Month: August 2012

Your Guide to 11 Kinds of WordPress Blog Pages

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The idea of an author blog is pretty simple, really. As most authors understand it, they write articles around the same topics that are central to their books, market their blogs to people who are interested in those topics, and slowly build an audience, a readership and, hopefully, their writing career.

All this activity arises from the basic unit of blogging—the blog post.

As you blog, each post is stamped with the date it was published, and takes its place in reverse chronological order in your stack of posts.

Your posts might also be available through category or tag searches, or in response to specific searches typed into a search box.

It Isn’t All About Blog Posts

But this is only half the story. WordPress, the popular free and open source blogging software being used by millions of bloggers, makes it just as easy to create pages as to create posts.

What’s the difference between a blog page and a blog post?

Pages are static locations within the hierarchy of your blog. Your pages can have the same kind of branching hierarchy that a static website has, with parent pages and children pages.

Pages stay where they are, while blog posts reside inside the content managment system—the big database—that holds all your articles.

When requested, they are displayed on a single post page that acts as a container within which the article or blog post is shown.

But when it comes to pages, there are quite a few types that can be useful to an author blogger. Many bloggers don’t realize these pages are not difficult to create, and can help with highlighting your books and other offers you make to readers.

What’s important here is that you don’t have to settle for every page—no matter what its function—looking exactly the same. So take a look at some of these different pages and what they are used for.

11 Kinds of Blog Pages

  1. Home page—You don’t have to create this, WordPress does it for you. Your home page is special because you can choose whether to have a static page or your most recent articles shown here by making selections within WordPress’s options. And there are many ways to customize your home page with <a href=" www.thebookdesigner.com="" target="_blank">Home page—You don’t have to create this, WordPress does it for you. Your home page is special because you can choose whether to have a static page or your most recent articles shown here by making selections within WordPress’s options. And there are many ways to customize your home page with plugins and custom-written code.

    2.  

  2. Single-post page—Also generated for you by WordPress to display any one blog post at a time. Like all other automatically-generated pages on your blog, it will have the same header, footer and sidebars you’ve created for the blog.
     
  3. General information pages—I’d put all the other normal pages you create, like your About page, pages about services you offer, guidelines for guest bloggers, competitions, regular blog features like blog carnival pages and so on. Each looks just like the other pages on your blog but the content is fixed.
     
  4. Category pages—When your blog has hundreds of articles, it can be a real advantage for readers to be able to find your posts by category. This makes it very efficient to find articles because you can use your browser’s search function to scan the headlines. Here’s an example of a category page about Book Design.
     
  5. Gallery pages—If you have a lot of paintings, photos, maps or any other graphics to display on your blog, WordPress provides pages that will display them in lots of ways like grids, animated fans, and other formats.
     
  6. Forms pages—These pages exist solely to present a form for readers to fill out, and the most common type is the Contact page. But you can use these for lots of reasons, like taking entries in a contest or submissions to a directory.
     
  7. Landing page—In a sense every page on your blog is a landing page because browsers can arrive there by following a link. But here I’m talking about pages set up to greet people for a specific purpose. An example would be the content landing pages in the Start Here categories in the left sidebar of the blog or the content landing pages on Copyblogger. These are great for helping newcomers find content that’s relevant to their needs, and they are a powerful way to make your content marketing more effective.
     
  8. Squeeze page—Here we come to a special type of blog page, one designed to present an either/or choice to the reader. Squeeze pages typically do away with the sidebars and menu system that’s found on the rest of your blog. Why? To make the binary choice obvious. For instance, I use a squeeze page here to offer my free PDF 10 Things You Need to Know About Self-Publishing in exchange for an email address. You don’t want the reader to have a lot of choices: either put in your email address or click away, that’s the squeeze.
     
  9. Sales pages—This is a variety of the landing page and it’s designed to sell something. Like squeeze pages, it’s really most effective to get rid of distractions on this page because you want readers to concentrate on your sales copy and, if they find it useful, to click your “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button. By presenting no distractions, you encourage them to make a choice one way or the other.
     
  10. Automatic pages—These are pages used in the completion of an automatic process of some kind, like sign ups for an email list or an event like a webinar. They might include the confirmation page your email provider sends people to so they know to check their email and confirm their subscription. Or it might be a Thank You page buyers are sent to at the completion of a transaction, and might also include a Download page for delivery of a digital product. In all these cases the pages are used by a process and won’t be seen by anyone else. Here’s an example of a confirmation page with a download included.
     
  11. Module pages—Created by some specialized WordPress themes—special software that modifies how your blog behaves. These automatically create parent/child relationships and a menu hierarchy so you can deliver online training courses or other material that lends itself to being organized into sections or modules. Many membership sites use these, like the Self-Publishing Roadmap.

This list is undoubtedly incomplete, as you can probably create lots of other kinds of pages in WordPress that I haven’t seen.

But as your experience as a blogger grows, you’re going to find more and more things you want to do with your blog, and these specialized pages will be the way you can get things done.

Do you want to sign people up to an email list, run a contest, ask for feedback, organize your content or some other project or goal you have in mind?

reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Victorian San Francisco in 1880: Social Structure and Character Development

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Publetariat Editor’s Note: In this post, historical fiction writer M. Louisa Locke shares some of her research findings about Victorian-era San Francisco. This is an informative post for any author who writes historical fiction, as it reflects the level of detail to which such an author must go to create realism in her work.

I have embarked upon writing Bloody Lessons, the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series that features Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, which means I am creating a whole new raft of secondary characters. And, as I have done in previous books, I am carefully considering the specific social make-up of San Francisco as I do so.

What follows is a brief summary of the social structure of San Francisco in 1880 (primarily from my dissertation, Like a Machine or an Animal) and how this has influenced some of the choices I have made in developing my characters in Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, the first two books in my mystery series.

Brief Summary:

“In 1880 San Francisco, with a population of 233,959 residents, was the ninth largest city in the United States. Located at the end of the peninsula that separates the Bay of San Francisco from the Pacific Ocean, this city of hills, sand dunes, fogs, and mild temperatures had been only a small village called Yerba Buena less than forty years earlier. This small village was one of the chief beneficiaries of the incredible influx of    people into the region after the discovery of gold to the north in the winter of 1847-48. In the early years of the Gold Rush, the town grew by over 1000 percent. Even in the 1860s San Francisco still grew at a rate of over 160 percent, but into the next decade the rate of growth slowed considerably to 57 percent, and the city would continue to grow at ever slower rates throughout the century.

“High sex ratios (more males than females) have traditionally accompanied high rates of growth, and this was particularly true in the Far West where so much of the initial growth in population was due to the in-migration of young single men searching for gold. San Francisco followed this rule, although it consistently had a more balanced ratio than did the state as a whole. Nevertheless, by 1880, as the city increasingly became the destination of families or as the earlier settlers either married or sent for their wives and children to join them, much of the imbalance in the sexes had disappeared. Most of the remaining imbalance reflected the large number of Chinese in the city, since most of the Chinese who immigrated to America at this time were males. In fact, among some groups in the city, the Irish for example, women now outnumbered men.

“As the number of women in the city grew, the proportion of families and children did as well. The percentage of adult males who lived in family households rose from fifteen percent in the 1850s to forty percent in 1880, and the average number of children per family rose as well. In addition, the city’s residents were now more likely to have been born in the Far West, and by 1880 over sixty percent of the city’s native-born population had been born in California.

