Month: October 2012

Varieties of the Publishing Experience

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I’m not sure how many of you—authors who took the leap, self-published your own books—know quite how heroic you are.

I bet a lot of you have already published books, but there are even more writers who are still thinking about it, reading about it, testing the waters.

And that’s a good idea. There’s no reason to rush into self-publishing, particularly if you think about what you’ll be taking on.

 

There are a lot of skills you’ll have to learn, new companies to research, service providers to vet. It really can be a lot of work, and it can test your own resources, the assets you bring to publishing, and your native abilities. Sometimes, even your character.

True, there are some people who are passionate about getting their work out there, and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to see their book in print and up for sale. I admire that kind of dedication.

But I also know that not everyone feels that way. There are lots of people who would like to publish, who might even have a book finished or almost done. But they haven’t made the decision to move forward.

Making Choices Isn’t Always Easy

A very successful author called for a phone consult recently to talk about the exciting prospect of publishing her own books.

We talked about her newest book and her publishing background. Then I started to talk about the kinds of tasks she would confront as a self-publisher.

As the list went on, I could sense her drawing back. And I was right.

This author had absolutely no interest in running a publishing business, buying ISBNs, setting up printer accounts and all the other little details that go into establishing yourself as a publisher.

So why do it? Why make yourself miserable doing stuff you hate?

In the end I suggested she find someone within her extensive network of authors and entrepreneurs to partner with, someone who enjoyed that part of publishing as much as she enjoyed meeting people, speaking, and networking about her work.

Together, they might make a dynamite combination that could be the beginning of a great publishing business, since one was already a bestselling author.

I think the moral of this story, if there is one, is to be honest about what your capabilities are, what things you enjoy doing, and what you can barely tolerate.

You know, the stuff that always seems to slip to the bottom of your to-do list, that you procrastinate about because it’s just easier to avoid.

On the other hand, you can format your book by yourself even if it doesn’t give you a lot of joy. Why? Because you only have to do it once.

But if it’s one of those things that you just keep putting off, it’s not that hard to find someone to do it for you.

On the other hand, if you hate bookkeeping or tracking expenses or keeping receipts, maybe you shouldn’t be in business at all. Accurate recordkeeping is a prerequisite for most successful businesses, and if the idea of tracking costs makes you want to scream, look for a different solution or see if you can outsource that part of your tasks.

Sometimes you have to look for ways to free yourself up to do the things that only you can do. If those are things you love to do, you’ve got a winning proposition.

My takeaway today is that there are lots of ways to get into print and participate in the amazing possibilities in book publishing. Maybe for you it’s going to be getting focused training in the publishing process that will give you real self-confidence as a publisher.

Or you might be better off looking for help with the tasks you don’t want to tackle. As long as you don’t lose control of your own book, there are lots of solutions out there that can work for you.

I’m curious: how have you dealt with all the tasks you take on when you publish? Have you outsourced, or gotten training? Let me know in the comments [on the original post].

 

 

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

A Bunch of Quotes About Writing

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 This post, by Philip, originally appeared on YouOffendMeYouOffendMyFamily.

I met a couple of kids over the weekend who hope to grow up and become writers. That’s always inspiring to hear but I also wonder if they really understand the struggles and hardships that await. So for them and anyone else who writes or wants to write or loves writing, here are a few of the quotes I’ve collected over the years on this “noblest of professions.”

…I had decided that the only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.
– Russell Baker 

When you start writing you’re 98% pure writer and 2% critic. After you’ve written for a length of time, you’ve learned a great deal about your craft, and you’ve become 2% pure writer and 98% critic. It’s like writing uphill.
– David Westheimer

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
– Paul Rudnick

Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.
– Robert Bresson

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
– Gene Fowler

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type ‘Act one, scene one,’ your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill or anyone. It’s that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.
– Meredith Willson

There was a time when making ‘Barney Miller’ a hit on the air was my life. I cared about nothing else. That was all I was concerned with. And I told my wife and I told my children if it costs me my relationship with my family, I’m committing five years of my life to making the best television show I can possibly make. Whatever it costs, under any circumstance. And I hocked my house, and I gave up my salary and I did everything to give the show a chance to start going. And that’s what you have to do.
– Danny Arnold

Hollywood is the only town where you cannot fail. You can only quit trying.
– Dennis Foley

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.
– Herman Mankiewicz telling fellow journalist Ben Hecht about Hollywood

My chief memory of movieland is of asking in the producer’s office why I must change the script, eviscerate it, cripple and hamstring it? Why must I strip the hero of his few semi-intelligent remarks and why must I tack on a corny ending that makes the stomach shudder? Half of all the movie writers argue in this fashion. The other half writhe in silence, and the psychoanalysts couch or the liquor bottle claim them both.
– Ben Hecht

Writers are lucky. Whatever the mood, no matter the longing, the writer can use his words to connect himself to any world he wishes to visit.
– Alan Zweibel from “Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner: A Sort of Love Story.”

Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.
– Rod Serling

 

 

Read the rest of the post on YouOffendMeYouOffendMyFamily.

Help! My Book Isn’t Selling. 10 Questions You Need To Answer Honestly If You Want To Sell More Books.

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I love answering your questions and I’m always happy to share what I’ve learned on the journey, but recently I have been receiving the same question over and over again, namely,

“Help, my book isn’t selling. What can I do?”

Most of the time people include a link to their book on Amazon and I can see immediately why they aren’t making any sales, because although I’m an author, I’m a reader first and I’ve been shopping for books on Amazon for years.

The ProWriter multimedia course ‘How To Find Readers & Market Your Book‘ covers this in great detail, but the following checklist will also help you identify your problem and solve it quickly. I have also included lots of links so you can find all the extra material on this (ever-growing!) site.

[As always, these are not rules, because there are no rules in this crazy, fast-moving self-publishing world. There will also always be outliers who get away with not doing any of the following, but these will at least help with some guidelines!]

1. Is your book available as an ebook?

99% of indie authors will not have print distribution in physical bookstores, and I would postulate that all the success stories we have heard in the last 2 years about indie authors and huge sales have come from ebook sales, not print.

I personally don’t do print books anymore because the cost/benefit didn’t work out for me and I want high quality print books (one of the reasons I am pursuing a traditional deal for my thrillers). But if you want a print book, fantastic, go ahead and use print on demand to do it.

BUT/ if you want to sell a lot of books online, then make sure you have an ebook for sale as well.

There has been an influx of ebooks (and print books) self-published in the last year, as well as traditional publishers beginning to re-issue backlists digitally. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about this so-called‘tsunami of crap’, but personally, I believe you can surf the wave and make good sales even if you’re starting now. The ebook market is growing globally as new countries come online and even within markets like the US and UK, ebooks are becoming more widely accepted.

