Month: November 2011

NaNoWriMo: Advice From The Fastest Writers Ever

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This series of slides and quotations featuring respected and commercially successful authors, curated by Romy Oltuski, originally appeared on Flavorwire on 11/3/11.

Yesterday marked the kickoff of National Novel-Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), the online project that challenges participants to write a 50,000-word book in the 30 days of November. To those scribbling hurriedly to meet its deadline, we wish you a book deal by December. And to cheer you on, we’ve rounded up a treasure trove of advice and encouragement from the great writers who best embody, in their own work, NaNoWriMo’s goals of writing much and writing fast. Below the jump, read through our favorite words from the wise, speedy, and prolific.

  

Jack Kerouac: “You’re a Genius all the time”

One of the central aims of NaNoWriMo is to encourage writers to trust their abilities — not to look back and scrutinize every detail of their prose but to look forward and trust their pens (or laptops) to spit out rapid gold. This is what Kerouac did, no doubt, when he jotted down the Beat bible On the Road in a mere three weeks on a 120-foot scroll of paper, and why we chose to highlight the 29th axiom of the 30 writing tips in his strangely spelled, hardly punctuated, partially coherent “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,” below. “You’re a Genius all the time,” he instructs (and with a capital G, no less!); you’ve got to believe it if your publisher will.

 

The slide show and quotes continue here, on Flavorwire.

Editing Non-Native English

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For those who edit books and articles professionally, occasionally you might run into a special challenge. How do you deal with works written by clients for whom English is not their native language. I certainly can’t claim to be a trained linguist; however, I have faced this challenge a number of times in my past. As a retired intelligence professional, I have been interested in other languages and have lived in other countries where languages other than English are spoken. Here is a list of languages for which some of my editing clients spoke as their primary languages:

 

  • German
  • Spanish
  • French Canadian
  • Korean
  • Chinese
  • Farsi
  • Japanese

What can you expect if you find yourself working for such a client? First,English is one of the more difficult languages in the world. We have so many exceptions and sound alike word choices. We have been influenced by so many other languages. When you couple these with the usual writing and punctuation mistakes we see in native speaking English writers, it’s not surprising that writers from other languages have problems.

As editors, we owe these clients two important aspects. First, we want to help them get their English correct. Second, we want to try to insure we help them communicate what they really mean when transitioning from their own languages. The following are some hints that you might find useful for accomplishing these two goals:

  1. Watch for patterns in sentence structure and word order. Usually these will become noticeable as you read through their work. If these sound funny or unusual, they may express how the client’s native language is structured. I have edited a number of clients who first wrote their book or article in their native language and then directly translated over word by word without considering how we arrange our words in sentences.
     
  2. Watch for unusual ways of saying things. My Korean martial art instructor had funny little ways of driving points home. For example: “If you hit him here, he should be die.” He was a professional translator with a degree in English from Seoul University, yet he still used these little idiosyncrasies in word choices.
     
  3. Sometimes clients will use idioms from their native languages that don’t make sense in English, just as we have many that don’t translate into their languages very well. You’ll need to ask what the client meant when you run into these. Idioms are the mark of true fluency in foreign languages. For example, I remember one phrase in German that translated into English thusly: “That place is so strange, that foxes and hares greet each other and shake hands.” This is not something I’ve ever heard used in American English, but it was common in Bayrish Deutsch (Bavarian German).

The bottom line is that editing folks for whom English is not a native language requires a lot more work and care in communicating. For this reason, I charge higher rates for such jobs because of the extra time, thought, and care they take. Such a client needs to understand this up front. It is always a good idea to ask for a sample of the work before coming to terms. I have had jobs that have required a complete re-write. They always take more time and effort. You may find you just don’t want to take it on, and that’s OK as long as it’s determined up front.

Editing non-native English can be challenging but not impossible. It can lead to frustrations, but it can also lead humorous situations. It also can open doorways into a better understanding of another culture. Although I was initially raised as an Indiana farm boy with no travel experience or exposure to other languages and cultures, that certainly changed when I went to college and into the military. For these reasons, I always provided foreign cultural opportunities to my four children, which has held them in good stead in their lives. As editors, we must be open to learning about other languages and cultures in order to improve our abilities of communicating with and understanding of people throughout the world. Editing non-native English users is a good place to start.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

I'm No Artist, But…

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Okay, so I maybe putting the cart before the horse, but I believe in getting a head start when I can. I’m only about half finished with my third book (first draft!) and I’ve been considering cover art. Why? Because you only get about 8 seconds to entice a prospective reader to take the time to read the blurb about what’s inside the cover.

 

Well, as this post’s title indicates, I’m not an artist. (I can draw a mean stick figure, but that’s about as far as it gets. :D ) I did design the cover for my first book, Fear Not!, using a photo from the drive-thru window of the Northwest Missouri Regional Credit Union where I work and Photoshop to create a rainbow. I also designed the text for the cover. However, being as it was a Bible study I felt the artwork was appropriate in its simplicity. With this Apprentice Cat being a fantasy, though, I thought maybe I should see if I could hire a real artist to design the cover.