“A significant number of the parents of these California born city residents were immigrants who had traveled to the Far West. In fact, from the beginning of San Francisco’s development, immigrants were more likely than the native-born migrants to be married or to bring their families with them when they moved to the city. In 1880 nearly 45 percent of San Francisco’s population was foreign-born, and if those native-born persons with foreign parents are considered, the proportion of residents with foreign parentage rises to over 74 percent.

“Reflecting national patterns of immigration, the foreign-born population of San Francisco consisted primarily of immigrants from Ireland (29.5%) the German Empire (19.1%) and Great Britain (9.6%). People from these three areas comprised over half of all the immigrants living in the city in 1880. However, the ethnic composition of San Francisco at this date did deviate from the ethnic composition of cities elsewhere in the nation in one substantial way. Chinese made up the second largest number (20.3%) of the foreign-born in the city; this was a proportion that was vastly greater than could be found anywhere outside of the Far West. In addition to the Chinese, Irish, German, and British immigrants that comprised the bulk of San Francisco’s foreign-born population, smaller numbers of French, Canadian, Scandinavian, and Mexican immigrants gave San Francisco an exceptionally cosmopolitan flavor. One Eastern visitor in 1880 felt that the city appeared even more cosmopolitan than New York City, commenting that when she asked a question on a San Francisco Street, it was ‘answered in a dozen different tongues.’ (Dall, My First Holiday 1881)

“The inhabitants of San Francisco did not share equally in the economic opportunities of the period. A foreign birthplace or a specific ethnic heritage clearly influenced entry into certain jobs and the possibilities of advancement. As a result, different groups clustered on different rungs of the city’s social ladder. Native-born residents of both sexes were much more likely than immigrants to hold white-collar jobs, while they were much less likely to work as semi-skilled or unskilled laborers. Native-born males in the city showed a greater degree of upward mobility as well.

“On the other hand, within the foreign-born population of San Francisco the occupational patterns of specific ethnic groups differed significantly, and some groups had better success at achieving or maintaining a higher occupational status than others. For example, among both males and females, the tendency of German immigrants to fill jobs within the lower white-collar ranks, particularly as petty merchants, meant that the occupational pattern of Germs did not deviate substantially from the pattern of native-born workers.

“Many of the young men who came to America from German in the nineteenth century first set up as peddlers on the east coast and then moved to the Far West to take advantage of the boom engendered by the Gold Rush. There they often worked first in the interior mining of farm towns until they could get enough capital to relocate in San Francisco as retail or wholesale merchants or manufacturers.

“By 1880 these Germans represented 34 percent of the merchant population of the city, comprising a much higher fraction of the merchant class than they did of the total city population. These German merchants concentrated in clothing and dry goods, and in the cigar trades, and they had a high degree of persistence in the city. Because Germans, including German Jews, played such an important role in the city’s merchant community, this group occupied a unique and favored position in the social hierarchy of San Francisco. While ethnic and religious prejudice against the Germans did exist in the city, and although Germans were not totally integrated into the ranks of the native-born elite, German Jews seemed to experience much less discrimination in San Francisco than they did within any comparable city in the nation in this period.

“While the backgrounds and eventual occupational success of the Germans and English permitted these two groups entrance into the social elite of the city, the Irish faced much greater obstacles. Their backgrounds of rural poverty and inadequate education constituted a handicap in employment, even though many of the Irish had settled on the east coast before traveling west. As a result, the Irish in San Francisco were under-represented in the white-collar or merchant occupations of the city, and as many as a third of them worked as common laborers in 1880.  However, the Irish in San Francisco were upwardly mobile, for not only were Irish males increasingly more likely to work in white-collar jobs between 1850 and 1880, but their native-born children gained in occupational status.

“Native-born children of the Irish found that their greater experience with urban life and their greater access to education offered many of them a chance to escape from the ranks of unskilled labor into skilled, semi-skilled and white-collar jobs.

“Although proportionally fewer Irish climbed to the top of the business elite in San Francisco, this group was certainly not excluded from the bastions of power within San Francisco. As Burchell has pointed out, ‘The Irish in San Francisco fought their way up the political ladder in the usual fashion and met with the normal nativist response. But their success was more complete by 1880, even by 1870, than that of their group in other major cities.’ (Burchell The San Francisco Irish 1979) Partly because of their sheer numbers and partly because of the unusual degree of fluidity within early San Francisco, the Irish found relatively greater political and economic success in this city.

Social Structure and my character choices

The main protagonists in my mystery novels, Annie Fuller, a widowed boarding house owner, and Nate Dawson, a lawyer, represent the dominant group among the middle and upper classes of San Francisco residents living in the city 1880 because they are of native birth and parentage. Annie was born in the city, and Nate moved to California with his family as a young boy. While both live in boarding houses, (San Francisco was famous for hotel and boarding house living for all classes) Annie’s boarding house, containing a mother and child, a married couple, two unmarried sisters, a single woman, and two single men, reflects a city that was no longer the boom town of only young single men it had been thirty years earlier.

The servants working in Annie’s boarding house, Beatrice O’Rourke and Kathleen Hennessey, are of Irish heritage, (as is Nellie, the Voss parlor maid in Maids of Misfortune,and Biddy, Kathleen’s friend and a servant in the Frampton house in Uneasy Spirits) because the Irish not only made up the largest percentage of working class residents of any ethnic group in the city, but domestic service was the occupation held by a majority of women of Irish birth.

At the same time, as mentioned above, the Irish were extraordinarily successful in achieving political power in San Francisco, one result being the large number of Irish found in city employment, including the police force. Hence my decision to make Beatrice O’Rourke’s deceased husband and her nephew, Patrick McGee, be Irish police officers.

However, when I was looking for a non-Irish immigrant to hold the job of cook in the Frampton household, it was easy to decide that the uncommunicative cook, Mrs. Schmitt, should be German since German immigrant women were almost as likely to hold domestic service jobs as were the Irish.

On the other hand, while Irish and German servants would have been common in any middle class household in any American city outside of the South during this time period, Chinese males servants like Wong, who worked in the Voss home in Maids of Misfortune, would have been rarely found in any city outside the Far West. In later posts I will elaborate about the unique pattern of Chinese migration to San Francisco.

Finally, while I haven’t been explicit about the ethnic heritage of Annie Fuller’s prize boarders, Herman and Esther Stein, their names represent their German heritage. I chose this background for them because I wanted to provide an example of that interesting group of San Francisco residents, wealthy German merchants, bankers, and manufacturers.

In the book I am working on, Bloody Lessons, a good proportion of the minor characters are going to be teachers. I will need to keep in mind that the majority of teachers in San Francisco, as was true for the nation, were females, and that the men who did teach dominated the higher grades and administrative positions. I will also need to keep in mind the unusually important role of immigrants and their offspring in San Francisco.

The ethnic composition of San Francisco teachers reflected the fact that nearly two-thirds of San Francisco’s residents were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. As a result, 60 percent of the young women who taught in San Francisco in 1880 were native-born with immigrant parents, and another 12% were foreign-born. The percentage of female teachers in San Francisco who were of foreign birth or heritage was actually double that of the percentage found in either Portland or Los Angeles in that year.

