Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

'Tis The Season To Plan Book Promotions

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Storytelling Is Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storytelling and Story-selling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s Storytellers—You and I?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Putting Sex Back In The Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This is a reprint from LJ Sellers‘ blog.

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

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

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

 

Warning: This post contains homework!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) Practice.

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

(2) Perform and test yourself.

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

(3) Skills development.

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

(4) Brand building and marketing

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

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

 

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

Expectation, Reality, and Serendipity

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

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

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

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

But I didn’t do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Zoe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

What Offer Does Your Author Blog Make?

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It seems that authors fall into two categories when it comes to author blogging:

  1. Authors who are blogging regularly
  2. Authors who think they should be blogging regularly

If you read blogs you come to the conclusion that there are lots of reasons authors are blogging. But sometimes I wonder whether authors have thought about the reason they are blogging—why their blog exists.

 

Now, admittedly there are lots of kinds of author blogs.

There’s a big divide between fiction authors who blog and nonfiction authors. And within nonfiction, there’s a big difference between the kind of blog you can develop if you write literary criticism or medieval history, or if you write about how to get rid of the weeds in your garden or how to make great vegan dishes.

So every author is different, and our subjects and audiences are infinitely varied.

But having some clarity about what purpose your blog serves can really help you achieve your goals. Even better, being able to sum it up in just a few words—why readers would bother to stop there and read it—is one of the best early exercises for new bloggers.

The Magic of the Tagline

When you decide to start a blog, you have to right away come up with a name for it. Or you can blog under your own name, on the “domain-name-of-your-author-name” plan.

No matter what domain name you end up with, you’ll notice that most blogs have a tagline, a bit like a book’s subtitle.

For instance, here are some taglines from blogs I visit:

  • The Creative Penn: Helping you write, publish and market your book
  • The Passive Voice: Writers, Writing, Publishing, Disruptive Innovation and the Universe
  • Writer Unboxed: about the craft and business of fiction
  • Copyblogger: Content Marketing Solutions for WordPress that Work
  • Social Media Examiner: Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
  • We Grow Media: Helping Writers & Publishers Make an Impact and Build Their Legacies

In each case, the blogger has tried to sum up the value of the blog to the reader.

Creating the Tagline for Your Blog

Doing this exercise was a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be. I already had the name of the blog—thebookdesigner.com—so that wasn’t a problem.

But it took several hours and a lot of thought before I arrived at the tagline. But going through that work was also very valuable, and I recommend this exercise to every author who is setting up, or reviving, a blog.

You can see my own end result in the masthead: practical advice to help build better books.

And no matter how far afield the articles here have wandered, this statement hasn’t changed, because my offer has never changed.

If you think about it, how well you fulfill the promise of this statement will have a lot to do with the success of your blog. And if it does succeed, it can become a vehicle capable of supporting your writing and publishing efforts, the ultimate foundation of your author platform.

We blog at the permission of our readers, and the exercise of creating a tagline for your blog is one of the best ways to focus on exactly what your offer is to your readers.

And it gives you the chance to see how well you’re fulfilling that offer.

What offer do you make to your readers through your blog? Have you thought about that?


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

Ebook Publishing: Focus on Platforms and Hardware

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This post, by Cally Phillips, originally appeared on the Edinburgh e-book Festival 2012 blog. Note that because it is aimed at a U.K. audience, some of the particulars given here with respect to Amazon KDP, Smashwords and Kobo may differ slightly in the U.S. Always be sure check the terms and conditions that apply to your region of the world on the site you’re considering before you commit to anything.

There are two sides to the technology (apart from the conversion/formatting which we’ve already looked into) and that is the distribution platform and the hardware.

What follows is a personal opinion based on personal experience.  I can guarantee that by this time next year (next month?) the opinion will be out of date but take it while it’s live and see what you think.

If we first look at the distribution platforms available for the ‘indie’ writer as publisher. That’s Kindle Direct Publishing or Kobo Writing Life or Smashwords.

KDP vs KWL vs Smashwords. Are we comparing like with like?

So, for the uninitiated these are three direct distribution paths for the independent epublisher (eyes glazed over yet!) Okay, let me try and turn this into a slightly more amusing/user friendly experience. We’re talking virtually but I do recognise you are REAL people.  Not human resources.

Just think Coke, Pepsi and Irn Bru – or no, let’s call it Moray Cup (because that’s a small local beverage company round my way who need a plug – and – like Smashwords, I’ve never tried it – I don’t drink fizzy pop any more.)

Actually, the drinks analogy is quite apposite (at least personally). Many many years ago (before I was health conscious enough to eschew fizzy drinks on grounds of sugar/carcinogenic product content) I embarked upon an embargo of the mighty Coca Cola organisation. (I’m not sure I adversely affected their profits substantially over the years but I know why I did it!) About the same time I stopped eating anything but Fairtrade chocolate. Knowing mainstream chocolate was (or could be) produced with child slave labour sort of soured the taste for me. Yes it limited my choices but it made me able to eat without gagging – and sleep at night.

