A new venture into book marketing for me. The original of this was posted on Tiktok (here: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJvjm6LS ), but I uploaded it to YouTube too for accessibility. It’s a bit rough and ready, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. It was recorded using natural light and I need to have an alternative handy for darker days. I also need to see if I can have the captions running across the top or bottom rather than the middle of the screen, but I’m sure I can figure that out.
I’ll need to put up regular content if I’m to spark engagement and that means figuring out some headline topics to talk about (keeping it concise) but I’m hoping it will be worth it.
One of the issues I’ve had to think about since I decided to publish is that there are so many books self-published now that it is almost impossible to stand out in the crowd without a lot of luck. The way to get lucky is to work at it, to try and be seen by at least some people and catch their attention. My conviction has always been that there will be people interested in what I’m doing if I can manage to find them (and figure out ways for them to find me). I haven’t had much success with Amazon ads, and Tiktok is the main platform that I haven’t tried to work with. Like Amazon, it opens the route to the long tail.
Anne McCaffrey, best known for her stories of the dragonriders of Pern, wrote a SF short story called Dull Drums, first published in 1973 and included in her collection Get Off the Unicorn, published in paperback in the UK in 1979. The protagonist is Nora Fenn, who, as part of an undergraduate university class at some future institution, is part of a team cleared to erase private records from a massive database to clear computing space. The records included confidences and hopes and fears recorded because the recordings were confidential during the person’s lifetime plus 100 years.
Nora figures out the human dynamics behind the recordings and the way that they disclose,
The subtle change of fear and suspicion of … neighbours to fear and suspicion of of computer-based society: then a gradual acceptance of computer-assistance … It’s noticable because people began inputting their most deeply intimate secrets.
The story isn’t especially good, but that aspect of it has stuck with me since I read it, especially to the extent that it anticipated the rise of blogging and social media.
But.
I’ve spent the last few days watching TikTok and what struck me is that, whereas McCaffrey thought people would want to keep stuff secret, in fact a great many people are more than happy to share their most intimate inner-selves with untold numbers of strangers around the world. On the whole, I think that’s a good thing.
A couple of things, the first of which is written in the hope that the Google bot finds it and indexes it for the benefit of other writers; the second is a call for help.
I have a short story on the go at the moment, making its way towards first draft stage. It is based around a tarot reading using the Pamela Colman Smith deck, also known as the Rider-Waite deck. I couldn’t decide whether or not the names of tarot cards should be capitalised (I capitalised them in the rough draft but had a crisis of confidence when revising.) The only reference I could find was to the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) that says the names of cards should not be capitalised. But that refers to a standard pack and besides, whatever American editors think, CMOS is not the be all and end all of style especially for fiction written in the UK. So I sent a message to some editor friends:
I hope you don’t mind this random question, but it’s something that’s bugging me: the names of tarot cards – Hierophant, the Tower, Six of Wands, Five of Pentaclesetc.: Should they be capitalised? I think CMOS says not (for a standard pack of cards: queen of hearts, five of spades), but it doesn’t ‘look’ right. Context: a short story based around a tarot reading where the cards are named as they’re drawn..
One of the editors put the query onto a group chat. The unanimous verdict was Yes: the names of tarot cards should be capitalised. I received two substantive responses that say more or less the same thing:
My instinct would be to capitalise – they carry more socio-cultural and specific weight these days than playing cards do.
***
I’ve checked all my (many) Tarot books and they all cap the card names for both the major and minor arcana.
Some cap ‘the’ in the name; others don’t. I personally prefer the Tower to The Tower, but it’s a style choice for you and the author to make.
The minor arcana cards would also be capped: Six of Swords or (a/the) Three of Wands, etc.
The Tarot is not like a pack of playing cards – each card has a specific meaning or symbolism attached to it, so the names and suits take on extra importance in that regard. Unlike in a pack of playing cards where the name of the card is simply a description. At least, that’s my logic for why the card names are capped in Tarot.
So there you have it: should the names of tarot cards be capitalised? Yes they should.
***
The call for help.
I am grateful to every person who has bought or read a copy of one of my books, but my lovely readers remain a niche minority and I haven’t yet purchased my writing retreat in northern Portugal. I’ve written elsewhere about the greatest single thing that one needs to source and that is luck: marketing is a process of generating luck. When I started self-publishing, I thought about TikTok as a promotional tool. I started an account (link below) but haven’t done anything with it, partly because of concerns about the app itself.
In the past few days I’ve revisited the app (I had it disabled for a long time) and am actively considering how to use it. So, if anyone reads this who is or who knows a TikTok creator willing to guide me through stuff, please get in touch either in comments or through the email link in the sidebar (and yes, I know I need to update my profile on the app).
All quiet here because there hasn’t been much to report. The principal excitement was receiving my Flu and Covid booster vaccinations for the year and, let me tell you, the Pfizer Covid booster packed quite a punch. That was exactly a week ago and the feeling continues to linger a little.
Other odds and ends have included turning several kilos of damsons and plums into jam and looking out of the kitchen window at all the apples and wondering what to do with them. The shed has had a fresh coat of preservative ahead of winter, and we had a good visit to family in East Kilbride.
I continue to run, although I took time out after the vaccinations. I also now need to focus more on running during the day (because the nights are fair drawing in) and looking at clothing choices as the weather changes. I have no problem running at night, btw, except that Edinburgh’s roads and pavements are in such a state that the chances of injury increase markedly when you can’t see where you’re putting your feet.
Hmmm … am I a Star Wars character or a protagonist in my own right?
On the writing front, work continues on the stories that follow up/complete Coyote in the Corner and I really need to motivate myself to get cracking on that.
In the background, I have a side project of a Star Wars story that I’m going to work up into a novella at some point (although I could divorce it from Star Wars and make it a stand-alone novella free of Lucas/Disney copyright restrictions), an urban fantasy novel set in Edinburgh that has been on the back burner for a while, and I’ve had the first inklings of aspects of concluding the Sanctuary sequence of novels.
Above all, I’ve procrastinated by watching assorted stuff on TV. Notably, I’ve warmed a lot more to Ahsoka and, on a whim, rewatched Obi-Wan Kenobi. I originally found the latter disappointing, but it stood up well on a binge rewatch, albeit that it has issues with it’s core story. My earworms from Star Trek’s Subspace Rhapsody haven’t gone away.
On the tech front, all of my laptops are ancient and my habit is to use them until they stop working to get the most value out of them. The one in the shed is a 13-year-old Windows 7 machine that works but takes longer and longer to boot up. Unusually for me, I’m toying with replacing it with a reconditioned Macbook Air to get into the Apple ecosystem. My requirements are fairly minimal – I need a robust and reliable keyboard, I need to be able to load Office Home and Student onto it and I need it to work with Dropbox.
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