Book Genres and Niche Writers

Happy Tuesday, good people of the blogosphere! Today I'm talking about writers who stick to one genre and why they might choose to do that. Open discussion, feel free to jump in and add your thoughts!

Have you ever thought about writing something way outside your usual genre? What prompted that desire? Why didn't you do it?

I see a lot of authors with no specific genre. Then I look around and see a lot of them who only write to one audience. What's the better avenue to take?

I have no idea. But, I've considered a few of the pros and cons of being genre specific.

Pros:

• Your fans will always be fans of the genre you write. They picked up your book for a reason, right?
• You can become a recognized authority of your genre.
• You'll always know someone, somewhere, will be looking for your name if they enjoyed your books.
• Eventually, your name could become synonymous with the genre. Think: Stephen King - Horror, Dean Koontz - Thriller, Fern Michaels - Chick/Hen Lit, Rick Riordan - YA Fiction/Mythology.
• You could gain a huge following if you write in a popular genre.

Cons:

• If you branched out from Romance to Fantasy or Horror, your current fans may leave you.
• Being a YA author with an Erotica title isn't usually a good idea.
• You're stuck writing that genre for the rest of your life unless you gamble fans will follow no matter what.
• You could become confused and screw up the story.
• If you use a different pen name for each genre, that's twice as much (or three times as much) marketing you have to do.
• If you have a publisher, they may not want you to write outside your genre.

I consider myself when I talk about this. I don't write in one genre; not sure what I'd do with myself if I had to. Which genre would I choose? I loved writing Yassa (Historical Fiction), but I also loved writing The Bird (fantasy) and I'm loving the Mystic series (New Adult/Paranormal). I just don't know how I would choose one over the other. A great story idea hits me when I least expect it, and the genres have a wide range.


Have you thought about this? Do you write in one genre or have many pen names? What are some of the drawbacks or hurdles you've had to overcome?

I'm interested. Let's discuss!!

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Proven Results Social Networking Schedule

Happy Monday, good people of the blogosphere! Today, I'm happy to share with you my results from using my Social Networking Schedule I posted two weeks ago. I used it last week, and here are some of my stats:

I enjoyed several retweets over the weekend and a number of downloads of my free PDF on cleaning up your image.


I gained five new fans and enjoyed two shares of my posts on Facebook.

Stumbleupon sent me eight new visitors to the blog.

I gained two new followers over on Tumblr.

I sold three books.

I got mentioned twice on Google+.

I now have two featured lenses over on Squidoo. http://www.squidoo.com/book-formatting2 and http://www.squidoo.com/things-i-learned-from-my-editor

I answered a question on Quora.

No video last week; but I intend to do one this week, as scheduled.

Ms. Rebecca Fyfe, over at the ChaBooCha, asked me to write a guest post for her. Integrating the Social Networking Schedule has never been easier! Go check out the post here.

Now that's a lot of activity. How many more people do you think I got my voice heard by? Becoming recognized in your field is easy if you schedule your time and use it to maximize efficiency.

If you missed my Saturday post, it was a blog tour stop for Good Ghost Gone Bad. I'm giving away two e-copies of that book. Go check it out and enter!

Remember, branding is important and so is social media. So, get on it!

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Good Ghost Gone Bad - Blog Tour - Author Janiera Eldridge

Happy Saturday, good people of the blogosphere! Today I bring you a tour stop for author Janiera Eldridge and her book Good Ghost Gone Bad. Enjoy! And don't forget to enter to win a copy via the rafflecopter entry form at the bottom of the page!

Synopsis:
Brianna Moreno was an average 22-year-old women who loved shopping, hanging out with her friends and making more career plans....until the night she was brutally and unexpectedly murdered.

Now she finds herself trapped in the ghost world while residing on earth. The problem is, her killer can see all of his ghostly victims and enjoys taunting them as much as he does killing them.Brianna soon finds out that her killer has horrible new plans concerning her family.

Brianna meets up with a few of her killer's past victims to hatch a plan so terrifying, the entire town will never be the same again.

Brianna is a good ghost gone bad; the good girl side is gone forever!

*This book is not a YA read. It's an 18+ only novella that features sex, strong language and strong violence.

