Today, I introduce you to the four winners of this year’s poetry contest followed by their Instagram handles. Get on over there and follow them neoww.
#1: Buddah Desmond
“Ghosts, Ghostbusting History + Visible / Invisible Lives (Freedom is Ours)”
(@buddahdesmond)
#2: Daphne Ayo
“Uncaged”
(@dee_.vox )
#3: Renita Siqueira
“Allowed to Exist”
(@renitasiqueira)
#4: Rebecca Whitman
“Moment of Truth”
(@rebeccajwhitman)
Congratulations!!
And congratulations to everyone who participated! There would be no contest without your support.
This is the first time we’ve had such a diverse group of winners!
We even have winners from India and Nigeria! Can you guess who it is?
We ultimately chose our winners for receiving high scores in several areas, including beauty, power, education/message, originality, creativity, how closely they followed the submission requirements, and overall impact.
I am incredibly proud of what they will bless you with in these coming weeks!
Over the next few weeks, we’ll spotlight each of these poets individually on the blog and social media. We’ll dig deeper into what inspired their poem, read the winning poem, and understand their writing process.
I used to ask people to subscribe to my email list, and almost no one ever did. It was also cringy to ask.
And then I realized I was working harder than I needed to.
How people look when you say subscribe to your author newsletter.
The truth is, asking people to subscribe to your email list is boring, and no one wants to do it. We have enough emails.
And if you are a new author, no one’s ever heard of, saying we will get a free copy of your book doesn’t work either.
As I alluded to in the last post, authors must start to think like readers if they want to attract them.
Instead of asking people to subscribe to your list directly, do this instead.[mepr-show rules=”31881″ unauth=”message”]
Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA
Offer Something They Want
The value in giving something away is that if it’s a truly valuable piece of content, it will naturally lead to your paid stuff. At first, this wasn’t working for me. It wasn’t until I gave away my best book (the one people actually wanted to read) that I started to see a difference.
For your give, my advice would be not to throw something together. Give us something good.
Your give is also known as a lead magnet and doesn’t have to be a book. It can be a resource, guide, free tutorial, or access to exclusive content. It can be a complimentary ticket to your online class or a virtual pass to the next event.
Deliver Your Give By Requiring Email Sign-Up
Choose a platform to use to collect email addresses. I use Mailchimp, but there are tons of others. Require people to enter their email to receive the freebie.
Set Up Automation
As soon as they sign up, they should be able to instantly download the freebie. Setting up an automatic welcome email to officially introduce yourself is an excellent start to a warm welcome.
You’re done, and you didn’t have to beg, borrow, or pull teeth to get here.
Other ways to add subscribers:
Collaborate with other Authors
Host a contest
These are the two most powerful strategies I’ve seen. I get the most sign-ups through my poetry contests or when I collaborate with other authors.
Have a sign-up sheet at every live event.
This is probably the only time it’s okay to ask people to subscribe to your email list directly. I always have it sitting at my table. Still, the amazing thing is people will walk by and put their email addresses down without me asking! So in a way, you still don’t have to ask. All you have to do is make it available.
Add a pop-up on your blog and website.
Please ensure this goes away after about 5 seconds and doesn’t take up most of the space. Pop-ups that aren’t easy to close out are annoying and distracting. This makes us feel like we are being forced to sign-up. You don’t want people leaving your site because your pop-up won’t leave them alone.
Use Your Blog
If email newsletters aren’t your thing, you can always use a blog. When people subscribe to your blog, they get an email notification whenever you post something new. You can use this with your third-party email list or by itself. Either way, it’s another way to stay connected with your tribe outside social media.
I can go on, but the moral of the story is there are tons of ways to collect email without spamming.[/mepr-show]
Oh, please be sure you provide a way out! It is illegal not to provide a way for people to unsubscribe if they no longer feel you. It is much easier to do this if your emails go through a third party. If people can’t unsubscribe, they will report you as spam, which can ultimately hurt you. I talk more about that here.
Kyrie Irving is in hot water for posting a link to the documentary Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black Americato his Twitter account. The movie is a film adaption of the Independently Published book by the same name. It is alleged that the movie has much antisemitism in it, (I disagree but that’s a different post), and Irving has since taken the tweet down and apologized to the Jewish community via an Instagram post.