These are just some of the ways I try to ground my mysteries in an accurate portrayal of the past, and I hope you found it added to your enjoyment of the series.

For those of you who haven’t yet read either Maids of Misfortune or Uneasy Spirits, you might check out the promotional offerings below.

Maids of Misfortune will be FREE on KINDLE Monday-Tuesday August 20-21 and

Uneasy Spirits will be FREE ON KINDLE Tuesday-Wednesday August 21-22.

AUDIOBOOK Maids of Misfortune

 

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

17 School Writing Rules You Need to Unlearn in the Real World

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 This post originally appeared on onlinecollege.org.

We have some good news for English class haters: some of the rules your teachers drilled into your brain are absolute hooey in the real world. Who really says “an historic”? And personally, we love starting sentences with “but,” “and,” and “or.” Read on as we explore these and 15 other school writing rules that really don’t have a place in modern writing. English teachers, you have our apologies.

1. WRITING ENDLESSLY TO GET YOUR POINT ACROSS:

As school progresses, we go from small paragraphs to 50-page papers in college, but more doesn’t necessarily mean better. In fact, in the real world, it’s much better to get your point across in a concise way.

2. SENTENCES CAN BEGIN WITH AND, BUT, OR OR:

This classic English class rule has become obsolete, as people have ignored it so much that hardly anyone observes it anymore. It may not be completely professional, but it’s widely accepted and a great way to get your point across.

3. WAITING FOR A PROMPT:

In school, you’re handed assignment after assignment that spells out exactly how you should approach your writing, but in the real world, rarely do such prompts exist. Learn how to figure out what to write and find the confidence to decide what you want to put into it.

4. LONG PARAGRAPHS:

Chances are, you were taught to construct paragraphs with topic sentences, supporting evidence, and small conclusions, but that’s just too long for the real world. You can better keep the attention of your audience by limiting paragraphs to three sentences at the most.

5. EDITING HAPPENS ALL AT ONCE, AT THE END:

No one’s saying you can’t give your work a once-over before sending it along, but if you’ve got a lot of ground to cover, it might make sense for you to edit as you go, rather than all at once. Fixing problems and having clean copy to work from can make it easier to move on and write the rest of your work.

6. NOT ENDING SENTENCES WITH A PREPOSITION:

Sometimes, you just have to end your sentence in a preposition. A good rule to remember is if you can remove a preposition and the sentence still makes sense, you need to cut it out. If not, keep it. For example: “What did you step in?” needs “in”, but “Where is it at?” could stand to lose the “at.”

7. AVOIDING INCOMPLETE SENTENCES:

Sentences do not have to be complete. They don’t even always have to have a subject, verb, and object. Quick, punchy sentences can help add drama and make a point when used sparingly. Journalists violate this one all the time.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 10 more writing rules that may not apply outside of school, on onlinecollege.org.

 

 

Catch 22 of Great Reviews: Thanks, John Locke!

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This week we learned that John Locke—one of the first indie authors to sell a million books—paid for hundreds of reviews at a now-defunct paid-review site that didn’t require its reviewers to read the books, just to crank out the stars. Because the story made the NY Times, one expert estimates that a third of all Amazon reviews are fake.

This pisses me off, breaks my heart, and makes me—and the other terrific and honest indie authors on this site—look bad. That is, if we have too many great reviews.

GalleyCat weighed in on this issue with this blog post, listing several bestsellers that each have more than 150 one-star reviews. The point of the short piece is that real bestsellers have lots of bad reviews as well as many good ones. The unspoken point is that books with too many good reviews and few bad ones must not be a real bestsellers, that those reviews must have been paid for or written by marketers or friends.

I resent this! Without good reviews, you’re treated like a hack and can’t sell books. Too many good reviews and not enough dogs, and you look like a phony. Obviously some authors—and publishers—resort to these tactics. But many of the books on Amazon’s bestselling and top-rated lists come by their reviews honestly.

I know I did. Dying for Justice is the top-rated novel on two of Amazon’s lists—police procedurals and mystery series—with 54 five-star reviews, 8 four-stars, and 1 one-star (idiot). Not one was paid for or written by a marketer. My sister claims she wrote a review, but she loves my work. And I can’t find it, if she did. And I have many great reviews in print magazines—Mystery Scene, Crimespree, Spinetingler, and RT Reviews—to support those online "amateur" reviews.

Yes, I gave away the book on Goodreads, with the idea that readers would post reviews, but I took my chances that they would be in my favor. And yes, I asked readers in a blog to post reviews for the book—but always with the caveat “if you read and enjoyed the story.” I don’t want or need fake support.

Here’s a question for GalleyCat: If a book with a lot of fake five-star ratings wasn’t good, wouldn’t a lot of honest readers start to give it bad reviews? You can’t fool everybody forever. No author has that many loyal friends or fake online IDs—except maybe Stephen Leather, another example of how some big-name indie authors are making the rest of us look bad.

And I have to throw in one more issue. The site that Locke used was clearly corrupt. Reviewers were directly paid to crank out good blurbs without even reading the books. But what about sites like Book Rooster? For a $60 admin fee, the site lists your e-book internally, then their unpaid reviewers sign up to receive and read books of their choosing. In exchange for free books, they write honest reviews.

This process seems fine to me, and I used the site for The Suicide Effect, my least-read book, just to get some reviews. But there was no guarantee of how many reviews or what they would be. It was just an opportunity for exposure, and I got lucky, mostly. But now I’m wondering if that was a mistake, just because the exchange of money (for the administrative fee) might make people lump the service into a paid-review category—even though no money goes to the reviewers.

What do you think? Have you read John Locke’s work? Does he deserve his success? Are you skeptical of any books with almost entirely good reviews? Do you think Book Rooster is a legitimate service? Should Amazon take Locke’s work down to show it’s serious about the trust factor for customer reviews?

This is a cross-posting from the Crime Fiction Collective blog, and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission. Read more about the author, LJ Sellers, here

The Business Rusch: The End of the Unprofessional Writer

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This post, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, originally appeared on her site, The Business Rusch, on 8/22/12.

On July 24, 2012, Canada’s The Globe and Mail published an article titled, “There Will Be No More Professional Writers in The Future.”  The article cites a number of writers, from the ubiquitous Scott Turow to Ewan Morrison who, The Globe and Mail thoughtfully tells me, is “an established British writer.”

Morrison says that the advances he’s received from traditional publishers have been slashed to the bone. He says traditional publishing has started to use “ominously feudal economics” to maintain its empire. He then goes on to denounce the digital revolution, saying it will destroy “vital institutions that have supported ‘the highest achievements in culture in the past 60 years.’”

And as if matters can’t get worse, he predicts, “There will be no more professional writers in the future.”

Here’s the thing: Viewed from a certain perspective, Morrison is absolutely right. A decade or two down the road, the model that we once called “professional” for writers will disappear.

That model depended on writers writing on spec until they sell something. Those writers need a day job to support themselves. Those writers once they sell something then hire an employee with no legal training who negotiates their contract. Then that same employee, who usually has no literary training, vets all of the writer’s future works.

