Month: February 2012

Scrivener: 3 Reasons You Should Use It For Your Book

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I used Scrivener for my latest book, Prophecy. It’s been a truly life-changing experience after the dreadful cutting and pasting process in MS Word that plagued my last novel, Pentecost. I am now entirely converted and am also an evangelist for the product.

I used Scrivener happily without reading the Help (because I hate reading the Help) but then I found David Hewson’s ‘Writing a Novel with Scrivener‘ which I highly recommend. It will convert you and make your writing life a whole lot easier, I promise!

 

Here are 3 reasons you should be using Scrivener (which is on Mac and PC now so you have no excuse.) It’s just US$49 and you can use it for all your books, fiction and non-fiction as well as academic publications and loads more. No, I’m not an affiliate but I truly do believe in the product!

(1) You can write in scenes then drag and drop to re-order.

If this was the only feature of Scrivener, it would still be enough for me!

I write in sporadic scenes, not in a linear fashion so the final scene is often one of the first I write. I’m already plotting novel #3 and have maybe 5 scenes I could set down right now, but I wouldn’t have a clue where they go in the story yet.

So for the Prophecy work in progress I had all these scenes but it was only in the 2nd edit that I decided on the order they needed to go in. Scrivener makes it easy to drag and drop the scenes to re-order the scenes. There’s no cutting and pasting and no huge Word files to manipulate.

I also like the cork-board view of the scenes. If you use index cards, you’ll be at home here!

(2) Auto-create Kindle and ePub files.

This is a game-changer.

Compiling for .mobi

You can now create your own ebooks by compiling and exporting from Scrivener which is under $50, which once paid you can use over and over again. You obviously need to check your created files carefully but for plain text novels with little complications, this is a no-brainer.

I still recommend using professional formatters if you have complicated books or lots of images, but for basic books, you can just use Scrivener. This is also great for providing files to beta-readers and for reviewing your book in the way many will now consume it. You can also export to Doc and other formats including Latex if you want to format in more complicated ways.

The point behind Scrivener is that book length works can be complicated and easier to write in chunks, but when you want to submit them you need it in one document. Scrivener compiles them based on how you have structured your Parts/ Chapters/ Scenes and also by how you define the compile and export settings. There are preset defaults but you can also customize, and there are lots of helpful videos and a forum in case you have trouble.

I have just added a video to my Ebook Publishing mini-course that shows you how to do this if you’re interested in more detail.

(3) Project Binders can also hold notes, research, pictures and more so you have one place for the whole ecosystem of your book

There is one manuscript/draft folder within your Scrivener project and then there are other folders which aren’t compiled into the final document. You can use these for research or for character sketches, for pictures and other associated media as well as pasting scenes you don’t know what to do with (I do that a lot).

You can also split the screen while you are writing so you can reference the notes at the same time as writing text. I use a great deal of art history in my books so having the painting or image in the split screen is useful so I get the details right.

One memorable image is the Escher print of angels and demons (shown right) which is on the wall of a character’s study. It was great to be able to see it on the page as I wrote.

Using Scrivener for my own novel, Prophecy

My own process for Prophecy has been as follows:

* Write first draft scenes in Write Or Die or Pages app on the iPad which I use for writing in the library and out of the house. I have found this the most effective way to write fiction now since my home office is orientated towards podcasts, interviews, videos, product creation and the business of The Creative Penn. I need a different space for making stuff up.

* Paste the scenes into Scrivener and move them around as well as revise scene by scene within the program. It’s easier to revise on bite-size chunks like scenes.

* At the end of every day, compile and export a .doc file which I email to myself on Gmail so I always have a backup of my work. Gmail is online storage so you’ll always be able to find this again. I also back on an external hard-drive and monthly on Amazon S3 cloud storage (paranoid, me??)

* After the first draft is completed, I compile the full .doc and print it out. Read, scribble, self-edit, destroy, rework. Write some more scenes and fill in the blanks.

* Edit full 2nd draft on Scrivener and repeat print and self-edit, then repeat print and self-edit until satisfied

* When I’m finally happy with the draft, I distribute to my editor to review and provide feedback. Then I make changes and send to beta readers.

* Make changes on Scrivener and compile for the final time and output for Kindle and submission to Smashwords.

