Horror genre author, Matthew W. Quinn, joins us this week to discuss how he gets his books in front of the audience that enjoys them. We have been having so much fun talking with authors in our authorship series, and this episode truly digs into some raw numbers of attending a convention. Matthew W. Quinn has some great advice for new writers about staying motivated and keep your costs low when promoting your books.
Welcome to Business Talk Sister Gawk. I’m Bekkah. And I’m Ruthie! Today’s episode is Book Promotion! And with us we have Matthew W. Quinn thank you so much for being with us today! We are so excited to have you.
Matthew: Thank you! You’re welcome! I’m always glad to help out!
Bekkah: Can you tell us what your business is?
Matthew: Okay, by day I’m a high school history teacher but by night and afternoons and weekends I’m a science fiction fantasy writer. Most of my stuff but not all of it is independently published.
Bekkah: Okay, yeah! Why did you start doing it?
How Did You Get Into Writing?
Matthew: Well, I’ve always wanted to be a writer and I remember when I was a very little kid my grandmother, she was a teacher for a different school system, had a very old electric typewriter that I remember typing stories on. A lot of it was just stuff I made up like one involving dinosaurs and diving helmets. I was probably about four or five. Over the years I’ve written a lot of short fiction. I didn’t sell any until about 2006. Now I have written books and some of them I’ve sold to small presses like my novella “Little People Big Guns”. There’s one called “The Thing in the Woods” that I sold to a small press and got the rights back and republished myself. Then I independently published a sequel. That’s “The Thing in the Woods” and “The Atlanta Incursion”. Now there’s an independent fantasy series I have called “Battle for the Wastelands”. The first book is “Battlefield Wastelands”. There’s a companion novella called “Son of Grendel” and I’m working on the second full novel called “Serpent Sword” that I’m hoping to have done and published by the end of the year. We’ll see about that.
How Did You Get Started With Getting Paid?
Ruthie: Wow! Nice. Okay, I have so many questions but the first one you mentioned kind of your progression and then you said you started selling in 2006. What was that transition there?
Matthew: If you want to be a writer there are places you can find markets to sell. One of the places I found is a website called ralan.com. There’s a webzine called Chimeras Serials like the greek mythology monster Chimera and so I sold them a short story I wrote called I am the Wendigo. The Wendigo is a creature from Canadian-Native American mythology that’s like the spirit of the sort of like cannibalism. The bigfoot crowd think it might be a more aggressive kind of bigfoot.
Ruthie: Okay.
Matthew: That attacks and eats people. So I wrote a story from the perspective of the Wendigo.
Bekkah: That’s a little morbid.
Matthew: Yeah, I sold that for $20.
Ruthie: I’m sorry what did you say? What did you say? The spirit of cannibalism in Canada?
Matthew: Yeah it’s Native American mythology. I think it’s a taboo against eating people when the winter comes the food runs out. It’ll turn into a monster that is always starving and ever-hungry can only eat people.
Ruthie: Okay.
Bekkah: Wow.
Ruthie: Object lesson right there, don’t do that.
Matthew: Things you learn from bigfoot books in the third grade.
Bekkah: I’m just like just shocked that you kept that from third grade until college to write that.
Ruthie: It’s been ruminating. He had time to let it percolate.
Matthew: That was my first sale was for a money order for 20 bucks from a webzine.
Bekkah: Okay, so now you’re an author. You’re doing a bunch of stuff. How do you do it, right now?
Matthew: Most of my money I actually make from conventions. There’s a website called the Southern Fandom Resource Alliance that has a calendar of conventions that are in the Greater South which is basically DC to Florida to Texas to Oklahoma. Atlanta being a convention city, there are a lot that are close by. So I checked the calendar for conventions. Atlanta ones are better because I don’t have to drive. Sorry, I do have to drive. I don’t have to spend money on a hotel overnight. This past summer I went to this little convention. A bunch of people wanted to go to liberty.con but that was shut down due to the pandemic. They called it “confinement”.
Ruthie: *chuckles*
Matthew: I spent one night at the hotel there. I did make a very narrow profit I think on that but if I didn’t have to stay overnight in Dalton I probably made much more.