This post is about how he found the documentary and what Indie Authors can learn about platforms.
Kyrie Irving found the documentary by researching Yahweh on Amazon, saying that’s what his name translates into. According to this interview, he typed the name in the search engine, and the movie came up.
Many Indie Authors have long-cut ties with Amazon, which is their business. What I hope we can gain is an understanding of how people search for information, namely books, and the role that it plays for us as authors.
Photo by Ricardo Esquive
Amazon is not a distributor or bookstore. Amazon is a retailer that sells many things but is known for books. They are known for books because, in addition to selling books, they operate a Self-Publishing arm called Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP. Amazon is so very well connected with books that bookstores hate them, and people who think of buying a book (and now movies) turn to Amazon almost instinctively.
Amazon is also the world’s second-largest search engine, with Google being the first.
“Amazon, with 54 percent of product searches taking place, is the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. Technically, Amazon is the second largest search engine in the world excluding Google.”
Decoding the World’s Largest E-commerce Search Engine: Amazon’s A9 Algorithm
When someone wants to search for a book and does not want to visit an offline bookstore like Barnes and Noble, where will they search first?
Today (11/2022), it is a #1 Bestseller with tons of new reviews. Yes, he searched for the movie, but the book is a #1 Bestseller.
All because a rich and famous celebrity tweeted the link.
And this celebrity found it on the second largest search engine in the US.
The Point
When deciding what platforms to put your book on, consider not what you want but what readers want.
When your average reader wants to look up a movie, topic, or book, they are not going to Smashwords. They are not going to Draft2Digital. They are not even going to Goodreads like that. They are also not flooding B&N.com, though they’ll visit the brick-and-mortar bookstore (catch that).
When people (not necessarily people who are always on the internet and are familiar with the book world but everyday people with jobs who happen to want to buy something) want to look up information, they go to Google and Amazon.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
Ignoring this is just not good business sense, except that your goal is not to make money from your books or bring a whole lot of awareness to it, which is cool. Not everyone publishes a book for these reasons.
(It is also not wrong to be on the other platforms, also known in the Indie community as “going wide.” It means you are not exclusive to Amazon but have your book available at other online retailers, which is awesome. I go wide myself. At the risk of steering away from the topic, that’s a post for a different day.)
However, for those of you Self-Publishing books you want people to buy, not being on Amazon is not bad or wrong, but it is leaving a lot of money (and exposure) on the table.
This post is a nudge to consider more strongly the platforms you wish to sell your book (if you are selling it).
It is a reminder to go to the places where your potential reader will most likely hang out.
That is the message.
Kyrie Irving found Hebrews to Negroes and made it a bestseller by posting the Amazon link (without a caption) because the book was sitting on a platform where readers are most likely to search for books.
Go where your readers are most likely to hang out, and search for books like yours.
Indie Author Basics simplifies and streamlines the Self-Publishing Process so authors can Self-Publish high-quality books without pulling out their hair.
After going back and forth with someone on TikTok who tried to come for me and didn’t know what she was talking about, I eventually concluded she was a troll and shall be blocked.
And then I thought, why don’t we do this more often? Why do we sit in fruitless debates with people who have proven themselves unworthy of our time?
And then I thought, why aren’t we more protective of our space in the digital world? Would you let someone come into your house, sit down and disrespect you to your face? So why do we allow people to come on our pages and blogs, sit in the comment section, and talk to us crazy?
I don’t know where we got this idea that we have to accept all the energy that comes our way on these social media sites, but that block button is there for a reason. That unfriend/delete button is there for a reason, and it is not only okay but necessary to make good use of them.
Protecting our digital space means establishing boundaries around our online presence. You don’t have to tolerate trolls and people who just want some attention.
“My platforms are my digital real estate, and I try to take the trash out on my properties. I block, report as spam, and mute as I deem necessary.”
Luvvie Ajayi Jones
These social media platforms might not be 100% in our control, but those things we can control, we should. We can turn off notifications if they become too much. We can block people for disrespecting us. We can even ask for certain content to be censored. We have the power to moderate what we want to occupy our energy fields.
Healthy debates are welcomed, where both parties are mature enough to listen to different perspectives to bring clarity. But online things go left quickly because people hide behind keyboards. Much of what people say here, they wouldn’t say, looking you in the eye. For that, we have to be even more diligent about establishing boundaries.
