Success! With A Little Help From Your Friends

By Opal Carew

  

Opal Carew

Life has been good to me lately!  I have recently become both a USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of erotic romance. I love seeing those shiny new credits beside my name!  And I know I will never get tired of them!

Being on a list like USA Today and, ultimately New York Times, has been a dream of mine for a long time, and I believe that’s true for most authors.  No matter how great a book you write, you still have to get it noticed by a huge audience before you’ll hit big lists like those.

How did I finally manage to do it?  The basic answer is, by collaborating with my network of awesome authors.  We all worked together to realize our dream of hitting the big lists!

Having a network is essential to success. Sometimes we all need a little help from our friends!  Using a network to bring together several authors to create a boxed set of books gives all the authors involved a huge boost.  Everyone benefits from the increased visibility. The dedicated followings of the featured authors provide new reach to every writer involved; bringing new readership as authors’ individual works are happily discovered. Putting the set out at 99 cents makes it very attractive to an even broader audience of readers.

Not only can the group achieve phenomenal sales through working together, they can also achieve further individual success as the added exposure increases backlist sales. It’s a win-win situation as the readers discover new books and new authors, and the authors bring in more readers and more sales.

But why stop there?  What if we continue this boxed set camaraderie past the one project? This is where you get the magic of on-going cross-promotion. You’ll be delightfully surprised at how many authors are open to the mutual benefits of this type of collaboration.

One of the best things an author can do is reach out and nurture a community of fellow authors.  Find other authors with similar genre and target audiences, whom you can comfortably email and chat with. Stay in touch by sharing each other’s success stories, posts, retweeting one another, offering lessons learned, sharing advice and answering questions.

When asking for cross-promotion from other authors, try to make their job as easy as possible.  Start by creating a list of Tweets, Facebook posts, and a quick 1-2 sentence newsletter write-up for your new releases and/or events that you can easily email to your network at release time. Ask them if they would be so kind as to share your news with their readership and make sure that they know that you are happy to do the same for them.

On-going collaboration is a wonderful thing and the hardest part is reaching out to other authors to get started. But do it. The wealth of ideas and shared success that will spring from working with these incredibly talented and creative individuals will excite and humble you.

Reach out and connect with another author today. Do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next... ;-)

It can be hard to keep afloat as an author. A writing career is a business and we all strive to achieve our ambitions. In this ever-evolving and rapidly expanding market, there are so many things to know, and just as many opportunities to take advantage of. Keeping close to your friends and contacts, and benefiting from their collaboration as they benefit from yours is an essential strategy for survival.

Welcome to the fray! It’s actually pretty fun and successful here.

All for one and one for all, right?

Opal

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As a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of erotic contemporary romance, Opal Carew writes about passion, love, and taking risks.  Her heroines follow their hearts and push past the fear that stops them from realizing their dreams… to the excitement and love of happily-ever-after.

Opal’s New York Times bestselling story, Hot Ride, is now available.  You’ll see another example of the power of cross-promotion at work with included excerpts from authors such as Jayne Rylon, Mari Carr, and Suzanne Rock.

Hayley is looking for more excitement in her life, but doesn’t know how to find it.
Excitement finds Rip, a biker who’s seen more than his share of trouble.

When trouble finds Rip yet again and a bar brawl starts, both he and Hayley are thrown to the curb.

Hayley knows this is her chance to find the excitement she so craves, but Rip doesn’t want to be some good girl’s bad-boy experience, so he turns down her advances, leaving her feeling rejected.

But life is never that simple for Rip, and he soon finds himself in her bed and wanting more. When his three biker friends show up, Hayley’s love of numbers turns into an erotic adventure none of them will ever forget. 

But is there a chance for more than that between Hayley and Rip? Find out by taking a Hot Ride you’ll never forget.

Also watch for Opal’s upcoming release, His To Claim, on June 3rd. 

Rafe is a rock musician by night and head of a multi-million dollar family business during the day. Melanie is his former assistant, a wallflower who’s harbored a secret crush on him for years. Someone he'd never even consider sleeping with.  But when Melanie decides to leave behind her shy exterior and live out her own sexy bucket list, the two of them are thrown together in a whirlwind affair that pushes both their boundaries.

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