How to Decide If a Convention Is Going to Be Worth Going to as an Author
Bekkah: How do you decide if a convention is going to be worth it for you? What goes into your decision making process for profitability?
Matthew: Okay, if I don’t have to stay overnight somewhere else because books are rather low margin. Ninety bucks for an overnight hotel stay is a great big bite out of profit. For example, my last big convention was a toy and comic show in Augusta, labor day weekend. My total profit was around $125. I had some relatives in the Augusta I was staying with so two nights a hotel say $100 bucks each, that means I’ve lost $75. Avoiding staying overnight. If I can find someone to split the table with like both times attended Days of the Dead I went with other authors. The first time was with T.S. Dan who also lives in Atlanta and Nathan McCullough who lives further out of town but he’s willing to come in and split a table with me. That was a very big factor in being able to make profit both times.
Ruthie: Okay, so those are your best practices for convention choosing. How do you prepare to attend a convention?
Matthew: Well, one way to attend a convention that’s real nice is if you can be a guest because you don’t have to pay for anything. I attended AnachroCon this past February and I was a guest so I was able to attend for free as long as I presented a certain number of panels. Which I did. I was also a guest at Hypericon. The problem with Hypericon is more the two nights hotel stay than the fee.
How to Be a Guest at a Convention as an Author?
Ruthie: How do you get to be a guest?
Matthew: Well, I can play up my knowledge and experience on certain things like independent writing and publishing. Let’s see, at Hypericon I presented on genre-blending. Have you ever read the book or watched the TV show The Strain.
Ruthie: No, I have not.
Matthew: It was on FX. It was about vampires and it’s like a combination medical thriller because the vampirism is a virus that’s carried by worms that converts the human body into a mechanism for spreading the worms that carry the virus. It is very scientifically fascinating and also incredibly gross. That’s genre blending. It’s horror. It’s a medical thriller, like Outbreak, and then eventually gets full-on post-apocalyptic later in the series. I talked a good bit about
The Strain.
Bekkah: In your presentation, you talked about the book? As a guest?
Matthew: I knew I could talk about that about The Strain even though I didn’t write it. That’s Guillermo del Toro who wrote it. My own work, Battle for the Wastelands, I call it Dark Tower meets Game of Thrones. It’s like a fantasy because it’s not our world. It’s a western because that’s the aesthetics of the world. It’s post-apocalyptic.
Bekkah: Hold on, hold on what is post-apocalyptic defined as?
Matthew: After something goes very wrong. Like a nuclear war or an asteroid impact.
Bekkah: Okay, I didn’t know that was a genre.
Matthew: Yeah. It’s a genre. Right now in the indie world there’s a whole lot of after the electromagnetic pulse fiction. All the computers and power go out because of electromagnetic pulsing, a high altitude nuclear detonation. There are a lot of indie action stories about what happens after the EMP. It’s oddly specific for an apocalypse. Basically, a way to get on panels is to have an area of expertise. With the genre-blending panel at Hypericon I was able to talk up The Strain which I didn’t write and Battle for the Wastelands which I did or the X-Files which blends, they have the overall alien invasion plot line – sci-fI. You have magic, fantasy, horror just as much as the overall aesthetic. It’s also kind of like a crime drama. The X-Files is an example of genre blending. I have a master’s degree in world history so like a steampunk, alternate history, world building type panel, that’s something I can play up. If I can find a convention or I can be a guest I can pitch myself as a subject matter expert in something. That way potentially attend the event for free.
Ruthie: It’s kind of like you get to just talk about what you love and then people listen. So that’s cool!
Matthew: Oh, yeah! That’s also why being a teacher can be so much fun!
Ruthie: The captive audience?
Matthew: Yeah, I tell the kids that then I start laughing maniacally.
How Valuable Is It to Read Other Authors and Watch Similar Genres?
Ruthie: I’m sure they love that so you kind of mentioned the strain and using that as an example of genre-blending but how valuable is it to read other authors and watch these similar genres of things that you already are already into? How has that helped you develop as an author?