For this single sale, the writers will get an interest-free loan that they do not have to pay back if their book fails to sell well. If the book does sell well, then that interest-free loan will be paid off and the writer will receive a percentage of the book’s cover price (in theory) for each copy sold. Of course, cover price might be subject to discounting (at which case the percentage paid to the writer goes down) and the definition of sold might include free copies given away in hopes of goosing remaining sales, but hey, who is counting?

Wait. The answer to that is no one. Because accounting programs at most traditional publishers are so behind the times that they can’t handle e-book royalties in any sane way. In fact, an intellectual property attorney tells me that in a recent contract negotiation with a traditional publisher, the publisher’s attorney removed a phrase the lawyer added. That phrase? That the publishing house was to provide “true and accurate” royalty statements. “True and accurate” is a legal phrase generally put in other business contracts in which one party fills out an accounting for the other party. But traditional publishers…well, apparently, they don’t want to do what other businesses do.

But I digress.

Morrison is right when he calls traditional publishing a feudal economic system. What he fails to see is that it has always been one. And that the economics are simply getting  more rigid as time goes on. The writers are getting less of the pie than they did before, and seem to have no way to combat that.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s site, The Business Rusch.

10 Grammar Mistakes that Can Keep Your Content from Spreading

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This post, by Alexis Grant, originally appeared on Copyblogger.

Ever read a blog post and think, “This writer seems to have some good ideas, but the grammatical errors are driving me crazy”?

(Pro tip: If you don’t ever think this, some of your readers probably do.)

Grammatical glitches make your writing harder to read, and they turn readers off.

Content may be king, but you’ll gain a lot more respect and credibility if your writing is just as brilliant as the ideas you convey.

And by brilliant, I mean clean.

When your writing is clean, readers understand where you’re coming from. And the more your readers understand and respect where you’re coming from, the more likely they are to share your content.

As editor of Brazen Careerist’s blog, Brazen Life, I often see the same errors in submissions for our site. If our smart contributors make these mistakes, chances are you make them sometimes, too.

So next time you write a blog post, whether it’s a guest post or for your own site, check it over for these errors:

1. Using that when you should use who

Whenever you write about people, refer to them using who, not that.

John is the guy who always forgets his shoes, not the guy that always forgets his shoes.

It’s easy to make this mistake because that has become acceptable in everyday conversations. But it’s more noticeable when it’s written down — or maybe it only jumps out to us grammar geeks?

2. Including the word currently in your bio

The word currently is virtually always redundant. (Can you tell this is one of my pet peeves?) But let’s focus on your bio, because that’s where most writers fail on this one.

Don’t write: “Tom Jones is currently a communications director.” If Tom Jones is anything, he’s that at that moment; you don’t need “currently” to clarify.

Just get rid of it.

3. Starting a sentence with There is or There are

This isn’t an actual error, but it’s often a symptom of lazy writing.

There are lots of better, more interesting ways to start sentences.

Ooops. See how easy it is to make this mistake?

Instead of starting a sentence with There is, try turning the phrase around to include a verb or start with you. For example, replace the sentence above with Start your sentences in a more interesting way.

If your copy includes a lot of phrases that begin with there is or there are, put some time into rewriting most of them.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 7 additional grammar errors to avoid, on Copyblogger.

The Publishing Process, In GIF Form

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This post, from Nathan Bransford, originally appeared on his site on 8/27/12.

In which literary agent-turned-author Nathan Bransford posts a ‘show, don’t tell’ blog all about what it’s like to go from being a hopeful to a published author.

At first you’re thinking of writing a novel and you’re all…

 

 

But then you have an idea!

 

 

And you go…

 

 

But then you hit page 50 and you’re all….

 

 

And then you hit page 75 and you’re all…

 

 

But you power through!!

 

 

Read—or in this case, view—the rest of the post on Nathan Bransford’s site.

Amazon Should Do What’s Best for Indie Writers & Readers

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This post, by K.W. Jeter, originally appeared on SteamWords on 8/27/12.

Here’s the background: Indie e-publishing phenom John Locke, famous for being the first indie writer to sell a million ebooks on Amazon.com, has been outed in the New York Times for having bought a large number, if not most, of the positive reviews that propelled his success:

The Best Reviews Money Can Buy

If this were just a scandale that concerned John Locke alone, I wouldn’t care about it, and I doubt if very many other people in the indie e-publishing scene would, either. But the problem is that it casts indie ebooks in general, along with their writers, in a bad light.

You only have to scroll through the comments to the New York Times article to find a lot of people piling on, saying that incidents such as this demonstrate that indie ebooks are crap, that authors have to pay people to say nice things about, and that’s why they don’t buy them. But not just there; Salon.com chimed in with a painfully accurate assessment:

“…employing a service that dishonest and cynical demonstrates a bizarre contempt for the reader. It casts the writer as a producer of widgets and the reader as a sucker who probably won’t complain if the product doesn’t live up to the hype, because hey, at least it was cheap. Books, in this scenario, become flea market trash…”

And how’s the Twitterverse discussing the matter? Here’s a couple of typical comments:

John Locke paid for positive reviews, according to NY Times article. Now, my question is: How many other authors pay?

and

John Locke, self publishing success, paid for over 300 reviews. I have no doubts many huge self pubs use this service.

 

Read the rest of the post on SteamWords.

25 Things You Should Know About NaNoWriMo

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NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is held every November. This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terrribleminds site on 10/4/11.

It’s that time of the year, then, that normal everyday men and women get a hankering for the taste of ink and misery, thus choosing to step into the arena to tangle with the NaNoWriMo beast.

Here, then, are 25 of my thoughts regarding this month-long pilgrimage into the mouth of the novel — peruse, digest, then discuss. Feel free to hit the comments [on the original post] and add your own thoughts to the tangle.

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

1. Writing Requires Writing

The oft-repeated refrain, “Writers write,” is as true a sentiment as one can find, and yet so many self-declared writers seem to ignore it just the same. National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo, which sounds like like the more formalized greeting used by Mork when calling home to Ork — demands that writers shit or get off the pot. It says, you’re a writer, so get to scrawling, motherfucker.

2. Writing Requires Finishing

The other giant sucking chest wound that afflicts a great many so-called writers is the inability to finish a single fucking thing. Not a novel, not a script, not a short story. (One wonders how many unfinished manuscripts sit collecting dust like a shelf full of Hummel figurines in an old cat lady’s decrepit Victorian manse.) NaNoWriMo lays down the law: you have a goal and that goal is to finish.

3. Discipline, With A Capital “Do That Shit Every Day, Son”

The way you survive NaNoWriMo is the same way any novelist survives: by spot-welding one’s ass to the office chair every day and putting the words to screen and paper no matter what. Got a headache? Better write. Kid won’t stop crying? Better write. Life is hard and weepy-pissy-sadfaced-panda-noises? Fuck you and write. Covered in killer bees? Maybe today’s not the best day to write. You might want to call somebody. Just don’t pee in fear. Bees can smell fear-urine. Pee is to bees as catnip is to cats.

4. The Magic Number Is 1666

Ahh. The Devil’s vintage. Ahem. Anyway. To hit 50,000 words in one month, you must write at least 1,666 words per day over the 30 day period. I write about 1000 words in an hour, so you’re probably looking at two to three hours worth of work per day. If you choose to not work weekends, you’ll probably need to hit around 2300 words per day. If you’re only working weekends, then ~6000 per day.