I went to Lulu.com first because they “supposedly” have professionals who do cover designs. Here’s my problem: each Lulu sponsored designer stated that they would design my cover for a fee, but I would have to submit all the images I wanted to be incorporated in the cover. Huh? I have to give you the images? Isn’t that your job? That’s the whole reason I’m looking for a designer. Sure I could probably merge some pictures together and come up with something nice, but I want a really great professional cover.

I’m still looking for a good artist with reasonable fees, but in the meantime I’m trying to find ways to use my Photoshop and the skills I learned at Rush Printing as a desktop publisher to create a cover I can be proud of.

When buying a book, how important is the cover art to you? If you’re an Indie Author, how have you tackled the cover design?

 

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

The Story of a Story, Or How I Was Flensed

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flense
verb, flensed, flens·ing

1. to strip the blubber or the skin from (a whale, seal, etc.).

2. to strip off (blubber or skin).

Beware – Harsh truth approaching: We are not good enough.

 

None of us are good enough. Sure we can get good. Good enough to be published. We can continually get better, assuming we have that desire and constantly work at our craft. Which we all should, of course. But, on our own, in our little bubbles of imagination and twisted ideas, we’re not good enough. We need to be better than we’re capable of being on our own. For that, we need the unbiased, critical eyes of others.

As a writer, I work alone. It’s part of the job and it’s one of the things I love about it. I also love the community of writers I’ve gathered around myself over the years, online and in real life. And therein lies the key. I have a handful of talented writer friends who are happy to read and critique my work. I’m happy to return the favour. It’s how our world goes around. I’m actually very lucky in that the majority of writerly friends happy to critique my work are far better scribes than I.

As the writer of a story (or novel, screenplay, webserial, whatever) we’re far too close to the thing to be objective. We’ve invested our time, imagination and effort into creating it. We’ve extruded the guts of it from the labyrinthine depths of our subconscious and regurgitated it into being. Up to a point we can be critical of our own work. We can put the first draft away for a while to let it fester, then pull it out again and read it with fresh eyes. The longer you’ve been doing this, the better you get at spotting flaws and being honest with yourself. We can turn a first draft into a pretty decent final draft. But we’re still not objective enough and it’s not really a final draft at all.

I wrote a short story recently that I was really pleased with. I spent a while going over it, polishing it, getting it just right. I sent it out into the world. And it came back. And again. And again. The rejections stacked up. It’s cool, I’m used to that. Every writer is. We have hides that make rhino skin look like tissue paper and a solid fuck-you-attitude that keeps us working in the face of constant rejection. It’s the only way to work in this game. After all, it’s not necessarily the story – it could be the editor just doesn’t dig that vibe, or the publication ran something a bit similar recently, or the publisher’s cat swallowed a bee and she’s sore at the world and takes it out on a good story. That last one is unlikely, but anything’s possible.

But once something has been bounced a few times in a row, you can start to see the common denominator. It’s the story, schmuck. It ain’t good enough.

eviscerated book The story of a story, or how I was flensed

So I went to my friends seeking help. In this particular instance I was fortunate enough to get the Evil Drs Brain* on the case. Given that it was a dark and twisted fairy tale vibe, I asked Angela Slatter* to have a look at it for me. She read the story, liked it, but took her flensing knife to it with abandon. I got it back and sobbed quietly for a few minutes, then manned up and listened to her advice. It was good advice. She’d seen flaws I hadn’t, picked up things in the story that needed to work differently. She’d identified character inconsistencies I would never have seen.

The story was greatly improved, but it still needed something; we could both see that now. Angela sent it over to her other brain, Lisa L Hannett*. Lisa added her flensing knife to the mix and my story was further eviscerated, but she saw the things that needed fixing.

One of them was really harsh – the whole story had grown from a killer closing line. I came up with the final line, something I really wanted to use to finish, and the whole story grew out of that. Lisa pointed out that the final line didn’t work. The story had outgrown its seed of conception and that line had to go.

I wailed and raged, but I knew Lisa was right. The line was cut. I killed the fuck out that particular darling. There’s no room for pussies in this caper.

The story has just been sold to a very prestigious market and I couldn’t be happier.

The moral of the story? We need our friends. We need beta-readers, critiques, flensing knives flashing in the cold light of dawn. And we must listen to these people.

Hopefully it gets to the point where our writing is good enough that we can usually get something to a standard editors want to buy and then they do that last bit of flense and polish. A good editor will see the gem in the rough diamond and draw it out. But they don’t have time for much. It behoves us to make our work shine as brightly as it possibly can.

In essence: fresh eyes, beta readers, honest critique, listen to advice and kill your darlings. You know, the usual shit. It’s been said before, and it will be said again. But it needs to be repeated.

Say it after me:

We are not good enough.
We must try harder,
All the time.
And help our friends as they help us.
For this is the flensing,
And the power of the story,
For ever and ever.
RAmen. (Quick and easy, the snack of the starving, jobbing penmonkey.)

Now, go write.

* CAVEAT: Angela and Lisa were happy for me to mention them in this post and applaud their shining word razors, but they won’t critique your work. This particular flensing was done on the basis of friendship and collegiality, built up over time. You can, however, get your own friends on the case. Join writers’ groups and crit circles and help each other. You’ll all grow and improve together. Just get involved and know that you need help and that you can help others. Meet people, be nice, take advice. It all grows from there.

