Marketing – Your Way

There have been quite a lot of articles around lately about how free and very low priced books are creating a large band of readers who are not prepared to pay for regular priced ones, thereby swiping the food out of “legitimate” authors mouths. That’s fine. People who are never going to pay for a book don’t matter, and probably wouldn’t buy your book even if it suddenly became illegal to ever give one away for free anyway. You’re in charge of the pricing of your work, and if somebody wants to read it they will buy it. Regardless of what all those intrepid freebie hunters get up to. So don’t be shouting at hardworking people simply doing their best to get a new product to the eyes of people who would otherwise never have a clue who they are. Indie authors who started publishing eBooks with Amazon seven to ten years ago had a lot more room to move up there than new Indies today. Some of the strategies that they used to get noticed, and beat their way up the rankings back then might not be so easy to implement successfully now with the thousands of books being published every single day. Those early writers who managed to grab hold of a rung on the ladder and work their way to the top will probably stay there now, so they won’t have to think totally out of the box to come up with brand new ways for their latest books to be noticed in amongst that epic labyrinth of millions of others that is Amazon 2014.

New ways will be found though. The kind of person who has the will and the determination to write a book, then polish it to publishing standard, design and make a cover for it, publish it, and then market it, all the while scribbling away at the next book, is most definitely the kind of person who is capable of thinking outside of any old box. I think that the self-publishing landscape will probably have to shift and morph to accommodate the sheer volume of new books pouring in, and the work to get to the top will be harder. I also think that we should be wary of demonising one or another of the tactics scribblers use to get their books to new eyeballs. After all, if there really was a proven formula to sell books, everyone would be in Stephen King Land, and that is not a reasonable idea to have. There is no formula that will ensure your success as an author. It’s all down to lots of hard work, trial and error, more patience than you would expect, and a large dollop of good luck. Indies are their own bosses, and with that goes the privilege of making their own rules as far as their own careers are concerned. They can do as little as they want, or as much as they want to market their books. They can sell boxed sets, give their books away for free or charge 99 cents or $9.99 for them if they want to. Very little of what other Indie authors do should have any effect on you. What works for one person’s book promotion won’t necessarily work for yours and vice versa. Apart from never, ever – seriously never – ever – spamming anyone with desperate pleas to buy your book, keep all of your options open when the time comes to launch your labour of love into the arms of the reading population.

If you have the resources to pay for the professional finishing of your book after writing it, and are able to afford to pay for it to be advertised, you obviously are going to fare better out of the starting gates than the writer who can’t afford these things. For the Indie who is going it totally alone, the work will be harder, and the pace to the point where you finally find some regular readers will be much slower. Much bumpier too, what with the inevitable learning curves with missed typos, disastrous first attempt covers, and formatting faux pas. You’d have to be some kind of superior being if you get it totally right the first time around without any help at all. It’s not the end of the world to make mistakes, as long as you fix them just as fast as you can when you realise what you’ve done wrong. The wonderful thing is that every time you falter and scrape your knees – or your ego, you’ve learned something new about the industry by the time you’re back up again.

It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about the free, the low priced, or the Goodreads giveaway. There are many vocal supporters both for and against these things. The only opinion that should count in your Indie world is your own. You are your publisher, editor, creative department, and sales department – and you get to make all executive decisions. I’ve tried the freebies and the 99 cents to very good effect – but that’s just me. Your book – your decisions, so try them all for yourself, and see how things go, and don’t for a minute believe that your little promo is going to have an effect on the sales of anyone else’s books at all. Only their own marketing efforts will. One thing I’ve learned in this wonderful world of Indie is that you’re learning all the time, and that opinions seemingly set in stone often change.

The Write Life-19 Websites and Magazines That Want to Publish Your Personal Essays

Hey everyone,

I subscribe to a site called

TheWriteLife.com

And yes, it has information about exactly what you think it does. An email I received this morning is something I thought might interest some of our writers out there. Even if you say you are a writer of novels and not for magazines and websites, getting your name out and about is key to success. Name recognition not only by the public but also by those in the industry always helps. The more you have out there the more you can point to.

So click the link below and check it out and sign up for the emails yourself. They have a lot covering a lot of different areas of writing.

19 Websites and Magazines That Want to Publish Your Personal Essays

Much Respect

Ronovan

@RonovanWrites

Read a Book, Write a Review.

That’s my new slogan here at LWI.

What many people don’t realize is, reviews have an impact on Amazon and other sites in how a book might show up and of course the more reviews the better chance of a book being purchased.

I’ll have something more about how to write a good review at another point. But really, just write an honest and helpful review for a possible reader. Write what you would be looking for if you were wanting to know about the book, without giving away the story of course. I had to throw that in there because you know some people might give away all the details.

Expect to see “Read a Book, Write a Review” a lot.

Much Respect

Ronovan

Writer’s Block

I love it when those super productive plot bunnies come to visit. Those days when ideas for new plots, or new exciting twists for a work in process come streaming in hard and fast, and supply writing fodder for years to come. But then sometimes you have those moments when you hit a brick wall writing a story. You’re scribbling away, and then—. Something needs to happen, and you realise that you haven’t got a clue what that something should be. You think, and you think, and you stare at the screen. You squish your face with the effort and hurl expletives at the world in general. But still nothing comes. A great big pile of nada. It can be quite a frightening moment, and if you carry on pushing yourself for days or weeks to think of what comes next to the exclusion of anything else, you will end up scaring yourself into the back of a cupboard somewhere, quivering and muttering profanely turgid sentences about the tragic ending of your yellow brick writing road.