5. The Problem With 50,000 Words

Be advised: 50,000 words does not a novel make. It may technically count, but publishers don’t want to hear it. Even in the young adult market I’d say that most novels hover around 60,000 words. You go to a publisher with 50k in hand and call it a novel, they’re going to laugh at you. And whip your naked ass with a towel. And put that shit on YouTube so everybody can have a chortle or three. Someone out there is surely saying, “Yes, but what if I’m self-publishing?” Oh, don’t worry, you intrepid DIY’ers. I’ll get to you.

6. The True Nature Of “Finishing”

For the record, I’m not a fan of referring to one’s sexual climax as “finishing.” It’s so… final. “I have finished. I am complete. Snooze Mode, engaged!” I prefer “arrived.” Sounds so much more festive! As if there’s more on the way! This party’s just getting started! … wait, I’m talking about the wrong type of finishing, aren’t I? Hm. Damn. Ah, yes, NaNoWriMo. Writing 50,000 words is your technical goal — completing a novel in those 50,000 words is not. You can turn in an unfinished novel and be good to go. The only concern there is that 50,000 words serves only as a milestone and come December it again becomes oh-so-easy to settle in with the “I’ve Written Part Of A Novel” crowd. Always remember: the only way through is through.

7. Draft Zero

It helps to look at your NaNoWriMo novel as the zero draft — it has a beginning, it has an ending, it has a whole lot of something in the middle. The puzzle pieces are all on the table and, at the very least, you’ve got an image starting to come together (“is that a dolphin riding side-saddle on a mechanical warhorse through a hail of lasers?”). But the zero draft isn’t done cooking. A proper first draft awaits. A first draft that will see more meat slapped onto those exposed bones, taking your word count into more realistic territory.

8. Quantity Above Quality

Put differently, the end result of any written novel is quality. You’re looking for that thing to shine like a stiletto and be just as sharp. NaNoWriMo doesn’t ask for or judge quality as part of its end goal. To “win” the month, you could theoretically write the phrase “nipple sandwich” 25,000 times and earn yourself a little certificate. Quantity must be spun into quality. You’ve got all the sticks. Now build yourself a house.

9. Beware “Win” Conditions

If you complete NaNoWriMo, I give you permission to feel like a winner. If you don’t, I do not — repeat, awooga, awooga, do not — give you permission to feel like a loser. This is one of the perils of the gamification of novel-writing, the belief that by racking up a certain score (word count) in a pre-set time-frame (one month for everybody), you win. And by not doing this, well, fuck you, put another quarter in the machine, dongface. Which leads me to:

10. We’re Not All Robots Who Follow The Same Pre-Described Program

NaNoWriMo assumes a single way of writing a novel. Part of this equation — “smash brain against keyboard until story bleeds out” — is fairly universal. The rest is not. For every novelist comes a new path cut through the jungle. Some novelists write 1000 words a day. Some 5000 words a day. Some spend more time on planning, others spend a year or more writing. Be advised that NaNoWriMo is not a guaranteed solution, nor is your “failure to thrive” in that program in any way meaningful. I tried it years back and found it just didn’t fit for me. (And yet I remain!) It is not a bellwether of your ability or talent.

 

Read the rest of the post, which contains 15 more things to know about NaNoWriMo, on terribleminds.

'Tis The Season To Plan Book Promotions

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We may still be sweltering in summer heat, but now is the time to plan your fall and winter book promotion schedule.

How can your book tie into upcoming events like back to school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah or the dawning of a new year?

Keep media lead times in mind when planning for book publicity. Daily media like newspapers and blogs have shorter lead times, while monthly magazines may be working six months in advance.

Other possibilities include virtual book tours, social media campaigns, school visits, and discount promotions. If you are doing free ebook promotions through KDP Select, holidays can make great promotional hooks.

So set some goals for what you’d like to accomplish over the next few months, grab a calendar, and start working on timelines and to do lists for your fall and winter book promotions.

To learn more about how to develop a book marketing plan, download my free report, Create a Book Marketing Plan That Sells Books.

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Charles Dickens and Me. Or, Is One Sale Enough?

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This post, by Helen Smith, originally appeared on the New Wave Authors site.

My new book is coming out in print on 4th September. It’s my pride and joy. It’s my masterpiece. It’s the best thing I have ever written. I want people to know that the book is available so they can buy it if they like the sound of it. I want reviewers to review it – favourably.

I have a virtual book tour set up in September and October. The book has gone out to ninety critics and book bloggers for review. I’m doing several events in London and (I hope) in New York to publicize my book. It’s exhausting. I’d rather not do any of it, to be honest. I’d rather sit at home and work. Or go out and get drunk. (Even that’s not true. Time is spinning by, more than half my life has gone by, and actually who cares about getting drunk? All I want to do is work. I’m worried that I may not get through all of it before I die. And I still smoke! But that’s another blog post.)

I don’t want to spend my time on promotions and publicity. But what choice do I have? When I’m feeling especially grumpy, I tell myself it ought not to be like this. In ‘the old days’ of traditional publishing, you only had to make one sale: to your agent. Your agent sold it to your publisher. You got on and wrote the next book. Before agents existed, you just sold your book direct to a publisher, but the model was the same.

That’s not quite true, of course – and it never really was. Charles Dickens ruined his health touring America reading excerpts from his book. He’s one of the most famous writers in the world. It’s not just that he was a prolific writer of brilliant books (though that helps enormously, of course, when planning your literary legacy) but he was also a keen self-publicist.

Even two of my childhood heroes, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, were more than ‘just’ writers. They were also reviewers and columnists who had useful platforms from which to reach a wide readership.

We’re in the midst of a publishing revolution, as you know. Anyone can buy almost any book online, very cheaply, whether digitally or in hardback or paperback, and read it instantly, or have it in their hands within a few days if it needs to be delivered by post. Soon all the books that have ever been written will be in print (i.e. available) and new books will never go out of print. We no longer have to go into bookshops and choose from a tiny selection which is only on display because a large publisher incentivised the manager to order a particular book. We can have anything we want. And it’s cheap. And (unlike with the second-hand market) the author gets paid for every sale.

 

Read the rest of the post on New Wave Authors.

Storytelling Is Us

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Author Henning Mankell, writing in the New York Times last year related how he came to live much of the time in Mozambique. Listening to old men sitting on a bench talk, he speculates:

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination (name) for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats–and they in turn can listen to ours.

Now, Homo sapiens means loosely “knowing person.” Homo narrans would be “storytelling person.”

Certainly we are differentiated by our intelligence, but I found Mankell’s idea magnetic.

No matter what realm we operate within, no matter what discipline we’ve learned or invented, storytelling has a central place.

For instance, it’s how we transmit the news of our discoveries, how we describe who we are and where we want to go, how we account for what we’ve become. In each case a personal narrative in involved. A collection of stories that taken together create a personal history all our own.

How did you meet your wife? Where did you go to school? Why did you decide to start that business? How are you different from the person you were when you graduated high school?

Each question evokes a story, or a chain of stories that weave into a narrative.

We vary widely in how compellingly we tell these stories, both to others and to ourselves. Some stories we tell internally, in our own minds, are always accompanied by feelings, justifications, memories, the bits and pieces left with us from our own experience and the way we’ve processed that experience over the years.

