Kathleen Kaiser discusses book marketing and the importance of joining writing communities for support and advice. Kathleen shared her experiences in the publishing industry and warned about scammers.
Key Points
- Kathleen emphasizes the importance of building a community and network in the writing industry
- Kathleen discusses the issue of scammers in the publishing industry and how WPN tries to alert members about them, as well as her experience helping someone ripped off by a hybrid publisher
- Kathleen emphasizes the importance of joining a community like WPN for support and advice in navigating the constantly changing publishing industry.
I’m here today with book marketing extraordinaire, President of Kathleen Kaisers and Associates, the Southern California Book Publicists’ Book Publicist of the Year for 2016, and President of the Writers and Publishers Network. Kathleen Kaiser, welcome.
Kathleen: Thank you, Lisa. I’m glad to be here. All those titles sound daunting.
Lisa: I know you have a very long and illustrious career in publicity for rock and roll and tech and all sorts of industries all over the world. And I encourage people to go on your website and read about that. But I was wondering if you would share how you got into the book marketing world.
Kathleen: I always knew I’d end the last part of my life. The last stage was going to be writing books, and I started on this journey in my fifties researching an idea I had for a book. And then in 1998, I was in my forties. 1998, I thought I had my first draft done. So I went to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference.
And I encourage anybody that can go to a conference, go to it because you’ll never believe how nice the people are, everybody you meet and the network you build. But I went there and I went into something called the Pirate sessions, which was from 9:00 at night till whenever it ended in two or three in the morning sometimes. Shelly Lowenkopf, the legendary west coast editor, when we used to have real publishing companies out here. And he’s written God so many books. He started in the 1950s writing pulp fiction. But he’s an amazing man and he’s an executive editor. And I sat down with my five pages and I said, Well, listen to a couple of people, and then I’ll read my pages.
And I sat in the back, Well, five days later, I’m still sitting in the back with my pages because I suddenly realized I had been writing for years, I was a journalist. I had written four books that had been published, but they were all nonfiction. And I realized listening to Shelly, I had no idea what I was doing with fiction, that there was a whole other language in terms and stuff.
So I got to know him and he introduced me to other people. And then in 2000, I was really busy producing things all over the world with conferences because I was doing technology, trade shows and conferences then and producing. And I had my own team. I had my own company. Well, Kathleen Kaiser and Associates has been around for 31 years now.
I started it in 1993, but as a emerging technology thing. But I realized I’m going to be winding down here a bit and it’s time to start really getting that book written and finished. I published it in 2009. I self-published it and I did everything wrong that you could do to promote a book. And having spent 50 years as a publicist and marketer, I couldn’t believe how stupid I was.
So I spent the next two years getting to know people, people that I knew who had introduced me to other people I knew. I have a question about this. You know, I have a question about that. What is really the value of e-books in da da da da da da? And I sort of went on a research project to bring myself up to speed, because luckily, when I was in tech for 20 years, I was writing the desktop publishing revolution into the internet revolution.
So I understood all the technology. I just didn’t know where the tools that I’d been using. I mean, since my Beatle fan club at 16, when you’re doing five part labels, you know, and typing up labels to stick on envelopes all the way to now everything’s on email and social media. So that was that was my journey.
And a dear friend who I’d known for a long time, Ivor Davis, had his book coming out in 2014 on The Beatles because he toured with them in 64. He was the only British journalist with them for the whole tour. He was on the plane with them, in the hotels with them, everything, and he asked me to do the PR and I sort of jumped in and said, okay, I can do this.
I had been doing a little PR and a few other things before then with authors and a lot of nonprofits. I’d been focusing on arts, nonprofit, but I said, I really like this. This is fun. So from him, other people came, and now that’s what I do full time happy, helping other authors get their books promoted.
Watching the evolution since 2009 till today, you know nothing’s the same.
You know, Amazon even has changed and they’re like, they stay with the clunkier software there is until it absolutely breaks. Well, they finally gave up on that stupid mobi that they were making Kindle and that was the worst program in the world and software application.