Well, in those days, I did still drink fizzy drinks so I drank Pepsi (or Irn Bru for a hangover like all true Scots) as my sweet brown liquid of choice.  (Now of course I don’t drink ANY fizzy pop and precious little alcohol so no need for the restorative powers of Irn Bru – hence why I haven’t tried said Moray Cup – my personal path to spiritual enlightenment has told me that fizzy drinks are NOT part of my ‘way.’ )

And I do like to find a simple analogy where possible, so accepting that we are dealing in the land of simile and metaphor not DIRECT COMPARISON, I shall continue.  When I think about epublishing distribution platforms (as believe me I have to do more than I’d ever like to) I try to equate my feelings to them to my feelings regarding the fizzy drinks industry.  Find your own points of comparison if you prefer.  This is nothing personal about fizzy drinks!

Amazon Kindle is the market leader.  That won’t surprise anyone in the UK at least. I believe it may be different/more sophisticated in US but I’m afraid I don’t know that much about the US except that they are far ahead of us in the epublishing ‘journey’ so I’m sure there’s a lot we can learn from them.  I shall concentrate on our domestic situation for now though. We are at entry level. And for us Amazon UK is the place where most of our ebook transactions take place (like it or not. I don’t.)  I spent 6 months trying to find other ways. It was a fruitless task. I was googling ‘distributor’ and they call themselves ‘content aggregator’s’ for one thing! Eventually I found one, had 6 months of hell with them and realised if I was to sell any ebooks I’d have to find a way to work with Amazon.

What’s good about Amazon? Well, primarily VISIBILITY. If your ebook isn’t visible it might as well not exist (in buying terms) Of course its value is far beyond price but when you’re trying to sell you need to be a) on the bookshelf  b) at the front of the bookshelf and c) it helps if you are shouting loudly, waving flags and wearing tassles and generally being as larey as possible in front of all the ‘competition.’  (I do have a problem with competitiveness in this context.  More on that later perhaps)

 

Read the rest of the post on the Edinburgh e-book Festival 2012 blog.

Another Amazon Warning: Those Kids Don’t Play Fair!

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(Originally published at www.sailletales.com)

This actually is both a whine and a rant, so proceed with caution…

So, you find a Kindle Discussion entitled “Why Indies Get Self Promo Wrong” on Amazon… you log in and check it out. You are a writer and self-published, an Indie if ever there was one.

You read through the posts, but instead of an actual discussion of how SP writers don’t promote properly, it seems to be a group badger-fest intended to tell hapless writers who stumble into the forum that they are not welcome. In addition, there are thinly veiled threats suggested that the diaphanous “they” can damage you online, should you persist in wanting to discuss the subject of the discussion.

You make a few posts, which are intended to express opinion based upon personal experience, but you’re told that as a “writer” you are not supposed to be here to discuss the impact of self-promotion by writers. Finally, after a few more pointed warnings, you leave the children to play whatever games they are engaged in, and sign off.

Here’s what I could glean from other writers who tried to enter this discussion about writers. First, you can’t mention your books. OK. Fine. No issues with me there. But, you have to remain warm, fuzzy, friendly and informative… oh, and funny, while not revealing you are a writer.

I decide these kids just don’t play fair, and withdraw to lick my wounds. Here’s the thing: Choose a topic title that issues fair warning. Maybe: Non-writers bashing writers with no rebuttal. How about, free author crushing? Or, No whiney authors allowed, except to whimper?

Look, I can understand that there are a lot of new writers out there who just got a book finished and are in a rush to sell as many copies as they can. Why, it almost sounds like what publishing companies do every single day. Every morning or evening, every TV-watching  or newspaper or magazine reading human being has some book talked up in their face in a talk show interview, or a big, splashy print ad, or a mailing or a magazine article, or… the list is actually endless. There are a lot of publishers, and their publicists are very, very busy. All the time.

Meanwhile, the kids on Amazon Kindle Forums don’t want to have to hear from any Indie authors. They want their book recommendations to come from the traditional, publicist- ordained channels such as book club recommends, or friends recommends, or TV talk-show hosts or free (get the irony here?) discussion… but never from the keyboard of the writer. God, no!

Maybe they want to feel like their notion to read a certain book came down upon them like a gentle rain from heaven, softly sowing the seeds of ideas of what to read, in the same way that Venus herself sprang from the Seafoam, fully formed and ready to party! Yes, that’s it!

Because of those wishes, one of the few honest places an Indie Writer has to get to know their readers, should be closed to them. Why, those Indie Writers can just be soooo annoying, can’t they? We may be reduced to whining about how unfair these nasty neighborhood kids can be, but what they don’t seem to realize is that in every way, they are simply (and quite helpfully…) promulgating the industry-serving idea that Self-Published work is dreck and those who write it, useless hacks. Right? Just what the publicists would have wanted if they had actually set out to do this. But the kids think they are being so independent, so morally just. It’s OK to trash other people if they are trash, Right?

But I get it. I’m no martyr. I’ll snuggle up in my hack-burrow and vow to never play with those nasty kids again. Well maybe not those kids.. there are other kids around town… and I’ve got a brand new ball.