Once you have the master project saved, you can always go back and make any changes and recompile. It’s a brilliant system and I am definitely going to keep using Scrivener. I can’t imagine writing without it now and in 2012, I will also be revising my non-fiction work using it too.

Are you a Scrivener convert? Do you have any questions about it?

 

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Building Your Author Platform

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You’ve worked very hard to write your book and submitted it to appropriate agents only to be told they and the publishers aren’t interested because nobody knows who you are. That quickly becomes a dog chasing his tail or a catch-22 problem. How can you become a known and admired author if no one will publish you? The fix for this is to develop a platform or a fan base. The larger your followership becomes, the more books you will sell. The publishers want to use this as a marketing guarantee. It makes their marketing efforts easier and makes them more money sooner. So, how do you build a platform?

It’s not easy but it is doable. Here are some suggestions you may find helpful.

Facebook, UTube, & Twitter—Social networks are a free, excellent way to become known to people who count. Seek relationships with readers, other authors, book publishers, agents, reviewers, genera bloggers, and anyone interested in whatever you write about.

Book Signings—Don’t expect many sales at the signings. Instead, seek positive relationships with owners, managers, and staff who will hand sell your book long after you’re gone.

Interviews—This is a potential treasure chest. Radio interviews are the best because you do them from phone wherever you want to. I did so many radio interviews, that I was eventually offered my own show, which did for two and a half years. TV is more difficult because you must do it from or through a studio. Newspaper interviews can be done from anywhere that is mutually convenient; however, they are getting more difficult to get because of the weakening newspaper industry. Seek a good media booking agent to help you make all these connections. Make the interviewer look good.

Book Fairs—These are good ways to meet the reading public. Some are expensive, so pick and choose wisely.

Industry Trade Shows— These worked very well for me. I would book a couple of adjoining booth spaces, fill them with tables, put colorful table clothes on them, and set up collapsible wire racks. I would fill them with my books and other good books in my genre. I would give speeches and/or workshops and provide my mobile bookstore. I became very well-known for this customer base.

Regional Bookseller Trade Shows— Yes, the Book Expo America is better known, but it’s huge and very expensive. It is worth attending for the networking opportunities and education. If you really want to sell your books, however, go to the regional trade shows. To learn about these, go to http://www.bookweb.org/resources/regionals.html

Book Reviews— These are useful to let book buyers know about you and your book. Even the largest review services have begun charging for their reviews, so use them wisely Reviews make for a good source of marketing blurbs. Never send a book in the blind and expect to get a review—huge waste of money. Be sure to check the reviewer’s submission guidelines and adhere to them.

Book Award Contests— These can get expensive, so be judicious as to how many you register for.

Email Campaigns to Bookstores— Check with the American Booksellers Association for mailing lists at http://bookweb.org/indiebound/indiessentials and at http://bookweb.org/membership/products .

Speaking Engagements— As I mentioned before, this is a wonderful way to become known and respected.

Book Clubs— I went to a mini-trade show for military books, linked up with the editor from Doubleday’s Military Book Club, and sold 25,000+ copies each of two of my titles. They also used my printer and allowed me to participate in their printings of my books at greatly reduced prices because of the economy of scale.

These are some platform enhancing venues I have used to good effect in the past. If you find only one or two that work for you, you’re ahead of the game. Remember, you’re competing against 500,000+ new books a year. You have to work hard to get seen in a crowd like that.

 

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

Blog Comments: What To Do When They Just Don't Like You

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This post, by Alice Bradley, originally appeared on the Babble Voices blog on 2/3/12.

Having addressed reader reviews in the last post, I now move on, AS PROMISED, to blog comments. I am nothing if not trustworthy! You can let me hold your bag when you go to the ladies’ room! Or men’s room! Whichever!

Why do you have so many pens in your bag? And why do none of them work?

Now. Blog comments on your blog (that part is important*) are an entirely different animal from reader reviews, in that 1) they are meant for you, and therefore 2) it is appropriate, and often necessary, for you to respond to them. If you’ve enabled comments, it means you want feedback and discussion among your readers. You’re part of your community, so you should get in there as well.