So first off, get your ebook published.

I use Scrivener for formatting in Kindle, ePub and Word formats and then I publish on Amazon KDP, Kobo Writing Life and Smashwords or BookBaby for the rest (US citizens can use B&N Nook PubIt as well.) It’s not hard if you spend some time with the various help pages.

2. Has your cover been professionally designed?

Book buyers still shop with their eyes. If people make it to your book sales page and your cover is terrible, they will not click the Buy button.

Don’t use a painting your child did or that you did yourself. Don’t DIY based on a YouTube video. Don’t assume you can make a professional cover.

Do research your genre on Amazon and take screenshots of books that stand out in a good way.

Do take pictures of books you like with fonts and designs you like.

Do check out the ebook cover design awards at TheBookDesigner.comto see some great covers and some truly awful ones. Then hire aprofessional cover designer, give them that information and work with them to create a professional cover.

If you don’t have a budget for this, then work extra hard until you have that extra money. Seriously, I believe this is non-negotiable if you want to stand out in the crowded market.

3. Has your book been professionally edited so it reads well?

I am passionate about the value of editing and editors, especially for new writers, or books in a new genre.

editing ARKANE

Some of my own editing

You should edit your books until you can’t stand them any longer, and then you should consider hiring a professional editor to help you take it further, because you cannot see your own words after a point because you know the story so well.

You need other eyes, preferably professional eyes who will critique you honestly and tell you where the problems are, especially if the book is truly awful – and sometimes it is (and that’s ok because you can write another one).

Stephen King in ‘On Writing’ says to rest the manuscript for a while, so put it away and when you have some distance, read it again. You may be horrified by what you find but better now than when it’s out there in the world. Here’s some more articles on editing and my recommended editors.

If you can’t afford a pro editor, then you can try using a critique group of readers within your genre, or join a group like theAlliance of Independent Authors to network with other like-minded authors in order to network and potentially barter your skills. Bartering shouldn’t be underestimated in the online world.

But definitely do not publish your book if only you and your best friend, or your Mum, have read it.

4. Have you submitted the book to the right categories on the ebook stores?

Sorry, but not everyone will like your book.

You may think that everyone will, but they won’t. You might not want to put it in a box or a genre or a category, but you have to because that’s how readers find it. The category/genre reader has expectations and if you don’t ‘fit’ they will be disappointed. That’s not to say you need to follow any specific rules in your writing (let’s not get into that now!) but when you load it up to the distributors you do have to choose which categories and tags to use and they need to be meaningful.

You need some distance from your book in order to do this, but consider where your book fits within the online bookstores. This means deciding on the categories, tags and keywords associated with your book.

It’s also important to match reader expectations and the promise of what your book delivers with what your book is actually about.

There is no point having a book with a swirly, girly pink chic-lit cover in the horror section of fiction. It won’t sell, however good it is.

There are some scammy sites out there that will tell you to aim for the categories that will rank the best in order to have a Bestseller on Amazon. That’s just silly because your book won’t match the expectations of the readers and even if you get a bump in sales, it will completely dry up very soon.

You can choose a category that fits your book AND is easier to rank in, for example, I use categories Action Adventure and Religious Fiction. I rank occasionally for the former and consistently in the latter. That’s optimization, but it is still true to the book and to the reader’s expectations.

If you’re struggling with this, choose 3-5 authors your book is like, not what you want it to be like, but what it is really like. That will help you find the right category.

5. Have you optimized your Amazon sales page with a hook, quotes from reviews and other material?

I have seen some Amazon sales pages with not just typos but terrible grammar.

Some of them make no sense at all. Some are just the back blurb with no review quotes or other things that might draw a customer in.

Basically you need to treat the product description like a sales page. People will not buy your book if your description is badly written or hard to understand because it’s an indication of the quality of your book. Here’s another great article on 11 ingredients of a sizzling book description.

If you want to see a fantastic example, check out CJ Lyons Bloodstained which continues to rock the Kindle charts. That product description seriously rocks. CJ also explains all of this in our ProWriter Marketing course.

6. Have you priced your book realistically, or at least tried different price points?

It’s important to say on pricing that no one has a clue how to price ebooks and authors are having success at many different price points. Check out this great article on The Passive Voice and the comments below to get an idea of the widely different levels of pricing and success.

However, I had one author ask why his debut novel wasn’t selling, and when I checked his sales page, the ebook was priced $11.99. It was his first novel and he had nothing else for sale.

However good your book, however marvelous the cover, your first novel is unlikely to sell at that price. Most ebooks are under $9.99, and a lot of fiction is under $7.99, with many indie books being under $5.

The 99c price point still has some power even after the algorithm changes but you might go somewhere in between, changing your price with promotions as well. I have my books at $2.99 right now so I make $2 per ebook. You get to set your own prices but there’s no way you’ll sell much at those very high prices.

7. Have you written, or are you writing another book?

Sure, there are some breakout successes, but most indie fiction authors making decent money right now have 5 or more books. For non-fiction authors, you can expect to make your money on back-end products ans services and not book sales anyway.

The more books you have available, the more virtual shelf space you have, the easier it is for people to discover you. Plus if a reader finds one they like, they may buy them all so you make more per customer.

I was as guilty as anyone of trying to hype my first novel, because it took so long and I thought it was a precious snowflake. I still believe you have to hustle those first thousand sales with everything you have, but my sales and income jumped when I released the second novel with very little fanfare because I already had an established presence on Amazon and they do a lot of marketing for you when you have multiple books, e.g. emails to people who bought your last one.

I am also fascinated by the rise of novellas and serials as a way to create more books, more quickly. Hugh Howey is a great example of someone who wrote novellas in different series and then continued the direction of the stories for the novellas that took off, Wool being his most famous and lucrative. I am definitely moving into this model in 2013 in between longer works.

8. Have you done some kind of promotion or marketing to let people know it is there?

Again, there are no rules and in fact, everyone has different results from different marketing tactics. Some hit a mega-success with none at all, but I do think that you need to hand-sell your first 1000 readers because they won’t just appear out of nowhere.

Remember: Marketing is sharing what you love with people who want to hear about it. You don’t have to be hard salesy, scammy or nasty. Just be authentic and share your passion.

Lots of marketing info here.

If you need some starter tips, you should definitely be building your email list from your own website and also from a signup at the back of your book.

If you do that with book one, you will have at least some people to market to with book 2. It’s a start, and it grows over time. This is my only non-negotiable recommendation for authors, because you never know what will happen with all these sites we depend upon for sales. If they disappear, or the terms we publish under change, then your email list of fans and buyers is all you have.

I also believe that social media can sell books, but it is a slow build over time and you have to have other goals than just book sales, e.g. networking with peers and other authors. It’s not instant sales so you can’t rely on it. The whole author platform thing is massively useful in so many ways but it is only one aspect of book sales.

