Our Bookish Cheerleaders!

 Cheerleading is harder than it looks.

How do I know? Well, when I was in middle school, I became a cheerleader. 2 years! And, because I was a...um...good-sized girl, I was always one of the bases for stunts. Keeping those small and light girls at the top of the triangle alive was one of my jobs. 

But cheering for my team? THAT wasn't the hard part! I loved encouraging them on - win or lose. I think that's why when I went to high school, I volunteered to be the mascot. Celebrating my team and encouraging the players and audience brought as much (if not more) joy to me than those around me because 1., I loved my team. 2. It was loads of fun. 3. I wanted others to love my team too.

That's why I appreciate the cheerleaders of our bookish world so much! There are THOUSANDS of readers who love our stories, have fun cheering for our stories, and want others to fall in love with our stories too.

Where can we find these reading cheerleaders? 

Let me share a few examples of different places where bookish cheerleaders are rocking it!! 

1. In person - Of course, any time you can have an opportunity to build a community in person, it's fantastic. Though most of our cheerleaders are on social media/online, it's AMAZING how folks will come out to an in-person event, sometimes traveling HOURS, to celebrate one of their favorite authors. It is AMAZING!

2. Bookstagram - Okay, ya'll. This group of readers are hardcore! I ADORE them. IG has been a social media outlet for me over the past 3-4 years and being surrounded by bookstagrammers has been SUCH a blessing. If you're not familiar with them, check out some of my favs like @bookstagrambyalissamorgan @books.n.blossoms, @jessthebookhoarder, @the.book.maiden, @dareyoutoread and @the_reel_bookery are just a FEW of the zillions of cheerleaders who celebrate books. 

3. BookTok - I'm not as involved with TikTok because it overwhelms me, but the tokers there are just as excited about books as those on IG. If you want to narrow down what you see on this ever-growing and sometimes confusing social media platform, I suggest you narrow down your hashtags to #christiantiktok #christianbooks #christianfiction and #booktok.  Some names to toss out here are @lindsay.dee, @valicityelaine, @jenniferautumnkropf, @laurenzyano, @chronicallybookish...just to name a VERY few!

4. BookTube -I'm super new to this one and am considering starting one myself just because I think it might suit my personality a bit better than TikTok, but this is a great place to meet bookish cheerleaders AND it allows for longer videos, organizes them all in a one-stop place to find, AND already has a community of BookTubers to cheer you on and introduce you to more books to read! One of my FAVORITE Booktubers is @BookLoverAmanda. Besides her accent being FANTASTIC (Go Tennessee!), her enthusiasm dances off the screen! I've just started following @Celestria and her love for books shines through on her videos too! Fantastic cheerleaders to add to your list!

5. Facebook - If you've never visited Avid Readers of Christian Fiction, a Facebook group, you are MISSING OUT! These folks are some of the very best cheerleaders on the planet and are constantly celebrating great Christian Fiction reads. Warning...you WILL be sucked into this delightful group of bookish people who also love Jesus! (Btw, isn't that a great shot of author Karen Witemeyer? :)

So...what cheerleaders would you add to the list? Do you have a certain place online or in-person where you get the best cheering opportunities?

************************************************************************

Pepper Basham is an award-winning author who writes romance “peppered” with grace and humor. Writing both historical and contemporary novels, she loves to incorporate her native Appalachian culture and/or her unabashed adoration of the UK into her stories. Her 20^th book came out in February 2023. She currently resides in the lovely mountains of Asheville, NC where she is a wife, mom to five great kids, a speech-language pathologist, and a lover of chocolate, jazz, hats, and Jesus. Her dual timeline novel, Hope Between the Pages, was a 2022 finalist for the prestigious Christy awards. Pepper loves connecting with readers and other authors through social media outlets like Facebook & Instagram.

You can learn more about Pepper and her books on her website at www.pepperdbasham.com

Utilizing Amazon’s Buying and Gifting eBooks for Others Feature

I’m the queen of jumping into something, being all gung-ho for a few weeks or months, then forgetting all about it. I’ll sign up for something (usually something that COSTS me), and then forget about it. Months or YEARS later, I realize I’ve been paying for something I never use.