Is The Photobook The New Self-Publishing Phenomenon?

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44.4thFotoWeekDC.Central.18L.NW.WDC.5November2011
44.4thFotoWeekDC.Central.18L.NW.WDC.5November2011 (Photo credit: Elvert Barnes)

This morning the Independent UK has a piece entitled, Do we still have a thirst for coffee table books? written by Tim Walker. The piece looks at the continued success of the Quarto publishing group, famous for its large-format, illustrated titles and coffee table books. Walker’s piece even goes as far as to suggest that such books could be ‘physical publishing’s last, best hope.’ which could, in fact, be physical publishing’s last, best hope. Laurence Orbach is founder and CEO of Quarto and he recently told The Bookseller that "the book- publishing ecosystem has been sundered" by the digital revolution.

 
The same piece in the Independent UK also cites The Bookseller’s features editor, Tom Tivnan, with the following observation:

 

"Illustrated books and art books have withstood the digital decline that the rest of the industry is facing. The ‘beautiful’ books are the print books that will survive in the digital age. The latest figures figures suggest, for example, that sales of individual monograph art books were up 70 per cent last year."

Some publishers have chosen to outsource the printing of illustrated books to manufacturers in the Far East because the costs are cheaper and the quality of books remains high, despite the obvious ecological and labour issues. Indeed, Pearson’s recent acquisition of self-publishing provider, ASI (Author Solutions), raised a similar issue in some quarters due to the company employing a large number of its workforce in the Philippines..
 
I don’t think we have reached the endgame Quarto’s CEO, Laurence Orbach, suggests we could reach for physical book publishing or that illustrated books represent the ‘last, best hope’ for publishers. However, I do think we are seeing a real revival in the coffee table book as a direct result of the digital revolution in publishing. This revival has never been clearer in the world of self-publishing providers. Their direct marketing often plays upon the romance of books being a part of the author’s world – and in a way that makes the physical book an experience, unique and apart from the experience of publishing an ebook.
 
As a publishing consultant, I often advise authors to begin with e-self-publishing, rather than undertake the more expensive physical route, particularly if I believe an author has quite a way to go to build an author brand, as well as defining and reaching their readership. Many authors still treat this approach with hesitancy and consider the advice adverse to their wishes and publishing needs. Books in ebook form remain relatively new to many authors, and unless you are an author under 12 years of age, you’ve grown up with the romance and experience of the book in its physical form. This kind of advice is obviously not something I’d give to an author wishing to publish an illustrated book or photographic book.
 
While publishers continue to get to grips with the digital revolution, some self-publishing providers continue to ride on a wave of success, particularly providers like Blurb and Lulu, which offer specific photobook services. I’ve said elsewhere on The Independent Publishing Magazine that providers heavily reliant on physical book production models (including systems like print-on-demand) may soon begin to see a downturn in profits over the coming years as more authors turn to DIY self-publishing services and ebook-only platforms like Amazon’s Kindle and Smashwords. It’s no coincidence that we have seen a marked increase in photo and image cloud services like Flickr, Instagram and Picasa. We are living in a highly image-laden world and we may be about to see the written word concede considerable ground to the visual image.
 
Post anything up to your Facebook or Google+ account and you can be assured the ones with photographs or graphic images will garner the most interest and traffic. The social network Pinterest has built its entire platform around the visual image. Sometimes a few words along with a strong image can deliver a more powerful message than a thousand words.
 
Blurb may have began life as a dedicated self-publishing service for photographers and graphic artists to produce portfolios of their work, and while it has now developed into more a more conventional publishing service for authors as well, like CreateSpace and Lulu, the photo self-publishing arena is becoming pretty crowded in the last couple of years. Even the grand king of self-publishing providers and darling of the POD publishing world, Ingram’s Lightning Source, has recently begun to seriously upgrade its print machinery and colour book services.
 
There are now a multitude of photographic book production services online and all of them appeal to Joe and Josephine Plumber (remember Joe the Plumber!) and not just artists and writers. Here are just a few:
 

I doubt if too many of the services above will diversify into what we might call ‘standard’ self-publishing in the way Blurb has, but many do offer two great strengths – the advertising is mainly directed outside of artist and writer networks; they appeal not just to Joe the Plumber, but to a young generation of people comfortable with technology and with a daily life captured and frozen by the power of the visual story behind an image.
 
While I still have high hopes for the spread and popularity of OnDemand‘s EBM (Espresso Book Machine) in every bookstore, pharmacy and newsstore, I’m not convinced it will ever achieve the popularity of dedicated photobook machines or services in the same outlets. Just before I read the Independent UK piece I referred to at the start of this article, I watched an advertisement on national TV by the Netherland’s largest supermarket chain, Albert Heijn, offering a 48 hour delivery photobook service. Several of the photobook services I’ve just listed in this article also advertise on national TV networks throughout the world. I’ll leave you with a couple of those TV adverts and we can ponder on whether we will see such mass advertising over the coming years for standard self-publishing providers. Maybe right now there is an executive or CEO on the phone to arrange a new partnership with a major supermarket chain!