Buy Links:
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Ghost-Gone-Janiera-Eldridge/dp/1482345730/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2
Barnes and Noble:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/good-ghost-gone-bad-janiera-eldridge/1114266415?ean=2940015962499

Excerpt:
That’s when I saw my face on the TV. It was my high school picture from four years ago. My face was fuller since I had lost 25 pounds this year from spending some of my spare time on a recreational soccer team but overall, I looked the same. There was no way I could fool myself into thinking it wasn’t me on the television screen. Next to the picture were the stats that once belonged to my physical self. The conservative looking reporter with his perfectly brushed come-over and bright blue eyes said I was 5’9, 145 pounds, black curly hair, dark skin, hazel eyes. My body shuttered from crying with no tears. It was a pathetic scene (which I was glad no one could see) but I cried harder knowing there was really no relief from this terrible pain. In life, tears were a way of watching emotional pain flee from the body, but now they were stuffed deep down inside of me somewhere and bottled up with a cork. I couldn’t hear what was being said on the TV and really didn’t want to. My parents must have gone to the police and said I was missing. I disappeared just in time to make the 11 O’clock news; I’m sure my killer was at home enjoying this. Exploding in anger, I punched the outside wall that faced the street. The couple sitting side by side on the couch shivered and moved apart. They felt me! “Hello!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. They didn’t budge anymore, but for a moment they did feel me. There was no hole in the wall, but they must have heard when the punch landed. For a short time, I was a part of the normal world again.


Author Bio:
Janiera enjoys feeding her book addiction when she not writing. Writing is theraputic to her during her struggles with Fibromyalgia. Being unable to work a normal 9-5 is what encouraged her to write full time. She is also a book blogger at Beauty and Books where she mixes being a book nerd with keeping things chic. When not reading or writing she is freelance writing in the entertainment industry.When trying to relax she likes a huge yard sale on a Saturday morning, rainy days to read by and nacho cheese is her kryptonite. Soul Sisters is her debut novel.
Feel free to visit her book blog where she loves reviewing books and doing author interview at Books & Beauty- http://janieraeldridge.blogspot.com. She loves feedback and welcomes any questions or comments to her email: prettyhaydengurl@yahoo.com or connect with her through her author page: https://www.facebook.com/authorjanieraeldridge

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Branding Step Five

Happy happy Friday, good people of the blogosphere! On to the weekend! I hope I've given you enough information this week so you'll have a branding project to work on for the next couple of days. Today is all about look and feel. So, grab your pens and notebooks and let's get going!

What is look and feel, anyway?

To put it simply, look and feel is the consistent look of your presence and the feeling a visitor gets when they come to your page or see your ads. If you saw an ad belonging to Jo Michaels somewhere, you'd know it was mine because of either the logo or the color scheme. Polka-dots be damned, mine are specific colors. This is what you should be striving for.

Even my mobile site is consistent with the rest of my marketing. Yes, it matters.

I want people to feel like they're having fun when they visit my sites because I'm a fun person. Think about what you're projecting with your colors and design. Is your site stodgy and boring? Are your colors saying what you want them to? There have been deep looks into what feelings colors incite.

Take a look at this:

Yes, click it and view it full size. Keep it if you like. But, above all else, remember it when deciding on your color scheme. If you notice, the colors in my logo are blue and brown. I added peach (a tint of orange) to the backgrounds of my sites. Now you know why.

The feeling your pages incite matters. People want to feel happy when they pay you a visit. Let them, help them, show them the way.

Now you know what look and feel is; make sure you're using it for maximum impact.

Come on back Monday when I'll be giving you all a look into what I accomplished this week with my social networking schedule.

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Branding Step Four

Wow! It's Thursday, good people of the blogosphere, and you made it over Hump Day. Just one more tiny day to go until the weekend will arrive! Can I hear some celebration, please? Continuing with my branding sequence of posts, today we're discussing naming. You're right, this could've been day one, but I wanted you to start thinking about the pictures related to your brand and to get excited about the possibilities before I dove headfirst into names.

IF you're a writer and you're using a pen name, one of the things you have to consider is your genre. It's only a half joke when you do the little test to determine your erotica writer name. Something like Bunnie Whipshard is a pretty telling pen name. Plus, the logo possibilities are out of this world.

Ha ha! Sorry, images of bunnies with fluffy tails and dominatrix masks just passed through my brain. Moving on...

As my example above shows, your name makes a difference. But, when thinking about your mark, you want something that's going to stand out in the crowd. If I'd wanted to take my logo in a fun direction, I probably would've used a cup of steaming coffee (Jo = Cup of Joe = Coffee). See the correlation?  My tag line could even have been something like: Jo Michaels Blog - Your Daily Cup of Joe. But I find coffee cups as logos to be way overdone; besides, I'm not a coffee shop.

When thinking about your naming, consider how it might be possible to move your logo from one thing you do to another. If you're an expert on something, consider using an image related to that expertise. Let's take a look at my friend, Sandi Tuttle, from The Average Woman in a Superwoman World blog. Here's her blog banner:

Her logo is an average female icon, used on many bathroom doors to indicate women, with a superwoman cape draped around her shoulders. It's simple and effective. Her blog is about making average women the best they can be, inside and out. It's fitting, huh?

