people I knew (Edwina Harvey and I were in the ten finalists in the 1998 George Turner Contest: the multi-talented creator has several web sites for her guises as reviewer, editor, artist, and of course author), and Lama Jabr who runs Xana Publishing & Marketing, as well as meeting a lot of interesting and helpful new people.

    The booths were typically manned by the author or publisher personally, and all were approachable and very happy to chat. There were a range of booth options from AU$150 to AU$1950.

    I'd like to mention one stand in particular, since it was all about some technology in development for reducing dolphin deaths in fishing nets: Whale Guardian? (How does that relate to books? Well, the talk about crowd-funding and marketing was just as applicable for writers as for anyone else, with good advice helping build an author platform and brand. Whale Guardian was used as an example.)

  • A small cafeteria, as well as additional food/coffee places nearby and, and the usual amenities, including but not limited to ATMs. :-)
  • An area where various events were held to entertain the kids (like learning to draw cartoons). They had a "pitch fest," where authors could sit with publishers to pitch their book. Again quoting from the web site: "Pitchfest Australia will offer potential and established authors the opportunity to sit in front of a publisher for ten minutes.
    "Book Expo Australia will work with potential and established authors to ensure that they:
    • Have the best manuscript possible
    • Have all the paperwork required by each publisher
    • Have prepared the best three minute "Elevator Pitch"
    • Have worked to have answers to all questions possible for the remaining seven minutes."
    (I didn't take advantage of that because I'm quite happy with my decision to self-publish; but it sounds especially valuable and helpful.)
  • They had a whole series of talks/workshops (and a film!) running on both days:
  • And a writing workshop from very influential screenwriter Karel Segers:
    • Screenwriting – Your next Career
    • From Book To Screen Adaption
    • Setting Up Your Writers Website
  • And the events for kids: Children’s Interactive, Mr Arthur Puppets, Dad Reading Comp, Rob Feldman, Mum Reading Comp, Kingdom of Chen, Duncan Ball, Jodie Wells-Slowgrove, Tony Harris, Eumundi and Friends.
  • A "Getting Published" series of workshops:
    • Social Media Marketing/Crowdfunding (Two experts in the area of Social Media and Marketing talk about building markets and achieving business goals. Presenters: Robert Coorey&Tim Lea)

      • See also How I became a best-selling author on Amazon.

    • Enhanced E Book (Self Publishing an E-Book that succeeds. Presenter: Amanda Greenslade)
    • Ingram Spark Self Publishing: The Challenges – from concept to distribution (Deborah Lee)
    • Book Covers: What makes it Work. Presenter: Julia Kuris
    • Oh, and not to mention "Murder by the Book," an interactive murder mystery (I didn't find time to get involved).

      Last but very far from least, there was a meet-up for lots of booktubers from Down Under – they struck me as a young and enthusiastic group of vloggers who just love books and vlog about anything book-related that takes their fancy. I mainly spoke to Chami (@ReadLikeWildfire) and Miranda (@BooKss101M), but also a little bit to Nicole (@NicsandNacs), and Rebecca, but they all seemed very positive and open. (There was supposed to be a bloggers conference stream too, with very interesting-looking topics, but a misunderstanding/miscommunication lead to its cancellation and forced some urgent reorganisation.)

      Here's my clumsy photo-stitch of a couple of barely-adequate candid photos of the happy crew:

      • Let's see if I can embed a link to their Expo videos here, for your convenience:

      First Nicole's:

      ... and then Miranda's (in which I make a brief and sheepish appearance :-) ) :

    I found some good books to buy directly from their authors (of course!), got info to follow up on more books, got to meet and ask questions of authors, and learned several important things that improve and in some cases dramatically change my plans. But rather than "smear out" the information in several places, what I'll do is update the relevant blog posts with my fresh discoveries, and I'll just post links to the various topics here, so you can find them that way. The new info will be in a "Book Expo Aus 2015 Update" section at the end of the updated posts, and I'll list the updates here as I complete each one.

    [Set of links to be added here]

    All in all I found it very interesting and useful, with some real gems. I also got the impression that the organisers would welcome help. It's a big job, and it was undertaken (in my opinion) out of the love of books, when the main organiser realised Australia hadn't had a Book Expo for twenty years. So I'd encourage people to support their efforts!

Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 15 October 2015

Emily Craven's brilliant idea for indie-published authors

I recently connected with Barbara Strickland and had a look around, and a read of, her blog Amorina Rose and the world of writing. There's useful stuff there, and I recommend the site; one link for example lead me to Emily Craven's e-Book Revolution blog, which again has lots and lots of useful information for Indie and self-publishers.

One item for example, happened just as I was discovering the world of book tubers, and found me in an especially receptive frame of mind. So, with that little intro, here is me explaining Emily's brilliant idea, from my point of view:

And just to highlight what people say about video, after I uploaded that to Youtube and shared it to Facebook and so on, I got more comments on the video at Facebook than I've received to any of the drier blog articles here. Which in my mind reinforces the idea that video is more engaging. It reinforced something which Lama Jabr of Xana Publishing & Marketing pointed out in one of her workshops: that Amazon make it easy for authors to include some videos on their Amazon author page.

I think video and text serve very different ends, though there can be a large overlap in the middle (depending on the content, naturally), and each has their pros and cons, but certainly for many kinds of communication, video is far more engaging.

Oh, I should probably add a tip, courtesy of film maker and copywriter Tim Lea (who I met at Book Expo Australia 2015): Google (the Youtube part) and Facebook are very much at war for mindshare in the video space (see his blog: "The Bloody Battle between Facebook and YouTube Part 2"). I think he had figures showing that more video was watched on Facebook than Youtube this year (though he observed that the picture is more complicated than that).

Anyway, Tim Lea's tip, if you want to maximise your brownie points with Facebook and Youtube, is to upload your video directly to each, independently. Don't just upload to Youtube and then link to it from FB: FB won't reward you for doing that. That was just one tip in an interesting talk he presented on some commercial opportunities for writers, related to video. He points out that if the video has dialogue, then it's probably going to benefit from having a writer involved! He shared his presentation with me, and I've made it available here:

(Incidentally, I found how to embed the PDF from here: How to Embed a PDF or Other Document Files in Blogger post. If you see advice where the html code ends with "view?usp=sharing", replace that by "preview" if you want it to work!)

Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)