Guest Blog: Spinning A Good Yarn Again, by Damaris Browne

Back in 2019 I was lucky enough to be involved in the publishing of Distaff, which went where no woman had gone before by being not only among the first SF anthology featuring all new stories by women and women alone – indeed, perhaps the very first of this elite band – but which was moreover wholly devised, organised, written, edited and produced by women.  From concept and cover, through editing and formatting, to the launch eats and promotional designs, it was women all the way.

Which was where the title came in, since a distaff is the rod on which raw fibres were traditionally wound prior to spinning, a task invariably carried out by women, and as a result “distaff” came to signify women’s work and their sphere of influence.  And in our view, SF – both the reading and writing of it – was also women’s work as much as it was men’s, and despite decades of female-written SF, it still needed to be further influenced by women and their ideas, concepts and concerns.

But Distaff wasn’t simply trailblazing, it was also award-nominated, with five of its stories, as well as its cover, being longlisted in the British Science Fiction Association Awards, and one story went on to win a coveted place in the 2019 Best of British SF anthology.

Crowned with that success, in early 2020 we decided to spin a few yarns again.  

 

At any time, putting together an anthology with several participants is frustrating and rewarding in equal measure, but with the myriad complications arising from the Covid Years, the many-skeined frustrations multiplied.  Yet the power of women lies in our endurance, and we’ve threaded our way past all the hitches with our material finished at last.

 

The stories we’ve woven this time are fantasy, not SF, but Femmes Fae-Tales is again a work wholly devised and created by women and non-binary writers and artists.

As our punning title suggests, the main characters of our stories are also women, but it is we who are the femmes fatales, spinning stories alive with allure and danger.  The warp and weft knitting together the full cloth of the anthology are strands of peril and enchantment – of magic, of power and of the fascinating, bewitching fae themselves.

Entwined among the tales of glamour, charm, temptation and seduction are stories of loss – lost children, lost minds, lost hope, lost integrity, lost pasts – and also of discovery, not least of ancient magicians and ensorcelled amphibians!

But above all we’ve been weaving stories of love and atonement and redemption – of regaining what was lost, of learning from past mistakes, of redemptive sacrifice, of finding one’s true self, of returning to truth and rejecting false promises.  The very fabric of women’s lives throughout the ages.

The Distaff women are spinning tales once again with Femmes Fae-Tales.  But as before, although they’re written by women, they’re not only for women – they’re for anyone who loves a good yarn!

Femmes Fae-Tales – by women, about women, for everyone

Link to buy on Amazon

Guest Blog: Anthologising – Not Just Spinning A Line, by Damaris Browne

I’m getting excited. On 15^th August the SF anthology Distaff is released – which makes it sound like a long-term prisoner finally getting out of jail, but I’m pretty sure that’s just coincidence. (Though do insert here your own puns about both being penned, and the price of the anthology making it a complete steal.) Then on 23^rd August there’s the formal launch. And that makes it sound like an ocean-going liner which needs to be sped on its way with a magnum of champagne, though since the launch is taking place at Titancon in Belfast, it’s perhaps more likely to be floated on a sea of Bushmills and Guinness.

Why the excitement? It’s not simply because my story The Colour of Silence is included, though if you want to read about a ship being launched – albeit without champagne or Guinness – there it is. It’s because the anthology is something of a rarity. An all-new (no reprints) all-SF (no fantasy) all-female (yep, no stories from men) anthology, and – which surely makes it unique – wholly devised, organised, written, edited and produced by women. From concept to cover, through beta-reading, formatting, and beyond to the launch eats and promotional give-aways, it’s women all the way.

Which is where the title comes in. For a distaff is the rod on which raw fibres are wound prior to spinning, a task which was invariably carried out by women, and women were often buried with their distaffs in the same way a man might be buried with the tools of his trade or his sword. As a result “distaff” also came to signify women’s work and their sphere of influence. And if in the past it also carried the weight of male condescension and a whiff of insult – when the church was drumming up support for the Third Crusade, those men who didn’t take up the cross were given distaffs and wool, the implication being they might as well be women and sit at home spinning – well, SF hasn’t exactly been free of that scorn for women, their worth and their writing, so we’re taking back control of that narrative, too.

