Emerald City Writer's Conference : Building a Career with a Digital-first Publisher with Tera Klienfelter & Shelli Stevens

Anyone can have healthy mid-list sales. Build your audience with regular releases, work to promote yourself.

What builds your career is a backlist. Each new release boosts the sales of previous books

How much marketing does Samhain put behind their authors? RT, Smart Bitches, Dear Author, sponsor conferences, etc. Promoting an author is also promoting ourselves, so most promotion for Samhain is intertwined with promoting our authors.

At what point do you start to pay for ads? Shelli Stevens shared that she did it for her NY books and did not see a pay off. "I don’t think I’ve done it for digital first. Social networking seems to work better for me."

Tera shared "the majority of the books that I accept are more story and less sex. As it becomes more mainstream to have a ereader, the sales are shifting toward more mainstream novels."

Editing tips from Tera

• Felt, knew, saw, heard, remembered, wondered can be removed.
• Write with all 5 of your senses. The most overlooked sense is scent.
• He could see the sun -> he saw the sun -> the sun shone

Tips from Shelli

• Write 1K a day, 5 pages a day. It is a single title book every 3 months.
• Readers would rather have a conversation with an author rather than seeing a website ad.
• Don’t hit and run on social networds – e.g. send the link to your book twice a week and only show up when you get a review. Readers get annoyed by that.