Matthew: Well, you can learn from other authors quite a bit. A former member of my critique group is an Atlanta author named James R Tuck and he taught me a way to write without using the word “said” or even speech tags at all. Instead of saying, “You moron!” she said angrily. “You moron!” she shouted or she glared, “you moron!” exclamation point. Tighten, tighten, tighten, tighten, tighten. That’s a technique I learned from another writer. You learn technique to improve your techniques from better writers in general. Like Stephen King, Dean Koontz these are people who are very good.
Is It Important to Read Classics and History When Writing?
Bekkah: Okay, when we heard you say that you’re a history teacher, has that had an impact or have other books that are classics impacted your writing or your ability to story tell in different ways?
Matthew: Oh, quite a bit! When I got my masters at Georgia State I took a class where I read a book called “Killing for Coal.” It’s about this series of strikes and fights between striking miners and the Colorado State Militia in the early 20th century. That combined with something like steampunk is the steampunk fiction a lot of times is just parasols and airships and all very nice and Jane Austen-y but if you realize the time period and culture which steampunk is based, there’s an age of class warfare strikes and labor violence and whatnot. As I was doing “Battle for the Wastelands” I made labor and strikes a very big part of it in a way that a lot of steampunk does not touch on because of what I learned getting my master’s degree.
Ruthie: It’s almost like being true to the actual genre instead of what people have made it to be
Matthew: Yeah, knowing history is very helpful for world building because many fantasy worlds are based on his real history. Like when J.R.R. Tolkien was talking about the decline of Gondor; he compared it to Byzantine empire.
Ruthie: How did you know that?
Matthew: For a present a friend of mine gave me “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien” which he wrote about his world to somebody. He’s writing about the decline of Gondor compared to the end of the Byzantine empire, the eastern half of Rome that just weakened and weakened and weakened. Eventually the Ottoman Turks put it out of its misery. Most fantasy land is fake, Medieval Europe which is based on Tolkien because everyone’s been ripping him off for decades now. Then some fantasy is different. There’s one fantasy series which is based on a conglomeration of China during the Qin and Han Dynasties in Southeast Asia. I think the series is called the Dandelion Dynasty or something like that.
How Does Social Media Help or Hurt You as a Writer?
Bekkah: When you’re getting ready to do an event or start promoting your books more, how does social media help you as a writer or does it have some negatives?
Matthew: Well, I have a Mailchimp email newsletter and whenever I’m at a convention I have my notebook and I have people sign up their names and emails so then I add them to my Mailchimp newsletter. I have about 400 people on my mailing list.
Ruthie: Wow!
Matthew: So when I have an event that’s coming, I announce that I’m going to be there and what I’m going to be bringing.
Ruthie: That’s how you promote your new books and material, too?
Matthew: Yeah, I attended an Indie writer’s festival at the end of the summer and I sent out that I was coming. Someone who had signed up on my mailing list when I was there last said, “I’m going to come so I can get the sequel to the book. I bought from you the first time!”
Bekkah: How have you utilized the different social media platforms or email and everything to keep your readers engaged with the different things that you’re doing?
Matthew: Okay, well, you want to emphasize what you can give people not what you can get from them/ With Mailchimp, my newsletter, I many times will send them links to this film podcast I’m on called Myopia Movies where they can listen to the podcasts or they can read my movie reviews I’ve written based on notes I’ve taken while watching the movies for the podcast. Myopia Movies as you watch childhood movies see if they’re still good. Some ones we’ve done recently are like – one that came out today was Daredevil. Which would have been like when I was in high school or college. I never saw it so I wasn’t in that episode but an episode we did do was Land Before Time
Bekkah: I watched that.
Matthew: The first one? The one that’s good?
Ruthie: There’s like eight or something!
Matthew: Yeah Don Bluth was only involved in the first one. That’s the only good one. As far as I know. I haven’t really seen the other ones even if they have good reputations. When I watch a movie for the podcast I take notes. I turn the notes into a movie review which I have on my blog and I can repackage for my newsletter to save work. Work smarter not harder and it’s giving my newsletter readers something. A recent newsletter I put out “How I would have done the 2004 King Arthur Movie.” That was a recent episode of Myopia Movies. So reuse content and what can you give your reader.
