Innuendo and a teaser

Something I never considered when choosing a name for this book was that I'd be listed among sex instruction manuals and religious manifestos. My only thought back then was that a little innuendo might make for a nice catchy title, a bit of titular wording to attract people's attention.  But when the book was first listed on Amazon and I gave people the title to look it up, they had to scroll through several pages of sex instruction manuals, S & M books, or texts on Mother Theresa before they got to The Missionary Position.

I'm happy to report as of today, however, that when I typed in "The Missionary Position" in Amazon's search box, my book came up number SIX! Mother Theresa is still on top (as she probably should be), but I've knocked the sex books down the list. I'm feeling pretty good about that. Sex is a hard genre to compete against when mine is admittedly a very small niche market of pulp-styled historical adventure fiction.

Now for a little teaser...I've got a number of sequels and prequels lined up for The Missionary Position. A couple have basic outlines already done, and I've got a number of ideas for the rest. One in fact is about a third written. What's my point in telling you this? All have the same innuendo style of titling as TMP. Should I veer away from this? I don't know. From a marketing standpoint I like innuendo, but it comes with a twist. By default of how I title my books I'll continue to get listed with books outside my genre if someone just types in their names. But I think it works. We'll see.

This is my first foray into indie publishing, and I've got a long way to go before I understand the pros and cons of it all. And truth be told, this genre represents only one of a couple others I'd like to publish in. Genres where innuendo titles won't necessarily come into play. For instance, I've had a novel written in the suspense-thriller genre for a couple years now, but I need to find some reliable editors and beta readers to take a look at it before I'll be comfortable putting it out into the world. The book sort of fell off my radar as I've worked these past couple years on finishing my Masters. I think it's a good read, but the longer I wait to get it ready for publication the more work it'll require to go back and update it.

Why? Well, I began writing it in 2007, and finished the first draft sometime in 2008. Think about the technology changes that have occurred since then. Some of my characters were using PDAs.

PDAs! Remember those?

Exactly.

Covers are tough

I’m an indie author, which to the uninitiated basically means I have much fewer resources at my fingertips than legacy house authors do to put a book together. For an author, the process is relatively straightforward. First, write a good story. Second, kill your babies (edit). Third, send it off to your betas (test readers) for feedback. Fourth, take the inputs that work and redo it. There’s more to it, but you get the gist.

Here’s the deal, though. As an indie author, I’m also an indie publisher. So after I take off my author’s hat, I have to put on my marketer’s hat, my graphic designer’s hat, my formatter’s hat (to make the book work on various e-reader platforms and for print), and so on, and so on. Much of the formatting stuff really isn’t that difficult, but when it comes to the blurb on the back of a book that sells it to the reader and the actual cover of the book, things get tough…and quick.

Collectively, the blurb and cover are your two most important tools to attracting readers. These are the first two things a reader will see when perusing the shelves of a bookstore, or, as is the case with me, the book pages of Amazon, B & N, or Smashwords. [NOTE: I’ll be posting The Missionary Position to the latter two in the next week or so…after I finish a test and paper for grad school.] As such, it is important to get these just right. Fail to do a good job and you risk missing readers who might actually love the story within the book, but for whatever reason were turned off of giving it a chance because there was nothing in the blurb or cover that appealed to them.

Legacy publishing houses have *teams* of folks whose fulltime jobs it is to put blurbs and cover designs together for their authors. These guys are professionals, trained in graphic arts, marketing and advertising. They’ve read studies of what gets reading consumers’ attention, and bend to make the books their selling appeal to their target demographic.

The indie author has none of this. At best, we can only guess at what a potential reader would like. For me, I wrote a blurb and produced a cover that would appeal to me if I were the one searching for a good fun read. I think the target audience for TMP is probably someone who shares a similar inclination towards historical pulp-styled adventure fiction as I do. In that vein, I felt my cover had to reflect some of the old-school cover art from similar texts sold 'back in the day'.

That said, the cover was still only designed by THIS guy (two awkward thumbs pointing in my direction), a NON-graphic artist who grew up in the days when Atari was the standard bearer for graphics. That probably makes me a bit clumsy with what I can produce for covers, but all in all I think it came out okay. After all, at the end of the day my goal is really just to create a world for my readers that is not their own where they can sit back and temporarily shut down the worry centers in their brains; a place they can disappear into, even if only for a couple hours at a time.

I would like to have readers’ opinions, however, on the cover work as this might affect future iterations of the book and others down the line. Thanks.