And now they use epub like everybody else. They sort of snuck that in without much fanfare that hello, we were a failure, but it happened. But in getting to know that what I like to do is a I found that the books that I want to promote, books I love.And if I’m not passionate about the book, I can’t do it.
So I’ve really found I go, I’m big on memoirs, I’m big on historical fiction. I love to work with those kind of books because I love to hear people’s stories. And I also love history and then mysteries, especially like detective mysteries and legal thrillers. Those are the areas that I think I excel at because I love those.
That’s what I read. I don’t do political nonfiction, but I read way too much of it. But I’m kind of a news junkie on part time, but I, I find people that are writing things and I won’t take on a client till I’ve read their whole manuscript and review it and make sure it’s something I want.
I know I can help them with because if I can’t help them, I’m not going to take their money. It’s a problem. And so then we put together a whole scope of how we’re going to market it. And if they’ve had other books out, we put together e-book promotion campaigns before the launch. We do a lot of different things.
We’ve found some really great vendors over the last five years that we get really good results from.
Lisa: Great. So I went to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in the nineties as well, Fortunately, because I was living in San Luis Obispo at the time, but my parents still lived in Santa Barbara, so I was able to stay there and attend the conference. But while I was living in San Luis Obispo in the nineties, I belong to a group called the NightWriters and I guess it’s because a majority of the people had their day jobs and they wrote at night.
I guess that was the concept when it was founded, although there was a lot of people who did come into the organization who were fulltime writers, whether, you know, nonfiction or journalists and that kind of thing. But it was good because we we would meet once a month and have a speaker and we would have breakout critique groups that met at people’s houses.
Back in those days, I don’t know what that organization’s doing these days, but I know that when I moved back to Santa Barbara, I wanted to find something like that because I liked that feeling of associating with other writers and being able to talk about kind of that unique perspective that we have and so besides attending the writers conference. I know you’re also on the board of IWOSC the Independent writers of Southern California, but I want to talk about other groups that have helped you along the way.
Kathleen: I’d say the number one group that helped me the most before I published my book was in late 2008. I joined the Ventura County Writers Club, which has been around since 1935, and they had monthly meetings and they had critique groups.
So I joined a critique group. First group didn’t get along with well, they didn’t believe in Oxford commas. I said, That’s what you have to do for publishing. So, yes. I said, Okay, you guys really don’t know anything about publishing. At least I knew that. So I found another group that was formed in very heavy testosterone Men and me, and I’m writing a woman’s Point of view book and they’re all off on an action adventure and all this other junk.
But it was really interesting to debate with our on different points. Women really think like this, you know, you know and when they would we be critiquing their stuff. It’s like I’ve never heard a woman say that you know, that was they were looking they were writing women as if they were male lite or something. That was my term. I came up with it, but that helped me a great deal and it introduced me to other people.
And as usual, I volunteered to help them with their PR. They had no idea how to write a press release, and I’ve been writing press releases since 1969. So I went and then I end up on the board and then I end up president.
But it really helped me meet local writers, and that’s when I got into IWOSC and I met Flo Salomon was the president, and she just won a lifetime achievement award from Book Fest. And she’s amazing. She has been a book publishers her entire career and the last like 15 years. She’s now just doing what she loves best, which is copyediting. She calls herself the woman with the red pencil. Now it’s the red type, red font, but she does it and she’s great. I gave her one book Ivor’s books he was working on. He thought it had been edited perfectly. I realized it hadn’t been. I mean, I’m not an editor, but I can read something and when I see mistakes.
She found over 800 mistakes in the supposedly perfectly edited book. Those are the kind of people that you get to meet. And so I love turning people on to them. It’s like, you know, I like what you’ve done here, but this isn’t right. It’s got to get cleaned up a bit. I try to be gracious, and I’m not an editor.
I totally admit that I have dyslexia for being a writer. That’s always fun, too. I could never be an editor because of that. I would be too concerned. I’m making mistakes and would make even more mistakes. But it’s been a really great journey. And this is where I always said I’d end up my life and this is where I am.
It’s my third industry as far as I’m concerned. And because I did 16 years in rock and roll and 20 years in technology, and then during the eighties, I spent four years in New York writing and then floated around doing, producing some international conferences every month. But I really got into the conference and trade show business in the late 80s, and that took me till when everything crashed and exploded and my partners and I decided we were going to close that venture we were doing together.
And I just moved forward on my own with my own company. I had ten employees, but I discovered I could save $3,500 a month in rent by sending them home, giving them a computer, a printer, paying for their Internet access and a phone line in 1997 and close the office because that $3,500 was coming from my money and we were producing paperless trade shows, you know, promoting how to have the paperless office. I put it into action.
Lisa: Wow, you are really ahead of your time because you started something that, you know, 23 years later just blew up very ahead of your time.
Kathleen: Thank you. You know, the funny thing is, though, what I learned from that and I’m seeing it now with what’s happened because of COVID, there are people that can work alone at home and get a lot done. And there are people that really want that watercooler. Want the interaction with people. And if they don’t do well at home.
Lisa: They want to go someplace else. They don’t want to work in their home. My sister does that. Her work said they don’t have room for employees where she works. So instead of working at home, she drives down the street and around the corner to my mom’s house and uses my mom’s home office as her office.
Kathleen: Wow. So she had to be somewhere out of her house. Yeah, I have made my whole home circle around the fact that I’m here 95% of the time. So everything is supportive of me. Whatever I’m doing here.
Lisa: Yes. And I know writers who do the same thing,they actually rent a room where they can go and do their writing off away from their home.
Kathleen: Well, you each have to do what works for you. You know, I like being in my house. I love it. So I actually turn the master bedroom into a library office because it has a great view of a mountain in the backyard. And I can sit here and look at my mountain instead of staring at a wall in my office.
So I just flipped everything on its head. But, you know, you have to find what is right for you. And I think building a community and making contacts. Do you know Sheila Lowe? She’s the handwriting forensic handwriting expert who’s written God like 30 books or something. She has the Claudia Rose series. She’s like a sleuth who uses forensic handwriting to solve mysteries.
Yeah. Sheila has put together an amazing network of people. I just went to the launch of her new memoir. She’s finally written. Her daughter was murdered in 2000, and she’s finally been able to write about it. But I went to the launch of it last week. But she has really put together a whole network of other writers because we’re really not competitors.
Nobody’s telling your story. Nobody’s going to steal your story. They have their own stories to tell. Okay, Stealing stories is the movie business. You’re not in that. You’re in the book business. And what she’s done is get like minded people and puts together. So when she has something five or six other writers are they’re all signing books and selling their books and enlarging their network and having people sign up to get their newsletters.
Sheila puts out a newsletter once or twice a month that is just amazing. And she’s put together over the last 15 years an amazing newsletter list, and she announces the new book. She announces other people’s books. You know, she really promotes that. She promotes the the world of writers. And I think more of us need to do that.
It’s something like with the Writers and Publishers Network. I really like it because we try to be resource driven because writing is a lonely business. I mean, you hear that over and over, but it really is unless you’re collaborating with somebody, you’re alone at the keyboard, but you need to know about who are whose. You know, if you’re going to self-publish, who’s really a reliable, maybe high bread publisher or a designer or someone who can upload all your thing and set up all of your accounts, what to do with this and that.
That’s what we are, how to market. I mean, as far as I’m concerned that 50% of writing a book is marketing it, because you can write the book and you can get it up on Amazon, who’s going to know it if you don’t market it? And, you know, and that’s part of like with the Writers and Publishers Network, we have our monthly newsletter, which gives you hints from some top people in the industry we have as columnists, some on grammar and different things.