With our Distaff, we’re spinning tales rather than wool or flax. And those tales cover the full cloth of Science Fiction, for we might be women but we haven’t written just for women – the stories are for everyone who likes a good yarn. (See what I did there?)

Past mistakes, present concerns, future prospects – these are the threads which wind through the anthology, making one whole from nine very different tales. Stories set on Earth, on spaceships, on orbitals and on alien planets. And if you want alien creatures we have friendly aliens, curious aliens, rocky aliens and mutant-humans more alien than all the others.

In this nine-ply skein there are twists of all kinds, with aspects of comedy, horror, romance, tragedy and everything in between. We have Nordic police and Nordic myth, environmental messages and examinations of grief, icy inventors, lovelorn ships, planet-saving AIs, rainbow ponies, staring chickens, plagues and immortality, guilt and nowhere-near-enough guilt, clever children and dead children, art and actors, a degraded Earth and an Earth being reborn.

Above all we’ve spun stories full of hope, determination, resilience and love. What more could any SF lover – male, female, both, neither, Earthling or otherwise – want?

Come on. Pick up a Distaff and take a spin with us!

Links:

Amazon US

Amazon UK 

Distaff website

Damaris

So you’ve brought out a book – now what…? [Guest post, by Jo Zebedee]

There are millions of books on Amazon and all their authors are sure they’re the best thing ever produced. They’re all chasing sales and reviews. How on Earth does yours get found?

I’ve been published just over a year now, and I have three books out, two traditionally published, one self published. For the purposes of this blog I’ll focus on the self published book with the big caveat that none of this is a whole lot different for any indie book (or, indeed, I’m told, for any author.)

This then is how to promote – what I did right, what I did wrong, what I’ve learned for the future.

So, let’s blow my own trumpet. What did I get right?

1. Promotion sites. These are a catch-22 in some ways. You need reviews to get accepted – but you can’t get reviews until you get readers (see later, in what I didn’t do so well.) Once you get the reviews, however, assuming you do, this is where Kindle Unlimited comes into its own. You can discount to 99p for a week and retain your 70% margin. If you can combine that with a good promotional campaign, you can get a lot of sales.

The king of promo sites is Bookbub. It’s expensive – because it works. I’ve had two campaigns in the UK and each has paid for itself and resulted in additional reviews. But don’t discount some of the others – I like Book Barbarian a lot, and always get good results, and there are many others. Google and ask around – see what works well for your genre and how much it costs for your genre.

If you do this sort of promo, work out your break-even and make sure it’s realistic in terms of sales.

2. Word of mouth. This, I am good at, apparently. Building some SM presence, and some support. A couple of tips come to mind:

Don’t spread yourself too thinly. There’s a temptation to be on every SM site and every forum, and you’ll end up exhausted. Pick a couple and do them well. My main platforms are Facebook, Twitter and two specialist science fiction and fantasy sites (as well as a few Facebook groups).

Be yourself. There will always be people who don’t like you, of course. But, mostly, if you engage, you’ll find some that do. But a fake persona stands out a mile after a time.

Promote others. Good will is important. Call out for others, share their events and news. Nothing is more boring than a timeline with one subject, and only one book, on it.

3. Blogging. I started my blog (www.jozebwrites.blogspot.co.uk) in 2014, having blogged previously on a specialist forum. I reckon in the first year I had about 20 hits per week. Sometimes less. Now I’ve passed 20,000 hits.

Blog regularly. Blog only if you like it, and it’s not a chore. Try to stay around some sort of theme. Try to keep some sort of voice – mine is relaxed and chatty. Try not to use it for promo – no one wants a bore.

So, great, I did okay with those. What didn’t I do so well at:

1. Using my website. I have one and have done for a long time, and the nice domain name of Jozebedee.com. But I used it mostly as a placeholder and not as a live site.

Not anymore. I now update much more regularly and intend to keep doing so. I’ve started a mailing list in the newsletter section (see in a moment), that’s slowly building. I plan to release exclusive content onto it and hope to build it more.

Why, since I already have a good Facebook platform? Well, Facebook pages are very ineffective at delivering content with a very low spread unless you’re prepared to pay for them (Facebook ads are another place I want to explore.) Plus, you don’t own them. That content could be taken down at any point. My website is mine….

