Quick Links: Write a Sequel That Doesn’t Disappoint: Part I

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Total confession time. I have been know to binge read a favorite author until I just can’t read any more and have to switch genres.  I don’t think that is what Kaitlin Hillerich means when she talks about disappointing sequels. It is especially true with eBooks, that volume can get you noticed. But Kaitlin’s issue is more about planning and writing a sequel if it makes sense for the story, not because dollar signs are flashing.  Read the post at Inks & Quills.

~ * ~

Write a Sequel That Doesn’t Disappoint: Part I

Kaitlin Hillerich

I have a confession to make, friends: I’m getting worn out on series.

I’m not sure when or how it happened, but in the last couple of years or so I’ve been seeking out more and more stand-alone novels and even writing my own. Which is weird, considering I used to snub my nose at stand-alones, and all of the stories I wrote (and planned to write) were plotted out as trilogies.

So what changed? Well, my theory is that I’ve come down with something I’ve dubbed “Sequel Disappointment Syndrome.” One day it struck me that I’ve read very few series that are actually well-executed and deserving of their 3-7+ volumes. To be honest, the majority of series I’ve read have a fantastic first book, but the sequels fall short in comparison and disappoint.

I can’t tell you how many series I’ve come across where I think to myself, “This really would have worked better as a stand-alone.”

And honestly, I would rather read a fantastic stand-alone than a trilogy where book 1 is amazing but books 2 and 3? Um…not so much.

These days, it seems like every book is a trilogy, if not part of a longer series. I can’t help but look back at the wealth of classics like Pride and Prejudice, Dracula, and Wuthering Heights just to name a few, and wonder if their authors were onto something by making them stand-alones. When did we start feeling the need to make everything a trilogy? If these books had been written today, would they have been series instead? And would their sequels have been as good as the originals? One has to wonder.

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Links: Book Pirates—ARRGH! Have Pirates Stolen your Book or Blog?

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Perhaps a reader has messaged you to let you know a book they read is a lot like yours or perhaps you found your title on a torrent list, thank goodness Anne R. Allen is here with wise words on how to manage.

~ * ~

Book Pirates—ARRGH! Have Pirates Stolen your Book or Blog?

By Anne R. Allen

Piracy has become big business in the age of e-publishing. If your intellectual property is available on the Web—in ebooks, blog posts or other web content—chances are pretty good you’re going to be pirated at some point. If you have a Google Alert on your name and book titles (and you should) you’ll get notices of this stuff pretty much every week.

You can sign up for Google Alerts here.

Mostly I get alerts on sites that use snippets of our blog posts to lure customers to buy fake medications, dodgy hair products, or knock-off sunglasses.

Then there are the torrent sites that offer my books for free.

Torrent Sites

“Torrent” sites are websites that use a protocol called “BitTorrent” for free file sharing. They’ve been around since the 90s. They were invented for sharing (often stealing) music files. But they’ve branched into ebooks now.

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Links: How to Write a Binge-Worthy Book Series

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Have you decided that your novel should be a trilogy? Or even a series? Jenny Bravo from Blots & Plots to the rescue! She gives out tips to help write a great series, even if you are a pantser.

~ * ~

How to Write a Binge-Worthy Book Series

by Jenny Bravo

arrow-vector-series_z1fIUetO_LIt’s stressful enough to plan one book, let alone a whole trilogy. As a pantser, the idea of sitting down and mapping out an entire world for several books makes me want to give up right then and there.

And yet, here I am, writing a trilogy. So, what’s the deal? First of all, you should know that I didn’t plan a single second of this. I wrote my novel, These Are the Moments, with the intent to wrap it up in a nice bow and be done with it.

But what I didn’t expect was how much story was leftover for my secondary characters. Two powerhouse women characters with major flaws and big, unfinished stories – Reese and Vivian – were ready to step up to the stage. So, I’m letting them.

How can you write a binge-worthy book series? Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

Know The Heck Out of Your Characters

The first thing that popped into my brain when I thought about writing a trilogy was my cast of characters. Here are a few questions to ask yourself before we dive a little deeper:

  • Have my characters completed their arc?
  • Where is there room to grow for these characters?
  • Will the story continue with my current main character or will it shift POV’s?
  • How can I build on what I’ve already created for these characters?
  • How will the relationships shift and change?