Some of these narratives are truth in the sense that the events described really did happen. Many many others are interpretive accounts, colored by the passing of time and the agendas and assumptions through which we filter our experience.

Some of the narratives are fanciful, intentionally or not. Fables, fantasies, speculations, imaginative wanderings, all those stories have their place too, and that’s why we have those other storytelling magicians, the novelists.

Storytelling and Story-selling

When I watch a really accomplished marketer at work, I’m always looking at the stories they are telling. It might surprise you to know just how much even the most dedicated pitchmen rely on stories to reach their audience.

Everyone loves a story, everyone wants to know how they end, what happens next: “Tell me more!”

The serialized novel, the never-ending soap opera, even the little 3-panel comic strips in your morning paper, they all rely on story and the narrative arc to teach, entertain, to amuse.

  • First panel, the setup.
  • Second panel, the conundrum.
  • Third panel, boom, the punchline hits from an unexpected direction.

The storyteller, no matter what her medium, knows how to surprise, to delight, to put a twist or a bend in the road that we didn’t expect. It’s all about keeping the attention of the reader.

Think how storytellers in the thousands of years before literacy became widespread had to be able to hold the attention of the crowd with only their own words.

A lot of that is still in our language and our expectations every time we realize there’s a story to be had. Every year we tell the iconic stories; the three wise men; the early settlers and the native peoples; the salvation of the world.

Most religious texts are, after all, collections of stories used to amaze and teach us.

Today’s Storytellers—You and I?

Because story is at the base of our civilization and runs throughout human endeavor, you would think that artful storytelling would be one of the most highly respected occupations a human could aspire to.

This isn’t true, of course, although our best storytellers who also capture the popular imagination—like movie makers, novelists, songwriters and playwrights—become stars.

But you and I, writers who unspool our stories for far smaller groups of people, are participating in an age-old and uniquely human activity.

Whether they are used to sell, to persuade, to inform, to entertain or to enlighten, our stories in a way define us. And in that sense, I guess I would agree with Mankell. Man truly is the “storytelling person,” Homo narrans.

Finding the stories you need to tell, and telling them as best you can, are things all writers learn. Heard any good ones lately?

 

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

Measuring Achievement By The Olympics. How Much Can You Achieve In 4 Years?

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The London Olympics are almost over and the closing ceremony will finish off what has been a glorious few weeks. (Britain seems to have done really well in the medal table too!)

At the opening ceremony I shared 10 lessons writers can learn from the Olympics, but I have also been thinking a great deal about time and achievement during the competition. I have been learning about establishing professional creative habits in the last few months and the discipline of the athletes has really brought it home for me.

 

Warning: This post contains homework!

I do yearly goals, I also do daily To Do lists and any number of other goal setting activities. But it’s August already and it seems that the time flies by and I haven’t achieved everything I set out to do.

And yet, I also look back to the last Olympics in 2008 and see how far I have come.

It is hard to measure achievement in just one year, and 5 years often seems too far to see. But the Olympics are a great milestone by which to measure our creative lives. Not too short and not too long a period. I’m being open and honest in this post so I hope you will be too. Let’s do this together …

Where were you on your writing journey in August 2008? (Beijing Olympics)

First, write down what you had achieved on your writing journey by August 2008 and anything else that might be pertinent to what you have achieved. Please do share in the comments if you would like to, but definitely keep this written down somewhere. I use Moleskine journals these days.

By August 2008, I had written my first non-fiction book, How to love your job or find a new one. I had self-published it but it had only sold ~100 copies. I had started learning about marketing from books, audio CDs and online courses. I was working full-time as an IT consultant for a large multi-national mining company. I didn’t know any authors. I had not seriously considered writing fiction.

I had a new blog but it was about my non-fiction book. The Creative Penn didn’t exist and I didn’t have a business at all. I wasn’t on any social networks and I didn’t know anything about them at that point. The Kindle hadn’t been released outside of the US and ebooks weren’t mainstream. I didn’t even know what ebooks were. There was no KDP or Nook PubIt or Smashwords or BookBaby (or I didn’t know they existed if they were there). Print on demand existed but wasn’t mainstream. I didn’t have a podcast and I had never made a video before. I basically had no online presence, no email list, no way to connect with anyone.

I was living in Australia and just about to get married. I read only print books and owned over 1500 physical books, many of which I had shipped from the UK, to New Zealand and then on to Brisbane, Australia.

Where are you now on your writing journey, in August 2012? (London Olympics)

Again, write this down in a notebook and add to the comments if you would like to share. I hope we can all look back at this so please be honest. You can see where I was 4 years ago!

I have 2 thriller novels out, Pentecost and Prophecy, in the ARKANE series. They have sold ~40,000 copies. I have finished the first draft of the third book in the series, Exodus and I’m working on 2 other fiction books. I have signed with a New York literary agent to represent my fiction. I have 2 non-fiction books available, including a re-release of my career change book, How to love your job or find a new one. I have a fiction website and blog at JFPenn.com.

TheCreativePenn.com has been voted one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2 years running and has monthly visitors of ~ 40,000. The Creative Penn podcast has over 130 episodes, over 70 hours of free audio on writing, publishing and book marketing. It has had over 60,000 downloads. My YouTube channel has had over 102,000 views. I am on multiple social networks, primarily twitter @thecreativepenn where I have close to 30,000 followers.

I am a full-time author-entrepreneur. I make a living from writing, speaking, selling multimedia courses and consulting on internet marketing.

I have been happily married for 4 years and now live in London, England. I read 90% of the time on my Kindle or my iPhone and we left 99% of our print books in Australia.

Reading this I am pretty happy with the progress of the last 4 years, even though the route here has been a twisty one. Building the business and starting writing fiction have been my main aims. My next focus will be seriously building my fiction brand and backlist.

Where will you be in August 2016? (Rio Olympics)

This is the tough one. You need to be visionary for this. I can also guarantee that whatever you write, the reality will surpass it (if you put in the Olympic training). Who said your writing goals have to be insignificant?

By August 2016, I want to have 10 thriller novels available and be a New York Times bestselling author. I will combine my books between traditional publishing houses and self-publishing. My print and ebooks will be available in multiple languages and I will have an email list of over 20,000 readers who are keen for my books. Financially, I will be earning 6 figures from my fiction.

I’ll still be happily married, but I won’t commit to a physical location, since I have moved every few years all my life! I love London but I won’t rule out more traveling :)

Yes, I plan on revisiting this post and seeing how we all did. I fully intend to still be blogging in 2016.

Again, write this down in a notebook and add to the comments if you would like to share.

Will you commit to the writer’s Olympic training program?

I’m all for visualization as one aspect of peak performance but you actually have to put in the physical effort as well. So, your writer’s Olympic training program for achievement by Rio 2016 should include:

(1) Practice.

Writing – first, last and always. If you don’t do this every day, or week, you won’t make your goals. If the athletes don’t show up, their muscles just get weaker. It’s the same for writers. Show up on the page and get writing. Do you see any of the Olympic athletes making excuses?

(2) Perform and test yourself.

For athletes, they need to test themselves by turning up for championships or competitions. For us, it’s about publishing. Whether that is self-publishing to a professional standard, or querying a traditional publisher, you have to get your books out there if you want to be a pro writer. The only way to test yourself is by having others read your work. Writing for pleasure is fantastic but it is not a professional career. It wouldn’t be an Olympic sport. So get your work out there.