You can’t control what your readers think, and this is both unfortunate and fortunate. Unfortunate in that sometimes a reader will dislike what you said or simply dislike you, and that can sting. Fortunate in that if you could control your reader’s thoughts we’d all be living in some creepy dystopia where you control everything, and you’d probably like that, LITTLE MS. CONTROL FREAK. God! What’s your blog? I’m going to go write an angry comment on it.

It’s pretty obvious what to do when your commenters love you or at least respect you and want you to respond to their comments: you respond, right? (Unless they’re demanding your home address and/or your blood type. You might want to demur in that case.) It’s all quite simple, until that day, the one where you finally get it: the unhappy commenter. The reader who thinks you suck. The person who knows you are an utter fraud and liar and kitten-kicker and calls you on it.

Congratulations!

Listen, if no one cared you wouldn’t have received a comment like this. Either the commenter is annoyed (but cares enough to share his or her annoyance) OR either people care about you and that really gets this commenter’s goat, so he/she had to lash out. Pretty much every blogger who’s read by more people than her immediate family will deal with criticism, in one form or another. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay. There, there.

Now that you’ve gone for a walk and maybe petted a cat for a while (if you like cats), ask yourself a few questions. Like so:

1. Does the reader have a valid point?

 

Read the rest of the post on Babble Voices.

Amazon, KDP Select, Monopolies and Asshattery

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Seems like everyone is weighing in on this debate and I can’t help having my say too. First and foremost, I’m all about seeing things from every side and not throwing out babies with bathwater. Seriously, who the f*** throws out babies!? So it’s fair to say that I still really like Amazon and all they’ve done. There’s no question that they’ve changed the face of publishing and bookselling and, for the most part, in very positive ways. Of course, brick and mortar booksellers will have a different view, but that’s life and progress.

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: strong language after the jump]

Amazon single-handedly made ebooks the ubiquitous force they are today. Others helped it along, of course, but Amazon made it happen in the timeframe we’ve seen. They’ve opened up the playing field to let indie authors and small presses compete realistically with the Big Six. They’ve made books and other items readily available and affordable to millions of people who may have had trouble accessing those things before. I don’t like everything about the Kindle model – exclusive file format, etc., but it’s very good overall. Amazon are very good overall.

There’s no question that I would rather have Amazon around than not. Although, on a slight digression, when the hell are we getting an amazon.com.au? Seriously, Amazon, why do you hate Australia?

But there are changes happening at Amazon that I don’t like. I’ve never been able to ignore a bully and I don’t like monopolies. They’re bad for everyone except the person in control of said monopoly. And while Amazon are still doing many good things, they’re starting to do many questionable things as well.

The major problems are these:

– Setting up as a publisher, not just a retailer;
– Starting the KDP Select program;
– Cutting publishers out of control;
– Propogating the cheap and free model.

Why are these things bad? Let’s look at them one by one.

Setting up as a publisher:

This is not a bad thing per se – another opportunity for writers to get published is a good thing, right? Well, not if it restricts the writer’s ability to sell their work. Whenever Amazon set up a service, they make it exclusive to themselves. For example, their CreateSpace POD printing venture means stock is only available through Amazon.com – not even the other Amazon branches internationally. As a result of in-fighting, Barnes & Noble have said they won’t stock any Amazon published books. This is a direct result of B&N’s problems with previous Amazon exclusivity policies, and I can’t really blame them. But it means that writers being published by Amazon have a greatly restricted range of outlets for their work. And Amazon encourages that in order to gain monopoly share.

Starting the KDP Select program:

This is a program where authors can make their Kindle ebooks available free for 5 days out of every 90. The idea is that it will greatly enhance their profile, drag more readers to their work and they’ll see greater sales in the long tail. Amazon have a pool of cash and for every author with a free book, Amazon distributes a share of that pool based on how many free downloads that book saw. Sounds great, but it’s not. That distribution pool is already getting smaller, the vast majority of people involved will only ever see a tiny fraction of it and, worst of all, those books can only be included if they’re exclusive to Amazon. No iBooks, no Smashwords, no Nook, etc. That means that once again, Amazon are forcing exclusivity and using sweet, sweet cookies to lure authors into snubbing every other retailer. Then you find out that the cookie is made of mud and dog crap.