If you have some budget you can pay for promotion, but be targeted and track results.

The biggest leaps I had on the Amazon charts were from paid promotional pushes on sites that market direct to Kindle readers. I have used Kindle Nation

Prophecy Joanna Penn next to Lee Child

Prophecy with Lee Child on the Action Adventure Bestseller List

Daily and Pixel of Ink and there are new opportunities all the time. I more than made my money back but the rankings were worth it. Prophecy hit the Action Adventure list above Lee Child! (of course, it dropped away but the screen-print is worth gold!)

Free is still a great option, especially if you have multiple books, as it means people can discover your work with no risk. Fantasy author Lindsay Buroker talked about this in our interview where she revealed that the first book in her series is permanently on free with her other books at $4.95. You can do this by making your book free on Smashwords and eventually Amazon will price match it.

9. Have you asked for reviews, or submitted to review sites?

reviewsThere’s been a lot of scandal about the sock puppet reviews but reviews are still critical because they give your sales page social proof and they feed into the book site algorithms.

I give away a lot of free books to people who might like my genre and ask that they leave a review if they like it. No hard sell, no pressure, no expectation. This is easy if you have built up a list from the last book, or if you have built a platform and in fact is one good reason to do this. Traditional publishing has been doing this forever so it is not a new or a scammy tactic.

Remember that not everyone will like your book and not everyone will leave a review, or a good review, but it is a start. [And remember, don’t respond to bad reviews!]

You can also contact book bloggers or Amazon reviewers to get more reviews. This is hard work but well worth it. You can listen to Rachel Abbott in this interview talk about how this strategy got her to #1 on Amazon.co.uk.

10. Are you working your butt off?

hard work aheadGenerally, I’m an even tempered type of girl, but when I get emails from people asking why they’re not successful and they’ve done nothing on this list, I get a little annoyed!

Especially when this site has over 500 free articles on writing, publishing and marketing and there’s 70+ hours of audio for you to learn from for free. Oh yes, and a 57 page Author 2.0 ebookon all this. That’s all available for free, but I also have a number of multimedia courses as well, so there is no excuse not to be educated, even just from this site.

I absolutely believe that you can be a great writer and make an income from writing.

I have to believe that for you because I believe it for me, and I have left a stable job and steady income to take a chance on being an author-entrepreneur. I’ve been on this path since 2007 when I decided to write my first non-fiction book, so I am 5 years into working my butt off to change my life.

But writing books is not a get rich quick scheme.

I look at authors like CJ Lyons, Scott Sigler, Chuck Wendig, Joe Konrath, Bob Mayer and so many others and I know they are working their butts off every day writing and getting their work out there. The recent success ofSean Platt & David Wright in landing a Serial deal with Amazon is because they work incredibly hard at writing all day, every day to produce new content for their market. They are my heroes.

These guys are pros and they know it takes hard work to get there and hard work to stay there.

So please, if your book is not selling any copies at all, go through this checklist and honestly evaluate what you have done and how much effort you have put in. Please also share this with other people who may be asking the same question.

I’d love to know what you think, so please leave a comment below. What other tips can you give for people who aren’t selling any or many books?

 

 

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

Popular Highlights On The Black God's War

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This post, by Moses Siregar III, originally appeared on his blog and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. It seems like the Most Popular Notes feature on Amazon’s Kindle may be a very useful tool for authors; who among us wouldn’t want to know which passages our readers felt most strongly about?

So I bought a new Kindle Paperwhite, and it’s almost an amazing e-reader (Mostly, I love it, but there are some issues with the “white” part when using the built-in lights–namely, the background isn’t a uniform color). One nice new feature (okay, I lied. It’s actually an older feature even on my trusty kindle2, but I hadn’t realized that until today) is that if you click to “View Notes & Marks” on a book, you’ll sometimes get to see the top ten most popular highlights on the book.

 

Some books show these highlights and some books don’t. And you’ll probably see more highlights on your device than you’ll see on a book’s page at Amazon.

I’m one of the lucky ones, because my first novel does show the top ten highlights. Because I haven’t had any big news in awhile–semi-kidding, although if you want to follow my author news, my Facebook Author page is the best way, or on Twitter @MosesSiregar–I’m going to paste the top ten highlights (selected by the readers) from The Black God’s War here. I’ll list them in order with the most popular highlight at the bottom of the list.

1) “I know know how to fight him. His gods are a projection. They are just as false as this world. I know that. I will win.”

2) “You are a master in a tiny field. The ultimate truth still lies far beyond you. There is no end to evolution, to the unshackling of chains.”

3) [this is one a bit spoilerish] “his domain also includes the dark processes of life, including the balancing of what you might call sin. Our concept is karma. It suggests that whatever we do returns to us because in truth there is no separation between us all. So when we act upon another, we act upon ourselves. Evil acts come back to us, while good deeds bring good karma. As I understand your Lord Danato, it’s as if he is a god of karma.”

4) “The mind is the master of the physical world. The physical isn’t observed by the mind–it’s actually dependent on the mind.”

5) “Introspection, clarity, and creative imagination must come before action.”

6) “It’s the most recent worst day of my life,” she said. “Thank you for asking.”

7) “The descent to Hades is the same from every place.” -Anaxagoras [this is a quote, not my words]

8 ) “A man must act on his conscience. I would rather die than live by no greater principle than my own survival.”

9) “This is why our desires must be questioned before we undertake any great endeavor. If our values are flawed, our actions can only produce imperfections.”

10) “I believe it is not important how long you live, but that you give yourself to living. Live as only you can, with every part of you fully engaged.”

It was definitely fun for me to see what readers have highlighted in the book. Do you have any popular highlights on your favorite books (or on your own books) that you really like?

And if anyone still manages to read my blog even after all of my updates have been going to FB and Twitter rather than here, and if you can remember–without going back to the book–which characters said each of the above quotes, give it a shot in the comments [section beneath the original post] and if you get them all right I’ll have to figure out something really cool that I can give you. Maybe a signed copy of book two?

 

Random House, Penguin Agree to Merge

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This story originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 10/29/12. 

In a deal that had been months in the making, Pearson and Bertelsmann announced Monday morning that they have signed an agreement to form a joint venture that will combine the businesses of Random House and Penguin. The deal, which is expected to close in the second half of 2013, will make Penguin Group chairman John Makinson chairman of the newly named Penguin Random House company, while Random House chairman and CEO Markus Dohle will be CEO. 

Under the terms of the agreement, Bertelsmann will own 53% of the joint venture and Pearson will own 47%. The joint venture will exclude Bertelsmann’s trade publishing business in Germany, and Pearson will retain rights to use the Penguin brand in education markets worldwide. Bertelsmann will nominate five directors to the board of Penguin Random House, and Pearson will nominate four.