(3) Skills development.

Athletes have coaches and go on training camps. They research techniques for cutting off an extra 0.001 second off their time. They are always improving. We need to focus on that too. Buy some books, pay for a manuscript critique or a developmental editor, go on a course, do an online multimedia program. Write in a different genre. Invest and keep improving your skills.

(4) Brand building and marketing

Usain Bolt has a brand and marketing manager. He needs to run but he also needs to pay the bills, now and into the future. He only has a few years at the top of his game, whereas we have a lifetime career to manage. Yes, we need to write more books but I also believe you need to invest time in building your brand, connecting with your audience and looking after your business. If you do this, you will be earning money for the long term and you’ll be able to write for your (may it be long) lifetime.

If you want to kick it up a notch for the next Olympics, this is what I recommend. What about you? Please do leave a comment below.

 

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

Putting Sex Back In The Series

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After all the trouble of taking Sex out of the Jackson series, I’m about to put it back. Some of you may be thinking, It’s about time. But those of you who know the series, know that I was talking about The Sex Club, the first book to feature Detective Wade Jackson.

Late last year, I pulled it as the lead Jackson story and moved it into my standalone thriller category, mostly for political reasons (see blog). The book features a Planned Parenthood nurse and crazy anti-abortionist (protagonist and antagonist, respectively), and I made the change so the first book in the series would be more palatable to all readers.

I worried that some readers would simply be turned off by the title. Many other readers bought the book for the title. Either way, at this point Amazon Publishing/Thomas & Mercer owns the rights, and they plan to market it as part of the series. By the time their version comes out in January with all the other Jackson books—including the new one, Rules of Crime—I’ll have modified my website, bio, and book listings to match up with Amazon’s marketing.

Once again, The Sex Club will be the first title many readers see when they visit my website or see a list of my books. I have mixed feelings about this. I love the story, and I’m proud to be its author. But it’s the only title I have that doesn’t really reflect the crime-fiction genre that I write in. Hopefully readers will look beyond that book and see that I’m really about crime, violence, and death. :)

When my kids were growing up, I used to say I’d rather they watched sex scenes in movies than violence, but that’s another subject.

For the record, I could have objected to the strategy to market The Sex Club as a Jackson story. Amazon is very concerned with my input and involves me in all decisions. But I trust them to know what they’re doing. And I’ve felt guilty about moving the book since I made the change.

The Sex Club is different from the others. I wrote it as a standalone with two main characters, one a nurse and the other a homicide detective. So it’s little different from my other police procedurals. But I knew I might bring Jackson back. And for readers who like to start at the beginning of a character’s development, it’s only fair they know about the first book. (Which I’ve tried to do anyway by including phrases like “featuring Detective Jackson” in my marketing text.)

So Sex is back. And it’s a good thing. :)

 

This is a reprint from LJ Sellers‘ blog.

Expectation, Reality, and Serendipity

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I think I’m almost a walking/classic example of “we don’t know what the public wants or how to anticipate it” that seems to be the battle cry of the entertainment industry, particularly books. Publishers take risks every day on things. They think “Oh this will be big” and then it isn’t. Or they put a book out there and it does way better than they ever expected.

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

That’s about where I am right now. When I started the Zoe pen name and the paranormal romance and then started the Kitty pen name with the erotica, the idea was as follows: I was going to market the hell out of Zoe, and really build that. It would be my more “commercial” name. Kitty would just be a niche passion project, written for love, not money.

The reality turned out to be the opposite. I have spent thousands of dollars marketing and pushing Zoe. I’ve spent probably thousands of hours toward the same goal. In the beginning when there wasn’t much in the Kindle store, Zoe books sold well. If I’d had a lot more books out (i.e. if I’d stopped arguing on the Internet and kept my eye on the prize), I would have been able to lock in more long-term fans who would REMEMBER me and keep coming back.

But I didn’t do that.

Now, a few years later, the paranormal romance market is glutted and it’s starting to go a little out of fashion. i.e. while there will always be hardcore PNR fans and you can always probably do pretty decently there if you’re at the top of the pile, except for your hardcore fans, it’s just a harder sell now.

Likewise, YA dystopians are probably on the way out, too. People just get so sick of seeing the same shit over and over. So I probably won’t be doing YA dystopians. I might do some YA, but not dystopians, probably. This isn’t me just letting the market dictate to me. If I had a really well-developed idea that I LOVED and that kept me up at night thinking about it, I’d write it and publish it and just let the chips fall wherever. It’s always possible to write that book in a glutted and largely on the way out market that just grabs people anyway.

I mean YA dystopians have been slowly falling out of favor and then we had The Hunger Games happen. So there will probably be another little surge of it. Just like there was another surge of PNR after Twilight.

So what does this mean? Life Cycle has been out three weeks. And this is generally the point where if a title of mine is going to have a good upswing in sales and ranking, it happens now. I’ve got a huge cross-promo thing going with Kimberly Kinrade. We have thousands of entries. I’ve got major paid promo with a company whose name I won’t mention since the results are lackluster and I know some people swear by the company… All this is going on CURRENTLY and is in progress. I’ve spent more money promoting Life Cycle than any other title I’ve written for either name and it’s had the most disappointing sales so far. It has only 2 Amazon reviews in all of that time. While I may love it and those who love everything I write may love it… it obviously doesn’t have enough interest in the general marketplace and people aren’t passionate enough about it to really talk about it. (This isn’t me whining or crying or bitching or boo hooing, this is me facing reality.) Though it does make me pretty sad given how much I LOVE Cain and wanted to share him with a larger audience.

Zoe has a MUCH larger visible social platform than Kitty. But doesn’t sell as well. So all this crap about building your ‘platform’ with a billion twitter followers and facebook followers and newsletter subscribers and on and on is just that… crap. 5,000 Twitter followers isn’t 5,000 core fan base. I would LOVE it if all my kitty fans were on my newsletter because frankly it feels wild and out of control to not have direct access to everybody who loves my books to make sure they know about them when they come out. But that’s part of the wholesale model, when you deal directly with an intermediary company instead of directly selling to your audience. It’s a trade off. On the one hand bad: you lose direct access to everybody. On the other hand good: you have more access to people in general.

Kitty has 150 newsletter subscribers. But every single person on that list is a SERIOUS fan. Zoe has over 2,000 newsletter subscribers and yet 25% or less even open their newsletters from Zoe. I used to have a much higher open conversion rate for Zoe. It dropped because I started giving away Kept for free to entice people to subscribe to the newsletter and also doing newsletter drives and promotions where people subscribe. Most of those people just delete the emails when they come. They don’t CARE about my work. They just wanted free stuff. (Obviously there are exceptions but they aren’t the rule.)

Back to Zoe:

I LOVE Life Cycle. I really thought it would break out. But I think part of the problem is… it’s book 4 in the series. And I think it just doesn’t matter how much I scream that it can work as a stand-alone, most people want to read books in a series in order. And Blood Lust is not my strongest book. It’s not “weak”, but it’s not break-out-able. So I can’t expect readers–except for a small core following–to push through all those books to get to Life Cycle.