 

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

The Future Makes A Comeback

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This post, by L.J. Sellers, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 11/4/11, and is reprinted here in its entirety with the author’s and site’s permission.

We’ve all seen the ads for the new book When She Woke (by Hilary Jordan), a futuristic novel in which a criminal’s skin is dyed to reflect her crime, a story that’s been compared to the classic, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. In recent years, other similar novels have been wildly popular too, such as The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. These novels are dystopian and reflect a society that has completely broken down and morphed into something ugly.

As a reader, my love of futuristic thrillers—which I distinguish from dystopian novels—started long ago with a terrific novel by Lawrence Sanders called The Tomorrow File. For the record, he’s my all-time favorite author, and TTF may be one of the best books I’ve ever read, or at least that’s how I remember it.

The story was written in 1975—and takes place in the year 1998. I read it in college and was captivated by Sanders’ vision of the future, in which genetic classifications are based on whether one is natural, produced by artificial insemination, artificial inovulation, cloned, or otherwise created without the necessity for sexual intercourse. The objects (people) of tomorrow eat food synthesized from petroleum and soybeans, and enjoy unrestricted using (sex) and an addictive soft drink called Smack.

The new language took some getting used to, but the story was so engaging with so many twists that it was hard to put down. Most important, the book triggered my fascination with well-told futuristic thrillers.

Another of my favorite novels set in the future is The Handmaid’s Tale, published ten years after The Tomorrow File. The book won numerous awards, was made into a film, and is so well known I won’t bother with the details, except to say it’s a feminist portrayal of the dangers of a conservative society. I admire Atwood immensely for tackling the subject. (I took a stab at that issue when I wrote The Sex Club…but that’s another story.) Reading The Handmaid’s Tale further inspired me to someday write a thriller set in the future.

Interestingly enough, yesterday a blogger posted comparative reviews of The Catcher in the Rye, The Handmaid’s Tale and my futuristic thriller, The Arranger. The blogger focused on insecurities as the theme, both social and personal, and concluded they were necessary in fiction. First, I find it interesting that people are reading or re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale from 1985 because of the advertising for When She Woke. It’s fun to see the novel resurrected.

Second, it’s an honor to be listed in the same company as works by J.D. Salinger and Margaret Atwood.

I don’t mean to imply The Arranger compares to any of the brilliant works I’ve mentioned, most of which imagine a shockingly different future. (I’m still not sure why Catcher in the Rye is in there, but that was the blogger’s choice.) My story is set only 13 years in the future, and I don’t consider it dystopian. It presents a bleak vision of the United States, in that the economy is stagnant, government has shrunk, and people without health insurance are left to fend for themselves. But all that seems quite realistic to me and didn’t require much imagination.

The Gauntlet, however, is an intense physical and mental competition that provides a backdrop for my novel and required me to create entirely fictitious scenarios.

Overall, I’m excited for the revived interest in futuristic novels. Does it represent a dissatisfaction with our current state of affairs or a fear of what is waiting for us? Or both?

Do you read futuristic novels? What are your favorites? What themes do like to see?

 

Getting A Big Name To Write Your Book’s Foreword: An Introduction For Self-Publishers

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Once again, we are happy to promote a post from member Joseph C. Kunz Jr.’s Publetariat blog to the front page.

Getting a notable VIP, industry guru, or media celebrity to write the foreword for your book is a great way to jump-start bigger sales and get positive publicity for your book. If you are an unknown author, getting a notable leader in your field to write your foreword is essential if you want to get readers to take a chance on you and buy your book. Having your name associated with an industry leader will greatly enhance your credibility within your industry and with your readers. 

Forewords give the endorser another place to discuss and show-off their skills and knowledge. It also gives them and an opportunity to connect with your reading audience in a deeper, more meaningful way. This is a great selling point to consider when requesting this service from someone. You get a foreword for your book that will help improve your sales, and the foreword author gets additional exposure and credibility for their own name and business. It’s a win-win situation for the book’s author and the foreword’s author.

The process of getting a foreword written is the same as with endorsements. But instead of simply writing a few sentences endorsing your book, the endorser writes what amounts to being a glorified recommendation letter to the reader. It can be as short as several paragraphs or as long as a few pages, and gives, in greater detail, the reasons why the industry guru recommends your book.

One thing you should remember – that when you ask a VIP to write your book’s foreword, that you should not be selling your prospect on your book’s good points. You need to sell them on their own value as a potential endorser of your book. In other words, don’t start off by telling them how great your book is. Start by saying why you admire their opinion and why it’s important for you to have their opinion included in your book. Also, make sure that you share your reasons for writing the book. Discuss the subject of your book in detail.  Finally, discuss who the market is that your book is addressing so that the endorser can readily see that you are marketing your book to the same audience that they serve. Doing this allows them to see the advantage in having their name visible to your network of readers. They are looking to connect with their own audience as much as you are.

This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com

Categories, Key Words, and Tags, Oh My: Why should an Author Care?

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Two weeks ago I published my second historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, and in the process I was reminded of how confusing it can be to determine the best category and key words I should use on Amazon to describe my book. Since there are several other authors who have been wrestling with the same question in the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative (HFAC) that I belong to, I decided to write this post on how to use categories and keywords to maximize ebook sales.