 

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In Conversation with Gillian Polack

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Gillian Polack is a fine writer, a fine person and a good friend of mine. You may remember that I reviewed her novel, Life Through Cellophane, a while back. Sadly, the publisher of that book, Eneit Press, fell victim to the Red Group/Borders debacle and went under. It seemed that Gillian’s book went with it. But, a literary phoenix from the ashes of corporate foolishness, it has found new life with the Pan Macmillan ebook imprint, Momentum. Now called Ms Cellophane and with a cool new cover, the book is back.

I got to talking with Gillian about the book recently. She was particularly pleased with my original review when I said:

I must admit that I felt a bit weird reading it. It was like I was hiding out during a secret women’s business meeting, hearing about things I shouldn’t know.

Mirror 6e 225x300 In conversation with Gillian PolackOn hearing this, Gillian said, “It’s a good reaction. You read lots, and this is the only book that gives you that sense. I get a lot of female readers saying to me, “This is my life, I read this and am looking into a mirror.” It makes me wonder why you haven’t encountered other books that give you the same sense. What sort of boundaries are out there and what sorts of restrictions do they put on us without us knowing?”

Alan: I think it’s largely to do with the types of books I read. It’s not that I don’t read books by women. In fact, on checking Goodreads, recently I’ve read:

Felicity Dowker’s Bread & Circuses
Jo Anderton’s Debris and Suited
Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine
Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts
Joanna Penn’s Prophecy
Lisa L Hannett’s Bluegrass Symphony

That’s just this year, which is a year where I haven’t read nearly as much as I usually do. But while these are excellent books by women, all with strong female protagonists and/or supporting characters, they’re not as much books about being a woman as yours is. So I wonder if I just don’t choose to read other books more like yours.

Gillian: My book was all about the type of invisibility that many women feel so yes, it wasn’t about a strong protagonist so much as about a very particular aspect of life. Can you pinpoint some of the things that made you feel as if you were entering a foreign universe – and maybe talk about how they differ from the approach you take to your own female characters?

Alan: I have a very simple, perhaps overly so, approach to writing female characters. I basically approach all characters as neither male or female, but simply as people. Of course, I will try to get inside my character’s heads and they’re all very individual people, but gender is only ever a small part of that, never a primary consideration.

Reading Cellophane, I felt as though I was getting an insight into the day-to-day miniutiae of being a woman. You do a good job of putting the reader in Elizabeth’s mind and it almost feels, to me at least, as though we shouldn’t be there. Of course, that’s a sign of great writing – feeling like we’re inside a character rather than simply watching from outside. And, equally, my male-ness is showing, simply because the process of reading your book came as such a surprise to me.

The best thing about it is that none of it was uncomfortable in any way – it was simply fascinating.

To go back to my own writing, I deliberately don’t try to make my female characters “feminine”. I use quotes there to indicate the insufficiency of the word. I don’t know what it’s like to be feminine. I know what it’s like to be around women. I’ve been married a long time and have many great female friends. I know what it’s like to interact with women and I know how they might respond to various situations. My author’s eye is always studying people and scenarios, subconsciously filing it away for later story use. All writers have to be great observers of the world around them. But I can never observe what it’s like to be a woman. Until reading Cellophane, that is. Because that’s something which gave me an insight I couldn’t get on my own. And while I read a lot of female authors – in fact, my favourite Australian spec-fic writers are all women! – I guess I don’t read very much stuff about women. So perhaps I need to know what I could read that would help me with that.

Of course, that also leads to a small problem. I hate “chick flicks”. I have little to no interest in reading books aimed at a purely female market. But Cellophane seemed to transcend that issue, so I guess I need advice on more books like yours!

Gillian: I don’t know where there are more books precisely like mine! There must be. Cellophane can’t be sui generis. I wrote it though, because I wanted to read books like it and I wanted the books to be speculative fiction. One of my publishers suggests that I’m like Anne Tyler, someone else suggests that the female-ness of my world is a bit like Alice Hoffmann, while Sophie Masson suggested that my first novel reminded her of A.S. Byatt. They’re all women writers who often put women in the centre of the story and are capable of working quite inwardly (though don’t always), so I’d start from them, I think, and work out. Ursula le Guin does the same inwards-out approach in Always Coming Home, but she’s more concerned with place and culture and change than with domestica.

There’s a lot of literary fiction written in a character’s head, where the internal view is key to the novel. There’s not, however, much speculative fiction that both takes this approach and focuses on the mundane. Kaaron Warren’s Slights does that, of course, but in such a different way! She wrote about someone quite terrifying and had me accepting, as a reader, that this was quite normal until we realised that this person we had accepted into our headspace was someone we wouldn’t ever want to meet. I really wanted to communicate the everydayness of lives and that these lives can be wonderful, and that magic doesn’t have to be the stuff of adventures and quests.

Alan: Slights is a great example of character, but you’re right, certainly not a particular example of womankind. More an example of arsehole-kind.

I think you hit it on the head when you say that you “wanted to communicate the everydayness of lives and that these lives can be wonderful, and that magic doesn’t have to be the stuff of adventures and quests.”