This is a great example of branding! That logo appears on her blog, radio show site, Facebook, and products. When I got her coffee mug with the "If I have wings... Why can't I fly?" quote on it, her logo graced the other side. No matter what facet she places herself in, she'll always be the average superwoman.

It's this type of branding and naming we should all be embracing. If we use these tools to their full potential, we'll be instantly recognizable no matter where we show up.

Let me give you one more example before I let you go!

If your name is Bunnie Whipshard, and your mark is that bunny with the dominatrix mask, you could brand it like this:

Bunnie Whipshard - Author
Bunnie Whipshard - Photography
Bunnie Whipshard - S&M Techniques
Bunnie Whipshard - S&M Toy Design

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Have you thought about your name and what a mark associated with that name could do for you?

Come on back tomorrow to catch the post on look and feel!

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Branding Step Three

Happy hump day, good people of the blogosphere! How lovely is it our week is almost half over? Very! Today, we're talking about what your logo says about you. So, grab those pens and notebooks and let's get going!

Here are a few of the logos I've designed and a few belonging to major corporations. Let's take a look and see what they represent.

Anyone see the surveyor's mark and the fun I had playing with the typography on this one?

This one is pretty obvious, no? DNA design, again, repeated in the typography. Like a computer doctor.

Fictional company. Logo is to represent movement forward in new construction techniques and residential windmills. Go green! The blue is to represent the sky.

This one, I love. Green to represent growth. Roots to represent stability. This community club has been around for six generations that keep branching off. Movement representing the wind on the ridge from left to right.

My own INDIE Books Gone Wild logo. Strong type with the indie and the book embracing one another. Our red color represents wildness yet we bring that stability and guarantee through in the black.





Now go take a look at McDonald's. Those golden arches represent bent french fries. Bethcha never thought of that, huh? Nike? The swoosh is representative of the wings on the god's shoes. Pretty clever!

So, what does your logo say about you? Mine was designed to represent flourish like a quill pen and stability like a solid letterform. See how the M wraps around the J? Blue is my favorite color, and my mark will emboss beautifully on that hardcover book someday.

If you're using an image as your identifier, think ahead to your business cards and printed materials. You can add a mark to an image and later use it as a standalone. Think about color, voice, and what you're saying about yourself with your mark. Come on back tomorrow and join me to discuss naming!

If you don't have a mark, why? Is it because you don't know how to make one or you don't think you need one?

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Branding Step Two

Happy Tuesday, good people of the blogosphere! This week is all about branding yourself with a logo, design, color scheme, name, and look and feel. As promised yesterday, I'm going into color schemes today. Grab your pens and notebooks and let's get going, eh?

You're probably most familiar with RGB (that's Red Green Blue). These colors are created with light. What you're looking at on your monitor is not what you'll see in print when using a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) printer. Why? Because these colors are created with ink.

It's a long, drawn-out process so I'm not going into all that. What I'm going to do is break it down and explain why you only want two colors plus black in any print job you send to a traditional printer. I'm also going to tell you a little about spot colors (PMS colors).

Now, your printer at home likely uses RGB (unless you're using one with individual cartridges for each color). This means your colors will be close to what you see on your monitor (if it's calibrated).

Big printing houses don't use RGB printers. They do a print run and lay down each color individually with each run. So, if you have a three color print job, that's three runs through the press. It costs you money for each run of your print job through the printer. More colors = more runs = more money out of your pocket.

It may be okay if you're only having fifty business cards printed. But what about when you have two thousand done? What if you want to have fliers or postcards printed? Now you're talking a lot of money.

You see my color scheme in my logo on the top left of my website. It's Brown and blue. Leave off the peach because I can remove that and still be two colors. Notice the peach doesn't appear in my logo/mark.

Most companies have one PMS or spot color in their logo and nothing else but white (or the paper color it's printed on). When you use white, you're opening yourself up to a lot of color issues because paper comes in a lot of colors and white is the absence of ink. A PMS color is often the only way to get that brilliant red, blue, or orange when printing.

Ever design something bright and have it come back from the printer looking dulled out? RGB to CMYK conversion does it every time. If you're designing for print, you should be working in a CMYK color space always.

Home Depot is an orange color. Coca~Cola is a special red (has a copyright, even). UPS-brown. You see where I'm going here, right? One color is sometimes all you need.

But, sticking with my original guidelines, check out these identity packages I've created:

The first uses only one color. Black could be added at a nominal cost. The second is two colors plus black. I know the leaves on the trees look like they're three colors, but they're just tints of the original color (a lighter version). By the way, black is CHEAP! You should see the brand standard book for the second identity package, it's huge.

So, what should you take away from this? That your logo should be harmonious and encompass no more than two colors plus black. Ever. Period.

I hope you got some useful information from this post. Tomorrow, we'll go into design and what it says about you. Many logos and marks have hidden meanings! Yours could, too!

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo