This is the show where we answer your questions, the ones that are bothering you or that you want to explore.
Should you change your website name after a divorce and remarriage?
Question: Sarah asks, “I was recently divorced and remarried, and now I have a new last name. Should I change the name on my website and social media and on future books, or use my old name as a pen name going forward?”
Jim: Let’s start with the downsides of changing your name. First, you’ll confuse readers. I know that first hand. To all my friends, I’m Jim Rubart, but on my books it’s James L. Rubart, and that confusion is real. My first website was JimRubart.com. Now it’s JamesLRubart.com. I once posted on a Facebook forum as Jim Rubart, and somebody asked me if I was related to James L. Rubart.
Changing your name will confuse people.
Thomas: Changing your name also means your divorce and remarriage becomes a question you have to answer every time someone sees your old books next to your new ones on a table.
Keeping your name the same avoids that conversation altogether. Readers already have you filed under that first name, and there’s no need to change it.
Jim: It’s also a hassle, in both expense and time, to change your website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and everywhere else you have a presence.
Thomas: And you’ll dilute your Amazon rankings and your book rankings elsewhere. Changing your name essentially means creating a new pen name.
Your sales under the old name get separated from sales under the new one. Some tools combine them, but most don’t, so the reputation you’ve built starts over from scratch.
We’re not big fans of changing your name, but there is an upside. It could make your new husband happy to see his name on your books. We’re not marriage counselors, and we’re not here to tell you what to do in your marriage, especially since I’ve been married for exactly zero days.
You can still do it, and I know people who have. There’s a politician here in Texas who got married three or four times. Her husbands kept divorcing her or dying, and she added each new husband’s name to her last name until she had a string of five or six names.
Radio personalities made fun of her by reciting the whole string twice. She was known as the lady with all the last names.
Do you have to market yourself in one specific genre?
Question: Darren Sapp, who writes to us from Darren Sapp.com asks, “I’ve listened to every one of your podcasts and found value in all of them. Thanks. Do I have to market myself in a specific genre? I know not to say, quote, ‘I write everything.’ I understand the value of marketing to a specific genre, but is it okay to be general fiction, or must I narrow it down to, say, Christian YA steampunk romance?”
Thomas: Darren has a great sense of humor. Steampunk romance is the best of all the romances and the worst of all the steampunks.
The benefit of picking a specific genre is that you build a fan base of everyone who loves that genre. Don’t think of a genre as limiting, think of it as an opportunity.
I believe there aren’t enough books about dragons. If your book has dragons, especially as an audiobook, just tell me about it and I’ll probably listen. Dragon isn’t even a genre; it’s a genre within a genre.
Part of why I like Star Wars so much is that there’s always a big monster in every movie. So think about who you want to reach first. You can grow beyond your starting genre later, but that genre is the bullseye. Without a bullseye, everything else is harder.
Jim: Think of it this way: are you going to be more effective with a shotgun or a sniper rifle? Go with the sniper rifle. Drill down instead of spreading wide, and you’ll hit the target instead of just causing damage.
Should you serialize your novel as blog posts?
Question: This is a follow-up question on our episode titled What Should Novelists Blog About. Carrie Lynn Lewis asks, “I recently read one of AuthorMedia’s blog post, ‘Why Your Blog Should Be Your Book’s First Draft,’ and have been busy planning a campaign to serialize a story on one of my blogs. Have you changed your mind?”
Thomas: It depends on whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction.
Many New York Times bestselling nonfiction authors started as bloggers. They bundled their posts together, edited and tweaked them, and had a book. That’s what Michael Hyatt did. If you read his blog and his book, they’re suspiciously similar. That’s not cheating, that’s smart marketing. Hyatt knew which posts were most popular, meaning they answered readers’ questions and met their needs best, so he had a guaranteed winner by starting with his blog posts.
The problem is that doesn’t work for fiction. No one wants to read your story in serialized form. Although, Just because it hasn’t worked for the thousands of authors who’ve tried doesn’t mean it won’t work for you, so you could be the first to make it through.
The one place I have seen this work is as a podcast, releasing each chapter as an episode or an audiobook, sometimes called a podiobook. That’s been very successful for some authors, some have even made the New York Times bestseller list with that strategy. If you’re a podcast listener, that might be a good fit for you.
Should you tell readers you wrote your book during NaNoWriMo?
Question: This question comes from Juliana Barnet. She says, “Hi, I’m enjoying your podcast, What suggestions do you have for novelists who wrote their first draft within NaNoWriMo. In regard to using that for marketing, might there be ways of connecting, doing outreach, and so on, based on having a NaNo origin?”
Jim: Yes and no. No, because you don’t want to publicize to readers that you wrote it during NaNoWriMo. Since it’s done so quickly, readers might wonder if the book was just thrown together, and many won’t even know what NaNoWriMo is, so it carries no cachet with them.
Where it can help is connecting with other writers who did their first draft the same way. There’s a real “you did 50,000 words in a month too?” bond that can form relationships. But for reaching readers, I’d say no.
Thomas: Most readers aren’t drawn in by “I wrote this book in 30 days. It was a furious, exhausting binge.” That doesn’t sell the book.
Jim and I have author friends, some very successful, who do NaNoWriMo but never tell anyone. The fact that a book was drafted in 30 days isn’t a marketing point, it’s something they keep to themselves.
A lot of NaNo writers also make the mistake of thinking their book is ready to sell right after November. In reality it needs edit after edit, then professional editing on top of that.
Some of my agent friends cringe every December because they get a flood of copy-paste manuscripts from NaNoWriMo. The event doesn’t have a great reputation for quality, since the goal is speed, not quality, so editors and agents often send those manuscripts straight to the trash without reading them.
I’m a big believer in NaNoWriMo itself, but it’s not useful for marketing. Readers aren’t looking for NaNoWriMo books, unless they’re NaNoWriMo writers themselves.
How do you reach out to a well-connected author contact without asking for too much?
Question: Christy Esmahan asks, “A friend gave me the name of her distant cousin, who is multi-published, as a possible contact. I’d like to get in touch with this cousin to see if she can help me, but I’m not sure what to ask her. Should I ask her to read my book, or ask for a review? I really don’t want to waste an opportunity to have someone help me by asking too much or too little.”
Jim: Great question, because in publishing you’re always running into “I know somebody” or “you ought to contact them.”
First, ask your friend how close she is to this distant cousin, what her personality is like, and whether she’d give you an introduction. They gave you a name, but would they grease the skids with an intro? That’s the first step.
Second, in any relationship, especially one where you’re asking someone in publishing for a favor, don’t ask for a commitment the first time out. You’re dating, getting to know each other, building a relationship.
Thomas: I want to underline this. If you want to get wheat out of a field, you have to put wheat into the field first. You can’t walk up to a barren field and ask where your food is. If you want heat out of a fire, you have to put heat into the fire first.
Your first ask might just be, “Can I buy you coffee?” You want to build the relationship. If you go straight to asking people for things, you’re essentially a beggar, and that’s not attractive. You won’t get the big favors that way.
Think about who you go out of your way to help. Is it strangers who contact you out of the blue, or people you’ve gotten to know over time, people who’ve done favors for you? I’m not saying you get to know someone just to get something from them. Treat people genuinely. If you’re mean or obnoxious, people won’t go out of their way to help you.
Our episode called The Secret to Getting People to Love You. James L. Rubart might be the best I’ve seen in publishing at this. Everyone loves him.
Jim: Finally, invest in this person. Before you contact her, buy her book and read it. That gives you a genuine connection point, since you’ve invested some of your own money in her, and it gives you something to start the conversation from.