For me, I decided that my series lent itself best to the idea of a new main character with every book, that way I won’t get bored, and hopefully, the reader won’t either. How can you make decisions about how to continue with your current characters?

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Links: Writing for Kindle Worlds – the Good and the Ugly

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

We all fantasize about being in the stories we love, and with Kindle Worlds, you can legally explore that fantasy and share with others. Kindle World writer Toby Neal knows, and she shares with us the good and the bad about writing fan fiction.  Head on over to How-To For Authors to learn more.

~ * ~

Writing for Kindle Worlds – the Good and the Ugly

Toby Neal

connected-world_Mksak_quMay 14, 2016

Toby Neal has her own Kindle World with 35 (and counting) books starring her characters, and has written two for others’ Worlds.

Whatever you feel about Amazon, they are cutting-edge as a company, and one of the most innovative programs they’ve come up with in publishing is Kindle Worlds. According to Nick Loeffler with Amazon, “Kindle Worlds is the first commercial publishing platform to enable any writer to publish fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters while earning royalties for doing so, and sell them in the Kindle Store. Until the launch of Kindle Worlds, selling stories based on copyright-protected material had been difficult.”

Not to mention, illegal!

Kindle Worlds has changed all that, by contracting with authors and other writers to legalize use of characters in a “World,” and providing parameters within which other writers can play. All benefit from this—writers get to entertain through known settings with their own stories, and readers get more of the characters they love.

Developed in 2013, Kindle Worlds includes graphic novels, TV shows, and of course, bestselling book lines. Kindle Worlds is licensed fan fiction, in a nutshell, and it captures the urge of writers since the dawn of time to write about characters they’ve fallen in love with as readers, and for readers to be able to enjoy storylines and characters they’ve become attached to long after original creators have stopped writing a popular series.

The Kindle Worlds site provides a quality assurance process that protects authors, and an easy review process that helps readers find the best of the bunch. I was nervous when my Lei Crime Kindle World launched in April 2015, wondering if readers would be willing to try new works by others using my characters—but I needn’t have worried. The Lei Crime Kindle World novellas, varying in genre from mystery to magical realism, have become some of the top-rated works in Kindle Worlds. It’s been a blast to read the expansion of colorful minor characters (as well as my main ones) into stories that I would never have imagined or had time to write.

What’s GOOD about writing for a KindleWorld?

  1. KindleWorlds is an opportunity to show your stuff and hook an established reader base. This is an excellent reason to try writing a story or novella in Kindle Worlds—you have a chance to attract an established reader base to take a look at your back list! The back matter of your KindleWorld book can be linked to your other books, email list, and more, and if readers like it, they’ll follow you. Mystery/romance author ML (Mary) Doyle says, “Readers who liked my Kindle World novella went on to buy my entire mystery line, and even try my romances.”

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Links: The Delicate Art of Character Folding

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

I will confess to being a big Game Of Thrones fan. One of my best friends just can’t get into the story. Too many characters, plots, and subplots to follow. Different strokes for different folks! But a good writer should look honestly at their first draft and see how many characters, backstories, and subplots they are making their readers deal with.  See if one or two can be combined or done away with, as Rebecca Makkai at Aerogramme Writer’s Studio explains.

~ * ~

The Delicate Art of Character Folding

Rebecca Makkai

People crowd7 June 2016

You probably knew, when you started writing, that you’d signed on for murder. I was warned well in advance: One of my favorite childhood books was Lois Lowry’s The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline, in which the title character finds the notebook of the man her mother is dating. “Eliminate the kids,” one note says. She and her brother swing into crime-fighting mode, only to discover in the end that this man, a writer, was talking about editing characters out of his work-in-progress.

Later, as I studied writing, I’d hear authors lament the characters they’d had to erase from draft two, the ones who “felt like real people” to them. Or they’d talk about the ones they kept around because, despite the fact that they served no real purpose in the narrative, they’d become old friends.

In fact, our first drafts are often overpopulated. There’s a reason: Your character needs a boss, so you invent a boss. He’s a typical boss. He wears a suit and does boss-like things. “Get me those numbers, Stan!” he says. You need someone to overhear the nighttime argument, so you invent the nosy neighbor. She’s always trimming her azaleas, of course. Naturally, she’s a widow in her sixties. Your character can’t get over someone, so you invent the ex. A cruel, beautiful ex who appears only in flashback, saying belittling things about your guy’s manhood. By halfway through a novel, you’ve got enough fictional characters to fill a cruise ship.