Cutting publishers out of control:

It’s getting harder and harder for publishers to manage their stock at Amazon. My novels are published by Gryphonwood Press. They recently commissioned new cover art for both books and tried to get Amazon to update the art. Nothing happened. No responses, no changes, nothing but huge frustrations. Eventually, after talking to my publisher, I went to my Amazon Author Central page and requested the changes myself. The update was made inside 24 hours. This is Amazon responding to authors, not publishers. That means they’re actively cutting publishers out, which actively encourages authors to do their own thing. That’s not an author’s job. It’s their publisher’s job. But this strikes me as an underhand way of getting authors to distrust their publishers or decide they can do without them and go the indie route, which is better for Amazon.

Propogating the cheap and free model:

So many novels are on Amazon for 99c. I’ve already talked about the free option on the KDP Select program. This is a big problem. For one, many readers are starting to undervalue work. They decide to wait until something is free or reduced to 99c before buying it and that’s bad for authors. This is our job – we’re trying to make a livng here and there’s a lot of work in writing a novel. It’s worth more than a single dollar. But Amazon don’t care. They’ve got something set up where anyone can upload an ebook, charge a buck for it and think they’re on the author gravy train. 99.9% of those people are unlikely to sell more than a handful of books. But that’s all right with Amazon. After all, if they make 75c for every book sold, they don’t need to sell millions of every book. They just need to sell a few copies of millions of books. Each author is making fuck all, but Amazon are raking it in. And those authors who stick exclusively with Amazon are told they’ll do even better, with no guarantee that that is actually the case.

You can see how all these things are set up to benefit Amazon, at the expense of everyone else – authors, publishers and readers. It’s better for all of those people if price points reflect the effort involved in making the work being sold; if product is available through a range of outlets for a range of devices to give readers a choice and therefore give authors a greater chance at more exposure and sales, leading to a stronger career. The only beneficiary of the models described above is Amazon.

Now I don’t mind Amazon doing well for itself, but not by monopolising an industry and not at the expense of authors and readers. That’s where I have to step in between the bully and bullied and say, “Wait a fucking minute, here, what do you think you’re doing?”

What can you do about it? Lots of things.

If you’re a writer or publisher:

Don’t make your work exclusively available in one place. It benefits everyone to have it available in as many places, for as many devices as you can.

Don’t price your work ridiculously low and devalue it. Equally, don’t price it stupidly high and drive all the readers to pirate sites instead.

Don’t saturate the work with DRM, inconveniencing readers who can’t read a book they paid for on seperate devices.

Stand up against monopolising policies wherever you can.

If you’re a reader:

Check various venues for the availability of the work you want and don’t always buy in one place.

Try to buy non-DRM versions in order to encourage greater openess in the future. DRM is not the way to fight piracy.

Don’t go for pirated work. If you respect the authors you’re reading, pay them for their work.

Don’t only read free books and those you can get for 99c. At the very least, you’re cutting yourself off from some really good stuff out there and only encouraging the lowest common denominator.

Chime in with a comment below if you have an opinion or an idea about this. Or if you completely disagree with me – I’d love to hear why.

 

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

KDP Select Free Promotion — Discoverability Experiment: One Month Later and Feeling Fine!

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As stated in Part One, my goal in joining the KDP Select program had been simple, to get my two Victorian San Francisco historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits back up to the top of the Kindle historical mystery bestseller category. And, as I wrote in Part Two, not only did I achieve this goal, but I also had fantastic success in selling my books immediately after the free promotion was over. In addition, I was now selling a significant number of books in Kindle, UK, and I had started to have a large number of borrows of Maids of Misfortune, all unexpected but delightful consequences of enrolling a book in the KDP Select program.

While not everyone has had the same kind of success using KDP Select, a number of authors have reported large numbers of downloads, followed by better rankings, and increased sales. These suggest that my experience was not a fluke. See David Kazzie’s post “How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved my Book” as one example.

However, there also seem to have been a significant number of authors who have been disappointed with their results. Caroline McCray, one of the most successful KDP Select authors, has done a very thoughtful post on the pros and cons of the program, with a clear description of how factors like the percentage of your sales that are on Amazon and your rank on the best seller lists, can affect how useful using KDP Select might be for you. I can see that I fit her description of those authors who might benefit, since 96% of my income came from Amazon in 2010, and I was already on one of the best seller lists on Amazon and close enough to the top 100 in other lists to mean that an increase in sales would affect my rankings and make my book more visible.