Some examples that I’m not proud of: 

A gym membership: Took me months to get the gym to stop charging my card. :(

eBates: Signed up years ago, got a nice bit of cash back on some purchases, then promptly forgot about it. The good news is that ebates was bought out by Rakuten, and I switched over last year. The good news is that Rakuten doesn’t COST me anything, but if I remember to use it, it SAVES me a few dollars, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you like, check out my Passive Income [https://seekerville.blogspot.com/2020/08/passive-income-with-emphasis-on-writers.html] post from last year that deals with this a bit.

And, most recently, I’m really, REALLY upset with Hootsuite. Their plans jumped over 500% from 2020 to 2021, so a plan that costed $119 a year ago now costs $588 a year. NOT COOL. So if you use Hootsuite and have it on auto renewal, be aware. But anyway, that’s another kettle of fish that’s going to get stinky soon. :)

But I digress….

Today’s post digs deep into Amazon’s Buying and Gifting eBooks for Others option which is an author’s friend.

Now, if you don’t want to read today’s entire post, just click on the link above to see what Amazon says about the process, and you’ll be all set. However, I do have some ideas and tips for you so that you do as I say and not as I DID five years ago. :)

So, let’s get started. Here’s the skinny from Amazon’s Buying and Gifting eBooks for Others page:

You can promote your books buying single units to send to specific people or buying multiple copies to offer to a bigger audience. 

  

• Buy for Others – eBook gift (single copy): You can gift a single eBook. When you gift an eBook, the recipient receives a redemption code and can choose to accept your eBook gift by redeeming the code. You can also exchange it for a gift card (US only).

• Buy for Others – Prepaid eBooks (single and multiple copies): You can purchase one or multiple prepaid eBooks as a gift in a single order. We create a set of redemption links (instead of redemption codes), one for each copy of the book. The purchaser can refund any unredeemed copies within 60 days or can re-gifted at any time. Recipients cannot exchange eBooks for gift cards or other products.

Pam again. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the “Buy for Others - eBook gift (single copy)” option where you gift an ebook to a winner of some giveaway program you’ve participated in, or perhaps you’ve offered to draw a name or two from your newsletter subscribers to gift one of your ebooks to.

All well and good, except then you realize that the book your subscriber chose from your stable of books costs $9.99. What if you had a handful of copies available that you’d purchased when they were put on sale by your publisher that you could slide into that slot for that winner? That’s where the “Buy for Others - Prepaid eBooks (single and multiple copies)” becomes your best friend.

In the first option, you log in to your Amazon account and purchase an ebook and send it to the recipient, usually with a “Congratulations, you won XYZ in the recent Ho-Ho-Ho giveaway!” Yada-yada. Unless all the stars have aligned, you’re going to pay full price (whether that’s $2.99 or $9.99) for that ebook that you just gifted on the fly.

In the second option, you purchase a handful of copies when they’re on sale and have the redemption links send to YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS. Then weeks, months, YEARS (cough-cough), you use those $0.99-$1.99 ebooks for giveaways.

But there’s a CATCH!!! Well, not really a catch, but… Don’t do like PAM did and FORGET about your stash of ebooks just waiting to be gifted. (Face-palm!!!)

So, let’s start with the basics: How DO you purchase in bulk in the first place? Again, Amazon makes this process pretty painless on the page I shared above, but I’ll walk you through the steps here.

To buy Prepaid eBooks (single and multiple copies) to send to others: 

1 Go to the eBook's detail page and find Buy for Others.

2 Choose the quantity. On Amazon.com, choose a quantity greater than 1.

3 Enter recipient email address(es) to have Amazon send to the recipient(s) on your behalf (optional).

4 Complete your purchase.

If you didn't send all copies at checkout, you'll get an email with instructions to retrieve redemption links. You can also go to Your Account › Your Orders › Manage eBooks to copy and send redemption links to your recipients. 

Pam again: Notice that even with this option of buying multiple ebooks, you CAN go ahead and enter recipient email addresses (see step 3) if you’re ready to do that. But the purpose of this strategy is to have a few copies that you purchased when they were on sale to use for later promotions at your leisure. The sentence that I changed to red is the key. Just don’t enter recipient emails and you’ll receive an email with the dedicated redemption links for each ebook you purchased on this order.