The announcement came after word leaked Sunday that News Corp. was considering making an offer for Penguin, but Makinson said the Pearson board is committed to the Bertelsmann deal. And Pearson and Bertelsmann executives made it sound like they were proceeding as they expect the merger to move forward.

“This combination with Random House – a company with an almost perfect match of Penguin’s culture, standards and commitment to publishing excellence – will greatly enhance its fortunes and its opportunities. Together, the two publishers will be able to share a large part of their costs, to invest more for their author and reader constituencies and to be more adventurous in trying new models in this exciting, fast-moving world of digital books and digital readers,” said Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino.

Thomas Rabe, chairman and CEO of Bertelsmann, said: “With this planned combination, Bertelsmann and Pearson create the best course for new growth for our world-renowned trade-book publishers, to enable them to publish even more effectively across traditional and emerging formats and distribution channels. It will build on our publishing tradition, offering an extraordinary diversity of publishing opportunities for authors, agents, booksellers, and readers, together with unequalled support and resources.” 

 

Read the rest of the story on Publishers Weekly.

The Business Rusch: Rights Reversion

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This post, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, originally appeared on her The Business Rusch blog.

Over the last couple of years, a number of writers have written to me to ask how to get the rights to their traditionally published novels reverted back to them.  These requests increased while I wrote the most recent short series, “Why Writers Disappear,”  and finally, one of the readers mentioned via e-mail that I should do a blog post on getting rights reverted.

It’s a good idea, so I’m taking it. 

When a writer signs a contract with a publisher to have a book published, that contract includes which rights the publisher is licensing and at what cost/percentage of that cost. All of this is based on the copyright, which can be sliced down to minute fractions, and each fraction licensed.

For example, a writer might license worldwide rights to publish the book as a hardcover novel in the English language. The other rights, from e-book to audio to mass market paperback, would not be included in that particular contract.

Some contracts are short, some are ten and twenty pages long. Each contract will delineate what the rights licensed are, what the publisher will pay the writer for the use of those rights, and when the contract expires. All contracts need an end date to be legal, and so you’d think that book contract would have a set time period. It’s pretty convenient: both parties know the contract expires on a specific date. The contract can be renegotiated around the time of expiration or renewed on a yearly basis, until one party decides to cancel the contract, or, or, or…

Before we go any further, I want to make something very, very, very clear. Often, writers in the comments section of this blog ask a question about contracts that assumes that all book contracts are the same. Some writers might understand that contracts differ, but those writers then believe that all bestsellers have the same contract, and all midlist writers have a different one.

Here’s the truth of it, folks. You—one writer—can have twelve book contracts with the same company, and each contract might have different terms from other contracts. In other words, you might have spent your entire publishing career with one publishing house. You might write the same type of book year after year, and you still might have twelve different contracts, with twelve different terms, including twelve different reversion clauses.

I know that’s hard to wrap your minds around, but it’s an important thought, because if you believe that all contracts are the same, you’ll end up signing something that’s bad for you. After all, Famous Writer (who publishes with the same publisher) signed that contract, right?

No, not right. Famous Writer is different from Famous Writer Two. One is a great negotiator who hires an IP attorney. The other is a terrible negotiator with an even worse agent. The great negotiator with the IP attorney might have a better contract. But he might not. Because the terrible negotiator might be too famous to piss off, and the publisher automatically offered terrible negotiator better terms than great negotiator.

You don’t know, and can’t know, and probably never will know.

So you must make decisions based on your own career.

  

Read the rest of the post on The Business Rusch.

NaNoWriMo Pep Talks From Successful Authors

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If you’re contemplating the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) with abject terror, help and motivation are available right on the NaNoWriMo site. Here are a few excerpts:

As the great Nelson Algren once said, “Any writer who knows what he’s doing isn’t doing very much.” Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what’s going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure. – Tom Robbins

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The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist.  – Neil Gaiman

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Sigh. You’re a lost soul. So there’s no help for it but to join the lowly company of the other aspect of The Fool. Because the fact is, that Fool is a Dreamer, and it is Dreamers who ultimately make life worthwhile for the unimaginative rest of us. Dreamers consider the wider universe. Dreamers build cathedrals, shape fine sculptures, and yes, generate literature. Dreamers are the artists who provide our rapacious species with some faint evidence of nobility. – Piers Anthony

———————

Can you keep your story going for a week without reading anything over? You’ll find you can. You’ll find that being able to rely on this ability will help you let one word follow the next without fussing as much as you do when you believe it’s the thinking and planning part of your mind that is writing the story. There is another part of the mind which has an ability for stories, for holding all the parts and presenting them bit by bit, but it’s not the same as the planning part of the mind. Nor is it the thing called ‘unconscious’—it is without a doubt quite conscious when we are engaged in the physical activity which allows it to be active. This something is what deep playing contains when we are children and fully engaged by rolling a toy car and all who are inside of it toward the table edge. The word imagination isn’t quite right for it either because it also leaves out the need for moving an object—a toy, a pen or pencil tip—across an area in the physical world. It’s a very old, human thing, using physical activity along with thing ‘thing’ that is neither all the way inside of us nor all the way outside of us. Stories happen in that place between the two. The Image world isn’t anywhere else. A computer can give you a neat looking page, higher word count and delete and copy and past abilities, but they are poor producers of the thing the hand brings about much more easily: Right here, right now, the pane of paper that the paper windows and walls require to give is the inside view, the vista. – Lynda Barry

——————— 

I know only too well what comes next. The excuses. The rationalization: “So what? So I switched stories. I’ve still got a work-in-progress. It’s just not my original work-in-progress. So I’m a little behind in my word count. I’m still writing, right?”

Sure, it seems innocent enough. But the problem with doing this is that of course the new story always seems better than that old busted up, out-of-control story you’ve been working on for so long. That new story has the aura of dewy freshness to it. It’s calling to you! It’s all, “Yoo-hoo…look at me! I don’t have any plot problems and my characters are way-intriguing and some of them wear leather jackets and oh, yeah, you know that weird transition thing you’ve got going on near chapter four that you can’t figure out? I don’t have that!” – Meg Cabot

———————-

In short, quit. Writing a novel is a tiny candle in a dark, swirling world. It brings light and warmth and hope to the lucky few who, against insufferable odds and despite a juggernaut of irritations, find themselves in the right place to hold it. Blow it out, so our eyes will not be drawn to its power. Extinguish it so we can get some sleep. I plan to quit writing novels myself, sometime in the next hundred years. – Lemony Snicket  

 

You can read all the pep talks, from very many more authors and NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty, here, on the NaNoWriMo site.