Bobbi Christmas is fabulous at that. Penny Sansevieri has her column on marketing. Penney’s, one of the top marketers. Jay Hartman has just left a publishing firm starting another one. But he’s been a poet. I’ve been a publisher for about 15 years, so he has the publisher’s perspective. And then for members of the Writers and Publishers Network, we have the market update, which I think is an incredibly valuable resource because we tell you here’s seven or eight new agents that are looking for clients in these categories.
We give you all kinds of tips on what’s really going on inside the business. Here is the latest stupid thing Amazon’s done. You know, it’s about how to work around it. Well, it’s true. Because they’re always doing something dumb, but they just keep it’s like I really hate tech guys who can’t leave a great website alone. They’ve got to screw with it so that you can’t use it.
You know, it’s like you’re on a continual learning curve. I actually hit a point about a year and a half ago and said, No more new applications. I’m learning nothing else because I have been learning software since 1985. I think I’ve maxed out, you know, I can play around in a few things, but how many more new things do I really need to learn at this point?
And what I’ve decided? I just hire people in their thirties and forties, you know, and they do that for me. And it works out because I know what my strengths are and that’s what I focus on and that’s what I think any writer needs to know, right. What’s your strengths? What do you have a passion about?
Because if you don’t have a passion about what you’re writing, it’s going to show. It’s going to show in the writing, be it fiction or nonfiction. The passion for the subject matter is what’s important. And getting that message out to people and one of the best ways, like you said, is critique groups.
You can see if you’re hitting them or not. You know, when you read the pages or if you guys, critique in advance and then review it, you’ll know if you’re hitting a spot or not. It’s like when I go back to that group I had with before men, there would be times I’d read some and it was like they were knocked out because it was like I said, okay, I got my message across here, you know, I got my message.
And other times they didn’t get it at all. But so it made me really think, well, there will be men that read this. Even though they’re only 20% of the book buying market, I would think one of them or two of them might pick it up someday. And it’s good to have that other perspective because writing is a growing process.
You’re constantly growing and learning and getting better at it. I don’t know one, and I now, because I used to produce the 805 Writers Conference, I was speaking with New York Times bestselling authors that we’d have as speakers. And there’s not one of them who doesn’t think their first two or three books were junk, even though some of them were bestsellers.
They are such better writers after a while and it’s that constantly growing because writing’s an art. There isn’t a painter that paints immediately a Picasso quality picture.
It’s development. The other advice I give to writers and it’s what helped me a lot in the when I was been writing throughout my life, write articles, submit articles to magazines, submit articles. If you’re a mystery writer, there’s mystery magazines, come up with some short stories, do stuff, get out there and put you’ve put yourself out there because a, if nothing else, it’s building you a reputation because you’ve been published somewhere. Even if it was a magazine and it’s establishing you as a legitimate writer.
Lisa: And also a great opportunity is that if anybody wants to write for our Writers and Publishers Network newsletter, there is a great audience for you. You want to connect with other writers, write an article or WPN.
Kathleen: Absolutely, because a lot of those articles are people just talking about their journey and what they’ve learned, and I think that so revising and if you go to writersandpublishersnetwork.com, you can sign up for the newsletter for free and just receive it every month.
Lisa: And you’ll receive two free ebooks as well.
Kathleen: Now we send out thousands of copies. We have a really good list, but it’s people that stick with us too. We have a very low unsubscribed rate, less than 5%.
Lisa: That’s great. And, you know, I remember when I first moved back to Santa Barbara, I was looking for my tribe and I went to the our local book and author festival. And I picked up a little brochure and thought I would contact this group called SPAWN, Small publishers, Writers, and Artists Network. And if anybody has heard of that. That is what is now Writers and Publishers Network. We had to kind of change that name and rebrand. And I think and that was after you took over, I believe you took over in leadership of the organization in 2014. Correct? And since then it’s really changed the website and made a lot of changes to the newsletter and it’s really grown and we’re continually offering new member benefits.
