The Strangely Dramatic Tale of Miss Hieber's Victorian Wardrobe

Guest post by my clothing: The Strangely Dramatic Tale of Miss Hieber's Victorian Wardrobe - Via Love, Power & Fairytale Endings

Leanna's Marketing Smackdown #3 - Tips for Writers

About the Marketing Smackdown:
Last year I wrote a quarterly column for my local RWA Chapter, RWA NYC, in their Keynotes Newsletter. Since then, several of the articles have been reprinted by other RWA chapters and since I'm continuing the column this year, I thought I'd offer the 2010 posts here too. While I'm not remotely a Marketing expert, I do spend a lot of time on various marketing platforms and happen to have a lot to say about it. I hope writers might find this useful, and that readers and fans might find it interesting (or perhaps daunting) to know some of the many things we authors are doing while trying to juggle everything else in our life.

Why do I call it the smackdown? Because it's me versus time versus deadlines versus marketing. All the time.

Marketing Smackdown #3 - A Few of my Favourite Things!

Copyright 2010 Leanna Renee Hieber

These are a few of My Favourite Social Media things:

10. Tiny URL – when posting long links to things, in group posts, or on twitter, the long URL’s get cut off, broken, hard to manage and use. www.tinyurl.com converts a long URL into something manageable, for free. It rocks. I use it all the time. Create one for your books at Barnes & Noble and such, you can create it so that you remember it, for example, I created www.tinyurl.com/tdlffppbn which is the letters of my absurdly long title plus the letters b and n for Barnes & Noble; that’s my pre-order link for The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker! I did the same thing for Amazon and Borders so that if I’m writing blog posts I can always pop those into links by memory rather than having to look them up every time and copy/paste. Also good? Bit.ly.

9. Publishers’ Forums. Forums are great places where fans loyal, say, to the Publisher’s book club, will go for news, for contests, for community. If you’re targeting a publisher, see what everyone is talking about on their forums and perhaps track some of their authors, learn from them! A great example of this? Sourcebooks Teen Fire site: http://teenfire.ning.com/

8. Facebook Fanpages: Easy, free, user friendly, a nice way to separate out your personal self’s facebook page from that which is a “Product” – To get a product i.e. fanpage, go to one that’s established, I’ll give you my own, for example: http://tinyurl.com/lrhieber . In the lower left hand corner there’s a button “Create a Page” – follow the prompts, and you’re off! You can also follow prompts from the Facebook homepage.

7. Book Trailers – I had such fun with mine, and using targeted advertising on YouTube was affordable and gained a lot of views (I have over 10,000 views of the first Strangely Beautiful trailer now) – for more on this, see my Do It Yourself Guide to Book Trailers .

6. Google Alerts! Go to Google, go to “More” and go to Alert and type in your name and the title of your book and what email you want the alerts to go to (You have to have a Google account to do this, if you’re on You Tube, Blogger, gmail, etc, you already have one). Alerts mean when all your lovely reviews pop up (well, and ugly ones too, you don’t have to click on said link if you see a sentence you don’t like) you know about it. You do need to know where you are on the web and when, and if someone has posted a lovely review you link to it, etc, you need to figure out what blog / online community has discovered you and also, argh, when your book is getting pirated.

5. Digg / Yahoo buzz / all those little options when you click the button that says “Share This!” - ok, the whole list is overwhelming. But if you just sign up for a couple, like for me, I do Digg and I’m already on Yahoo with my mail, so you can “vote” for content. When someone posts a nice book review, “Digg” or “Buzz” it! (Get grandmothers and family members who are bored at work to do this for you too), every ‘vote’ for online content gets it tracked to things like Google and it shows up on searches more easily.

4. Get your friends to “Like” the nice Amazon reviews, it puts them to the forefront. If someone has written a snark-tastic mean review, you can tell your friends to “dislike” the review, but DON’T respond to the review yourself in any way. Ever. That spells certain doom. Oh, and Amazon reviews will not make or break you anyway. Again: DO NOT RESPOND TO BAD REVIEWS. EVER. PERIOD. It makes you look unprofessional and always ends up turning out for the worse. Also, get your friends to Facebook "Like" your books on Amazon and also on Barnes & Noble and anywhere your book is sold that has a "Like" button. Likes breed other likes on Facebook, they're like marketing rabbits.

3. Book Tour.com! This wonderful site is the perfect place to list your events, plus it routes all your events to your Amazon Author page (which you do have to claim but don’t have to upkeep) and to your Goodreads (www.goodreads.com) page. Again, claim this but you don’t have to upkeep it or maintain presence there other than having your info there, which leads me to…

2. Claim your author pages on Amazon and Goodreads! If you have an ISBN then you have an author page waiting for you at both of these venues, claim them and route your blog to it, link to your websites, etc, (just follow the prompts) its pretty user friendly! And your events will route there too, it’s lovely!