Is a Writers Group Important to Becoming a Good Author?
Bekkah: You kind of mentioned this a little earlier about like learning from a writer’s group and stuff, has that been beneficial for you to have a writer’s group or is it not important in the process?
Matthew: Oh, it’s very beneficial because for starters you have I have to commit to having a chapter or chapters for each meeting. Whether I have the chapter written or not. I tend to dawdle and spend way too much time on social media. That’s the downside of social media is as a time suck. I commit to having chapters so I can run the whole book through the critique group. This, incidentally, means the draft that gets finally published is much, much better than the first one. There’s a writer I know named Delilah S Dawson who said, “The first draft is word vomit. Just get it written. Worry about it being good later.” I ran chapter eight of “Serpent Sword” the second “Battlefield for the Wastelands” book through my writing group. They had so many suggestions on how to improve it that it’s going to be major rewrites. If I just wrote it by myself and then self-published, it would be much worse because that’s the thing with self-publishing is no one is telling you no or no one is telling you what you did wrong to improve unless you seek it out like through a critique group.
Bekkah: That’s really good advice or really good thoughts on that though because a lot of people publish books because they’re like, “Oh, this is good enough and I don’t really care if anyone else likes it!” But I don’t necessarily know if that’s a way to be profitable long term.
Matthew: Yeah, there are a lot of bad self-published books out there. People who just finished the book and self-published it without really editing it. Also the writing group is good for networking like thanks to James Tuck I know Jason Sizemore who’s the head of Apex Publications, a small press. He did a professional level critique of draft four or five that’s usually when it gets to him. Then I revise it heavily based on his instructions. Then he formats it and then I upload it to Amazon. He got me the hookup with his cover designer. “Battle for the Wastelands” and “Son of Grendel” also “The Atlanta Incursion” the sequel to “Thing in the Woods”, they both look good in terms of packaging. Which is very important because a lot of self-published books you have the same artist and five or six books might use the exact same cover just different titles.
How Do You Prepare to Launch a New Book?
Ruthie: That would be confusing. You have been utilizing these different groups for networking and for learning and for improving things, what are some other ways that you prepare to launch a new book?
Matthew: Once upon a time, I was a regular participant in something called PitMad. It’s like Twitter pitch parties where you would post your book and hashtag it PitMad and people who are participating would retweet it. Agents would like it and then you would send the first chapters or whatever to an agent. I saved the Twitter handles for the people who helped me. The ones who retweeted it or talked about how great it was so when the book was finally published I tweeted the buy links to those people originally. Some of them just had quit Twitter. Some of them I tweeted at and I think they blocked me because they were like, “Who’s this? Why are they spamming me?” They’ve forgotten but some people remembered and they retweeted so I get pretty big spikes early on from the wave of people I’m Tweeting at.
Ruthie: Is that a technique that you just picked up on or did somebody tell you about that?
Matthew: I think I figured that out on my own because I realized I had all those people who had retweeted my pitches because they liked the concept. So I thought ready-made market here.
Ruthie: Yeah, that’s really cool.
Matthew: And then they might review.
How Do You Stay Motivated as an Author?
Ruthie: How do you stay motivated with all this? Of all the things that you’ve been talking about , it all sounds like a decent amount of work. I mean you intro-ed with, “This is what I do on in my evenings and on my weekends,” and so it sounds like a lot of work. How do you stay motivated?
Matthew: Well, going to conventions is fun. You get to talk to people and make quite a bit of money and go to new places. I like doing those and plus you can write off so many expenses. It’s almost like a vacation that’s tax deductible. Writing group can be fun but I mean a lot of times it’s just a matter of discipline. Sometimes you just have to sit down and make yourself do it. Brian Keane is a horror writer. He blurbed “Little People Big Guns”, he was part of the horror show with the Brian Keane Podcast. He decided to step away from that to focus more on his writing. He talks about writing eight hours a day. Which since I have a day job that’s not possible so I need to make sure I use the time I do have efficiently while at the same time also having a social life and exercising and doing all these things to stay healthy and functional.
Bekkah: What tools have helped you to become a better writer or save time? Do you have any kind of resources that you’ve been like, “These are really great. I would recommend these,” and do any of those also apply to promotion?