Kathleen: Oh, constantly. There’s nothings coming along and there are some consistent ones that are like, the Chicago Manual of Style, which is online. And it might be daunting, especially if you’re not very good at grammar, but, you know, doing something like that for a while we had a discount program to get Grammarly Pro, which I love. It’s in my emails, it’s on Facebook and everything I do, and it’s cleaning up my writing because sometimes you can put stuff on Facebook that makes no sense and you don’t want to do that if you’re promoting something, especially for a writer. So I’ve just sort of said, Well, I’ll just plug that into everything and do better.
But you when you have a group like Writers and Publishers Network, it’s there to support you. We really mean it. It’s like anybody who’s a member as President, they can email me and ask me questions. And often, you know, we have long emails or I’ll say, you know what? Why don’t you give me a call?
Let’s set a time to talk, because some of them are struggling with a problem or they’ve ran into trouble. I went through that last year with one person who was getting completely ripped off by this, supposed hybrid publisher. And because we put out scam alerts, that’s the other thing. Because there are so many scammers out there right now that are pretending to be publishers and doing this and doing that, and all of the creeps that were with Author Solutions, which was a complete boiler room con job they went and bought when they sort of got ran out of business, they went and bought iUniverse and some other ones and now they’ve got quote legitimacy and it’s the same scam they’re running. Once you get on their list, they call you daily trying to sell you something and emailing you. And it’s really a you know, we try to alert people of that, especially when they come up with a new incarnation. And that’s like whack a mole.
It’s so easy to get a new name and search out a new website and just be doing the same garbage or like I was talking about I’m going, do I really think I want to put the article in Writer’s Digest instead of the IBPA magazine. But I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I’m doing a case study on this couple that wrote three books and maybe gotten $40 from their publisher, where I know we sold over 400 e-books last December, and she claims there were three.
Lisa: Oh, wow.
Kathleen: Yeah. And she has total control over everything and they can’t get their rights back. She charged them to have the book design. She charged them to do everything. She takes a percentage of everything, and then she expects them to pay her to get their stuff back that they already paid for. And she has a contract that is complete garbage.
I can read contracts. I was part of the Society of Independent Show organizers in the nineties and I chaired the contract committee and I got to work with the top attorneys in the trade show industry. So I learned how to do contracts and I can read a contract. And I realized she had stolen this contract from someone.
And because I’m reading and suddenly other company names and initials are showing up. And she hadn’t even edited the contract correctly and she had stuff up on her website. If you’ve ever published something, you know, on Amazon, they ask if you want international exposure or different things, you just check a box. Okay. She had a huge long list of Amazon, UK, Amazon, Germany. She went on like she was doing all this stuff, setting all of this up for you. Barnes Noble’s here and dotted it. And it was like, Oh my God, this is like a complete con job. But the people who she had done this to that I know I’m working with them, they thought that was really fabulous.
She had all these connections and ways to do things and, it was just complete garbage. I don’t know. I don’t like people that scam people. I think it’s horrible to take advantage of people because just because they don’t know.
Lisa: And just knowing about these companies to avoid and I yeah, I hear about that all the time and things popping up and all the changes, even just changes in publishing, not necessarily, bad things or scams, but also just basic changes. Like you said mobi going away and epub becoming the the major. There’s people who don’t know about this thing. And so that’s why these communities are really helpful.
Is there any kind of last advice you would like to to impart?
Kathleen: Really think one thing that’ll help you the most is get out there and join something. The Writers and Publishers Network, when it was SPAWN, was created in 1995 or 96. I wasn’t a part of it then, but they created it because they saw the Internet was going to be. It’s like a national literary nonprofit.
So we have members all over the country. The board of directors is all over the country and it’s, you know, get with people so that you can learn and don’t be afraid of it, because there really are simple steps that you can take. Book marketing terrifies some people, but there really are simple ways you can start doing something and, you know, just sign up for the newsletter.
Look around, Google if there’s any writing groups in your town and see if you can join them. Because because if you join five other people in a critique group, they’ll probably know five other people who are doing it too. And you can say, I’m trying to learn about X, Y, Z, and they’ll they all know somebody who can help you, and that’s how you build a support network.