For the purpose of this post I am focusing on ebooks on Amazon, in part because that is where I have the most experience, but also because Amazon is definitely ahead of the other ebook stores in its sophisticated approaches to helping readers find books. My understanding of these issues is based on my experience as a self-published author using KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Finally, as with much of the publishing process, there is still a lot of conflicting information about how Amazon categories, keywords, and tags work, so some of what I say is more of an educated guess than documented fact.

First some definitions:

Categories: When a book is uploaded into KDP, an author (and, I assume, a traditional publisher) has the opportunity to choose two categories. It used to be that Amazon allowed you to choose five categories, which is why some books have more Kindle Store categories listed at the bottom of their product page. When you, as author, choose a category for your book, you are actually choosing a browsing-path for readers. That browsing-path/category consists of a hierarchy of sub-categories and your book is available for readers to discover under each of the parts of that hierarchy. For example, in the case of my most recent book, Uneasy Spirits, one of the two browsing-path/categories I chose was:

Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical 

If you browse for Uneasy Spirits in the Kindle store, you will find it in under all four parts of the hierarchy:

Fiction
Fiction–Mystery&Thriller
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical  

Note that each time a reader goes one step further down the hierarchical browsing-path, there are fewer books to browse. For example, as I write this, here are the numbers of books in each of these four areas:

Fiction [324,671]
Fiction–Mystery&Thriller [43,629]
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery [9,700]
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical   [73]

By carefully choosing my category, I make it much more likely that a reader will find my book, since the pool of books is smaller with each step down the path.

The “categories” Amazon offers when you upload your book to KDP are apparently BISAC categories, a book industry standard for subject headings.  What is confusing is that the “browsing path” that Amazon generates from your choice is not always the same as the BISAC category you chose. Amazon apparently converts the BISAC categories that you pick into the Amazon browsing-path categories and subcategories that show up in the Kindle store — and the two are not always the same.

To make matters more confusing and frustrating, this conversion process does not always work accurately. You can read more about this on my blog post, “Working Amazon” and on Suzanne Adair’s blog post, which provides a hilarious description of the trouble she had with getting her wonderful new Revolutionary War thriller, Regulated for Murder, in the right category. (Suzanne is a fellow HFAC author.) To complicate issues further, the browsing categories for books and ebooks are not identical, and Amazon creates browsing categories like “newly released” and “best sellers” and “editors’ pick” — some of which are separate from the browsing-path/categories and some of which are available as additional qualifiers to the browsing-paths. Are you lost yet?

Keywords: When you publish your book with KDP, you can choose seven “key-words” in addition to the two categories. These are really key phrases since they can be more than one word. For example I used terms like “Victorian Mystery” and “cozy mystery.” These “key-words” are apparently used by Amazon in its own search engine — along with words in your title and subtitle and product description. This may seem very straightforward, until you get to the next definition—tags.

Tags: These are another kind of key-word or key phrase. They are listed on a book’s product page under the heading “Tag this product” and were designed by Amazon to help customers describe and find products using key words called “tags.” Readers can add tags to a product page and can indicate that an existing tag is useful. It used to be that the “key-words” that authors chose at the time of uploading a book to KDP were automatically displayed as “tags” on the book’s product page, but this evidently no longer happens. Of course, after publication, an author can add tags to a product page just like readers can.

There is contradictory information about how Amazon uses “tags” and “key-words” in its own main search engine, but I believe that “key-words” that the author has assigned to a book are searchable in Kindle store, the but “tags” are not.  For example, I did not add the word “clairvoyant” as a “key-word” when I uploaded my book Maids of Misfortune to KDP, but it has been added by customers as a tag on the Maids product page. So, if I go to the Kindle bookstore on the Kindle device (or the main search box on the Amazon website) and search for “clairvoyant,” Maids of Misfortune does not show up in the 100 books that are listed in the search result. So, apparently, Amazon does not include the customer-created “tags” in its Kindle bookstore search (available on the Kindle device) or in the standard search box on the Amazon website.

“Tags” are available for a different kind of searching, though. The “tags” themselves are clickable links. Readers can click on any “Tag” on a product page and find other books that have the same “tag.”  For example, if, on the Maids of Misfortune product page, I click on the tag “clairvoyant” (which 19 people checked as useful), the result is 152 books, including Maids of Misfortune. Also, in the “Tag” section of the product page there is a special search box labeled “Search Products Tagged with.”  By entering terms in that special search box, you are searching only “tags.”  Searching “clairvoyant” using the special tag search box finds those same 152 books. Note that “tags” are typed in by users so you will see misspelled tags!

Why Should an Author Care?

Categories, keywords, and tags can be used to help readers find your books, and these are methods that are generally not available to authors of print books that are sold in brick and mortar stores. As authors of ebooks, we need to learn how readers find books in estores like the Kindle store and use the tools that are available to us to maximize our sales.

When you sell a book to a traditional publisher, who then distributes that book to bookstores, you, as author, really don’t have much to say about how readers find your books. You hope that the bookstores will shelve your book on the right shelf (and that they have separate shelves for your genre) and you hope your publisher can convince the seller (or pay them) to put your book in special places like “newly released” tables, or “best seller” tables, or under “staff recommendations.” Beyond that, there isn’t much authors can do besides cultivating booksellers at conventions and through book signings, hoping this will convince them to feature their books — a time-consuming and expensive proposition. (Although I know one author who always turned their books and books of their friends so that the full cover showed whenever they found them in a bookstore!)