Matthew: Well, in order to manage your time – Google calendar. If you have gmail and Google this and Google that. My father encouraged me to use Google calendar. That’s a good way to keep organized. You know when everything has to be done.
How Do You Give Yourself Deadlines as an Author?
Bekkah: You do that for when you give yourself deadlines for each piece.
Matthew: Yes, set deadlines. Tell me when I need to do different things. When I need to follow up and bother people. One promotional technique I’ve learned is Booktube. Like, Youtubers who talk about books. I just had the youtube channel Books of Blood just put out a review of “Little People Big Guns.” So I had in Google Calendar, “It’s been how long since you submitted to him, make sure you follow up.” For promotional tools, I have my calendar like on Saturday evening I need to set up Amazon ads because now that I got the rights back to “Thing in the Woods” and self-published it I can advertise “Thing in the Woods” using Amazon’s AMS system. The sequel comes out so on any Amazon ads, if someone clicks and buys the first one then they might go on to the second one because Amazon ads are only profitable if you have more than one book.
Bekkah: Interesting. How did you figure that out?
Matthew: Learning from other writers. I listen to a lot of writing podcasts.
Resources Every Author Should Check Out
Bekkah: Do you have any recommendations on writing podcasts that people should check out?
Ruthie: That’s what I was going to ask.
Matthew: There’s the Sell More Book Show, The Six-Figure Author, those are two big ones. The Sell More Book Show is one that recommended getting your book into libraries. So I donated some copies to the Gwinnett library in Gwinnett county Georgia. You can see how many times your book’s been checked out. There are like six holds on two copies so when Gwinnett county library is willing to host events again I can maybe have like a book talk at the library and bring books to sell. Because my first books book signing event at a library I had a PowerPoint I made a PowerPoint. One of my church friends showed up. She was the one person who came and she bought a copy from me. I guess to be nice.
Bekkah: Good to have moral support, right?
Ruthie: No, she’s probably excited to read it! She has a friend who’s an author and that’s really cool!
Matthew: Probably some of that, too. It’s wasn’t a total pity sale but that’s kind of how it felt. But because Gwinnett has so many people who checked out the books that when I talk to the library people after things calmed down and they put out their newsletter, there is a decent baseload of people who have read the book in a way that the first library book talk probably did not have because I got the book cataloged and probably not that long afterward I arranged the library to have a book signing. They put out in their newsletter but probably very few people had read the book, if any. But the Gwinnett library, they’ve had so many people who have read the book now that this might work. Same with Decatur. The Decatur library in Dekalb county, they said they could tell me how many times my book has been checked out. “Thing in the Woods” as of like last year or the year before had been checked out three times. They tracked that now.
Bekkah: You can just call them up and say, “Hey, can you tell me how many times my book has been checked out?”
Matthew: Yeah!
Ruthie: That is slick!
Matthew: That tip I got for the Sell More Book Show led to me having an idea of where I can have book events. COVID short-circuited that but where I can have them later. Also because I had my book in the Cobb County Library I managed to swing that into a newspaper interview with someone I knew from UGA who worked for Marietta Daily Journal, which in turn when I had a book signing people who had read the article came.
Bekkah: Wow! How did you know who your audience was? I’m just thinking about this, you have such a specific group of readers that are really into that.
Matthew: Well, I did create a Facebook fan page to run Facebook ads. Facebook you could set an audience for your ads like people who are interested in e-books and in horror literature and are engaged shoppers. That narrows the audience down to advertise via Facebook to the most interested audience. Of course, Facebook’s most recent ad update, you can’t do that anymore. Now it’s ebooks or horror fiction or engaged shoppers which is like 100 million people. Which is useless to me. Luckily my old audiences from before the update still exist so I can advertise to them. I can use those old audiences and Facebook said they’re working on that because they said that I’m not the only author to complain to them about that. None of my Facebook ads have made a profit. The closest I’ve come is making $43 in royalties on a $50 spend but they do move copies or at least they did. My most recent ads haven’t and I suspect that’s because they’ve advertised everyone already. Okay, so my next plan is to go back to Amazon ads.
