Ah, marketing. For many authors, myself included, marketing is the stickiest part of the publishing journey. Annoying as it is, it’s vital. As my book gets closer to publication, I find myself diving deeper and deeper into the uncharted waters of advertising, PR, and social media.
 
One piece of the marketing puzzle that I have surprisingly enjoyed is working with influencers. I’ve found this group to be hungry for content, keen on aesthetics, and open minded to collaboration even with debut authors like me. You may be asking yourself, “What should I be offering influencers? What do I put in an influencer box?” Let’s discuss.
 
What are influencer boxes?

Influencer boxes are curated marketing packages designed to showcase your book. The goal is for the influencer to unbox or feature the contents on their social media platforms, which hopefully translate into book sales and a boost to your own online following. There are a lot of other ways to engage with influencers besides book boxes, but for the purposes of this blog, we’re going to focus on this particular strategy.
 
Effective book boxes aren’t just a copy of your book in a box or envelope. They include themed gifts, printed marketing materials, and intentional packaging to get that “wow” moment when the box is opened.
 
How to get started

Start curating a list of online influencers that would be a good fit for your book. Maybe they’re genre-specific, or are aligned with other themes in your book. For example, my book takes place in a big state park, so I researched outdoorsy and hiking influencers. Once you have your list, begin engaging with their content. Like and comment on their posts, share their content to your own platforms, etc. Become authentically engaged in their online spaces. This doesn’t need to soak up a ton of time; start by dedicating 15 minutes a day to engagement.
 
How do I stand out?

While you’re building these relationships, start developing your boxes. These influencers get books sent to them all the time. Some post videos of them unboxing 20+ books they’ve been sent that week. In order to get the attention we want, we need to stand out. All of this is budget-dependent of course, but for an especially eye-catching box, I suggest including the following:
●      A gift box, not just the cardboard shipping box
●      A copy of your book
●      Information card (could be a bookmark)
●      An on-theme gift
●      2-3 smaller items (sticker, candy, etc.)
●      Short, personalized thank-you note
●      Colored packaging material, either tissue paper or shredded fill
 
As I mentioned, influencers care about aesthetics. We need to make our packages as visually interesting as possible to get screen time. Use intentional packing material to make sure items don’t get jumbled in transit, make sure everything is color-coordinated, and include a hand-written thank you note to show you appreciate them. This will go a long way!
 
Now that you have boxes and relationships, start sending out asks! Some influencers have guidelines on their profiles about how to send mail. If so, follow those to a tee. If not, send a nice DM offering to send them one of your boxes.
 
Hopefully this little how-to on influencer boxes helps you out! Do you have other ideas on influencer engagement? Lingering questions I didn’t answer here? Let’s keep the conversation going! Find me on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
 
Eloise Corvo finds inspiration and peace of mind while skulking around her home library which her husband affectionately (?) says embodies an "Edgar Allan Poe meets Applebee's" aesthetic. Eloise has short fiction published in literary magazines like The Corner Bar, and her debut novel is set to release on April 29, 2025 through Level Best Books. The kindle version is available for preorder now. She loves mint chocolate chip ice cream, appreciates a good puzzle, and is terrified of clowns. To learn more, visit EloiseCorvo.com.

There’s nothing worse than killing the wrong person.

If I said that to anyone other than mystery writers, I’d get myself arrested. Honestly, I think a night or two in the lockup might have been preferable to what happened when I realized I’d made a fatal error in the first draft of The Stuff of Mayhem.

The book, second in the Old Stuff series, begins with murder and, ahem, mayhem at the Fourth of July cannon firing in the tiny town of Unity, Connecticut. Historian Christian Shaw, her rainbow of found family, and her hot new boyfriend, prosecutor Joe Poli, now have to track the killer, relying on Christian’s knowledge of old things. The businessman who gets blown up made a perfect victim: slimy, pompous, and unethical, involved in a shady development project that threatened our sweet little community.

All good.

What wasn’t so good was the second death: the suspicious end of adorable ninety-something Edit “Amy” Taylor, a World War II bride who was studying for her long-delayed bat mitzvah with the town rabbi. Her death clears the way for a land sale that drives the topline plot, which we find out as we meet her various annoying relatives, one of whom turns out to have killed her with a hatpin to the skull.

Evil and creative, for sure.

And also entirely wrong.

Any writer with a couple of working brain cells could tell you it’s a huge mistake to kill off such an appealing character. As a matter of fact, Amy was happy to tell me herself, taking up a spot in my brain and refusing to leave as I started the first read-through of the manuscript.

Normally, I don’t have a traditional first draft. I do a quick edit of the previous day’s pages at the beginning of the next morning’s work as a way to get into the story. But I wrote this draft during NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month project many writers do in November.  Under the NaNoWriMo rules, you’re supposed to write as many words as possible and edit later.