1. Again, Twitter – I know, Twitter is way old hat. It's so not new. And yet, I am serious, folks, it’s the very best tool of all. It is easy, gets you interacting with people, I found all my fave new book bloggers there and it continues to drive more traffic to my website than any other venue. I'm @LeannaRenee.

Happy Writing, happy selling!

As Seen on BBC America!

Huge thanks to Ay-Leen the Peacemaker, The Wandering Legion of Thomas Tew, Andy from BBC America and The Way Station for the awesome event that provided the background footage for this brief feature on the BBC World News America yesterday! Very exciting, great work Dr. Grymm! I'm seen here in full regalia alongside similarly regaled and highly regarded fellow fantasy author Mary Rodgers as I prepare for that night's reading from The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker. Huzzah!

STEAMPUNKS 2011 from Andy Gallacher on Vimeo.

Scandalous Women: Guest Blogger Leanna Renee Hieber on Clara Lemlich...

Scandalous Women: Guest Blogger Leanna Renee Hieber on Clara Lemlich...: "To commerate the 100th anniversary of The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Scandalous Women is pleased to welcome Guest blogger Leanna Renee Hieber on the inimitable Clara Lemlich..."

Triangle: Remembering The Fire

For those of you who are used to my blog as containing only fluffy updates on books, travels, fun things… This is not one of those posts. This is history at its most tragic.

I’ve just finished watching a review copy of Triangle: Remembering the Fire, premiering March 21st at 9pm on HBO, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. I’m wiping my eyes from profound bouts of tears. I’m not one for reviewing books or films, but this is an event that must never, ever, ever be forgotten. My devotion to and career in historical fiction drives me to share the basics of this horrific day in human history, and to encourage you to find out more for yourself, and never to take workers’ rights or workers’ safety for granted.

To be clear, I knew what I was getting into when I sat down with this subject matter. I was well aware of this fire and its infuriating details, first having learned about it during my training as a New York City Tour Guide, from the incredible New York: A Documentary (which I could not possibly recommend enough, it is one of the best and most well-crafted series detailing the history and character of a city) where Ric Burns first taught me about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in all its terrible details. I wept then, too.

I knew all the historic photos I’d see of the countless heaped, dead bodies on the street, young women having jumped to their deaths in a tangle of cloth and limbs. I knew the outrage I felt then, the same I’m feeling now and whenever I hear the words “Triangle Fire” and see those terrible sepia photographs in my mind’s eye.

There were a few new particulars about the fire that I learned from this 40 minute documentary, and I noted a few things they left out. There were extraordinary human stories as told from descendants of victims and survivors. The beautiful sepia portraits of the young female victims cry out for a better death than they were given. My tears flow now in part out of fear that all that has been put into place after the horrific events a century ago may be undermined if we as a society don’t demand the moral best of ourselves, our workplaces, and those who control them.

About the fire: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory occupied the top floors of the Asch Building on New York City’s Washington and Greene streets. (Shirtwaists were women’s blouses and the workers were nearly entirely female). It was one of the only garment factories not to have allowed Union and Labor concessions after the Uprising of the 20,000 that launched the Great Strike of 1909 where New York City women took to the streets for rights, safety and fair practices long before they gained the right to vote. Had Triangle implemented some of the safety precautions advocated in these concessions, this tragedy would not have occurred. But there was no federal mandate for factory safety at the time.

Near the end of the work day on March 25th 1911, a fire began on the 8th floor, likely started by a cigarette butt or end of match not entirely extinguished, dropped upon highly flammable scraps of pattern paper and cloth. The floors were jammed with sewing machines, about 300 or so per floor, and with all the paper and cloth (and no sprinklers as they were not required) it was a tinderbox. A telephone operator on the 8th floor phoned the 10th floor and many on that top floor escaped onto the roof and over to the adjascent NYU building where a Law professor and students provided assistance, but in the tumult the 9th floor was not informed until the fire was literally upon them. There were two exits per floor but some exits were locked- presumably to keep the girls from taking breaks. Staircases between floors were only two feet wide and wooden, quickly consumed. There were elevators and while the two noble elevator operators managed to get over 100 women out in about nine trips, bringing the car directly up into the flames, between the heat and weight of bodies jumping down the shaft, the car was incapable of making further trips.

Firefighters were on the scene quickly, but their ladders only reached the 6th floor, hardly helpful to those top floors. Some women began jumping out the windows as an alternative to being burned alive. 9/11 is all too present in our minds when we think of this. Life nets held by firefighters were useless, bodies fell through them. 146 deaths all told. The workforce was mostly Jewish and Italian girls. Girls. The average age of the victims was around 17 to 23.