And how could you possibly cut any of them? If you lose the boss, you lose the whole storyline at work. You lose the neighbor, and all the pressure goes out of the fight scene. So you keep them all—which is often the wrong answer. Or you bite the bullet and have a stiff drink and sit down to cut those people, cut those scenes. Which is quite possibly the wrong answer too, and almost definitely unnecessary.

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Links: Ten Clever Ways To Keep Your Reader Enthralled

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

We all want readers to love our story, to not be able to put them down until the last page is read, and then having our readers want more.  Sue Coletta over at Writer’s Village shares with us ways we can accomplish this goal. What is your favorite writing tip to keep your readers hooked?

~ * ~

Ten Clever Ways To Keep Your Reader Enthralled

by Sue Coletta
June 10, 2016

Boy readingWe all know how to inject pace into our stories, don’t we? Just drop in a lot of exciting moments and space them with ‘scene hangers’. ‘Little did I know that my life was about to change forever’, and the like.

But hangers are clichés. Sure, they’re useful but not right for every story.

So what else can we do to keep the reader enthralled? Turning our every page? And wholly immersed in our story?

Top crime suspense writer Sue Coletta reveals ten tricks of the trade. We can adapt them to any genre!

1. Language itself is the subtlest means of pacing.

Throw away those passive expressions. ‘His head was hit by something sharp and cold.’ Yawn...

Think concrete words.

Concrete words are nouns that we experience through our senses. Example: smoke, mist, iceberg. Use active voice plus sensory information that’s artfully embedded. If you write long, involved paragraphs, try breaking them up into shorter ones.

‘Hail pounded his head. Icy water down his spine. He drew his collar round his throat and shivered.’

Drop in lots of white space.

Fragments, staccato sentences, and short paragraphs quicken the pace. They also give the page visual texture. At a glance, it looks interesting.

Crisp, punchy verbs, especially those with onomatopoeia, add a lot of tension to a scene. Onomatopoeia? It’s the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named. Example: sizzle, crash, scamper, lunge. ‘The steak sizzled on the grill.’

Examples of staccato sentences are: ‘She froze.’ ‘He paused.’

At a moment of tension, why say more?

A sentence fragment might be: ‘Deliberate.’ ‘Intentional.’ ‘Dangerous.’ For example: ‘The pit bull growled at me. Dangerous.’

The reader can easily digest one or two word sentences so they speed up our pacing.

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Link: Deepen The Protagonist to Readers By Challenging His or Her Moral Beliefs

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Want readers to invest in your main character? Make them interesting. How? Give them depth and reasons, show why they do the things they do. Nothing is more boring than a perfect character who always knows the right thing to do and does it. Challenge their morality. Push them to the edge and see what happens. That is what Angela Ackerman over at Writiers Helping Writers helps us to learn this week.

~ * ~

Deepen The Protagonist to Readers By Challenging His or Her Moral Beliefs

May 28, 2016

by Angela Ackerman

This is what I found when I searched for "perfect" and the title, I kid you not is "The Perfect male body". Someone totally needs more depth.
This is what I found when I searched for “perfect” and the title, I kid you not is “The Perfect male body”. Someone totally needs more depth.

When we sit down to brainstorm a character, we think about possible qualities, flaws, quirks, habits, likes and dislikes that they might have. Then to dig deeper, we assemble their backstory, plotting out who influenced them, what experiences shaped them (both good and bad) and which emotional wounds pulse beneath the surface. All of these things help us gain a clearer sense of who our characters are, what motivates them, and ultimately, how they will behave in the story.

But how often do we think about our protagonist’s morality? It’s easy to just make the assumption that he or she is “good” and leave it at that.

And, for the most part, the protagonist is good–that’s why he or she is the star of the show. The protagonist’s moral code dictates which positive traits are the most prominent (attributes like loyalty, kindness, tolerance, being honorable or honest, to name a few) and how these will in turn influence every action and decision.

In real life, most people want to believe they know right from wrong, and that when push comes to shove, they’ll make the correct (moral) choice. People are generally good, and unless you’re a sociopath, no one wants to go through life hurting people. Sometimes it can’t be avoided, but most try to add, not take away, from their interactions and relationships.

