Category Archives: Audience

The Genesis of the Elephant

In the six years since I created Elephant’s Bookshelf Press, I’ve seen my personal writing time winnow down to a dribble.

I’m not making excuses. I chose to focus my creative time on publishing.

This year, however, that has changed. I’ve been working on two different writing projects and one major edit/revamp effort, too. In a sense, I have spawned a similar problem. Once again, I have taken large bites and tried to chew too quickly.

So, with the second quarter of the year a little past midway, I’m slowing things down a little. On the bright side, you’ll probably see more of me on the blog this way.

I want to talk about our genesis. Think of it as a “why we exist” post.

In the beginning was the word… and the word was “elephant.”

When I was a small child, I fell in love with elephants. When I learned to talk, and people asked my name, I would say, “Elephant.” I didn’t have a big nose. I was possibly small for my age, but the name wasn’t intentionally ironic.

I simply loved elephants.

As the son of a scientist who worked at perhaps the premier research laboratory of its day, I grew up among books and learning and smart-ass older brothers. Eventually a smart-ass sister would enter the mix, too. I enjoyed educational experiences that I only learned to fully appreciate years later.

And there were lots of elephants. Stuffed. On the pages of books. (I had a wonderful collection of Babar books, and many of the volumes are in my attic.)

My grandfather bought me a Dumbo that I played with so much his felt wore off, and he eventually wore a baseball-playing elephant shirt that I’d outgrown. My mother even created an elephant pillow that my daughter now sleeps on or cuddles depending on where her dreams take her in the night.

I grew up among loving parents and loving extended family members. We played together (lots of Wiffleball), prayed together, and stayed together. When sad or bad things happened, we got closer. Still do.

As genesis stories go, it’s not much. Just another happy kid from a privileged upbringing with lots of books in an unfair world.

My biggest challenges growing up, I realize now, were related to ambitions. All I wanted to do was write or play baseball.

As hard as I tried, I simply didn’t have the skills to reach the major leagues as a ballplayer. The writing came more naturally.

I’m fortunate that in my adulthood, my ambitions of making a living as a writer never left me, and I should feel proud that I’ve been living my dream of being paid to write. I do. But…

But like most dreams, they’re not quite what you expect. The nightmares are rarely as harrowing as they seem at the time. And the “normal” dreams carry more portent and potential than we might recognize.

Back to Elephant’s Bookshelf Press…

Assuming some of the readers here are friends I’ve made at AgentQuery Connect, you’ve probably heard this before, but I’ll share it anyway.

EBP arose out of e-conversations between several of my fellow moderators at AQC. We decided in 2011 that we wanted to find out what the whole e-publishing revolution was about. And while some of us had gained agents, many of us were finding the reception to our queries not so encouraging.

I couldn’t tell you when I last sent a query to an agent. Struggling with perfectionism, I was still plugging in the electrodes on my moribund manuscript waiting for lightning to strike so I could cry out, “It’s alive! Alive!”

So, I was happy to volunteer to lead the effort that became Spring Fevers, the first anthology from Elephant’s Bookshelf Press.

Initially, it was to be an e-book only, but we decided a few weeks after initially publishing that it would be fun to have a paperback.

I can’t remember which came first, the decision to publish a paperback or the decision to publish a second title, The Fall. Either way, I’d bought myself several ISBNs because I had already decided that mine would not be a one-book adventure.

Unbeknownst to me, I was developing new ambitions.

You see, Elephant’s Bookshelf Press was borne from a desire to help other writers. We wanted a way to share our stories, literally and figuratively. I built a platform, and initially I wasn’t fully aware of what that would mean.

Starting in 2015, but especially last year, I’ve spent a lot more time developing systems for EBP and determining what new products we can create. I’ve looked to develop new services for writers, not just to help them as writers, but also because it’s abundantly clear to me that being a writer in the twenty-first century is not simply about writing.

It’s about creating.

Creating books, sure. Creating websites. Creating blogs. Creating courses, perhaps. Creating partnerships. Creating relationships with readers.

Creating an audience.

Sharing and amplifying a voice.

It has been slow going. Mostly because I haven’t always understood what EBP is really about.

I know what we do: we publish books.

But why?

At Elephant’s Bookshelf Press, we love stories. We love telling them. We love hearing them. We love sharing them.

Stories are as old as humanity.

In the beginning, God snapped a finger and blessed a walking ape with an extra sense of self and a new level of curiosity. That ape started thinking in stories.

Language evolved.

Soon, that imaginative ape attracted a similarly gifted mate, and so sparked humanity.

We’re attracted to authors who tell interesting stories and tell them in an engaging manner.

Like elephants, we tend to travel in herds; at EBP, we call them anthologies. We haven’t published an anthology in a couple years now, but we will in time.

Because Elephant’s Bookshelf Press isn’t just about selling books; it’s about helping authors meet and mingle with their audiences.

Not the end.

Questions for those who write for children

Lately, I’ve been working on a short novel. The best part about it is I know exactly who my ideal reader is, because I read to them every night.

The characters in this story, which I believe will be the beginning of a series, are third graders, just like my girls. We’re talking about a book that’ll probably have no more than 10,000 words. This is not a middle grade novel.

It’s not ready for prime time at all; I haven’t even finished the first draft, and I know I’ve created some tangents I’ll need to lop off before I’m done. But that’s part of the editing and revision process; I’m writing right now.

But I’m curious about what other writers out there have learned during this process.

How have you determined whether you’re writing with the right language? I tend to write too old (probably related to my writing for a business audience for the past twenty-plus years).

Do you test with children?