However, self-published authors, by their choice of categories, keywords, and tags, can increase the chances that a reader will find their books in an ebook store. I am going to discuss two strategies an author can use to achieve that end.

The first strategy is to choose a category (browsing path) that ends up with a small number of books at the end of the path.

For example, I could have chosen as one of my two categories, the browsing path of Fiction—Historical Fiction for my newest historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, which is most certainly a work of historical fiction. However, this would have placed this book in a final pool of over 15,000 books in the Kindle store. Maybe some day I will be such a successful author that I can compete in a pool of that size, but right now as an indie author without a big promotional campaign behind me it would be easy for me to get lost in that pool. Few people are going to scroll down through hundreds if not thousands of books to find mine.

So, I chose to place both of my books, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits in the Fiction—Mystery&Thrillers—Mystery—Historical category/browsing-path. Not only does this more accurately define the sub-genre of these two books, but there are fewer than 100 books in this subcategory. It took me six months to reach the top ten books in that subcategory with my first book, Maids of Misfortune, but once I did, my sales went up exponentially. In May 2010, I sold 55 copies of Maids in Kindle and in August, after the book hit the top 10 in this category, I sold 249.

I did a fair number of things to help Maids of Misfortune achieve that top ten status (price changes, reviews, short story, etc.) but I could have done all those things and it still wouldn’t have gotten me into the top 10 in the category of Historical Fiction—it is just too big a pool of books. With the publication of Uneasy Spirits, I had the benefit of now being a better known author, with an already existing fan base, which explains why it took only 24 hours for this book to hit the top ten in the historical mystery subcategory. Even so, as an independent author without a whole publicity machine behind me, I still would not have achieved this within the “Historical Fiction” category.

This strategy (getting your book into the smallest possible pool of books) is also why I chose to put Uneasy Spirits into the browsing path Fiction—Romance—Romantic Suspense (4,800), rather than into the Historical Fiction (15,000 books) or the Historical Romance (8,800 books) subcategories. Again, this was in part because this subcategory accurately describes the book, but also because the pool of books in this subcategory is smaller than in these other two. This is also why, when I had 5 choices of categories when I uploaded Maids of Misfortune, I chose History—United States—state and local—west as one browsing path. I not only figured that people looking for books about the western US would be interested in my book, based as it was on solid historical research, but this was also a pool of less than 500 books, and Maids of Misfortune has been at the top of this list for most of the last year.

The second strategy is to use key-words and tags that will help users find my book in a small pool of potential books.

Let’s take the example of a work of historical fiction that is not a mystery and that, therefore, doesn’t have a lot of options apart from being placed in the historical fiction category with those 15,000 other books in the Kindle store. Here the application of key-words (or tags for people who are doing a tag search) is the appropriate strategy for narrowing the pool to a reasonable level, giving your book a better chance to compete. For example, when I was giving advice to a fellow HFAC author, Elisabeth Storrs, who has written a well-reviewed work of historical fiction, The Wedding Shroud, which has not yet found the readership that it deserves, I investigated what key words she could use.

I discovered that a user who is browsing in the historical fiction subcategory and looking for books about Rome will narrow that list from 15,000 books to 221 books if they put in the search term “Rome.” If they search for “Ancient Rome” they will find a list of just 88 books. And, if they searched for “Early Rome” while browsing in the historical fiction subcategory, they would find just two books.

My recommendation was that she use “Rome” and “Ancient Rome” for two of her seven “key-words” because readers using this browse-then-search strategy would be more likely to find her book in these smaller lists of books that match. This would enable her to compete more successfully in an otherwise broad category. And, of course, these terms more accurately describe the historical fiction she has written!

However, I did not recommend the use of “Early Rome” (although it equally described the period of the book) because it produced such a small pool of books that readers probably wouldn’t return to that search. The other two key-words bring up enough books to make them search terms that readers would be likely to use the next time they were ready to look for a new book.

These two strategies can boost your sales in two additional ways.

First, they will help you get on an Amazon “Top 100 Best Seller List.” Second, they will help ensure that people who find your book will have found books similar to yours — and that improves the chances of your book showing up on the Amazon “Customers who bought this book also bought” recommendation system.

The best-seller lists: Amazon has a computer algorithm that updates the “best-seller lists” in each category and subcategory every hour. While secret, the algorithm evidently takes into consideration “all-time sales, as well as recent sales that are weighted more heavily than older sales…” according to an Amazon spokesperson quoted in this article. Needless to say, no matter how good your sales are in a given hour, or day, your chances of getting into a top 100 best-sellers list and staying there are pretty slim if you are competing against 15,000 other books.

If, however, you are in a group like Horror-Dark Fantasy (227 books), or Science Fiction—Series (169 books), or Fantasy—Authurian (27 books), or Mystery—Historical (73 books), your chances of being ranked in the top 100 in these categories increases (or becomes 100%). Since many customers start their searches for book in the best-seller lists, this heightens your visibility and cachet and increases your sales, which in turn helps you stay on and move up the best seller lists. The increase in sales may, in time, help your book rise in the other categories or key-word searches where your book is listed. Very briefly after Christmas of last year, when my sales were high (700 books in the 3 days after December 25), I actually made the top 100 of the category Mystery—Women sleuths (6,222 books). Heady days!