I think I can wrap up this series in 7 books, so that’s what I’m going to do. Hadrian and Angeline’s book (book 5) is next. That will tie up their storyline started in Dark Mercy. Then I have 2 more to wrap up the series. I’m not going to continue to try to resurrect something that just isn’t giving me the results I want. But by the same token, I’m not going to betray the fans of the series by not finishing what I started. (and FYI, I only had 7 books with full PLANS. I was going to put in an extra book assuming I could figure out something to go in that slot, but I’m not going to do that now.)

Not when Kitty does so much better. With Kitty I have done NO major promos or giveaways (nor will I ever.) I’ve come to understand that if your selling point is giving away a Kindle or signed free books you are mainly attracting people who want free things, not a fan base. They may say: “Oh, that book sounds good!” but they will add it to their TBR pile (maybe) and then never bother to buy it or read it. Some will, but most won’t. This is 4 years of experience with all this crap talking. (And 4 years isn’t massive experience, but it’s enough to note a trend and stop doing stupid things.)

When I think of all my favorite authors and favorite books, the selling point that brought me to those authors was THE BOOK. It wasn’t a giveaway of any stripe. So all this expensive and time consuming promotion just doesn’t work. IMO. Maybe it works for other people and if so, great. But I’ve seen the difference in how Kitty and Zoe sell and the crazy amount of work I have to put into Zoe for mediocre sales

Zoe is also harder for me to write. It’s more work for the writing, more work for the editing, more work and money for the marketing… lackluster results. Kitty is easier to write, less work for the editing, no major marketing… better results… sells better over the long haul even with many months of no new release. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what I should be focusing most of my attention on, here.

Writing is my career. It’s what pays my rent and puts food on my table. Without writing, I’d have to go out and get a real job. So, while I can’t write something I hate just to please/feed a market… (i.e. I can’t just ‘write what’s hot’ if my heart isn’t in it)… I also have to focus on what makes the most sense to focus on.

I said I would write and publish as long as I could make enough money to sustain me doing it. That applies not just to my writing in general but to specific pen names/genres and how much energy I assign to things based both on my passion for it as well as reader passion for it.

There is a lot of ego tied up in Zoe. When I was this scrappy little indie not making any money I was all over the Internet running my mouth. I had something to prove. By pulling away from Zoe some, it feels like failure. It feels like all those people will go: “What the fuck happened to that loud-mouthed indie? I haven’t seen anything from her in awhile. Guess she didn’t have the goods.” Well, I think I ‘have the goods’, but the issue is, I either don’t have them enough in this genre, or I’m trying to fight an uphill struggle in a glutted market and it’s just me being stupid.

There is a lot of ego death involved in letting Zoe fade off more and more people’s radars. There was so much of a “I’ll show them!” attitude going on. And frankly I just don’t think ZOE is going to show anybody anything, except how to keep doing the same stupid thing over and over when it is like banging my head against a brick wall.

I’ll do more Zoe stuff after this series, probably. I’ll probably be shifting more into urban fantasy with romantic subplots. But I won’t put giant energy into it until and unless I see it’s got a real market/readership potential. It’s a close enough neighbor to the PNR that I think I can keep most of my readers. But at least until I finish the Preternaturals series, I’ll probably be doing one Zoe book a year and focusing most of my energy on what’s selling right now and what I’m most passionate about and have the most active ideas for and excitement… the kitty stuff.

And I’m sure I’ll get “kittied out” and need to write some Zoe, or maybe perhaps a third pen name, which I probably won’t share. Because it gets to be too much pressure. Anything tied into Zoe is too much pressure. If I’d just QUIETLY done my thing, it would be one thing… but I was not quiet. And so… whether or not anybody really notices or cares I feel like I have to “live up to something” and that’s too much fucking pressure.

I’m also pretty much finished expecting anything. I frankly don’t know what the fuck people want, and I’m tired of pretending I’m some kind of fictional oracle. For Kitty, I didn’t really think much about The Auction. I mean I enjoyed writing the book as much as all of the other Kitty books, but I didn’t think it was going to sell great. It got to the highest ranking of any of my Kitty books. People LOVED those alien dragon guys. Who knew? Several people want some more sci-fi type kitty stuff, and I do have some ideas of that nature.

Comfort Food still sells strong after over two years. Sometimes someone will rave about it with a big following and it will get a huge uptick. like a few weeks ago it got back into the top 2k of the Kindle store. (And you know what, Guys? I GET that Amazon is not the only market out there, but it is the biggest one and how you are doing there in sales ranking is a pretty good indicator of how your name/book is doing overall in terms of popularity side-by-side with others. And yes, you shouldn’t compare yourself to others… blah blah blah… but… really… you need to have some inkling on how you rank. If I didn’t pay any attention to that stuff, I wouldn’t know Kitty does so much better than Zoe.)

But… then The Last Girl, which I LOVED, didn’t do as well. It still does better than all my Zoe books, but for a Kitty book it didn’t exactly explode the charts.

But the bottom line of what I’m trying to say is… I’m done trying to “make people interested” in stuff they aren’t interested in. Advertising is next to useless. It’s word of mouth that sells books. The theory is that you need enough advertising to get enough word of mouth started, but honestly if a book is THAT gripping, it doesn’t take that many readers for word of mouth to really get started. (Kitty stuff is a prime example of this.) Advertising only really pumps up books that are already going. It’s hard to get people’s attention with stuff they’ve never heard about. And I’m really starting to believe that the kind of brand-building advertising that seems to “work” (as much as advertising ever does), is really more for the big boys, or people who are in a very limited niche where they have access to much of that audience over and over.

If you’re writing/making/doing something that has an audience you can’t reach all at once, then it’s pissing in the wind at a target you can’t even see. For something that costs thousands of dollars and tons of angst, it’s not how I want to be spending my time or money.

In an interesting twist of serendipity, today while I’m thinking about all of this, this post was Freshly Pressed on wordpress.

The only thing I don’t fully agree with is: “Let money dictate what you do”. If you are an ARTIST and that is IT and you don’t rely on your art as your livelihood, then yeah, feel free to ignore that. But if you ARE reliant on the money to live, then ideally you want to find something you love that other people love and will pay for (like for me: the Kitty work), but it’s not feasible to keep doing something that isn’t giving you the results you need/want.

That’s just reality. I have to do what I love that pays the bills. Zoe doesn’t do that for me nearly as much as Kitty, so I’m done waiting for something of Zoe’s to “break out”, or for it to “catch on and build up a following” etc. I’m just done. I’m still writing Zoe, I’m just not putting all my hopes and dreams in it or the bulk of my energy into it. Likewise, I’m not going to start having tons of expectations for Kitty, either, because it’s the expectations that lead to the disappointment. I’m just going to write what I love and am passionate about and let the chips fall wherever.

If I hadn’t been trying so hard to push Zoe and make Zoe “work” on a larger scale I probably naturally would have drifted to 1-2 Zoe titles a year as a break from Kitty and most of my focus on Kitty. I feel like if I ignored this instinct, 4 years from now I’ll be talking about how I had an opportunity to really make Kitty work, but was focused too much on Zoe. (Like I did with regards to Zoe vs. Internet arguing.)

And I swore I wouldn’t make that same stupid mistake twice.

 

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters. Also see this follow-up post.