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Unique Marketing Strategies
Help M.J. Rose Keep Her Books on Top
An Exclusive Authorlink Interview
With M.J. Rose, author of
The Halo Effect (Mira, July 2004) July 2004
The Halo Effect Buy This Book
via Amazon.com M.J. Rose, well-known for her success as the self-published e-book author of
Lip Service (and later published by a major house), has now penned her fifth novel,
The Halo Effect葉his time with Mira (Harlequin).
The Halo Effect, first in a trilogy, is the titillating tale of New York sex therapist Dr. Morgan Snow, who becomes involved with Detective Noah Jordain in trying to catch the "Magdalene Murderer," a serial killer who targets prostitutes. Worried that her patient is the killer's next victim, Morgan goes undercover as a call girl to do her own sleuthing, only to become embroiled in a deadly game.
Rose was the first novelist to use the Internet to successfully publish a book online. She sold 2,500 copies of
Lip Service as an e-book first and then a print version. The Literary Guild and Doubleday then bought the book club rights, marking the first time they had ever bought a self-published book which had debuted as an e-book. Pocket picked up the novel shortly thereafter. She has also published two nonfiction works. As a Mira novelist, Rose is now backed by a national ad campaign and multi-city book tour. Here, she talks about how she conceived the idea for
The Halo Effect, and offers some of the secrets she used to build her audience.
"I had written two novels
that were rejected. I got an agent right away, but the works didn't sell." 由ose AUTHORLINK: How did the idea for
The Halo Effect originate?
ROSE: I had spent a lot of time in therapy myself, and had gone back to school thinking I wanted to become a sex therapist. I studied the subject for six months and worked with a New York City therapist to see whether I would be good at the profession. What I thought was a desire to get a degree and help people turned out to be a desire to learn about a subject I wanted to write about in fiction. My therapist thought I was an excellent diagnostician. I could put my finger on the problems and come up with solutions. But when you're a therapist you can't really devise the solutions yourself. The client does that. So I went back to writing novels.
AUTHORLINK: How did you become a novelist?
ROSE: I had written two novels that were rejected. I got an agent right away, but the works didn't sell. We sent the novels to 12 editors. The answer was the same every time. They loved the manuscripts but didn't know how to market them. The stories didn't fit neatly into any one category, and in 1994 fitting a category was far more important than it is today. Then I went through a series of life-changing events. I got a divorce, my mom died, and I spent six months in personal therapy. Then I decided to self-publish
Lip Service. I knew from my background in advertising that publishers were often missing opportunities with how they promoted fiction. From my research on the Internet, I saw it as a medium that had not yet been exploited for book promotion. I spent six months developing and implementing an ad campaign. Using the Net was so different for its time that the strategy worked. The ads talked about the theme of the book, rather than focusing on blurbs from other authors. I spent time on list serves and in chat rooms, drove visitors to my website for contests and free excerpts. I also wrote ten articles, distributed them to websites in exchange for live links and offered more than 250 books to people I identified as "bigmouths" who would spread the word about the book.
AUTHORLINK: So, how did you wind up with Mira as your publisher instead of staying with the New York house where you landed your first big contract?
ROSE: Pocket was the first publisher but after two novels there my editor left the publishing house. I followed her to Ballantine and published my next two books there.
I left Ballantine mainly because Mira offered the marketing commitment I wanted and needed for The Halo Effect. Plus Mira is especially good at taking authors who are ready to break out and turning them into big names. I was excited about the way they wanted to do this, and they have the distribution capability to meet their goal. For the most part, Mira is handling the marketing, though I am also doing my own guerrilla campaign.
"Only an author can become somebody the reader wants
to know. The publisher
can't do it. " 由ose AUTHORLINK: What kinds of guerrilla tactics are you applying?
ROSE: I'm offering two diamond and white-gold charm bracelets (worth more than $650 each) as "reader rewards" to fans who can best answer the questions about what the charms on the bracelets have to do with certain items in the book葉hese include a butterfly, a high-heeled shoe, and a purse.
My "street team" of fans are helping me hand out 4,000 postcards about the rewards program. There are also a dozen websites owned by fans of my work who are promoting the contest--all told it will reach more than 100,000 people. The bracelets will be given to the winners in October.