It took 18 minutes. 18 minutes before there were no more jumping bodies, the floors utterly consumed, fire hoses battling the inferno. 18 minutes for one of the worst industrial accidents in the history of our country to burn a hole right through the heart of the world.

There's more to the story, to the fight, to the indignity. More that will touch and infurate you.
Please visit this site to learn more. Please watch Triangle; Remembering the Fire on March 21st on HBO. If you are in New York City, please take part in the centennial events happening on March 25th. (I’m very upset I cannot attend. I would be there but I’m ironically engaged with many events at the Steampunk Industrial Revolution that weekend).

Details the documentary left out that I'd learned from New York: A Documentary:

- The fire escapes. There were fire escapes that were small and not well supported. The heat of the fire weakened the metal and the women that had poured out onto them dropped with the fire escapes when they gave way, crashing them fatally onto the pavement below.

- While management claims the locked doors were meant to curb breaks, others said it was to keep out Union organizers.

- The engagement rings. If I recall Ric Burns' work correctly, I believe there were 13 engagement rings on the charred fingers of the dead bodies.

(I won’t tell you how HBO's documentary effectively describes the different ways family members managed to identify a series of bodies, you’ll have to have your own tissues on hand for that.)

This is not just a historic event to be looked upon, considered, and filed away under ‘things I know about history’. If we’re not very careful and attentive to worker’s rights, safety standards and regulation, everything we take for granted about a work week and a safe environment could erode. It’s already eroding. Look at Wisconsin, and how workers’ rights have been stripped there; bargaining for pay and safer work spaces has been removed. It’s a slippery and frightening slope once basic rights begin to be taken away. As a member of three unions I fought hard to gain membership into, I so dearly appreciate what I’ve gained from the struggles of those brave women beaten on picket lines, I honour their deaths and I cry all the harder for those sacrifices that shouldn’t have been necessary if factory owners simply would have done the right things, all preventable things, all things that had been urged by the Fire Chief at the time and by Union organizers. It took an event as horrific as Triangle to force uniform change a century ago, and to people like Al Smith and his Factory Commission to enforce it. Labor Unions aren’t something to be looked at as outmoded. Unions are the very things that have fought for what the average American worker now has the privilege of taking for granted. Please honor the memory of the 146 dead by not taking your rights for granted in all of your workplaces.

- Triangle: Remembering the Fire - March 21st, 9pm on HBO

- How you can commemorate

DARK NEST: RECKONING now available!

Time out from my regularly scheduled Victoriana to announce a trip to the future...

Dark Nest: Reckoning (futuristic fantasy) - the sequel novella to the 2009 Prism Award winning novella Dark Nest is now available for download by various digital vendors, including ARe and Kindle!


(Regarding pricing, ARe is a price point I feel more comfortable recommending as this is a novella, not a full-length novel. We the authors have no say on pricing.)

This novella will be available via all major digital vendors, including Nook, and also in print, including "Legacy" a Victorian Gothic short story, hopefully by the end of the month.

Visit the publisher, Crescent Moon Press and read an Excerpt!

Leanna and a TARDIS or, Epic Win

So what could be better than a steampunk event in a bar with a TARDIS? Well, not really much of anything. Huge thanks to Ay-Leen the Peacemaker of Beyond Victoriana and Lucretia of The Wandering Legion of the Thomas Tew for organizing Steampunk Stylin' at the uber-awesome The Way Station in Brooklyn this weekend, where their signature drink, The Way Station, is an absinthe-esque journey to exquisite. I was thrilled to read the Ripper chase scene from The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker. I was truly honoured to share the stage with the awesome talent of: Samara of Dancing Frozen, Psyche Corporation, Painless Parker, Eli August and all with Dorothy Winterman's gorgeous hats standing guard and a beautifully dressed crowd that never disappoints. One of my partners in crime from way back in the day, Kelley of the entrancing Wickie Arts, even made it out to the festivities. The TARDIS and me here pretty much sums up my mood about the whole thing. This might go beside the dictionary definition of SQUEE. (Thanks to the multi-talented J. M. Coen for said lovely and squee photos and to Michael Angelus Salerno and his ridiculously awesome steampunk-fitted camera for the photo of me and fellow fantasy author Mary Rodgers in her awesome captain's coat below.) Oh, yeah, and did I mention the BBC was there filming? *faint*

Next time you're up for an adventure, hit up The Way Station. It's bigger on the inside.

What's Leanna's next event? Why, she's the Literary Guest of Honour at the Steampunk Industrial Revolution!! Check it out!