New Year - New Authors' Cave!

Year of Change – BACK TO THE ROOTS

We hope everyone’s New Year is starting off fantastic—maybe like March McCarron’s! Fantastic results with ENT and Book Bub! It is with this New Year, that we must now make some changes to BRD and Authors’ Cave 1) because of time constraints, and most importantly 2) to get us back to our ROOTS!

How do we all sell more books?

What are the most effective marketing avenues?

What is so ridiculous is that for nearly 2 years as I have managed the group, I have hardly marketed my own books at all! I want to get back to that—ROOTS! …and help you guys by sharing what works for me, and in return, learn what has worked for you.

As many of you in the group know, I have returned to a full time job. I am happy to be back at work, but unfortunately, there are not enough hours in the day to maintain the stuff required by the Authors’ Cave site and also the social interaction at BRD, as well as feed my family, take care of the house and the garden, oh and write on my own books…I want to get back to that—ROOTS! Additionally, the group is now being managed by only 2 of us—Chameleon and I.

So… ROOTS

Our goal has always been to create a collaborative community in the hopes that marketing as a group effort versus individually would generate more book sales for all of us. Since the launch in July, we have put forth several free venues for collaboration opportunities in which you could generate additional sales and reviews through higher visibility, including greater exposure through our eZine. Despite the free factor, only a fraction of the membership has taken advantage of these venues.

In light of these things... 

we are restructuring Authors' Cave and streamlining our purpose

What we have found is that it has been Premium Members who typically participate and are open to our ideas and we believe we can do more with a smaller focused group. We have created the Authors’ Cave Exclusive which will be made up of the 36 Premium Members we currently have. The group will be capped at 50 for now, so we have 14 positions open to fill.

With these 50 authors, we plan to collaborate, hold workshops, share experiences in marketing, and co-market for each other. The group is only for people who want to actively participate, so if you are not willing to work together, please do not sign up. The eZine will be revamped to feature a profile page for each member of the Authors’ Cave. Members are encouraged to write columns, share poetry, chapter excerpts, videos, trailers, etc on their page. The eZine can be used as a group marketing piece and assist in co-marketing, without much effort.

Finally…Workshops! 

We want to focus our time in areas that have been a complaint of members for a long time. We will go step by step in helping each premium member build the perfect, effective Author's Toolkit. Beginning March 1st we'll be covering the following topics, in-depth, as a group and individually.

• Plot: holes, unresolved issues, characters, world, etc.
• Writing: pace, info dumps, descriptive text, how to show and not tell
• Presentation: cover, how to easily make a digital table of contents, how to properly format your ebook
• Media: video trailers and media presentations – easier than you think! You'll end up with a professional media presentation (a $150.00 value) you'll be able to post around that people will enjoy reading and looking at!
• Marketing: effective marketing tools and strategies that will get you noticed!

How will this affect BRD?

We will still run the BRD group and have the BRD review process but will be making some changes to that as well, including the following:

Book Review Depot Process

• Books on the list 1 year or more will be removed immediately (after Mar 30, 2015, books on the list over 9 months will be removed).
• A book can only be posted to the list 2 times in a 1-year period.
• It will now take 7 reviews to earn a spot on the list to get 10 reviews in return.
• The genre of the month is no longer in play for double review credits, it's too hard to track and we need to balance the post to review ratio. 

We will be removing some of the genre categories that are not read as much and combine those into one “Miscellaneous” category. These include Non-fiction, and Children’s for now. There are a couple other categories that may be combined at a later date. We think it's only fair that authors understand the limited interest we've been able to generate for these before they do their reviews.

We will still participate in the ever-fun conversations because those are great entertainment!

Book Club

Authors’ Cave will no longer manage the book club. Participation simply wasn't enough for the amount of time it took to organize.

Authors’ Cave Services

Chameleon and I are going to focus on more of the services for the marketing side of the selling books going forward meaning we will not be doing express reviews, the Grind (editing and redlining). We will be offering book covers, book trailers, media kits and formatting.

Check out our new website! Authors' Cave

We wish you all the best for the new year and invite you to join our new collaboration efforts at Authors’ Cave Exclusive!

-Ginger and Chameleon

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