Now, how do you keep UP with this stash of orders? There are two ways, and I recommend both.

1) Create a spreadsheet of your orders. This can be as simple or detailed as you like. The most important part is to include your Amazon Order # and the link to your Digital Orders. That way even if it’s been a year or more, you can easily plug in that order # on your Amazon account and see how many copies you still have left that haven’t been claimed. You can include book title, # of copies ordered, date, etc., but the main thing is the Order # so you don’t have to dig through everything else on your Amazon account to find unclaimed ebooks.

2) If you think you might already have unclaimed ebooks on your Amazon account, follow these steps to check:

                  a) Go to Account > Content and Devices

b) Change “View Books” dropdown to “Gifts”

c) Change “All” to “Unclaimed”

Now you can see if you have unclaimed ebooks languishing on your account. If you’re ready to do something about those unclaimed ebooks, you can follow through on Steps d-g…

d) Either Resend the Gift email OR select change recipient email if it’s been a long time since you sent the gift..

e) Enter your email address as the new recipient

f) Check your email and the ebook is now in your “holding” stash for later

g) OR… you can at that point Request a gift card credit.

#g wasn’t even on my radar, but as I worked through this post, it quickly moved up the chain of importance. If you gifted someone a copy of an ebook at full price like FIVE YEARS AGO (because you were committed to one of those Ho-Ho-Ho!! Promotions when your ebook wasn’t on sale!) and the book was never claimed, AND you also have copies that you purchased at a discount sitting in reserve, then it makes sense to request a gift card on that OLD EXPENSIVE ORDER and get that $7.99-$9.99 back. (I had 2 of these from 2016. 2016??? Seriously? I paid $7.99 (each) for them and they were never claimed. You can bet I’ll try to get that gift card credit, and then buy 4-5 when they go on sale again. 

Update: As I was working on this post, I went ahead and requested a refund for both of these gifts that were never claimed… I paid $7.99 for the books in 2016. They’re listed at $2.99 now. Requesting a refund was a no-brainer. The gift card balance on both were approved immediately. $15.98 applied to my Amazon account! Boom!)

Who benefits the most from this strategy? A traditionally published author or an independently published author? I would say that since you have no control over when your publisher will put your ebooks on sale, then using this strategy on your traditionally published books would be a good plan. Not to say that having a copy or two of independently published ebooks to gift would be a bad idea, but typically you can gift those direct if you’re not concerned with the person pirating the copy in some way. Also, my understanding is that you won’t get royalties on any of these ebooks until they are “claimed” by a reader. Since racking up royalties isn’t the point here, that’s sort of an aside, but I thought I’d mention it, just in case the question came up.

Final Tip #1: If you (or a group of authors you’ve partnered with) ever decide to UNPUBLISH an ebook or a collection, check your “stash” of ebooks available to give as gifts. Give those away before the ebook/collection is unpublished. Otherwise, you’ll lose those few copies forever and have no way of getting your money back OR gifting a (now) unpublished ebook. I only had this happen with a couple of ebooks that someone never claimed. If I had been on top of my game, I could have refitted those before the collection was taken down. Fairly cheap lesson to learn, though.

Final Tip #2: I’m sure that buying a handful of ebooks on sale throughout the year might not be high on the list of things for readers and bloggers to do, but if you do enjoy giving ebooks to family and friends, or even gifting them through your blog, then this strategy will also work so that you have a small stash of .99cent or $1.99 ebooks ready to gift whenever the urge strikes.

So, there you go. I thought I’d have a really short post this week, but I guess as usual, I’ve gone around the world to explain a simple process. Oh, well, sometimes more is better, yes?

Thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea? Pros? Cons? Let's chat!

And... what good would a post about finding long, lost eBooks do without offering them to readers, yes? So, here you go. Here's what you DO with those ebooks. You give them away. I'm on a mission to increase my followers on Bookbub, so that's the focus of today's giveaway.