For me, rather than wasting time, and upsetting myself with thoughts of my absolute lack of any writing talent at all, or verbally abusing innocent passersby, there are a couple of things that I try to do instead, and one way or another that missing happening always arrives when it’s ready. Without fail. The first and easiest thing is to type in a whole lot of bold red exes so that there’s no chance of losing that plot black hole, and then carry on writing on the other side. You obviously know why you need this event to happen – it is the cause for some outcome in your book, so just carry right on into the outcome and the event will eventually be revealed to you. Promise.

If you’re just way too angry at your own ineptitude to write anything at all, then walk away from your computer and do something else. It’s amazing how being tense can block up all creativity, just as it is the way being relaxed or doing something totally different can unplug that old blockage. Run around your house – hop up and down in the garden – windmill your arms, or do the Makarena while singing it loudly. Writers are supposed to get moving every hour anyway, to prevent the entire body from oozing downwards and pooling around your ankles after years spent unmoving in front of a computer. Not a good look I would imagine. Any old physical thing generally gets me going. Get all those endorphins on the move, while at the same time gaining inspiration for future scribbles from the reactions to your awesome activities from your family and neighbours.

Edit. Work on ideas for your covers. Do some research. Either for the event that has you stumped, or for any other project. While you’re cramming up on the merits of murder by lily bulb, your brain is working on your problem behind the scenes, and the solution could pop up at any time. Have a little faith in your writer’s mind – it’s probably more than a little strange, but it won’t let you down in the end.

Ideas come from the strangest places, as all you scribblers already know. Television is great for inspiration, and for me, watching shows like Ancient Aliens classifies as research. So get out the ice-cream or other equally healthy snack and settle into your couch to do some work. Or for a little bit of fun, go play with a Random Plot Generator. You never know what could be lurking in a bit of silliness to inspire you. Click on the image to read the brilliant computer generated story, and see – reviews too!

LitWorldInterviews Author PS Bartlett WINS! @PSBartlett

LitWorldInterviews Author

PS Bartlett

of The Blue Diamond–The Razor’s Edge out Friday, Oct. 3

Wins

GET HER LATEST
The Blue Diamond–TheRazor’s Edge

FRIDAY, OCT. 3

Read her interview here!

Welcome Jo Robinson to the LitWorldInterviews Team! @jorobinson176

Welcome Jo Robinson to the LitWorldInterviews Team!

@jorobinson176

As soon as I interviewed Jo I knew I needed her to join me on this adventure in helping authors be promoted and give her invaluable advice as a successful self published author. What makes someone a success? She is doing it and doing it and it’s her choice and she knows it inside and out. Her goal in may ways will be to help authors see how self publishing can be done by pointing them in the right direction while also giving her own tips on writing along the way. She brings a wealth of expertise in the self publishing arena as well as an author. I am blown away she said yes when asked to join up!

Thank you Jo for joining LitWorldInterviews!

Make sure to check out Jo’s site and her books as well.

The Rules

A lot of indie authors are pretty rigid with their writing rules. There’s nothing wrong with this when it’s your style, and self-imposed. You’ll have problems though if rigid rules don’t fit well with your character, and you’ve only inflicted them on yourself because a successful and well known writer said that that’s what you should be doing if you ever want to succeed. “Must” is often the word lurking behind procrastination in any field, and when it comes to creative souls, I believe it could shut down production pretty well.

The minute we’re told we must do something, our subconscious goes into overdrive, bombarding us with all the ways we could fail, and settles like a lump in your mind, effectively blocking all those wonderful sentences that had been champing at the bit to leap onto your pages. This fear can be good in small doses. When you have to do one particular finite job, it can goad you into stepping up to the plate and giving it your best shot, purely so that you can put it behind you and move on. But if it’s a rule that you see looming into your entire future career, it could very well be daunting enough for some to throw in the towel rather than risk failure.

If you are told that in order to be any sort of author worth your salt that you MUST write a minimum of X amount of words every single day, and you MUST avoid adverbs, and you must this or that or the other thing – and you believe it – even though your writing regime and style are miles away from that, you’re pretty much going to knobble yourself. If it is your own personal goal to churn out ten books a year, and your personal writing style is naturally succinct, then apply those rules to yourself without fear. On the other hand, if you like to toss in a couple of flowery or acrimonious adverbs now and then (as I do), and if forcing yourself to write thousands of words every day raises your cortisol levels to terrifying heights, then you really shouldn’t, because even if you do manage to get any words down they’re not likely to be the ones that you would have written under your own steam. Fine for businesslike articles, but not so much for creative fiction or non-fiction.

We have more than enough fear already as writers, whether previously published or not. Thoughts pop up that what we publish will be laughed under tables all over the place, or that readers will guess which bits of our fiction aren’t really fiction at all, and think that we’re just plain weirdoes, and so on, and so on. Write your own book at your own pace, and in whatever style is yours without worrying about what anyone will think, until you’ve written the very last word of it. Then you can worry about grammar while you’re doing your dreaded edits. And just because a particular way of writing is believed by many modern authors to be the most well received, that doesn’t mean that it’s true. There is nothing wrong with a couple of well placed adverbs in any story for instance. They can add feeling and depth to a sentence. We use them in our speech after all, so why should they be excluded from the written word?

So yes, read what other authors say about their own success stories. Read all the advice out there, but think it through first as it would apply to you, and follow your own heart and style when you write your own. Many of the most wildly successful books were written in styles and by writers who conformed to nobody but themselves, and broke so many of the rules that they wouldn’t have stood a chance if they had followed the pack.