Is that something you’ll be exploring more? The street-level magic of the everyday wonder rather than the “big story” wonder? Will you write about Elizabeth again?

Gillian: I won’t write about Elizabeth again, but I will definitely be exploring the everyday wonder. In fact, I have a novel out there… It’s one of those hard-to-categorise novels, like Cellophane. Publishers are both loving it and not willing to publish it. This is a problem I face regularly, for there is no general sub-category for what I do, and so it’s hard to fit into a schedule. Personally, I can’t see what’s hard to categorise about a magic-wielding feminist divorced Jewish Sydneysider who is not speaking to her father. In fact, the short story that’s set after the time of the novel was published years ago (in ASIM), for short story markets are more flexible. It was listed as recommended on an international Year’s Best, and I have a recording of actor Bob Kuhn reading it, just waiting for the right moment to appear. People ask me about Judith, and I have to say, “Still no home.”

The cursed novel (The Art of Effective Dreaming – due to appear some time ago) is about dealing with the mundane world, how to escape it and what the implications are of such an escape, but of course, the novel is cursed (and contains dead morris dancers). It was supposed to appear several years ago, but the most extraordinary life events (hurricanes, earthquakes, computer failure, near death experiences) keep getting in the way. I find it rather ironic that a novel about an ordinary person should be doomed to adventures and not be seen, but right now, the story of the The Art of Effective Dreaming’s delays would make a rather good disaster novel.

Alan: Sounds like you need just the right small press for the Judith novel. I’m sure it’ll find a home eventually. I hope it does, because it sounds very cool.

And The Art Of Effective Dreaming will eventually see the light of day, right?

Gillian: From your mouth to God’s ear (to use a Jewish expression I did not in fact grow up with!). You want to read about the dead morris dancers… Actually, The Art of Effective Dreaming also gently takes the mickey out of quest novels, so I rather suspect you might like it. I hope you get to read it soon!

Alan: As far as I’m concerned, the only good Morris Dancer is a dead one, so yes, I’d love to read it.

As Gillian once said to me in an email: “One of the messages I wanted to get out there about my writing is that it’s not bad despite not fitting categories. So many people look for categories and assume that a novel is not readable, simply because they haven’t encountered its like before… for there is a public perception that there’s a gender divide and that women read men’s books but that men don’t read women’s. I’m beginning to think that it’s being reinforced through being assumed and would love to break it down.”

So get out there and have a read of Ms Cellophane. It might change your perceptions a little bit. It’s available now from Momentum.

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Publishing Is Broken, We're Drowning In Indie Books – And That's A Good Thing

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This article, by David Vinjamuri, originally appeared on Forbes.com.

I love books.  Physical books.  Books that sit in my lap and warm it like a sleeping pup.  Three and a half years ago, I had an e-reader unwillingly thrust upon me.  I ignored it at first; shunned it.  Then one day I was packing for a long trip and it came on me in a flash that if I used the damned thing I wouldn’t have to limit myself to five pounds of books in my luggage.

Since then I read more ebooks than physical books. I buy a lot more books, too.  Last year I noticed that books were getting cheaper, but the writing was getting worse.  It started to get harder and harder to shop the Kindle store because I was either upset by the price of a book or the quality of its writing.  Accidentally, I had stumbled upon the new face of self-publishing.

My experience reflects a profound and wrenching transformation of publishing that is shaking the industry to its roots.  The beneficiaries of the existing order – major publishers and their most successful authors have become the most visible opponents of the turmoil that these “Indie” authors have introduced.

Which is too bad, because careful examination suggests that this period of chaos will eventually yield significant rewards for both authors and consumers.  It even points a way forward for traditional publishers who have faced years of declining profits.

Is Indie Publishing Good or Bad for Authors?

I interviewed mega-bestselling techno-thriller author Brad Thor (whose new book Black List has already given me paranoid nightmares).  Thor is unequivocal in his support for the existing system:

The important role that publishers fill is to separate the wheat from the chaff.  If you’re a good writer and have a great book you should be able to get a publishing contract.

Thor is being polite.  When successful mainstream authors let their guard down, stronger words flow.  Just listen to the 32-time bestselling author Sue Grafton (as interviewed by Leslea Tash for LouisvilleKY.com):

To me, it seems disrespectful…that a ‘wannabe’ assumes it’s all so easy s/he can put out a ‘published novel’ without bothering to read, study, or do the research. … Self-publishing is a short cut and I don’t believe in short cuts when it comes to the arts. I compare self-publishing to a student managing to conquer Five Easy Pieces on the piano and then wondering if s/he’s ready to be booked into Carnegie Hall

Why do mainstream authors dislike Indie publishing to the point where some even disagree with the coined term “Indie”?  It comes down to worldview.  Bestselling authors who are talented and hard working – like Thor and Grafton – are inclined to believe that publishing is a meritocracy where the best work by the most diligent writers gets represented, acquired, published and sold.  But this is demonstrably untrue.  The most famous counter example is that of John Kennedy Toole.

 

Read the rest of the article on Forbes.com.

The Thesaurus is Your Friend – Really!