Kindle eBooks - Two Winners - Winners Choice

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Also, I’m babysitting today since school is still out for the holidays, but I’ll check in as often as I can to hear your feedback.

Happy New Year!

Update: Winners have been notified as of January 7, 2022. Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway. You are a blessing!

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One Thing That Works For Me with guest Roseanna M. White: Surprise and Delight

 

Good Monday morning, Seekerville! I (Carrie) am here to introduce today's guest for this month's 'One Thing That Works For Me' series. Please join me in welcoming author Roseanna M. White as she shares about 'surprise and delight'!

For the last several years, my husband has been fine-tuning a marketing approach that he learned via Rob Hardy called “Identity Marketing.” It was originally created for filmmakers but was oh-so-easily adapted to the book world that he invested quite a bit of time into writing out those adaptations…and of course, sharing them with me, mwa ha ha ha. The whole system is amazing and works super well with the outlook I’ve always tried to have—that it’s not about selling, it’s about serving. And one of the tenets of this system that I especially latched onto was the principle of “Surprise and Delight.”

What is it? Very simple—whenever you can, come up with something that will surprise (in a good way, of course!) your readers. We all love plot twists in stories, right? Well, one of our goals should be delivering little twists in our marketing too. Things that our readers don’t expect, and which put big smiles on their faces.

Great in theory…but what about in practice? How do we actually come up with these things? I have a whole list of things I’ve done and tried, and many have worked quite well. But today I want to tell you about my absolute favorite.

So around two years ago, when we were just beginning to test this system, I had the idea for an online Tea Party Book Club. Now, this was before the world went virtual thanks to The Pandemic That Shall Not Be Named. The inspiration came in May of 2018; I had a book coming out…I went to a tea with the ladies from my church at a local tea house…and my husband had been running some virtual events via online meeting tech similar to Zoom. All these things swirled together in my mind and made me say, “Hey! Why couldn’t we do a tea party online?? I could put together packages, mail them out, and then get together with readers to chat about the book and have tea and treats together!”

I quickly became OBSESSED with this idea. (This is pretty typical of me, LOL.) I priced bulk tea. I priced pretty vintage teacups. Spoons. Sugar cubes. Individually wrapped treats. Candy. Mints. I weighed and priced postage. I considered how much I pay for this sort of thing at the local tea house. I came up with a package price and built it out on my website. And then… then… I presented it to my readers.

Would they love it too? Hate it? Not want to pay for that sort of thing? I didn’t know—all I knew was that I found the idea delightful, LOL, even though it would be a ton of work on my part.

I didn’t have to wait long to find out how my readers would receive it. Within a few days of announcing the idea, I had people filling the parties, ordering “starter kits” that involve tea pots and vintage cups and spoons, a lady from my church volunteered to make tea cozies for me, and I even had some people so excited that they signed up for all the extras and then realized an hour later that, oops, they were out of town that day or already had a tea set they could use.

But this was my answer—this idea, unheard of at the time, sounded so fun that my reader friends JUMPED to be a part of it. Where else did they get an hour with other fans of the book and the author and receive a hand-selected package of goodies to go along with it?

Now, granted, in the last year and a half everything has gone online, and we’re beginning to see a lot more things like this. But I’m thrilled to be able to say that I’ve been at it for over two years, that kinks have been worked out, processes have been streamlined…and that the seats keep filling up.

Best of all, relationships have been developed. I have regular attendees, and they greet each other like friends when they see a familiar face come back for this month or that month. Readers have become friends. And the conversations have been AMAZING.

Will I do these tea parties forever? Who knows. But I’m having a blast doing them now—especially because my readers are too. It’s just one thing in the many that I do to try to reach out to them, but it’s been a total success. It’s one way to Surprise and Delight them…and seeing how well it’s worked, it’s an inspiration to keep coming up with new ways to do just that in the future.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award nominated author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing for WhiteFire Publishing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 

You can learn more about her and her stories at www.RoseannaMWhite.com.

 

Roseanna is offering a $15 credit in her online store to one commenter!

 

Authors, what questions do you have for Roseanna about her tea parties or her 'surprise and delight' strategy?
Readers, what are some ways other authors have 'surprise and delight'-ed you?