Do you share with other parents?

How do you find these things out for yourself?

If you have thoughts or suggestions, feel free to comment here. Or send an email to me at matt@elephantsbookshelfpress.com.

And if anyone’s interested, I’m putting together an early readers’ team for these books. I’m very much at the early stage of this, but I’ll definitely give you free copies of the book when it’s ready.

A few minutes with Jean Oram, author of The Wedding Plan

One of the many wonderful writers I have met at AgentQuery Connect is Jean Oram, who is described as the “super moderator” of that writers’ community. In the fiction realm, she tends to write romance, and in the nonfiction area, she focuses on child’s play, with sites like It’s All Kid’s Play.

Jean’s latest new release, The Wedding Plan, is about a secret marriage between ex-lovers. But with their past and being stuck in a cabin out in the small, nosy little town of Blueberry Springs you can be sure their secrets will be difficult to keep! The Wedding Plan is from her new Veils and Vows series and can be found on all major online bookstores.

She also has been an important supporter of Elephant’s Bookshelf Press since its beginning and served as copy editor of our best-selling anthology, The Fall. For this interview, we talked about marketing and her approach to building her audience.

Do you have a mailing list and newsletter?

I sure do!

How often do you send anything to your mailing list?

It depends on a lot of different things, but typically I try to reach out to my subscribers every 4-6 weeks so they don’t forget who I am. 😉 It has to be meaningful though—I never want to annoy my subscribers.

Do you have a blog?

Yes.

How often do you post on your blog?

That, like my newsletter, depends on what’s going on. My blog is a place for my readers to find updated news, items of interest, giveaway entry forms, and the like. Sometimes there will be four posts in a week, sometimes nothing for 6-8 weeks.

What else do you do to market yourself as an author?

I try everything and an answer to this question could fill an entire book.

Basically, you never know what’s going to work for you, so you’ve got to experiment. Some things that haven’t worked for others work for me. Some things that work for others don’t work for me. Things that worked two years ago no longer have the same effect now. For example, doing a basic signed paperback giveaway used to create avid fans—like a 90 percent conversion rate. Now it’s more like 25 percent which makes it less financially feasible to use those kinds of giveaways in that manner. So, now I use few signed paperback giveaways and use them for different purposes. Why has it changed? Who knows, but if you’re going to keep selling your books, you have to stay hungry, stay smart ,and keep rolling with the punches.

Do you offer services like editing, query review, etc.?

I do not.

What do you consider success for your marketing efforts?

It really depends on what the purpose/goal on a particular marketing effort was. Recently, I wanted to increase the number of people in my reader group (on Facebook), and so I gave it a push from several different angles and met my numerical goal for new members. My next goal is to get them active, make friends with those members. After that will be to find rewarding ways for them to help me share the word about my books—that’s going to be a more difficult thing to measure. Because what are my goals? Visibility? Then having a few members share a post can help. If it’s getting sales directly from posts being shared…well, that’s more difficult to measure directly.

Thanks, Jean!

Jean Oram is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling romance author who loves making opposites attract in tear-jerking, laugh-out-loud romances set in small towns. She grew up in a town of 100 (cats and dogs not included) and owns one pair of high heels, which she has worn approximately three times in the past twenty years.

Her life contains an ongoing school theme, having grown up in an old school house, then becoming a ski instructor in the Canadian Rockies, then going on to marry a teacher and becoming a high school librarian. She now runs a fundraising committee for her daughter’s school.

Jean lives in Canada with her husband and two kids. She can often be found outdoors hiking up mountains, playing with kids on the soccer field, racing her dog on her bicycle–sometimes the dog lets her win–or inside writing her next novel.

Subscribe to Jean’s newsletter and get a taste of her small-town comedies that will have you laughing while falling in love. Get your FREE ebook by signing up here: www.JeanOram.com/FREEBOOK.

Rowing on the ocean

I was talking with a writer friend recently who was feeling down in the dumps. She had seen her first book published, but the experience with her publisher had not been ideal. Inadequate communication, a lack of a cohesive launch and promotion plan, and ultimately a company that fell apart left her fighting to regain her rights.

A prolific writer, she ended up self-publishing a book that had been committed but not yet published. But that hasn’t been exactly what she hoped for either. She learned what many of us discover: It’s difficult to shift gears from writer to publisher. Frankly, there are different skill sets involved, and it takes a while to develop new skills. Moreover, it’s frustrating, especially when you feel like you’ve failed somehow even though you grabbed hold of the brass ring.

Or to use a different metaphor, imagine discovering that you’ve been set adrift on a raft without a motor. You have a couple oars and you know the basics of setting the raft in motion, but it’s a big ocean and you have no sign of land on the horizon. In my friend’s case, she has some advantages. She has an agent who is providing guidance. For sure, it’s better to have direction and a compass than to attempt to rediscover how our ancestors navigated by the stars, but guidance is not propulsion. Wherever you are on the journey, one thing is clear: Publishing takes energy. Continue reading Rowing on the ocean

Revamping the Elephant’s Bookshelf Blogging Experience

Hey guys. It’s been a while, I know. Though it’s not obvious from the number of posts on this blog, I have been busy, and I believe the busy-ness will become evident very soon.

In a nutshell, I’ve spent the past several months working on expanding and developing Elephant’s Bookshelf Press, especially from a marketing perspective. What this means in the short term is that two books are being made ready for publication this year, with the possibility of a third also (though that one may run into 2018).

I’ve also been rethinking my blogging. Not just my schedule but also my purpose. Continue reading Revamping the Elephant’s Bookshelf Blogging Experience