Which I did.

There was a point, as I was writing the scene of Amy’s shiva (the traditional Jewish equivalent of calling hours) when I wondered what on earth I was doing. But then, the drive to finish the day’s words took over, and I kept on going.

NaNoWriMo has become problematic in the two years since I wrote the original Mayhem, but I learned my lesson during that read-through. About two chapters in, I started to get a nagging little feeling it wasn’t working. A tiny whisper: maybe this isn’t the right plotline.
By the end of the read-through, it was a scream. A window-shattering, Munch-painting howl of absolute anguish. Followed by several days of abject despair.

What on earth do you do when you’ve committed to something entirely wrong?

Well, I tried denial.

Maybe it was really okay, and I was just borrowing trouble as my Scottish grandmother
(and Christan Shaw’s, too!) used to say. I read it again. Nope. Still a mess, and it all stemmed from Amy’s murder.

So, there was nothing for it.

At the end of the day, it’s my work, and my name’s on it. It’s got to be the best it can possibly be when I turn it in. And killing off the bat mitzvah girl is a mistake.

You probably know how this ends by now.

Yep. Somewhere around three-quarters of the book ended up in the digital dustbin. And I started writing again. Without, thank you very much, an eye to daily word count targets.

The plot still revolves around the death of that rotten businessman at the cannon firing, and a land-use issue still becomes motive for murder. But, with a little inspiration from a real-life dispute over a Revolutionary War site in New York, Christian and her friends use their expertise on possible artifacts. And Amy’s very much alive, involved in the land-use issue, and studying for her bat mitzvah.

Now, the bat mitzvah is the setting for the big denouement – and Amy, unfortunate murder victim in the original draft – has the satisfaction of unmasking a killer.  Any more is a spoiler, so let’s just say Amy is a great addition to the cast in her new lease on fictional life.

Obviously, I’ve learned the hard way to think twice about who I kill. And to listen to that little caution voice. And The Stuff of Mayhem is a much, much better book.

So mazeltov to Amy…and me!

Kathleen Marple Kalb describes herself as an Author/Anchor/Mom…not in that order. An award-winning weekend anchor at New York’s 1010 WINS Radio, she writes short stories and novels including the Old Stuff and Ella Shane series, both from Level Best Books. Her stories, under her own name, and as Nikki Knight, have been in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, Mystery Magazine, and others, and short-listed for Derringer and Black Orchid Novella Awards. Active in writer’s groups, she’s served as Vice President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society and Co-VP of the New York/Tri-State Sisters in Crime Chapter. She, her husband, and son live in a Connecticut house owned by their cat.

I started out writing literary short stories and that’s all I did for the first five or six years of my writing life and I was lucky enough to have many of them published.
 
Then, I entered a novella competition called The Great Novella Search. I won that and part of the prize was publication and the book was called Drifting, a kind of love story road novel and that was in 2017 and it’s still out there on Amazon and other digital stores.
 
After that, if I wrote a short story and it was published I’d ask myself if the idea was bigger and that’s how I wrote my first crime novel Going All the Way. It’s about a footballer who got kicked out of the big time after fucking up and now works as a Night Manager in a seedy three star motel in Kings Cross. A sex worker is killed in the motel while he’s on shift and he makes a decision to find the killer. And he never gives up no matter what.
 
I kept on writing short stories and published three collections all available through Next Chapter Publishers. I also wrote a crime trilogy that started with a book called City of Sin and includes City of Fear and City of Vice.
 
About this time I also started taking a lot of photographs and entered a few competitions and got shortlisted and commended and I found I loved doing it. I went to Vietnam and Hong Kong a few times and I swear to God my camera was out constantly. I like point and shoot photography. I don’t do much editing at all, maybe a little sometimes but just with the Apple photo app or the Google App, and that’s very rare.
 
There was a story in one of those short story collections called Tokyo Jazz and it was the starting point for my novel TRAFFIC, which is the first novel of mine due to be published by Level Best Books in March 25. The book features Bangkok-based, Australian PI Lee Jenson and there will be a three book series.
 
I’ve started writing another series that features a female PI, the first time a main character of mine has been a woman. I like the Andy Warhol quote, and I’m paraphrasing, where he says while other people decide if your art is good or bad just keep making art. For me, I’ll just keep writing and taking photos and let other people decide if it’s good or bad.
 
Thanks for the opportunity to blog here.


Sean O’Leary is a writer of crime and literary fiction from Melbourne, Australia. He has published five short story collections, four crime novels and two novellas as well as over fifty short stories in journals. He likes to walk everywhere, take photos like crazy, loves travel, writes like a demon, and thinks test cricket is the greatest game of all.