No, people cannot talk to you any way they want, and you do not have to keep them around so they can suck up all your energy.
As we go into the new month, remember that trees shed their leaves for a reason. Everything in nature is getting rid of the old to embrace the new. We should too.
Bless those who shall be blessed and block those who shall be blocked.
When I was about seventeen and eighteen, I wrote stories about my sisters and our friends in this red notebook. Then, we would all sit on the porch, and I would read it to the neighborhood. Everyone had nicknames but also knew who they were so it was hilarious, and they loved it.
When I moved out of my mother’s house a couple of years later, I carried that notebook. One day, while reading it, I decided I wanted to turn it into a play. There was only one problem:
I was not the teenager who wrote it.
By now, I was deeply biblical, had loc’d my hair, and changed my name. This hood tale didn’t fit the newer version of me.
I decided to keep the characters but change their names and give them more dignity. They were successful Black men and women instead of whores and hustlers. In the original story, Tina was a lawyer because when we were younger, that’s what my twin sister Tracey wanted to be when she grew up. In the red notebook, Tina was Tracey.
This dope cover for my first screenplay was designed by Black graphic artist Andre Hawkins of Kenosis Design Innovations
I published Pearls Before Swine in 2014, registered it with the Screen Writer’s Guild, and participated in my first book signing at the Doubletree Hilton Hotel in Chicago, which went well.
And then, I started this blog!
I made the mistake* of naming this blog after the book hence why it’s called thepbsblog. Over time, I decided to keep the name for a few reasons. You can read about that here.
*I don’t recommend authors start blogs and name them after the title of their book any more than I would advise authors to create websites with the name of their books. You will write more books. Are you going to create a new website for every book? It is easier to brand yourself using your name.
Although it did okay when first released, and I love the cover, I better understood how to use my voice and messaging after The Stella Trilogy. I had grown again and vowed to be more relatable. The story was also not properly edited and the plot was confusing to people outside of my immediate circle.
I would turn Pearls Before Swine into The Men with Blue Eyes. And then, for the last change, I decided I wanted these angels to be women, which is how The Women with Blue Eyeswas born. I used the backstory and characters of PBS with a fresh plot.
TWWBE is still heavily spiritual, but in a way where even if you are not religious, you could still relate to it. This was intentional.
I would love for this story to take on another evolution: for Shonda Rhimes to turn it into a TV series. (Somebody tell her people to call my people.)
I am also considering sharing more of the backstory of PBS in another installment of The Women with Blue Eyes. The details about Ronnie and Big Sam and how it all went down was in the first book. This is material I can still use.
When Tina’s nephew, Ronnie is killed, she is left to care for his siblings and to solve a series of mysterious murders involving only Black men. Investigating each murder thrusts her and her team into a world of deities, demons, and fallen angels, leading Tina to battle a serial killer beyond this realm.
The moral of this story is don’t throw anything away! Just repurpose it.
If you want a shot at winning one of the top four slots for this year’s poetry contest, be sure to email your poem to me at yecheilyah@yecheilyahysrayl.com by midnight tonight.
That’s 12a EST, 11p CST.
The rest of ya, figure out ya time zone, lol.
I know we can get a bit anxious as we wait for the results, so please take the time to review the following:
Poetry submissions close at the end of the day on September 30, 2022. I don’t read any poems until after the contest ends, and neither do my fellow judges. Feedback on entries will not be provided until the winners are announced.
We will announce the winners on November 1, 2022. I am an advocate for questions. Asking questions is how we learn. However, do not ask if I liked your poem or how I feel about it before the winners are announced on 11/1.
Winners will be notified by email of their win at least one week before the public announcement to prepare them for their promotions. Our first-place winner also wins a personalized frame of their poem that must be customized, so the artist will need these details ahead of time.
It is imperative that the email you have on file is active and that it is the one you check often. We will need to pick another winner if we cannot contact you about your win in time. Not only do you not want this, but it also creates more work for us, so please be diligent. Start paying attention close to the end of Oct. Check your spam and junk folders. If we follow each other on IG, check your DM’s. Know I will do everything in my power to contact you, but if I have to call the FBI you’re gonna miss out.
If you submitted a poem, you should have received a reply saying your submission has been received. If you did not get this email, please resend it ASAP.