Update on Categories and Keywords: Why Authors Should Still Care

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A year ago (October 2011), I wrote a piece entitled Categories, Key words, and Tags, Oh My!: Why Should an Author Care?, which has become the most frequently viewed post on my blog. It has been reposted numerous times, and I still get comments on it weekly. There is a reason for this. The subject is complicated, confusing, and yet crucial to selling a book successfully online.

 

 

While most of the original post is still relevant, it seemed time to update it, with the special addition of a section on how categories play a role in KDP Select promotions. For those of you who never read the original, I hope this helps. For those of you who did, I hope I have clarified a few sections and added some useful information.

This post focuses on ebooks on Amazon (although the main points work for print books as well) because that is where I have the most experience and because Amazon is definitely (still) ahead of the other ebook stores in its sophisticated approaches to helping readers find books. As with much of the publishing process, there is a lot of conflicting information about how Amazon’s categories, keywords, and tags work, so some of what I say is more of an educated guess than documented fact, but I will link back to Amazon’s information pages whenever possible.

First some definitions:

Categories:

When a book is uploaded into KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), an author (or traditional publisher) has the opportunity to choose two categories for that book. It used to be that Amazon allowed you to choose five categories, which is why some books, like my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, have more Kindle Store categories listed at the bottom of their product page. (If you want to know what a book’s categories are­­––look under Look for Similar Items by Category) When you, as author, choose a category for your book, you are actually choosing a browsing path for customers. That browsing path consists of a hierarchy of categories and sub-categories and your book is available for readers to discover under each of the parts of that hierarchy. For example, in the case of my most recent book, Uneasy Spirits, one of the two browsing path/categories I chose was:   Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical 

If you browse for Uneasy Spirits in the Kindle store, you will find it under all four parts of the hierarchy. Note that each time a reader goes one step further down the hierarchical browsing path there are fewer books to browse. For example, as I write this, here are the numbers of books in each of these four areas:

Fiction [570,230]; Fiction––Mystery&Thriller [74,482]; Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery [15,240]; Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical [2,587]

The “categories” Amazon offers when you upload your book to KDP are based on BISAC categories, a book industry standard for subject headings. What authors find confusing is that Amazon converts the BISAC categories into the Amazon browsing-path categories and subcategories that show up in the Kindle store––and the two are not always identical.

To complicate issues further, the browsing categories for print books and ebooks are not identical, and Amazon creates additional browsing categories like “newly released” and “best sellers” and “editors’ pick”––some of which are separate from the browsing-path/categories and some of which are available as additional qualifiers to the browsing-paths. Are you lost yet?

Finally, to make matters even more difficult, this conversion process does not always work accurately (for a long time the historical mystery category had less than 100 books in it because of a computer glitch). However, the KDP Support system has improved in the past year in helping authors resolve these problems. If you click on the Contact Us link at the bottom of the KDP page, the menu leads to an option to email the support staff to change your categories, and if you use the Author Central Contact Us link, you can even ask for a telephone consultation.

Keywords:

When you publish your book with KDP, you can choose seven keywords in addition to the two categories. These are really key phrases since they can be more than one word. For example I used terms like “Victorian Mystery” and “cozy mystery.” These keywords are used by Amazon in its own search engine––along with words in your title and subtitle and product description. Because I used those keywords and also have Victorian and Mystery in my subtitle, when Maids of Misfortune was first published, it immediately showed up near the top of the list of book when a customer put in the key search words “Victorian Mystery.”

Tags:

These are another kind of keyword or key phrase, but many authors get confused and think that they also help a book get found using the search box at the top of the Amazon page or on their Kindle device, but they don’t work this way. Tags are listed on a book’s product page under the heading Tag this product and were designed by Amazon to help customers describe and find products using key words called “tags.” Because this is so confusing, I am going to address the question of tags in a separate post.

Why Should an Author Care?

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

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

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

The first strategy is to choose, at least for one of your two categories, a browsing path that ends up with a relatively small number of books at the end of the path.

For example, when I first published my second historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, I could have chosen as one of its two categories, the browsing path of Fiction—Historical Fiction. However, this would have placed this book in a final pool of over 24,000 books in the Kindle store. As an indie author without a big promotional campaign behind me, it would be easy for this new book to get lost in that pool. Few people are going to scroll down through hundreds if not thousands of books of historical fiction books to find mine.

Instead, I chose to put Uneasy Spirits into the Romance–Suspense category [8,000 books] and, more importantly, I chose to place both of my books, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits in the Fiction—Mystery&Thrillers—Mystery—Historical category/browsing path. There are only 2600 books in the historical mystery category, and with a category this size I have been able to keep my books continuously on the list of top 100 bestselling books. This means both books are always visible when someone browses, which means both books sell well day-after-day. To date, I have sold 35,000 copies of Maids of Misfortune and 10,000 copies of Uneasy Spirits.

Obviously you don’t want to put your book in a list just because it is small. It has to make sense to the reader.  My books are cozy mysteries, and if I chose the hardboiled mystery sub-category just because of its size, I would end up with either few sales or nasty reviews. However, you should take the time to learn what categories are available that might fit your book. For example, look at the categories successful books like yours are found in, and then think about how to use your 2 category choices wisely.

The second strategy is to use keywords in combination with categories to help when the category is too large to be effective under the first strategy.

Take, for example, that large category, Fiction––Historical Fiction. Since this is really a more accurate description of both of my books than Romantic Suspense, once Uneasy Spirits got enough sales to be more competitive (helped along by its placement in the Historical Mystery category) I changed its second category to Historical Fiction. However, on a day-to-day basis, neither Uneasy Spirits or Maids of Misfortune show up high enough in this large category to be visible. This is where your choice of keywords can help.

When I was coming up with keywords for Maids of Misfortune and then later for Uneasy Spirits, I could have used the term Gilded Age as one of my 7 choices. It is actually a very precise definition of the time (1877-1880) and place (U.S) where my series of books are set. However, if someone was in the Historical Fiction category and put in the term Gilded Age, only 28 books come up. While I am sure if I had used this as a keyword, that my books would have been near the top of this category and search list, how often would a customer bother to check a list so small? But if you put in the term Victorian (which is used for the entire 19th century in England, Europe, and the U. S.) you get 367 books. This is a list of books that is large enough for a customer to find it a useful place to browse, but small enough for my books to do well in. Therefore, I chose the term Victorian and made sure I put this keyword in my subtitle as well. Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits are at the top of that list of 367 books.

A third strategy for using categories includes considering what category you want your books to be in if you do a KDP Select free promotion (something that didn’t exist when I wrote my original piece.) While it is good to have your book listed in at least one relatively small category, where it is visible to the casual browser, if the category is too small, or has no sub-categories, it can limit your exposure when you make the book temporarily free.

Let’s take, for example, Of Moths and Butterflies, a book by a V. R. Christensen, a fellow member of the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative.