Now that a month has passed, as promised, I am going to report on my numbers and what my strategy for the future is going to be.

My two-day free promotion of my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune was December 30-31, 2011. During those two days the book was downloaded 15, 576 times, and, the first week it went back on sale, the average sales of Maids of Misfortune and my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, combined, was 501 books a day (the price of each book is $2.99.) The second week in January the average number of books sold was 253 a day (and I had stopped thinking that I was going to be in the big leagues with Konrath and company.) The third week the average was 151 a day and the fourth week the average had dropped to 107 books a day. For the whole month, the average number of books sold was 236 a day. (A vast improvement from the 31 books a day for November or 35 books a day average for December that I had been selling.)

And, although my sales steadily dropped after the first week of January, by the end of the month I had, nevertheless, sold a total of 7,323 of books. Seventy-five percent of them were Maids of Misfortune; the rest were sales of Uneasy Spirits. (In December the newer book, Uneasy Spirits, made up 55% of my sales). In addition, 1272 people borrowed one of my books as part of the Amazon Prime Lending option.

I have to take a deep breath here. This month, my income was more than twice what I made in any given month in my entire career as a full professor of history (not being the Newt Gingrich kind of historian — smile.)

Apart from the sales and the money I made this month, which will go a long way to cover the income I lost by retiring to write full time, there is the fact that the free downloads exposed me to so many more readers, which should sustain my sales over the long haul for my subsequent books. I know that people say that those who download books for free may never read the books, but this month I have received 16 more reviews for Maids of Misfortune, 13 of them 5 star reviews, and they were clearly from people who had downloaded the book and read it immediately.

As I hoped, the increased sales in Maids of Misfortune resulted in increased sales for my sequel. Uneasy Spirits sold an average of 20 books a day in both November and December (the book came out in mid October), but the average for January was 48 a day.

So, what are my plans for the future? Since it appears that I am in the midst of a steady, albeit a gentle, slide downwards in sales, I will use at least some of my remaining KDP Select promotion days for Maids of Misfortune in February, if only to see if there will be a similar bump in sales. I confess I am assuming the increase in sales will be less, but it might at least arrest the downward slide.

In addition, I have entered Uneasy Spirits into KDP Select, and I will also do a free promotion of it. As a sequel, (although it can be read as a stand-alone) Uneasy Spirits will probably not do as well as Maids did. But if it only garners me more positive reviews, I will consider the promotion a success. After reading a discussion on the Kindle Boards where readers expressed frustration at downloading a book for free and discovering that they were going to have to buy the first book in the series, I decided that I would put both books up for free for one day and then possibly continue the free promotion for the sequel for a second day.

Who knows if I will have even a tenth of the success of my first promotion? But, whatever happens I will be happy if I gain more readers and more information about how promotions work. For me, half the fun of being an indie is being able to experiment. If something doesn’t work, I change strategies; if it does, I celebrate. And I get back to writing.

 

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

Copyright, Piracy and the Arts

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Over on Slate, a debate on the topic of the merits of copyright, as well as the ethical and moral implications of digital piracy, has been raging between Slate Business & Economics Correspondent Matthew Yglesias and author and literary scholar Caleb Crain.

In the first post in the series, Why Should We Stop Online Piracy? (subtitled "A little copyright infringement is good for the economy and society"), Yglesias posits:

"…even when copyright infringement does lead to real loss of revenue to copyright owners, it’s not as if the money vanishes into a black hole. Suppose Joe Downloader uses BitTorrent to get a free copy of Beggars Banquet rather than forking over $7.99 to Amazon, and then goes out to eat some pizza. In this case, the Rolling Stones’ loss is the pizzeria’s  gain and Joe gets to listen to a classic album. It’s at least not obvious that we should regard this, on balance, as harmful."

Read the rest of the post here.

