Keepers of Knowledge series is coming soon!

 

They who hold the knowledge keep the secrets.

After all, every secret needs a Keeper.

10 Authors, 10 Books, 10 Keepers, 1 Shared World

Welcome to Pyreshore, New Hampshire—a quaint coastal town with pristine landscaping, elegant architecture, attractive homes, and a robust economy. But Pyreshore has more to offer than meets the eye. It’s not a town any regular person would pay attention to. To most, Pyreshore is a dying, run down, former tourist community barely fit to even ignore.

Yet, beneath the wards that keep this gem hidden from the mundane world is a thriving community of supernaturals. But not just any supernatural beings. Pyreshore is home to The Keepers of Knowledge. A small organization charged with the vital task of authenticating and recording every major historical event and artifact that exists within supernatural occurrences. They are the librarians, record keepers, and museum curators for all important things within the supernatural community.

One member from each race along with their families, heirs, and successor live there with a small cluster of others that both help run the town as well has have special abilities they lend to the Keepers. So, when one of the Keepers dies, a Mimic, it becomes apparent to The High Counsel that much of the Mimic’s histories may be lost with him. That’s when they decide it’s time to give every supernatural race a second keeper.

The Keepers of Knowledge Series is a shared world paranormal book series. Official cover reveals will be coming soon! Watch out for every book as they release!

Dec 21 - The FREE promotional novella

Jan 4 - R.J. Lloyd

Jan 18 - B.K. Rae

Feb 1 - Brandy Nacole

Feb 15 - S.F. Benson

Mar 1 - Bridgette O'Hare

Mar 15 - Catherine Stine

Mar 29 - M.R. Polish

Apr 12 - Christine Rains

Apr 26 - Michael J. Rinna

May 10 - S.W. Walters

Keep up to date on all the Keeper news on Facebook.

I'm so excited to be a part of this project. We have awesome authors, and everything is coming together wonderfully. I'm nearly done the first draft of my book, Curse of the Hunted. My protagonist is a Sphynx and the story has a paranormal cozy mystery feel. The covers you see in the promo image aren't the actual covers, but I still think they're really cool!

Wicked Wednesday - reviewing the numbers

I always find it interesting to hear how other authors are doing on social media. Do they focus on one or two sites or a bunch of them? How many hours do they put in? What are their marketing tactics? To give you an idea of what I do, here are my numbers from last year.

Start of 2015:
Facebook: 332
Twitter: 4796
Blog: 523 (GFC)
Newsletter: 18

Last year, I had my first books published with my publisher. This brought me to a new audience. Did it help on social media? I don't know. I'll break each of the four main tools I use down individually.

End of 2015:
Facebook: 409

I don't use Facebook (FB) much for promoting. I post maybe three times a week on my author page. (Mostly I use my personal page to put up pictures of my kid and cat!) I'm not a big fan of FB. My numbers did go up. They rose with my giveaways at the beginning of 2015 when one of the entries was to like my page.

Twitter: 6101

I made the most changes to how I handle Twitter. I promote my books less - only two or three times a day. I used to do it at least a half dozen times. I interact with people more, talking about all sorts of things beyond books. This has helped and has made Twitter more enjoyable to me. I unfollowed all the inactive followers, the spammers, the bots, and the ones just selling stuff. I'm following less people than are following me.

Blog: 522

I always say my blog is my number one tool. I still believe it even though it doesn't seem the number has changed much at all. I can only go by the number on GFC. It has gone up to 528 and dropped to 519 over the year. It's stable. I do know I have new readers following in other ways because they comment. Sometimes people will do so on the blog, but they also email and comment via Twitter or Goodreads. I always do my best to return comments on the blogs of people who comment on mine.

Newsletter: 156

This is the biggest jump. The one that made me most excited. I know exactly where over 120 of these new subscribers came from too. Back in September, the marvelous Graeme Ing posted 35 free ebooks on his blog and the response was astounding. Here's the post in case you want to get yourself some awesome free ebooks! Within the first week, I had over 50 new subscribers. If you have a newsletter, you know it's super tough to get people to sign up for it. I offer a free ebook to new subscribers, but that alone didn't draw in a lot of readers. Graeme's post was the key.

My 2015 review and sales numbers were, well, not even worth reporting. Not a good year. Except I still don't know how my Paramours series has done since they came out in the final quarter, and my publisher has no sales ratings on their site. That check will come to me in a few weeks.

2016 will be a fun year to watch the numbers. I hope to start releasing my newest series, Totem, and it will sing to the 13th Floor fans. (I do wish I kept track of my numbers in 2013 when I was releasing those books!) I'm going to try a few different marketing strategies that don't involve me wearing myself down every time I release one of the books.

Do you keep track of your numbers? What tactics do you use for your social media tools?

March Madness at Untethered Realms

March Madness! Untethered Realms is pleased to be hosting a monthly game on their Facebook page. Multiple entries are permitted. Keep it PG. The winner will be decided by the authors of Untethered Realms. This month's prize: an ebook copy of Boomtown Craze by M. Pax.

We’re looking for crazy opposites – ie, rocks that tickle, pretty little flowers that eat people. The winner will be the most creative combo you come up with. What crazy combos have you’ve got?

Only ten days until the official release of 1304 - The Harbinger.

W4WS Facebook Page Now Open To The Public

W4WS Now Open To The General Public! 

W4WS has been very successful. So much so that many people have asked if they can post links to their books on the W4WS Facebook Page. So we’ve decided to open it up for anyone and everyone the first ten days of March and see what happens. If it works out, then we can repeat this every month moving forward. No sense letting the W4WS FB page lay idle for all but a few days each month. But please, no spamming!

Social media and time

I've been doing some research on social media lately and how to use it to my advantage without giving up too much more of my free time. I already put a lot of time into my blog and connecting with people through here. For me, this has been the most effective tool in making connections.

I have a Facebook account, but it's my personal account. I check it twice, maybe three times a day. It's mostly for keeping in contact with friends and family, and bragging about my kid. I'm planning to make one specifically for Christine Rains the Writer. I haven't decided if it's best to create a fan page or open a new account for this purpose. Have any of you had the experience of both? And if so, what's your preference? If you use Facebook at all, how often do you check fan pages as compared to accounts?

I don't have a Twitter account. I'm going to start one when I open the new Facebook account. I was never a fan of Twitter, but I do admit that it has a large following and it would be beneficial for me. I've read in a few places that for Twitter to be an effective marketing tool, you have to tweet at least 25 times a day, but no more than 35 or else people will get annoyed. That's a lot. I don't have the time to do it either. For those of you that use Twitter, have you found it helpful in marketing yourself?

I have LinkedIn and Google+ accounts, but I rarely use them. I really like Goodreads, but I haven't done any promoting on there. I just like seeing what people are reading and their reviews. I have no interest in MySpace. My husband suggested Digg (a social news website). He works with marketing at his company and Digg is growing.

Even if I signed up with various sites, I don't have the time to maintain them. I considered a social media management site like Hootsuite. I'm afraid that it might make it all more complicated. Does anyone use any type of social media management systems? If you do, what has your experience been like?

I realize it's important to get your name out there. There are a lot of opportunities to do so on the internet, but it takes time. Time that I don't have. Time I should be writing. And the most important thing I need to be doing as a writer is writing.

I'd also like to give a big thank you to Tara Tyler for awarding me the One Lovely Blog Award. She passed it on in such a clever way too!