We are giving away cash prizes this year, so when contacted about your win, we will ask you how you’d like to receive your money electronically. The other gifts will be shipped off to you.
You will be promoted on my blog, main author newsletter, Twitter, and IG pages @yecheilyah and @yecheilyahbooksllc. Be sure you are following both (especially @yecheilyah, as it gets the most engagement).
What if I didn’t win?
We are only contacting the four winners. If, on November 1, you do not see your name among the winners, your poem has not been selected.
I want to take the time to thank each and every one of you for participating in this contest. Putting yourself out there is not easy, and I am humbled that you’ve trusted me with your creative work. Make no mistake about it: without your support, there is no contest, so I am grateful, humbled, and excitedddd to read what you’ve blessed us with.
How Can I Read the Poems of Previous Winners?
You can check out the poems and interviews of previous winners at the links below.
**2020 was skipped per Covid when none of us knew what to do next.**
*FINAL CHECK* The little things can sometimes get away from us so remember: get your poem in BEFORE the deadline. Make sure it is on the topic of FREEDOM in some way. Double check you’ve sent it to the CORRECT email and that you are 18+.
It’s that time of the year again when ya’ll start telling people to quit their jobs and start a business.
Entrepreneur advice on social media is leading a lot of people astray. Here are my top pet peeves.
Telling People to Quit their Jobs
Please stop this.
There is nothing wrong with people working a traditional 9-5 or working in corporate America. Starting and running a business has a lot to do with lifestyle more than anything else. We all have different ways of life, and some of our lives aren’t conducive to the entrepreneurial arena. It can also be a mental thing. Some people are stressed out mentally from their 9-5s and want to try something new. But at the same time, some people love their jobs.
There is also the misconception that entrepreneurs work for themselves. But, the truth is even entrepreneurs depend on other people to make money. If people didn’t want to read my books/writings, there would be no one to buy them. If the hairdresser doesn’t have people who want to get their hair done, there is no business. There is no business if people don’t want to listen to your music. There is no business if people don’t buy your products/services.
“Six Figure Earner”
This really grinds my gears.
First, when did it become cool to tell people how much money we make? I thought people who had money didn’t talk about it? Now, everywhere you look, people are talking about being six and seven-figure earners. It’s giving elitist vibes. Like ya’ll can’t sit with us type.
People are even screenshotting their PayPal and Stripe accounts and posting them to the gram. Like huh? Before you call me a hater, ask yourself if this is good business sense. Heck, is it safe? The same thing applies to taking pictures of your house keys. Congrats on the house, but it takes nothing to copy a key. My husband works in the apartment industry so I know. Post something else, but not your house keys, baby.
But I digress.
Here is why I think someone calling themselves a six figure earner can be misleading:
Are you making six figures consistently or did you make a mil one time and started calling yourself a millionaire?
How much taxes are you paying out of that six figures?
How much of that do you have to pay to employees or put back into the work?
How much of that goes toward bills and household maintenance?
The next time you feel discouraged by somebody you see on the internet, remember that social media shows us very little about how people live their lives. Many entrepreneurs still work a 9-5 to fund their businesses, and there’s nothing wrong with this unless you pretend you don’t for clout.
Missy – “Ooh. I have one.”
EC – “Missy. I’m trying to talk to the people.”
Missy – “But I’m your pet and I have a pet peeve.”
EC – “Go ahead girl. What’s your Pet Peeve?”
Missy: “Okay, okay. Okay.” *wags tail*
EC – “Missy…”
Missy – “Okay. Okay. What gets under my fur is how there aren’t any pictures of me on this blog. Not one single photograph.”
EC – “Missy, that doesn’t have anything to do with entrepreneurship.”
Missy – “But you are gonna let me get my own Instagram right, right?”
EC – “No.”
Missy – “Why not?”
EC – “You don’t have a purpose for an Instagram. All you wanna do is post selfies all day.”
Missy – “What’s wrong with that?”
EC – “I said what I said.”
Sorry about that. She thought because this was called “Pet Peeves,” I was supposed to talk about her.
Yes, I am an entrepreneur. Full time. But I don’t believe in shaming other people into becoming one if it’s not something they are really passionate about doing.
What about you guys? Any pet peeves you have with advice floating around social media? We haven’t even talked about all this bad financial advice. Whew chile.
The PBS Blog 