In his rebuttal, Crain replies (with tongue only slightly in cheek):

"That’s quite a line of argument, and I don’t think Yglesias has really taken it as far as it could go. So let me take it from him, as it were, and go further. If I were to visit the Slate cafeteria, sit in Yglesias’ chair, and eat his lunch, it’s not as if the money that I failed to spend on a lunch of my own would vanish into a black hole. No! The economy will not suffer! Yglesias, after all, will have paid for the lunch I ate, and the money that I didn’t spend would still be in my pocket or my checking account or whatever. So I could take that money and spend it on, say, the new Shins album. Now I can afford vinyl! Flourish, Keynesian multipliers, flourish!"

Read the full rebuttal here.

Yglesias comes back with a counterargument, in which he attempts to—believe it or not—draw a parallel between Jesus Christ and online pirates:

"Crain thinks he shouldn’t steal my sauce. I agree. He thinks he shouldn’t pass my recipe off as his own invention, and I agree. But suppose he duplicated the sauce and used it to feed the poor—is that so wrong? When Christ performs the miracle of the loaves and fishes do we condemn him for depriving fishmongers of hypothetical income? I say that the man who learns to conjure pasta sauce out of thin air will be one of humanity’s greatest benefactors, even if he drives the Olive Garden out of business."

Read Yglesias’ full counterargument here.

Not about to let it go, Crain returns with his own counterpoint essay:

"In my initial salvo, I pointed out that Yglesias had minimized the harm of copyright infringement with a rationale that could extenuate theft of any kind. Yglesias repeats the error in his reply. He describes copyright holders as monopolists who set high prices in order to maximize profits, thereby pricing some consumers out of the market…"

"But nearly all companies try to maximize profits when they set prices, and every price higher than zero excludes somebody. Suppose that Savor of the Savior tomato sauce sells for $4.99 a jar and I feel that eating it is only worth two bucks. Theft would help me get my hands on it. Would theft therefore be socially beneficial? Am I justified in stealing the goods of any company whose prices don’t suit my budget?"

Read Crain’s full counterpoint essay here.

 

Why Publishers Are About To Go Data Crazy

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This post, by Sachin Kamdar, originally appeared on the PBS Mediashift site on 1/17/12.

The following is a guest post from Sachin Kamdar, the CEO and co-founder of Parse.ly. Currently in stealth, Parse.ly provides a new set of performance metrics, specifically tailored to publishers’ needs. Here, Kamdar explores the new age of data and how publishers will be a part of it.

We spend too much time talking about how publishers are adapting to the rise of the web, and very few moments trying to understand the unique challenges their businesses face.

Many pundits have criticized the industry’s inability to adapt their business models to a new web-first world. But it’s not the publishers that aren’t adapting — it’s their toolbelts that haven’t evolved to meet most acute needs.

The printing press is a great example of a technology that was quickly and widely adopted, and believe it or not, evolved rather quickly over the course of the last century. I’d argue that publishers are better at adapting to change than we give them credit for.

For example, we rarely ever acknowledge that Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters were into "big data" long before it became a buzzword.

And while the advances in media consumption technology for readers have been rapid, the publisher side of web technology hasn’t kept up with the pace. Publishers have been running a marathon in a pair of shoes that are four sizes too small.  

2012 will be the year that publishers get access to sophisticated, innovative technologies that are purpose-built for their needs, and this is precisely what’s going to change in the next year. Rather than publishers having to make due with the innovations in consumer technology, the ecosystem of technology vendors will realize the huge opportunity to address publishers’ needs. The result will be great news for a publishing industry that has been stunted by poor tools for too long.  

Here’s what it’s going to look like.

Social Isn’t Just For Distribution

For as long as most of us can remember, publishers have been using the likes of Twitter and Facebook to grow readership, improve content reach, and build community. As they’ve gotten more sophisticated, it has also become apparent that they need more insight into the cause and effect of social sharing. They need to move beyond just looking the part and making nice conversation.

The social web is great for distribution, but it’s also good for measuring the performance of content. 

Unfortunately, traditional measurement and analytics tools are designed for radically different business models — typically B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) companies that sell physical goods or services. The resulting metrics are tracking for leads, or sheer volume, or purchase cause and effect. But content is an entirely different game.

After years of "one size fits all" social media measurement platforms, 2012 will be the year that publishers are going to be served with a variety of completely new offerings that are purpose-built for content-centric businesses (instead of bending an all-purpose tool to their will).