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This post, by Jodie Renner, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Do you ever draw a blank when you’re trying to find just the right word to fit a situation in your fiction or nonfiction writing? It’s on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t think of it. That’s where the trusty thesaurus comes in. Look up the most ordinary or closest word to the one you need, and you’ll find similar words you can then use to narrow down to "le mot juste” – the one that perfectly expresses what you’re looking for.

The thesaurus sometimes gets a bad rap because of writers who get carried away trying to find a more original way to express something and end up replacing good, solid, concrete words with abstract or esoteric words that evoke no emotion and often annoy or confuse the reader. For example, using pretentious words like “abscise” instead of “cut” or “snip,” or “mendacious” instead of “dishonest” or “lying.” But if used judiciously, the thesaurus can be an indispensable guide for helping you enrich your language and imagery and write more powerfully—and keep the readers absorbed in your story. And by avoiding trite, blah, everyday words that have lost their power, you keep your imagery fresh and your story compelling. 

For example, check out how many ways you can say “walked” or “moved.” (Hint – look up the present tense – “walk” or “move.”) You can use an online thesaurus or go all-out and buy the best print one out there – J.I. Rodale’s The Synonym Finder, which, at a hefty 1361 pages long, is without a doubt the most comprehensive thesaurus in book form in the English language. (Thanks to Jessica Page Morrell for turning me on to this indispensable aid for writers.) 

For the verb “walked” for example, Rodale gives us a long list of great synonyms for the verb "walk" to help us capture just the right situation and tone. He just lists them, but here I’ve roughly categorized some of them to suit various situations, and changed them to past tense, to suit most novels and short stories. Can you think of words to add to any of these categories?

Drunk, drugged, wounded, ill: lurched, staggered, wobbled, shuffled, shambled

Urgent, purposeful, concerned, stressed: strode, paced, treaded, moved, went, advanced, proceeded, marched, stepped

Relaxed, wandering: strolled, sauntered, ambled, wandered, roamed, roved, meandered, rambled, traipsed

Rough terrain, hiking, tired: tramped, marched, trooped, slogged, trudged, plodded, hiked

Sneaking, stealth: sidled, slinked, minced, tiptoed, tread softly

Showing off: strutted, paraded

Other situations: waddled, galumphed (moved with a clumsy, heavy tread), shambled, wended

So in general, it’s best to avoid plain vanilla verbs like “walked” or “went” if you can find a more specific word to evoke just the kind of movement you’re trying to describe. But choose carefully! For example, I’d usually avoid show-offy words like “ambulate” and “perambulate” and “peregrinate” (!), or colloquial/slang/regional expressions like “go by shank’s mare” and “hoof it.” 

Also, some synonyms are too specific for general use, so they can be jarring if used in the wrong situations. I had two author clients who seemed to like to use “shuffled” for ordinary, healthy people walking around. To me, “shuffled” conjures up images of a patient moving down the hallway of a hospital, pushing their IV, or an old person moving around their kitchen in their slippers. Don’t have your cop or PI or CEO shuffling! Unless they’re sick or exhausted–or half-asleep. Similarly, I had a client years ago who was writing about World War II, and where he meant to have soldiers and officers "striding" across a room or grounds or battlefield, he had them "strutting." To me, you wouldn’t say "he strutted" unless it was someone full of himself or showing off. It’s definitely not an alternate word for "walked with purpose" as "he strode" is.

Similarly, be careful of having someone “march” into a room, unless they’re in the military or really fuming or determined. “Strode” captures that idea of a purposeful or determined walk better. And in a tense situation, don’t have your character “saunter” around. Sauntering implies a relaxed, carefree pace. So after you’ve found a few possible words in the thesaurus, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to also check the exact meaning in your dictionary. For that, I recommend Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (mine has 1622 pages).

Or try looking up the verb “look” in a good thesaurus. Here are some of the synonyms J.I. Rodale lists: see, visualize, behold, notice, take in, regard, observe, study, inspect, examine, contemplate, eye, check out, scrutinize, review, monitor, scan, view, survey, scout, sweep, watch, observe, witness, gaze, peer, glance, glimpse, ogle, leer, stare, goggle, gape, gawk, squint, take a gander, spy, peek, peep, steal a glance at, glare, glower, look down at, look daggers… (and the list goes on). Some of these, and others he lists, are too specific or archaic for general use in fiction, so again, choose carefully. Don’t use “behold” for “look” in your present-day thriller or mystery, for example! And “reconnoiter” works for military situations, but not for everyday use. Also, watch for eyes doing weird physical things, like "his eyes bounced around the room."

Also, don’t start using a bunch of fancy synonyms for “said.” Best to just use “he (or she) said” most of the time, as words like “postulated” and “uttered” and “articulated” can be laughable and distracting, whereas "said" gets the meaning across without drawing attention to itself.

Why not open your own Word file and call it “Thesaurus” or “Synonyms,” then start lists for the verbs you use most in your writing, like walk, move, look, run, etc. That way you can quickly find lots of variations and try them on for size.