AUTHORLINK: This is a promotion
you're doing, not the publisher?
ROSE: Readers respond to authors in ways they don't respond to publishers. What works best is if authors become marketing partners with their publishers and do what only they can to connect to their readers. For two years I have taught an online class about "how to buzz your book" using guerrilla marketing, and I always teach creative ways an author can build an audience.
"I have had more fun writing
this book than any other." 由ose
AUTHORLINK: What excites you the most about
The Halo Effect?
ROSE: I have had fun writing this book. For one thing, my protagonist is a sex therapist, making her a unique character in contemporary fiction.
Morgan lives in a world where she meets all kinds of people, from the damaged to the depraved, and she passionately believes in the privacy of her patients耀o much so that she is willing to risk her life for them and gets caught up in their world.
AUTHORLINK: And what is so exciting about that world?
ROSE: I'm interested in people who do the wrong things for the right reasons; who have standards and principals and hold fast to them. In a thriller with a detective or an FBI agent there is not that great a moral crisis or conflict when they go boldly forth into danger. They are licensed to kill, to investigate, to solve a crime. It is simply not a difficult decision for one of them to go into that darkened room even if it means they might be shot at. They signed on for that.
I wanted to explore something more complicated.
What happens when an ordinary person is thrown into an extraordinary experience?
An FBI agent or detective is trained and expects to deal with crime and danger. I wanted to explore what happens to a woman who is trained to deal with the mind when the challenge changes on her and becomes dangerous in a very different way. Any one of my readers might have to deal with it if it happened to him or her.
Also, I read a lot of suspense novels and find it hard to relate to many of the protagonists that many writers choose容specially when they force women into roles predominately held by men. I consider myself a feminist, but there just are not as many female FBI agents, detectives, or investigators as there are males. The majority of women don't aspire to those jobs. The majority of us don't have friends who hold those jobs.
But most of us know women who are doctors, social workers, or therapists and I think many readers will relate to an ordinary woman who is just doing her job, winds up in a suspenseful situation, and then has to make a moral decision as to whether to protect herself or her patient.
AUTHORLINK: So do these same characters live on in your forthcoming books?
ROSE: Yes, the characters continue in a series--so far I'm contracted for three Butterfield Institute novels. Morgan is the main character, but there are other therapists at the Institute who will come to the forefront in subsequent novels.
AUTHORLINK: How often do you write?
ROSE: I write six days per week. But I don't force myself if it's just not working. I'm very disciplined though I write three to four hours per day. I do take a three- to four-week break between finishing one novel and starting the next.
AUTHORLINK: Are there any special tricks you use to help you perform more creatively?
ROSE: Before starting a new book I make scrapbooks for my main character; and don't write during that time用erhaps 4 to 12 weeks. The scrapbooks contain things like postcards from places the character has been, poems she loves, flower petals from an occasion that mattered to her. I might include swatches of her favorite colors. I go to stores where the characters might go, or to movies. I want to see what they see. I want them to tell me about their lives.
I teach an online class on this method called "Procrastinating Your Way Into Writing a Novel." It's about learning that as writers we need time to take in and absorb, not just concentrate on output.
AUTHORLINK: How did you find an agent and get published in the traditional world?
ROSE: When I finished my first novel I hired a book doctor, not so much because the novel needed work, but because part of her service was to help writers find agents. Her name is Joan Sanger, an ex-editor at Doubleday. She's part of a group of book doctors called the Editors' Alliance. Joan and I targeted five agents. Loretta Barrett was our first choice and I was lucky that she felt the same way about me. Hiring a book doctor helped me cut two years off the publishing process.
It was expensive, but worth it.
AUTHORLINK: What are you working on now?
ROSE: I have just finished the second book in the Butterfield Institute series,
The Delilah Complex, and have started to do research for the third.
"All I want is to entertain people, to give them someplace that's fun and exciting to escape to.
由ose AUTHORLINK: I won't ask you how you'd like to be remembered since you're very much alive! But what general impression would you like for readers to have of you?
ROSE: I have no lofty goals. All I want is to entertain people, to give them someplace that's fun and exciting to escape to.
M.J. Rose lives in Greenwich, CT with her significant other of eight years. She has no children.