Publishers need to know what exactly caused an article to go viral — was it timely content that created a new trend? The guest author and her accompanying network? A particularly influential commenter? A confluence of factors?

Publishers generally already know what happened in the past. But what about the future?

 

 

Read the rest of the post on Mediashift.

The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Writers

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This post, by Bamidele Onibalusi, originally appeared on his YoungPrePro site.

I’m in the process of writing an ebook I plan to be releasing soon and one topic I touched that I think a whole article should be dedicated to is SEO. Most writers are concerned with just one thing, writing, and the reality is that focusing on that alone can only take them so far.

Writing isn’t just about writing an article that mesmerizes people; it is also about getting as much people to read your writing. In most cases, there is no point in writing an article if no one will read it, especially online.

 

I have been learning the basics of search engine optimization, how content get ranked in the search engines, and as a result I’ve been able to make some changes to my site that has resulted in significant growth in search engine traffic; at the moment, an average of 800 people visit YoungPrePro from the search engines every day, so I believe I have a few insights that can help you take your blog to the next level.

Some of these tips helped launch my blog in the search rankings, and some of these tips helped increase my traffic by over 200% in only a few months, so make sure you utilize them on your blog for better results.

What is SEO?

Most writers are only familiar with the process of writing articles and getting it published, and very few people really know what SEO is.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, the process of optimizing your website in a way that is search engine friendly to publishing content that is search engine friendly and building quality offsite signals that helps the search engines know that your website deserves to be ranked well for a particular keyword.

In most cases, SEO isn’t just set-and-forget or something that you can do once and expect to be ranked well for every keywords. Of course, traffic to your articles will be consistent, but you have to keep optimizing for new keywords to get them ranked, and in some cases you have to keep optimizing even pages that are already ranking well for highly competitive keywords.

In a few words, SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence, optimizing your content to be search engine friendly and getting links, shares, votes and other signals to make it rank.

I know the process might be a little complicated right now, and that exactly is why I wrote this article. I’ll be giving you a basic breakdown into how SEO works, so that at the end of reading this post you can take necessary actions with your blog and begin to get results.

Why You Should Care about SEO

I keep hearing from people who hate marketing and who are not ready to learn the “jargons” of SEO. Most people write online, yet they believe that all they need to do is focus on what they’re good at, writing, and expect the results to come.

It just doesn’t work that way!

Traffic is the currency of the web, and no matter the quality of your content and your eloquence with words, you won’t survive online without traffic because not even an ant will read your content. And traffic, my friend, is what brings results; it is what brings sales, it is what leads to subscribers, it is what brings about clients and it is what leads to fame.

Search engines control a larger fraction of all the traffic online, and a great way to ensure you are getting as much traffic as you want is to learn how SEO works. Here are a few quick benefits of SEO.

  • It helps you get discovered; by publishers, by readers, by fans, by fellow writers, by clients and by the media. Getting your message heard is important, and search engines help make this possible with little efforts and possibly no charge on your part.
     
  • Targeted traffic; an added advantage to getting your content ranked well in the search engines is that you get targeted traffic. Most people only use the search engines when they want real solution to a problem, and this can be your leverage towards getting the results you want. Search engine visitors are people with real problems who desperately need a solution and are not just visitors from other sources like social media that just happen upon your website because the headline compelled them; these people weren’t interrupted by ads, nor were they forced to click over from a social media site due to the cleverness of your headline. They have a problem, they need a solution and they came to you just to get that through the search engines.
     
  • Results that can be tracked; While it’s easy to go for an advertising campaign you think might be effective, you can’t really be sure of what works until you track your results. Search engine traffic is easy to track and optimize for even better results.
     
  • Long term results; Unlike traffic from other sources, or online advertising campaigns, you only need to optimize a particular content once and reap the benefits for years to come. I haven’t done any conscious SEO for this blog for months now, and I’ve seen an almost 300% increase in search traffic.

Terms You Should Know

 

Read the rest of the post, which contains links to many more free online SEO and traffic-building resources, on Bamidele Onibalusi’s YoungPrePro.

The New World of Publishing: Pen Names

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This post, by Dean Wesley Smith, originally appeared on his site on 1/29/12.