In real life, most people want to believe they know right from wrong, and that when push comes to shove, they’ll make the correct (moral) choice. People are generally good, and unless you’re a sociopath, no one wants to go through life hurting people. Sometimes it can’t be avoided, but most try to add, not take away, from their interactions and relationships.

To feel fully fleshed, our characters should mimic real life, meaning they too have strong beliefs, and like us, think their moral code is unshakable. But while it might seem it, morality is not black and white. It exists in the mists of grey.

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Links: How to Read Critically and Become a Better Author!

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Reading is my favorite homework assignment ever! But I don’t think the kind of reading I like to do is what Kristen over at She’s Novel is talking about. Instead of devouring books, Kristen recommends slowing down and really examining how your favorite writers write.  It really is a great post, so go check it out.

~ * ~

How to Read Critically and Become a Better Author!

Grow your writing skills by analyzing what you read

Smart guyMay 27, 2016

Hellooo there, friend!

If you’ve been hanging around the writersphere for a while now, you’ve probably heard the phrase “read critically” tossed around a time or two. Or, ya know, twelve.

In fact, it’s one of the topics I’m most often asked about in emails and tweets and such, probably because I mention just how important reading (and reading critically) is whenever I get the chance. And I’m not the only one who thinks so…

Check out these quotes from famous authors:

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” – Fran Lebowitz

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”  – Joseph Brodsky

 

And these are just a few examples!

Reading truly is fundamental to who we are as individuals, as well as to society as a whole. Books are the backbone of culture and learning and entertainment. They challenge and excite us just as much as they keep us educated and informed. Without them, our lives would be vastly different.

And to state the obvious, there would be no books to read if it weren’t for the authors who write them!

Just as writers create books, books are integral to the creation of writers.

Think about it: would you be a writer today if you hadn’t first fallen in love with reading? Books can make an incredible impact on writers. And this impact? It thrives when you read critically, which is exactly what we’re going to talk about today. So let’s get started!

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Author Tools: I wrote this review of a Freewrite on a Freewrite

by

Author Tools – things to help you get your writing done

I don’t know that a first draft only mobile word processor is for everyone, but if you want to what one is like head on over to Boing Boing where Jason Weisberger reviews his.

~ * ~

I wrote this review of a Freewrite on a Freewrite

Jason Weisberger

Jun 3, 2016

Astrohaus-Freewrite_lg_05-1024x768I jumped on the Freewrite/Hemingwrite kickstarter ages ago. It took so long for the single purpose, first-draft-only word processor to show up, I’d occasionally forgotten it was coming. I’ve had it for a few weeks now, and last weekend I typed a review out, on the unit itself.

Thing is, you can’t edit on the unit. The review below is the raw output of my clattering away at the old-timey keyboard.

If there is elegence to be found in simplicity, the team at Astrohaus have done their damnedest with the Freewrite, their single-purpose, distraction-free word processor. Originally billed as the Hemingwrite, I bought into the kickstarter on this years ago, hoping it’d help me focus on some short stories I never get finished while working on my laptop, or bother to transcribe from my notebooks.

I waited a long time for this unit, so I’m a little less forgiving of the problems than I might be with another kickstarted piece of kit. I have absolutely no complaints about the fit and finish. The device is pretty lovely in its gaudiness. It is supposed to resemble a typewriter, I think of the 1920s-1930s generation of my Remington Rand Deluxe Porta 5. It sort of does, the selector switches are mounted in a way to resemble the reels for ribbon, but it more closely feels like a mid to late 1990s portable wordprocessor. It weighs slightly, but not much less. It works about the same, and part of its charm is that it throws back to a mechanical keyboard like they would have used back then.

The keyboard is pretty much heaven, if you come from the days of yore, as I do. It feels like I am jamming along on a Commodore Vic20, or a WYSE terminal. While the e-ink isn’t vac green, its about as slow as the old led based screens would have been. You get just enough text on the screen to let you read back 1-3 sentences. You can’t edit at all, aside from erasing with backspace, so watching as you type and not looking at your fingers on the keyboard is really critical. I find that if I miss a typo by more than 5 words, I try to leave it and not go back.

Read the full post on Boing Boing

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Author Tools: Is Patreon the Way Forward for Publishing?

by

Author Tools – things to help you get your writing done

Patrion is a crowdfunding source for artist. Fans, called patrons, pledge support allowing the artist to have money to live off of while they are creating.  at BookRiot wonders if this is a viable way forward for authors.