Of Moths and Butterflies is currently in the two categories, Fiction­­––Historical Fiction [24,000 books] and Fiction––Drama––British & Irish [2500 books]. The choice of the second category makes a good deal of sense since it is a much smaller category. As a result, the book is currently listed as #21 in the bestseller list for this category and is much more visible to browsers.

However, when Christensen does a KDP Select promotion, I would recommend that she try shifting the book temporarily from British & Irish Drama to Historical Romance. The reason for this is that the British & Irish Drama free list is filled with public domain books that are always free, and this means it isn’t a list where people would regularly go to find free books. Historical Romance, on the other hand, both because of its subject matter and robust free list, will be a place that people routinely look for free books to download. In addition, the book would show up on the Romance Free list as well (since a book shows up on all the stages of a browsing path), which is an even more robust free list.

This means Of Moths and Butterflies would be seen, and possibly chosen, by a much broader pool of potential customers. More downloads means a better ranking when the book comes off of the free promotion. Christensen could then keep Moths and Butterflies in this category if her sales are strong enough to keep her in the top 100 Historical Romance bestseller list, or she could shift it back to British & Irish Drama. I have followed this pattern with Uneasy Spirits, shifting it between Historical Romance, Romantic Suspense, and Historical Fiction, to good effect.

In Summary:

As an author, you need to choose categories and keywords carefully when you publish or promote. Social media and traditional marketing can only do so much to drive potential customers to find your book. You need to make sure that the person who is just browsing in the Amazon or Kindle store has a good chance of finding your book (and then your cover, description, reviews, and excerpt will hopefully do the rest). You need to take into consideration not only what best categories describe your books, but also what will maximize the chances that a reader who is browsing will find your books. You also want to make sure that readers who find your book are the ones who would be most likely to buy it and enjoy it. Careful uses of categories and keywords can also increase your chance of having a successful free promotion, which in turn will help boost your sales. Carelessness in using these strategies can condemn even the best work to the backwaters of the Kindle store––undiscovered, unbought, and unread––and that would be a shame.

 

 

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

Should Charity Be Profitable?

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 A news story this week asked “Is ABC Going to Far in Covering Robin Roberts Illness?” The journalist was speculating about whether the network’s “concern” had crossed the line into exploitation in an attempt to boost ratings.

It’s a very fine line and a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because it applies to authors, charity, and book sales. Many authors have donated the profit, or part of the profit, of a new book to charity, typically a charity or medical cause that corresponds with a theme in the story. And in doing so, they boost their sales and visibility.

On the surface, this seems noble, and we did it on the Crime Fiction Collective blog when the tornado tore apart Joplin Missouri. We all donated all of our profits during a certain time period to a Joplin family, who was very grateful for the help. I even think it was my idea.

But the more I ponder this trend, the more I believe that for myself, charity needs to be separate from commerce. Any donation I make should be done out of compassion and goodwill alone—without profiting from it directly through increased sales.

But why not accomplish both things at once, when it seems so expedient? I’m not sure I can articulate why I’ve come to feel this way. Except that rooting for your book to sell is a completely different emotion and experience than sending money to help others in need—perhaps even a contradictory one.

I understand why authors do this. Their hearts are in the right place. And the readers who buy those books are even more commendable. They’re figure they’re going to spend money on books anyway, so why not make a donation to charity at the same time?

Many businesses also run these campaigns. A pizza parlor down the street often donates part of its one-day profits to a charity, school, or foundation. Everybody wins.

And I understand what ABC is trying to accomplish: educate viewers, raise money for medical research, and boost its ratings. But has it gone too far? Probably. Charities are by definition nonprofit, and raising money for, or donating to, a cause without directly profiting from the effort seems more noble. Yet goodwill results naturally from generosity, so indirect benefits are inevitable, but they’re not the same as direct profit.

I’m not saying it’s wrong for authors to connect their books to a charity. It’s just not something I’m comfortable doing myself. But I’m probably in the minority here. What do you think?

 

This is a reprint from L.J. Sellers’ blog.

The 22 Rules of Writing

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 Today I have an infographic for you based on tips and advice on storytelling shared on Twitter by Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats.

Emma set out "22 Rules of Storytelling" based on what she learned working for the animation studio (responsible for such blockbusters as the Toy Story series and Finding Nemo). In my opinion there are some real gems for fiction writers in all formats and genres here.

The infographic was created by Jessica Bogart of PBJ Publishing, and is shared with her permission.

 

 

 

Note that I had to reduce the size of the graphic to work on my blogging platform. If you can’t read it clearly, you can access the full size (5 MB!) version at this website.

If you would like a printed, poster-size version of the graphic, you can buy it from Jessica’s Etsy store (not an affiliate link).

I particularly like Rule 12: "Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself." As a writing tutor myself, I can testify that one of the most common mistakes in new writers’ work is predictability.

I also love Rule 19: "Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating." If you stick to this one rule alone, it will put you ahead of 90% of fiction writers immediately!

I hope you enjoy reading "The 22 Rules of Storytelling". If you have any comments about it or suggestions for additional rules, please do post them below.

 

This is a reprint from Nick’s Writing Blog.

 

Note-Taking And Writing Apps For iPhone and iPad

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Sometimes it’s hard to find ideas for a new blog post, short story or a poem. That’s why it’s so important to catch them at the moment they come to mind.

Mobile devices are a great way to capture ideas, no doubt about it. You’ve got a mobile phone always with you. It’s much quicker to start writing ideas on a tablet than a computer.

Most smartphone or tablet users will probably agree that those devices are not meant to write and publish a complete piece of work. You can write draft posts, scratch new ideas, or list topics to be included in a presentation. You can and should develop them on a computer if you want to work with text effectively.

That’s why syncing is one of the most important features of any note-taking or writing application. It gives the opportunity to access your work from any device and to make your writing as productive as possible. 

 Notes

Available for: iPhone, iPad | Syncing: Gmail | Price: free | Default app

The default iOS note-taking application. Users usually neglect it as it’s very basic. Many still don’t know that the app can sync files via Gmail account. All updated notes are stored in a Gmail account, under a Notes tab. More details in this post.

If you write notes from time to time and need a simplest possible way to do it, you won’t need probably anything more advanced than Notes.

EvernoteEvernote

Available for: iPhone, iPad | Syncing: Evernote | Price: free | App Store link

The most powerful and advanced note-taking, idea-grabbing solution for iOS. You can add not only text, but also audio and photo notes. Access them via web browser and Mac or PC applications.

To start using the app you have to sign up to Evernote. A free account allows for 60MB of data transfer per month. Offline note-taking is not enabled, but you can send notes to your account via e-mail, to a special address created for your Evernote account.