I get the “pen name” question more than any other question. Period. And that’s because I am very open about writing under different names and I have varied reasons for doing so. And weirdly enough, I have written under pen names since I started writing.

So after a few more varied questions this last week about pen names in indie publishing, I figured it’s about time I give a full and complete opinion on the topic. But let me be clear here once again.  Ready?

 

NO WRITER IS THE SAME AS ANOTHER WRITER.

Or as a sign in our workshops say, “You are responsible for your own career.”

Take my opinion on this topic as opinion. Nothing more. Then do what you damn well please because… well, because you can. And should.

History

Pen names have been with fiction writing since the beginning. And the reasons for writers to take pen names is as varied as the writers doing the writing. I’m sure some of you English majors out there could even tell me a bunch of pen names of major literary writers through the centuries. But honestly, please don’t. (grin)

The pulp era of popular fiction brought in thousands and thousands of pen names. There are entire books that have been done trying to track the pen names of the pulp writers, from Max Brand to Kenneth Robison to all the hundreds of pen names of Edward Stratemeyer and his “Syndicate” of writers. (You remember Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and so on.)

Many of today’s major writers wrote under pen names, sometimes many, many pen names over their careers. And almost always for different reasons. I don’t think Robert Silverberg can even count all his pen names. Lawrence Block wrote under many, many names as well, sometimes in the erotic markets of their day. I was at Harlan Ellison’s house one day and asked him off-handedly that if next trip I brought down a copy of Adam Magazine that he had a story in, would he sign it. He laughed and said sure, and he would sign two of the articles in the same issue as well, since he had written those under pen names. I was impressed he remembered.

In fact, in the high peak of science fiction magazines, there were often only one or two writers per issue, even though the magazine showed six or seven authors.

So pen names are nothing new. And the reasons for using a pen name or not using one are varied depending on the author, the time, the publication location, and so much more.

Major Reasons to Use Pen Names

Again, there are thousands of reasons to use pen names, each depending on the author’s situation at the moment.  But let me give you a few of the main ones that have lasted over history.

Top Reason: Writer is too “fast” for traditional publishing.

In other words, the writer has a work ethic and has trained himself to sit at a typewriter or computer for more hours per day. And by doing that, the writer will just produce more work than someone who spends two years writing a novel. Just nature of the beast.

In the pulp era, it was fine to write fast and hard and long under one name. The writers had other reasons to switch names back then that I will get to in a moment.

But with the advent of the influence of the university system and editors coming out of that university myth-filled system, the belief started to sink into the traditional publishing offices that writing more than one or two books per year was a bad thing (except in a few genres like romance). And besides, the big machines of modern traditional publishing just couldn’t keep up with a fast writer. In fact, fast writers just scare hell out of them.

So those of us who have a work ethic and can sit at a computer for a regular work day, we flat had to have more outlets. So instead of putting novels into drawers, we came up with pen names and started many writing careers, often with numbers of them going at once.

At one point, Kris and I were joking around at a conference and actually counted the career income streams coming into our home at that moment in time. We had nine writers’ incomes coming into the house. That was more than we had cats at that point.

Today we have about that many, maybe a few more, but some are not making much, at least not enough to live on. Luckily the pen-name writers don’t eat much.

The key is the same with all aspects of the publishing industry: Diversity and a lot of product. If you have three or four writer’s incomes hitting your house, it’s a ton better and safer than only one. And nine or ten incomes just makes things much easier.

The idea of multiple income streams from different names is not something most writers think of until they happen into it by overwhelming their own publisher and deciding to not slow down (meaning spend less time at the computer or playing Angry Birds) as their agent wants them to do.

However, now with indie publishing, fast writers have far, far more outlets and the idea of being a “fast” writer, meaning spending more hours writing, is once again becoming a good thing. At least outside of traditional publishing. Inside of traditional publishing being fast still scares hell out of people and they will do everything in their power to get you to spend less time being a writer and more time being an author.

Second Major Reason: Help Your Readers While Writing What You Want To Write

 

Read the rest of the post to learn about more major/historical reasons for using a pen name, as well as for a discussion of plenty of other valid reasons, on Dean Wesley Smith’s site.