~ * ~

Is Patreon the Way Forward for Publishing?

This week, fantasy author N.K. Jemisin used Patreon to raise almost $4,000 in monthly pledges so that she could quit her day job and write full-time. I really enjoyed Jemisin’s debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and although I haven’t gotten around to reading more of her work, I was impressed enough with her writing to be happy that she’s able to devote more time to it.

NK Jemisin's Patreon Page Header

The Patreon model involves creators asking fans to pay a monthly dollar amount to the creator, usually in exchange for some sort of reward. Jemisin, for instance, will send a monthly picture of her cat to $1 patrons; $2 patrons will get the cat pics and access to patron-only blog posts; patrons at the highest levels, such as $50, will receive signed copies of her new books as they’re released. Creating these perks will take time, but the assumption is that they’ll take less time than a full-time day job.

Read the full post on BookRiot

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

In The News – What is the Internet’s Favorite Book?

by

In The News – Articles Of Interest For Authors

It probably isn’t what you are thinking. But I have to agree, I love this book too. Read on to find out how Priceonomics came up with their results.

~ * ~

What is the Internet’s Favorite Book?

By Dan Kopf

Which is the better book: War and Peace or installment one of The Hunger Games? 

If you ask a book reviewer or look at any of the “Best Book” lists compiled by  critics, you would say War and Peace. But what if you asked everyday readers on the Internet?

Over four million members of the website Goodreads have rated the first installment of The Hunger Games on a 1-5 scale, and it has received an average score of 4.36. It currently sits atop a Goodreads crowdsourced list of “Best Books Ever”. By comparison, the average score given by the 150,000 people who have rated War and Peace is 4.10, and it ranks 724th on the “Best Books Ever list”.

It’s no surprise that on a crowdsourced ratings site, a briskly paced young adult novel beat out a dense, 1,000 page philosophical epic about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. And it’s probably not exactly the same group of people rating the Hunger Games and War and Peace. They likely have different backgrounds and expectations in literature.

Still, Goodreads ratings provide a glimpse into the literature that people actually like the most, and how that might differ from the critics. We know what the literati think from the variety of literary prizes and lists of books you must read before you die. But what do the people say? We collected the ratings for tens of thousands of books on Goodreads to find out.

Read the full post on Priceonomics

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Link: Now a Word from the Copy Editor . . . Nan Reinhardt – Anachronism

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

An anachronism is anything in a time period where it doesn’t belong, and it can bring your reader’s experience to a jolting halt. Copyeditor Nan Reinhardt from Romance University, discusses anachronisms at length and why they are so bad for your story. I am pretty sure I never want to play against her in Trivial Pursuit. Read the article and you will see why. ; )

~ * ~

Now a Word from the Copy Editor . . . Nan Reinhardt

Copyeditor Nan Reinhardt gives us a new word of the day – and a reason to hope we never get to use it when writing our books!

TimeAnachronism—it’s a great word, isn’t it? I love words and this is one of my favorites because if you don’t already know it, you can’t even begin to guess the meaning. Am I right? And when someone uses it in a sentence, like “Kind of anachronistic, don’t you think?” you have to be right in the moment to get the meaning and even then, it might not be obvious. No, most of us don’t get this word from context and I confess, as a newbie copy editor, the first time I heard a project editor use the word, I had to look it up. I wasn’t going to be able to “watch for anachronisms” in the manuscript I was editing if I didn’t know what the devil an anachronism was.

So, Webster tells us an anachronism is “an error in chronology; a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other; a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place; especially one from a former age that is incongruous in the present; the state or condition of being chronologically out of place.”

Make sense? Try this, in a historical romance I once read, the setting was pre-Civil War Georgia and the heroine was having a ball to celebrate her engagement. A friend came to the plantation and admired the flowers—dozens and dozens of orchids—that the heroine had used to decorate the ballroom. The heroine said, “Aren’t they lovely? I had them flown in from Bermuda.” Okay . . . hmmmm. Interesting. First of all, who flew them in? In 1856, the only things flying were birds and hot air balloons, neither of which could have brought hundreds of orchids from Bermuda to Georgia. Anachronism! Maybe in 1956, she could’ve had orchids flown in to Georgia, although if she’d done some fact-checking she’d have discovered that orchids aren’t indigenous to Bermuda—they don’t grow well in the ground there, so even Bermudans have to import orchids if they want them or grow them in pots.