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought: Amazon uses an algorithm that identifies other books that people who have bought your book have bought. You have to have a certain number of sales for this to kick in (Uneasy Spirits had enough Kindle sales so this section appeared within a day—my print edition came out a week later and has had fewer sales, so its product page does not yet have this feature.) In addition, it appears that for a book to appear in this list, a certain number of your customers must have bought the book. For example, nearly 15,000 people have bought Maids of Misfortune, yet there are only 100 books that show up in the “Customers Who Bought” list, and I know that those 15,000 people bought more than 100 books altogether. It also appears that there might be some other limitations; I haven’t seen more than 100 “also-bought” books listed, even for popular books like Amanda Hocking’s ebooks.

You’ll want to do more than just sell enough books to trigger this feature, however. You’ll want to make sure that the books that show up are similar to your book – and you can do that by using the right categories, key-words, and tags. For example, I could certainly have put my books into the category of Romance—Historical, but then the books that would show up in this “Customer who Bought” list would be dominated by books that tend to put the romance before the history and have explicit sexual themes. While there is nothing wrong with these books, a customer who bought my book, based on the expectation it would be like these historical romances, might be very disappointed by the rather chaste nature of my protagonists’ relationship.

Since my books are in the Mystery—Historical category, it is not surprising that the list of books in the “Customer who Bought” feature is filled with historical fiction (usually in the Victorian era) and mysteries. This adds to the chance that the customer who is checking out my book will think, “Hey, I read those books and liked them, I will probably like this one.” And if they buy my book, there is less chance they will be disappointed —  thinking, “Where was the sex?” — and give my book a bad review. And finally, it will also mean that my book will show up on “customers who bought” lists for books that are in my sub-genre. You can imagine how pleased I was when I discovered that Maids of Misfortune had started showing up on a “customers who bought” list for Victoria Thompson’s Gaslight Mystery Series! That meant my book was being seen by exactly the readership I want to attract.

In Summary:

As an author, you need to carefully choose categories and key-words when you publish and add your own “tags” after publishing. You need to take into consideration not only what best describes your books but also what will maximize the chances that a reader who is browsing through the Kindle store will find your books. You also want to make sure that readers who find your book are the ones who would be most likely to buy it and enjoy it. Careful uses of categories and key-words and tags can also increase your chance of getting on one of the best-seller lists and showing up on one of the “Customers who bought” lists, which in turn will help boost your sales. Carelessness in using these strategies can condemn even the best work to the backwaters of the Kindle store —  undiscovered, unbought, and unread — and that would be a shame.

 

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s blog.

Author Blogging 101: Up With Comments!

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One of the first experiences you’ll have when you start your blog is publishing a post and then wondering if anyone is reading it.

Especially at the beginning, author blogging can feel a little bit like “pouring from the empty into the void.” We all know that some of the best blogs are about the conversation going on between the blogger and the readers, but it can take a long time before you start getting those comments on your blog articles.

 

Commenting is central to the kind of blogging I like the most, and the one that seems to work best for most bloggers. There are lots of reasons commenting is a tool you should learn to cultivate and respect. And whatever you do, try to make it easy for your readers to comment. It will do many things for you:

  1. Comments allow you to engage one-on-one with readers. When we write for publication, we’re writing for some group of people, and we may or may not know very much about who is reading. But when a reader steps forward and writes a comment, they are opening a dialogue with you, one that can have profound implications.

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  2. Readers will make your blog posts better with their comments. If you’ve missed something in an article, or made a factual error, astute readers may well point it out. And since none of us can know everything about a subject, comments can make a conversation more complete and well-rounded than it would have been with only one voice.

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  3. The voices of many people can be heard in the comments. These other voices help to expand the range of your blog and its appeal to more kinds of people.

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  4. Comments show that a community is building around your blog. Many of us follow dozens of blogs, but we can only give enough attention to become part of the community at a handful of sites.

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  5. Commenting gives readers an opportunity to get to know you better. In fact, this is one of the most common pieces of advice given to bloggers who want to write guest posts for other blogs, and it certainly works. For instance, the wonderful article on Friday by Joan Reeves came about because of her comments on another article.

 

A Word About Blogs Without Comments

Although it seems like most bloggers are eager for comments, sometimes you come across a blog where the comments have been turned off. I don’t read many of these blogs, and it’s interesting how different the environment is on a blog without comments.

It feels more like a website where articles are posted regularly, and that’s about the only relation to a blog. Some bloggers have good reasons for blogging this way, and it does take time and attention to have a conversation with readers that just goes on and on.

So it can be done, and done very well by the right person, but I’m not talking about those kinds of blogs in this article.

What is “Social Proof”?

One of the reasons you want comments from your readers is because it contributes a great deal to “social proof.” What does that mean?

Social proof is a psychological trigger that affects our behavior. It’s the tendency, when you are undecided about something, to be influenced in your choice by the apparent choices of a group of other people.