Writers – do you have anything to add? Any suggestions for finding just the right word to capture the mood or tone of the scene? Readers – do you have any examples of words that stuck out in your reading because they just didn’t fit the situation?

For a related post, see my my post, "Tone and Mood – Choose Your Words Carefully," and my review of The Emotion Thesaurus, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

Copyright © Jodie Renner, August 2012

Jodie Renner is a freelance editor specializing in thrillers, romantic suspense, mysteries and other crime fiction. For more information on Jodie’s editing services, please visit her website at www.JodieRennerEditing.com.
 

Jodie’s craft-of-fiction articles appear here every second Monday, and once a month on five other blogs.

Jodie’s 40-page e-booklet, Writing a Killer Thriller – An Editor’s Guide to Writing Powerful Fiction, is available for only $0.99 on Amazon or direct from the author in PDF.

 

 

Somebody Please Tell Me The Path To Survival For The Illustrated Book Business

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files.

My eye was caught at the end of last week by a story in The Bookseller that acknowledged that ebooks just haven’t worked for illustrated books. It appears that the publishers of illustrated books they spoke to for the piece think that situation is temporary. The Managing Director of Thames & Hudson, Jamie Camplin, is quoted as saying “you have to make a very clear distinction between the situation now and the situation in five years time.” And Dorling Kindersley CEO John Duhigg emphasized that his team is being kept up to date with digital workflows and innovations, so they can “be there with the right product at the right time.”

But maybe, except for an opportunity that will arise here and there, for illustrated book publishers trying to exploit the same creative development across both print and digital, there won’t ever be a “right time”. There certainly is no guarantee there will be.

Duhigg characterized what he called “the black and white digital business” (but which I think would more accurately be described as “the immersive reading digital business”) as “flowing along” while admitting it is “very different” for the companies with “fully-illustrated lists”.

That’s accurate. Expecting that to change could well be wishful thinking.

Illustrated books in printed form depend on bookstores more than novels and biographies do. If the value in a book is in its visual presentation, then you might want to look at it before buying it, and the view you’d get of it online might not be doing justice to what you’d see if you held the book in your hands.

Camplin sees that optimistically. He has an aggressively modernist view of what will happen with novels. “I don’t see why print should survive at all for fiction, beyond the odd bibliophile” which he apparently believes could open up more bookstore display space for illustrated books.

But if the buyers of Patterson and Evanovich and 50 Shades of Gray aren’t visiting bookstores to make those purchases anymore, will there be any traffic to look at the illustrated books, however prominently they are displayed?

This problem has been nagging at me for a while. Books are illustrated for two reasons: beauty or explanatory purpose, more the latter than the former. When they’re illustrated to better explain, such as showing you how to knit a stitch or make a candle or a piece of jewelry, wouldn’t a video be a better option most of the time? If the illustration is a map, isn’t it likely that being able to manage overlays digitally (for the movement of the weather or the troops on the battlefield or the adjustment of borders over time) will deliver more clarity than whatever stills were in the book?

Of course, these things can be done by book publishers for the digital versions. But they require creating or licensing and then integrating new content assets and rethinking and redesigning the presentation. And that’s not even accounting for the work involved in adjusting the content to multiple screen sizes, a problem that just keeps getting more challenging as more different tablet and phone screen sizes are introduced.

One major publisher I know really endeavors to make ebooks of all their new title output, which includes some imprints that do a lot of illustrated books. Like everybody else, they frequently see ebook sales of 50% and more of their fiction, and 25% or more on immersive-reading non-fiction. But the illustrated books are in the single-digit percentages most of the time, with some of the more successful categories in the very low double-digits.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

My Brief Experiment Going Off KDP Select: At Least I Got This Nifty Blog Piece Out Of It!

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So…

I lasted only a month off of KDP Select. It was an eye-opening experience. I knew that I would lose sales on Amazon without the borrows and KDP free days to keep my books visible on the historical mystery bestseller lists, but my hope was that I would be building enough sales on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and the Smashwords affiliates, to make up for these lost sales. I even told myself I was willing to accept lower overall sales for 2-3 months in order to test the idea that having my book on multiple sites (even if the sales on those sites were lower, on average, than on Kindle) was a workable alternative to exclusivity on Amazon, which is what KDP Select requires.

But this was predicated on being able to figure out how to get my books, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, discovered on these other sites, because my experience is that if readers find my books, they will buy them.

But I was not able to figure out how to do this for Barnes and Noble or Kobo and I didn’t see any evidence that this was something I would be able to solve in a short period of time.

As I have written about before, there are primarily two ways a person ends up buying a book (from a brick and mortar store or estore).

They either:

1) come to the store looking for that book (or books by a certain author) or

2) find the books in the store while browsing.

For authors who are independently published and who sell most of their books in on-line stores, social media (blogs, twitter, facebook, pinterest, etc) can play an important role in getting people to go looking for their books. When a potential reader discovers the title of a book through reading a review or an interview with an author on a blog, or reading a tweet or a facebook post from a friend, they may decide to go looking for this book. The more frequently they run across that author’s name or the title of the book, the more likely they are to do so. In addition, social media usually provides direct links to the product pages of estores so that the impulse to look for the book can lead immediately to the decision to buy the book, which increases the effectiveness of this form of marketing.