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Links: Why Authors Need To Know About Book Sales Cycles

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Among all the other things an author needs to know is that book sales follow a fairly predictable cycle. This is very important for your marketing plan and helpful for when to pick your book launch. Thank goodness C.S. Lakin on her Live Write Thrive site has some timeless advice for dealing with the books sales cycle.

~ * ~

Why Authors Need to Know about Book Sales Cycles

May your sales look like this...

May 26, 2016

For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re looking at an excerpt from The Cycles of Book Sales by Anthony Wessel, a book industry veteran and founder of DigitalBookToday.com:

I read indie authors’ blogs about the lack of sales in the past months. Most indie authors have only been through one or maybe two holiday seasons. A book is a product. Just like with most products there is a sales cycle on a year-to-year basis.

Readers are still buying books in the same cycle as they always have. Just on a different medium.

Trend Lines Are Pretty Much the Same

The book industry has sales trend lines that have been consistent for the past forty years. Sales are relatively flat on a week-to-week basis for forty-six weeks out of the year. Slight sales increases are seen on the minor sales holidays. This means approximately the same number of books is being read in any given week compared to the previous year. The marketing efforts of authors and publishers generally do not increase the total number of books that are purchased. The marketing effort is to get the consumer to purchase your product (book) instead of the competitor. A great example is the car industry.

Sales boom for six weeks (holiday season). During the last ten days of the holidays, retail bookstores would often have sales for a day that would equal what they would do in a week during the rest of the year.

The digital book sales for the 2011 holiday was different. People received a lot of Kindles/tablets under the tree. The only problem was that they had no books on them to read. The result was a Christmas sales season that happened in January, February, and March for ebooks. This was very reminiscent of the PC computer days of the ’80’s and ’90’s. Families would get PCs under the tree and then would have to go out after December 25 to purchase software.

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Link: Writing a Book and Finding a Literary Agent

by

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

While we are fans of self-publishing here at publetariat, we know that any way an author can find success is a good thing. So in that spirit I give you Vanessa Carnevale‘s post on finding a literary agent.

~ * ~

If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

In the News – Barnes & Noble Should Carry Indie Books

by

In The News – Articles Of Interest For Authors

I have to admit Barnes & Noble just frustrates me. I want them to succeed, I want there to be competition and a lot of choices with books and eBooks.  But if you told me that Barnes & Noble was deliberately trying to fail, I would believe you. First they make affiliate advertising a horrible painful experience, and their support of self-publishing books is non-existent.  on Digital Book World agrees and makes his case why Barnes & Noble should carry indie books.

~ * ~

Barnes & Noble Should Carry Indie Books

By:
Expert publishing blog opinions are solely those of the blogger and not necessarily endorsed by DBW.

Barnes & NobleAn open letter has been making the rounds the last couple days that pits the self-publishing community against one of the banners of big corporate publishing.

Here’s an excerpt from indie author Cambria Herbert’s “An open letter to Barnes and Noble” (Emphasis is hers):

This isn’t just an angry letter because I got another form rejection. I’ve had many. I’ve also had many successes and my career doesn’t hinge on store placement. This is about change, and about asking for a chance to be equal.

I’ve been in this business a while now, I don’t know everything, but I do know some things. I know you have the capability of helping to lift up the talented writers who do ALL their own marketing, publishing and branding.

It’s time, Barnes and Noble. It’s time you step into the new era of publishing. It’s time you acknowledge there are good books out there that don’t just come out of big six [sic] publishers.

It’s time you recognize us.

What this all comes down to is respect. The self-publishing community is a passionate one, believing its authors have just as much of a right to publish a book as do authors who have traditional publishers. Moreover, many of them believe their mode of publishing is the right one.

At the end of the day, they just want to be treated as authors, not self-published authors.

As evidenced by the need for Herbert’s letter, there is still a significant stigma surrounding self-publishing and indie authors. Hell, I’ve been accused of perpetuating it myself.

But I don’t think that stigma is reduced when proponents of self-publishing say authors need to be writing several books a year. As one commenter on our interview with Hugh Howey wrote, “That’s not writing; that’s typing.”

What’s more, there are two types of self-published authors: those who write a manuscript, get the book proofread and professionally edited, have a cover professionally designed, create a marketing plan, etc; and those who don’t.