What does that mean? What I mean is that suppose you happen onto the blog at Copyblogger.com, one of the internet’s premier resources on the subjects of copywriting and content marketing. You like the article you’re reading, then you notice the subscription box:

Copyblogger.com

When you see that over 155,000 other people have subscribed to the Copyblogger blog, you are assured it would not be a big mistake to take a chance and put your email address into the subscription box. The number of subscribers is a kind of proof of quality, a social proof that can influence our behavior.

The same is true for blog comments. If you see a blog article with 10, 30, 50 comments, you might automatically think that it has some value, that it’s not just an empty post parroting something some other blogger said. Otherwise, why would it have so many comments?

So having comments, and displaying the number of comments on your blog posts, naturally prompts more comments. And remember, the vast majority of your readers will never comment on the blog, so each person who does represents a whole swath of readers who likely have similar opinions.

How Can You Stimulate Interaction?

As a blogger trying to build community and relationships, your readers are vitally important. Encouraging comments makes your blog a better read and more attractive for interaction.

So how do you get those comments?

  • Ask—I know it seems obvious, but it’s not that easy when you start out. If you’re writing a post that centers on your opinion, ask for reader’s opinions. If it’s a how-to article, ask if they understood it. If it’s a survey, ask if readers know other resources.

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  • Unfinished posts—I learned this from Chris Brogan and it works. Instead of writing all the way to the logical end of an article, stop and ask readers how they would finish it.

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  • Controversy—One of the easiest ways to spark a discussion is to take a controversial stand, to oppose the current trends in your field, or pick a fight with a leading figure.

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  • Revelation—Discussing your problems and your passions, revealing yourself to your audience in an emotional, contactful way will bring in comments from a variety of readers.

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  • Co-creation—You may want to try creating a resource with the help of your readers. This can be a powerful community-building experience, especially if you can get enough people to participate, and the comments are a great way to do that.

The Golden Rule of Comments

Okay, now you’ve got the story on blog comments. Comment on other people’s blogs so you can get inside the feeling and know what your readers are experiencing.

Use comments to ask your readers what their concerns are, what information they would like, or what they think of your new book cover. These conversations turn into relationships and the bond between you and your readers will grow strong.

The Golden Rule of blog comments, of course, is to never ignore them. What’s the point of asking people to comment if you never answer them?

You don’t have to answer every comment, but it makes a huge difference if readers sense that you are as much a part of the discussion as they are, and a well-placed response will be much appreciated.

So does that answer your questions about blog comments?

 

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Plumber by Day, Writer by Night

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This article, by Crystal O’Gorman, originally appeared on the South Charlotte News site on 11/2/11.

Indie author focuses on Internet intrigue

David Moore knows joy.

A native Charlottean and resident of Matthews’ Windrow Estates, Moore recently turned 50 and launched his career as an indie author with the debut of his second ebook, "The Collective, " which came out last week.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Moore has been a plumber for more than 30 years.

Currently the plumbing superintendent at P.C. Jackson Plumbing in Charlotte, he’s overseeing two 10-story and one 12-story office building and three parking decks being built in Ballantyne.

Plumbing pays the bills, helps take care of his wife of 26 years and has seen both his sons through college.

But when the work day is done, Moore returns home, turns on his computer and turns into Maxwell Cynn, author and publisher of "The Collective" and "CybrGrrl," which came out in 2008. (Moore estimates he has sold about 1,000 copies of "CybrGrrl" at $2.99 a download.)

Cynn is more than just a pseudonym; he holds the consciousness of what Moore calls his muse.

Moore says, "(Dr. Carl Gustav) Jung (the founder of Analytical Psychology) would call her my anima: that part of me that is just below the surface, that is creative and free, that knows no boundaries or responsibilities, that part of me that dreams."

Through Cynn, Moore plunges into a world where computers and the Internet become weapons used to brainwash and kill innocent Web surfers all in the name of research and development.

 

Read the rest of the article on the South Charlotte News site.

Denying the Muse

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This post, by T.L. Tyson, originally appeared on her blog on 11/1/11.

Like I’ve said a handful times before, I used to be the Queen of beginnings. For the longest time, I wrote stories I never finished. Beginning after beginning, start after start and nothing to show for it, except a truck load of half stories that I never wrapped up. I feel this is the curse of an overactive imagination.

A lot of writers talk about their ‘muse’. This is basically what we call our imagination. Some people even name them, things like Bob and Flutterbutt DeBarnacle, and give them characteristics. The idea of a muse is a bit crazy if you break it down. A lot of non-writers don’t understand why we have them. Well, a muse to a writer is much like an invisible friend is to a child. They keep us company when we’re all alone, or in really boring, never-ending business meetings. In a lot of ways they keep us sane, while giving the world the impression we’re completely off our rocker.

Writers, like fingerprints, are all uniquely different.

Some need complete silence while others need music. There are some people who can create under any circumstances. They have the luxury of being able to shut the world around them out. Others need to lock themselves away, burrowing themselves in a dank, dark cave as far away from humanity as possible. Some even write with their laptops precariously perched on the arm of their couch with the television playing the latest episode of something they can pay little attention to, a cat laying across one arm and a dog’s head in their lap. The later might be close to what I experience on a day to day basis.