2. Reviews. This is where I wasn’t cheeky enough, or aggressive enough at the start. Reviews are important. The number of reviews is very important. Ask people, nicely, if they’d consider doing one. Offer free copies in exchange for reviews. Politely ask bloggers etc it they’d consider one. You want to be hitting 50 or so for both the Amazons – I’m crawling up there at the moment.

3. Mailing list. I’ve been slow on this one (but, really, no one can cover all this, write, have a job – as most writers have to – and any sort of life. Do the best you can, bit by bit.)

Basically, if you’re an author, you want one of these. I use a mailchimp extension to Wordpress and it’s reasonably straightforward. What it means is that if people sign up I can launch one email (which takes about 10 minutes) and send it out to everyone.

Don’t spam. Only release one if you have something relevant. For me that’ll be free content, launches and events. Anything else goes in my blog.

And, really, that last point is the most salient – know what goes where. Each platform is different, each brings something else – and if they don’t, they’re not worth the additional effort.

Good luck with it!

My links: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jo-Zebedee/e/B00VM61TZG

https://www.jozebedee.com

https://www.jozebwrites.blogspot.co.uk

Guest post: Authors Navigating Instagram - Hashtags, Sister Apps, and Best Practices, by Jo Michaels

Happy Friday! Jo Michaels here. Before I get going with my guest post, I’d like to take a moment to give Thaddeus a huge shout of thanks for having me on his blog. It’s such an honor to be here and be allowed to share all the things with you. Okay, that done, let’s get into why I’m here in the first place. Today, I’m talking Instagram. We’ll go over some sister apps and why you need them, where to get your hashtags and why they matter, and best practices. Ready? Grab those pens and notebooks, and let’s get going!

If you’re not familiar with Instagram, I urge you to check it out. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, where posts with text are the most important forms of updates, Instagram allows people to communicate via pictures—and images are a universal language. To get the app, go here for Android devices and here for Apple.

Let’s start with the hashtags. There is no other social media site where hashtags are more important (not even Twitter). Instagrammers click photos they like and then through to the hashtag to fill their feed with similar photos or specific user types. Here’s an interesting post on how many hashtags you should use and why. To find the ones that are trending highest, you’ll see a link there that’ll guide you to this site. There, you can actually perform a search on a specific topic to gain insight on which hashtags are the best for your image/user account type (author, artist, photographer, etc…) and gain followers that way.

Sister apps you’ll want to have(I’ll explain why in a moment): Layout Android devices can grab it here Apple devices here and Hyperlapse (not yet available on Android) Apple devices can get this here. 

Why you need those apps: Instagram allows you to post a single photo from your phone or device’s camera roll, with Layout, you can collage more than one image to make a single post photo you can then put in your feed. Pretty cool, huh? Instagram also lets you post fifteen second videos to your timeline, and this is where Hyperlapse comes in. It can do slow motion films and other cool things to feed your page with content.

Speaking of content, let’s get to best practices, shall we? Instagram is all about the visuals, and people are hungry for them.

• You should typically post at least once a day (I totally fail at this). Every time you log on, take a look at your feed on the home screen. You’ll notice how massively and quickly it updates. Your pictures will get buried rather quickly if you don’t post them often.
• Don’t repeat a lot of the same content. People like fresh and new; keep your account’s feed fresh and new.
• Follow others! Everyone likes to network with the folks in their circles. Grow yours.
• Take part in monthly challenges. In February, there was the #AuthorLifeMonth challenge. I gained a number of new followers, and I got to know more writers (expanded my circle).
• Comment. Leave messages for others! It’s just good manners.
• Click the little heart icon when you really like something. This pushes the image to the trending (when you click on a hashtag, the first ten images or so that pop up) section of the hashtag’s feed, and it’s not difficult to do.

If you’re wanting to sell on Instagram, here’s a post that’ll help you with that.

Now, as a last word, let me throw this out there: Facebook bought Instagram a while back, and you can now set your ad to be placed over there, too. Double the marketing! Food for thought. *grin*

I hope you all learned something useful from me today. I had fun putting this together.

If you’d like to give me a follow on my blog, where I often post tips like the ones above, you can find me at http://jomichaels.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Thaddeus for having me over to entertain you!

Any questions? If so, pop them in the comments, and I’ll be around to answer.

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

Jo