With Evernote, you are either a powerful user or don’t use it at all. Premium account costs $5 a month or $45 a year. A comparison of features is available on this page.

SimplenoteSimplenote

 

Available for: iPhone, iPad | Syncing: Simplenote | Price: free | App Store link

Evernote made easy. The app is very simple to use, yet has all the features you would need. You can access and edit your notes from a web browser as well as many third-party apps and add-ons, listed here. You can publish a note and it will be available at a unique simp.ly url address. You can also share the note with others by tagging it with their e-mail addresses.

A free account is ad-supported. The ads are not intrusive, but if you want to remove them, you have to spend $19.99 a year or $1.99 a month for an upgrade to Premium account – which also enables Dropbox sync and writing notes by e-mail.

Awesome Note (+Todo)Awesome Note (+Todo)

 

Available for: iPhone, iPad | Syncing: Google Docs, Evernote | Price: iPhone – free or $3.99, iPad – $4.99 | App Store links: iPhone, iPad

Note taking application and to-do manager in one. Out of all applications featured in this post this one has the best design and richest personalization options. You can change not only a font but also a theme to match the type of note.

I’ve used the app for some time as I’m very keen to be connected with Google Docs ecosystem – and Awesome Note can sync with it. It’s not perfect, though, as you can only do it manually. It’s good to remember to sync before you open and after you finish your note to make sure you don’t lose anything.

To use Awesome Note on both iPad and iPhone you have to buy two separate versions.

MoleskineMoleskine

 

Available for: iPhone, iPad | Syncing: no | Price: free | App Store link

The official application of the legendary Moleskine notebooks. It’ll surprise you with a modern UI concept and design. You can draw sketches as well as add pictures and labels from a large selection of Moleskine icons. You can also geotag your notes.

There is no sync functionality, so the only way to use notes on another device is to send them as an e-mail to yourself.

ElementsElements

Available for: iPhone, iPad | Syncing: Dropbox | Price: $4.99 | App Store link

This is how I think a writing application for mobile devices should look like. Once you open a note you can focus on writing. The design invites to write longer forms, but you can always use scratchpad to write a quick idea.

You can check word, line and character counts for every note, send a note by mail or print it. The notes are synced back to your Dropbox account as .txt files.

iA Writer for iPadiA Writer

Available for: iPad | Syncing: Dropbox | Price: $0.99 | App Store link

The application makes writing on the iPad serious. It helps you focus on writing by providing features no other app has. You can use FocusMode to concentrate on one sentence at a time.

The keyboard is tailored for writing needs – word and arrow keys as well as most used punctuation marks are available without switching. Word count and reading time is shown at the top bar. You can manually sync notes with a Dropbox account.

The overall design, typography and care for details make this app a great choice for professional writers.

Pages for iPadPages

 

Available for: iPhone, iPad | Syncing: iTunes File Sharing | Price: $9.99 | App Store link

The ultimate text processor for iPad. It includes Apple-designed document templates, several formatting options and advanced layout tools. You can style text, set intents and margins and insert tabs with ease.

You can import and work with Pages ’09, Word and text files. Share your work as Pages ’09, Word and pdf.

Pages includes most of the features of the desktop word processor. The only question is, whether you really need them on an iPad or iPhone.

* * * 

If you are looking for ways to write and edit Google Docs on your iOS device(s), there are applications like Go Docs ($4.99) or Documents ($0.99). Use them with care as you can lose formatting of your original document when you open it in the app and start editing. This happened to me a couple of times. When I really need to change something in one of Google document, I’m using either Safari browser or Safari-powered G-Whizz.

My favourite app is Simplenote. You can’t write for a long time on an iPhone. iPad is not for writing a content but for curating a content. What I really needed was a simple, fast, reliable app which syncs notes across all devices seamlessly. Simplenote matches those needs perfectly. 

If you liked this article, please share it with your friends. Get free updates by e-mail or RSS, powered by FeedBurner. Let’s meet on Twitter and Facebook. Check also my geek fiction stories: Password Incorrect and Failure Confirmed. 

 

This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect. 

6 Predictable Romance Novel Heroes

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This post, by Susan Whelan, originally appeared on her Reading Upside Down site.

The Doctor

Still grieving for the loss of his wife/child, this gifted medical practitioner puts all of his emotional energy into healing his patients. Somehow he manages to maintain a buff physique despite his 16 hour working days.

The Cowboy 

Practical, tough and sexy as all-get-out, this hardworking rancher doesn’t have time for anything except for his property and his horses.

Funnily enough for a man who only seems to leave his property to visit the rodeo, feed store or local honky tonk, he can be amazingly suave when the right woman comes along (see Hugh Jackman in Baz Luhrman’s Australia for the Aussie equivalent, The Drover).

The Billionaire Tycoon

From dirt poor beginnings, probably with one alcoholic parent and one absent parent either through death or desertion, this man has abandoned all emotion in his single-minded quest to accrue wealth and power.

He is most inclined to fall in love with a) his plain-jane secretary who’s really stunningly beautiful and incredibly nice and has secretly loved him for years, b) a sassy woman who cares nothing for wealth or monetary success and is not impressed by him in any way or c) a random woman that he asks to marry him to fulfil some business ultimatum from a managing director or to avoid some money-hungry socialite trying to trick him into marriage.

 

Read the rest of the post, which covers three more stereotypical romance  on Reading Upside Down.

Quick Tips for Contests & Giveaways

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When authors think about book marketing, they often begin with a groan. It seems like an endless trudge from one social media site to another, trying to spark interest in readers who have hundreds of offers, ads, and other promotions coming at them every day.

That’s not a pretty picture.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and authors who find ways to stand out from the crowd get a lot more eyeballs on their books than those who sink without a trace.

One of the easiest ways to generate some interest and enthusiasm is by making your promotion more fun, and more rewarding for people who participate.

That’s where contests, giveaways, and freebies can boost your marketing to a whole new level. Let’s take a look at some ways you can use these reader-engagement and promotion tools to gain more attention for your books.

Contests Engage Readers

Like most of these promotions, contests are mostly used around the time authors are launching a new book and trying to get some attention while it’s new.

But you don’t have to be limited to just running contests during your launch. You can also tie them to holidays, special events, and any other time when there’s some link to the subject matter of your book, or just for fun.

And who doesn’t want to win something? What you give away is up to you, but you might be surprised how many people will enter your contest even if the prize is something modest like a $25 Starbucks gift card.

Contests bring traffic to your site, put names on your email list, and help spread your brand.

Tips for using contests: 

  • Choose a prize or prizes for your contest carefully. Most authors want to give away a copy of their book, but you have to ask yourself whether that’s going to motivate people to enter. Consider giving an e-copy of your book to everyone who enters your contest and you might get a head start on your word of mouth marketing by putting your book into the hands of a lot of people over a short period of time.
     