But that’s all physical environment and, in reality, there is another environment writers are tested with every day. The mental environment. Humans are moody bastards. We allow the people around us to dictate our moods, as well as the weather and trivial things like how many dishes are in the sink. There are some writers out there who can write no matter what mood they are in. I hate them with my whole heart. Just kidding. Well, sort of. I just went through a very tedious couple of months where I was unable to write a word. Even the outgoing dirty emails I like to send screeched to a halt. (That’s another joke.) For me, I need a mental environment like a soothing rainy day, calm, slightly gray and a total sense of not caring.

 

Read the rest of the post (and see the funny cartoon, too!) on T.L. Tyson‘s blog.

No Hurry to Publish

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This post, by Marika Flatt, originally appeared as a guest post on Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer site on 11/1/11.

In today’s guest post Marika Flatt, founder of PR by the Book, shares her wisdom about choosing your pub date and planning ahead for publicity.

This blog post is for all you authors out there who are self-publishing, now or in the future! Let’s start with the big picture. There is a reason why it takes so long for the publishing process to roll out with publishing houses. It’s not unusual for there to be an 18-month window (or longer) between a publisher accepting a manuscript and the publication date. There are a myriad of reasons why this is. So much has to be done: editing, cover design, more editing, seeding the distribution pipeline, sales meetings, more editing, printing galleys (also called ARCs/ advanced review copies), etc.

The publicity department starts working on a title approximately six months prior to the pub date. The reason for this is because they want to send galleys to publications that are book review publications, industry publications (for that topic, such as education magazines) and national media outlets (such as national TV programs). This process takes time. And, for six months leading up to pub date, the publicists are pitching, pitching, pitching (and lunching with producers for national TV shows).

 

So, self-published authors . . . what’s the big hurry? I talk to one or two authors per week who tell me that their pub (publication) date is this month or next month and what can we do?? First of all, you don’t want your pub date to ever be in November or December (unless it’s a holiday book).  Don’t get me wrong. Publicists stay busy during November and December, but not on books that are releasing those months. So, why?

The publishing industry has two big time frames for releasing books: the Fall (primarily September and October) and the Spring (primarily March and April). There are a few other months that are popular for releasing books, depending on genres/ topics: January for New Year’s resolution-oriented titles: February for relationship books and books from African-American authors since it’s Black History Month; May and June for beach reads, etc.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Savvy Book Marketer.

5 Things Paratrooping Can Teach You About Self-Publishing

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This post, by Chris Allen, originally appeared as a guest post on Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn on 10/31/11.

As a thriller writer, I am always keen to experience new physical adventures! I have done tandem and static line parachute jumps so I was fascinated to hear what Chris Allen had to say about paratrooping in this guest post.

As a kid growing up in Western Australia in the 70’s, I knew I wanted to be a writer of action stories from the moment I picked up my first Ian Fleming (The Man with the Golden Gun, a dark blue, dusty old hardcover borrowed from the school library).

I devoured Fleming’s descriptions of dastardly villains – devoid of scruples and resplendent in physical malformation, his exotic women – subtly flawed but incredibly beautiful in their own way, the locales, the action, the adventure, and of course, the ultimate action hero… James Bond. What boy wouldn’t be hooked!

Of course, not everyone needs to see action to write about it, but I wanted to – fuelled by the belief that I was ten tall and bullet-proof.

So, joining the Australian Army at the tender age of 18, the next fifteen years I spent ‘in’ as an Officer gave me all the fodder necessary to recreate action scenes in my writing. But what I didn’t expect was the similarities between publishing books and those exciting days as a Paratrooper, when I’d launch from a plane, sometimes by night, into less than hospitable parts of the world.

Back then, I remember what would flash across my consciousness whenever we’d force ourselves to depart from a perfectly good aircraft into black, starless skies…

To the brave belong all things

Sometimes we needed encouragement to launch out into the unknown, and when it came to me, it worked every time.

The stoic Celtic adage applies equally to those of us who are part of the current publishing revolution  – blazing a trail (or perhaps, hot on the heels of those doing so) into the world of eBooks, online communities, and technologies that allow readers to find and enjoy stories from a diverse new range of voices.
There are other ways that being a Paratrooper is similar to being in the writing and publishing game, so if you’re conscious and still reading this, thank you, and here they are.

(1) Trust your peers

My mates in the Army always double-checked my gear before I jumped, and even today they still have my back. Similarly, as writers we’re lucky to have friends, family, colleagues, fellow authors and online fans who will tell us first-hand about their reading experience as we press the green light. We are no longer totally reliant on the big publishing houses to send their versions of our stories out into the world. Listen to honest feedback from your own network and use it – it’s your lifeline to connect with your fans and give them what they want.

Real-life outcome: We chose our book cover via an online vote using SurveyMonkey.com. It gave us amazing feedback direct from our fans, and a classic cover!

(2) It’s a long way down

It can be overwhelming, overseeing the editing and design of your book, researching and choosing providers, building your author platform, planning events, negotiating with distributors, bookstores and libraries… all at the same time. I recall peering over the ramps of Hercs many times and being so weighed down by the gear I was carrying (usually 90kg) that I just wanted out of the aircraft, if only to take a load off. Once you get on your way with your publishing project, adrenaline and pig-headedness will keep you going. Stay the course, even when it seems like it’ll never end, and resist the urge to hurl your computer out of the nearest window.

Real-life outcome: We drew on the energy and enthusiasm from our network of friends, family and online communities when it seemed like we’d never get there.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Creative Penn.