  • Keep the entry time limited, since our attention spans seem to be shrinking all the time. A contest that goes on for a month will likely lose steam.
     
  • The bigger the prize, the more interest and attention your contest will generate. If your budget is very limited, get some other authors together and run the contest jointly, with everyone contributing to the prize and sharing in the excitement on their own blogs. You can amass a lot of books in the same genre from different authors, for instance, for a more impressive prize, or chip in and give away a more expensive gift than you could manage on your own.
     
  • Clearly state the rules and deadlines for the contest when you ask for entries. Make sure your rules and deadlines are simple to understand.
     
  • Entries can take any form you like. For instance, if you want more comments on your blog, make commenting the way people enter. If you want links back to your blog, make the entry a blog post on the entrant’s own site that links to yours.
     
  • Be careful what you ask for. Don’t make posting a review a condition for entering your contest, as e-retailers have to be careful about authors trying to “game” their ranking system. You don’t want to run a contest and end up getting banned or demoted.
     
  • When the contest is over, get those prizes out right away. Follow up to deliver the goods, and make sure you post an article telling everyone who the lucky winner was.

Freebies and Giveaways

Besides being declared the “winner,” the next best thing is to get something for nothing. Giving stuff away is one of the most common marketing techniques, and it’s easy to see why.

If I offer to give you something of value in exchange for a few minutes of your time, or your email address, or for taking a survey, you’ll balance what the cost is against your own perceived value of the “freebie.”

Most authors want to use their book as what they’re giving away but, again, think about whether your new, and therefore mostly unknown book, is really the best thing to motivate people to take part in your promotion.

More on Contests and Giveaways

There’s a whole science to running contests that focuses on social media sites. If you have a good-sized following on Facebook or Twitter, a contest can be a great way to engage with your readers, spread the word about your books, and make a lot of new fans.

For instance, you might run an entire contest on Twitter and gain a lot of new Twitter followers at the same time.

If you decide to use Twitter for your contest, you’ll want to create a unique “hashtag” so people can follow your contest. This is a way to tag tweets so they can be filtered out of the stream of all tweets, and it will allow people following the contest to stay up to date with developments.

On Facebook, the most common request is to ask readers to “like” your fan page in order to enter. That’s a very low barrier and, depending on what the prizes are in your contest, you may want to raise the bar and ask for a comment, a suggestion for topics for your next book, or for results they’ve achieved using your ideas or your program.

These forms of feedback can be very helpful to your other promotions down the road, since you are soliciting testimonials at the same time that you’re running your contest.

The best guides for authors who want to incorporate contests and giveaways into their book promotion is to see what other authors are doing, and to approach it as if you were going to enter the contest yourself. Is it worthwhile? Will the prize motivate you? Is it fun?

Be creative, and use these proven promotional tools in your book launch. Your readers will thank you.

What results have you seen from contests or giveaways? Were you happy with the result? Got any tips for us?

Originally published by CreateSpace in a slightly different form as Promote Your Book with Contests & Giveaways.

 

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

Mad Dash – How To Use The Dash In Writing

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This article, by Ben Yagoda, originally appeared as part of The New York Times Draft series on the craft of writing.

Let’s consider the most versatile piece of punctuation — the dash. That’s right — I’m talking about the horizontal line formed by typing two hyphens in a row. It’s the mark that — unlike commas, periods, semicolons and all the others — doesn’t seem to be subject to any rules. 

You can get a sense of the dash’s versatility from the above paragraph, every sentence of which employs at least one of them. As for rules, well, there are some guidelines, but not too many.

First, make the thing the right way. There are a few ways to do it, but generally, on a keyboard, you can do as follows: previous word/no space/two hyphens/no space/following word. Word-processing programs turn the two hyphens into an unbroken line that’s roughly the width of a capital “M” — hence the official name of this punctuation mark, the em-dash. (Some publications, including this newspaper, add spaces around dashes.)

Do not call a hyphen (-) a dash — as, for some reason, computer-support personnel feel compelled to do when they recite into the telephone the characters you are supposed to enter.

Dashes are used for two main purposes. The first is what I call the Pause Dash. It more or less says to the reader, “Right here, I want you to take a breath. What you will read next relates to what you have just read in an interesting way, and I would like to emphasize it.” When using dashes this way, you are allowed only one per sentence.

The second main category is the Parenthetical Dash, in which dashes are deployed in pairs and set off nonessential elements of the sentence. When using dashes this way, limit yourself to one pair per sentence. (More than that produces confusion about exactly what is meant to be set off by the dashes, as in this sentence from a well-known piece of social criticism: “While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality—that everyone should be treated the same—an ethic of care rests on the premise of nonviolence—that no one should be hurt.”) In addition, make sure dashes are placed in such a way that, if the material within them is removed, the sentence still makes sense.

A third purpose of dashes is to indicate disjointedness. This function shows up in dialogue (“I saw Bill yesterday — wait, is that a helicopter up there? — never mind”), in prose with a stream-of-consciousness quality, and in poetry, and is subject to no rules at all.

 

Read the rest of the article on The New York Times blogs site.

To Write Horror, You Must Be Horrified

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This post, by Matt Moore, originally appeared on Matt Moore Writes.

If you write horror, you know that sometimes it can be fun. The set-up, misdirection, the monsters and mayhem, blood and gore. There is fun in horror writing and readers often share in that fun.

But the question to ask is: Do you want readers to have fun?

 

Think about the over-the-top slapstick gore of Evil Dead II, the self-referential nature of theScream series or the unintentional hilarity of the Friday the 13th films. (And I am going to use films because they are more well-known.) Is that what you’re trying to write? Maybe you just want to tell a story about blood and guts to make the reader feel queasy.

Or are you trying to horrify the reader? Think The Exorcist or American Psycho. Stories that make us squirm. True horror stories are those that leave a lasting impression of something being just plain wrong.

So how do you write horror?

Horror is a Moral Genre

At its heart, a good horror story challenges our morality. (And don’t worry, I’m not going to ride a morality high horse here. Neither does Rev. Jonathan Weyer in his blog post, which I highly recommend.) It’s not the blood and guts that horrify us, it’s that our sense of right and wrong is thrown off balance.

 

What makes Psycho unsettling is not (just) the spooky house, insane mother and mad-slasher elements. It’s matricide, suggestions of incest and the mother being so hung up on her son getting laid she’ll kill to prevent it.

In other words: sex. Considering when Psycho was released, it was shocking material.

But the motivation of the killer in Psycho can be explained. What drives:

  • Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (let’s assume the subsequent books/movies never happened)
     
  • The Joker in The Dark Knight


  • The demon in The Exorcist


  • The xenomorphs in Alien and Aliens

 

 

Read the rest of the post on Matt Moore Writes.