Social media also has the benefit of costing less money and requiring less clout than the methods traditionally used by authors to market (reviews in print media, book signings, talks at conventions, interviews on radio or tv, mass mailings, etc).

While I don’t believe that the majority of sales I have made have come through my social media activities, I did understand that I might have to work harder to drive people to look for my books in the Barnes and Noble and Kobo stores because they initially wouldn’t have much visibility in these stores. What I didn’t expect was to have difficulty finding places on the internet that specifically targeted Nook or Kobo owners. If an author wants to connect with Kindle owners there are the Kindle Boards, literally dozens of Kindle oriented facebook pages, book blogs and websites that target Kindle owners, providing free and paid methods of promoting your book. I couldn’t find any similar sites that focused on Kobo beyond their official facebook/websites, and the small number of sites that focused on Nook ebooks generally didn’t have many followers. So beyond tweeting using the #kobo or #nook hashtags, I discovered few ways of reaching out and alerting these specific readers that my books were available on their devices.

Which brings me to the other way people find books–browsing. Whether it was in the libraries of my youth, the bookstores of my middle years, or Amazon in my senior years, I discover new authors primarily by looking on the “shelves,” being intrigued by the cover picture and the title, looking at the short description of the book and blurbs, maybe scanning the first pages, and then deciding to take a chance. This is what I want to have happen with my books, and while Amazon’s browsing experience isn’t perfect, for my books, it turns out Amazon is much better than the other two major ebook stores at helping potential customers find my books on their shelves.

I had some hopes for Barnes and Noble because my books had been in this store before and had done moderately well. While I had been disappointed in the total number of my Nook sales, I thought that if I could figure out how to get my books visible in the right browsing categories I could increase these sales. I was particularly encouraged by the fact that Barnes and Noble gives you 5 categories to put your books in (Amazon now only gives you 2), and that they had some smaller sub-categories that Amazon didn’t have where I knew my historical mysteries would shine (like historical romances in the Victorian/Gilded Age, or American Cozy mysteries.) I also know a number of people who sell well on the Nook, although most of them have at least 5 books for sale, usually in a series, and they have been able to take advantage of either the NookFirst program or have used the first book in their series as their loss leader by making the book 99 cents or free (through price matching.) But they also seemed to have their books in the right categories.

However, my plan to make my books be more visible through better category placement in the Nook store failed completely when I couldn’t even figure out where my books were showing up after I uploaded them through ePubit, much less how to get them into the right categories.

Side note: all the Kindle/Nook/Kobo self-publishing systems have the same problem in that the categories you get to choose from when uploading your book aren’t identical to the categories that show up when browsing. See my discussion of this in my post on Categories.

Both the Amazon and Kobo product pages lists a book’s browsing categories, not so Barnes and Noble. When I went to the categories and subcategories I thought my books might be in and scrolled through, looking for my books, either my book would be missing or the pages would freeze before I got through the hundreds of pages, so I could never determine if they were there. Arggh. (And of course this means a potential customer wasn’t going to find them either.)

So, I did what I had done to get my books properly in the right categories on Amazon when I was first figuring out how browsing worked in that store, I wrote the Barnes and Noble/Nook support staff, first asking what 5 categories my books were in and next asking how I could get them into the 5 categories I wanted.

And got no reply. Not even an automated, “we have received your email and we are working on an answer.” Nothing. So I resent my request a week later (mentioning that this was the second request and that I would appreciate some response.) Nothing. So then I wrote the Director of Digital Content, asking if she could direct me to where I could find out the answers to my questions and asking if she could give me advice on how to better market my books for the Nook. No reply.

Bangs head.

I do believe that if I got my books into the right categories that I would begin to have decent sales on the Nook. I am assuming the books I did sell were primarily to those people who went into the bookstore looking for them (based on my tweets and facebook postings), but I don’t think it makes sense to go another month or two hoping I will finally get an answer, and that my books will finally start showing up where I want them to be. I am leaving my short stories up in this store, and maybe I will eventually get these stories into the right categories and begin to get more sales. If this happens and my sales of these stories increase enough on the Nook, I may try again with the full-length novels.

I also had high hopes for Kobo, after reading about their new self-publishing initiative, WritingLife. What was particularly attractive was that they are letting indies price their books at free, without an exclusivity requirement or time limit. But, despite the promise that they had been consulting with indie authors in beta testing, Kobo’s WritingLife is not yet ready for prime time when it comes to browsing categories or free promotions.

I was pleased with the ability to designate three categories on Kobo and my books actually showed up in the categories I put them in. The problem was that these categories are currently very limited. Most distressing from my perspective, there is no historical mystery category (which is the subgenre that is most aligned with my books). Also, if you put “historical mystery” in as a keyword search there were 51,000 books (many which didn’t appear to be historical mysteries), which says to me the search function isn’t very useful as an alternative way for readers to find this kind of book.

The categories my books do show up in the Kobo store (mystery-women sleuths, historical fiction and historical romance) contain a lot of books, with none of the sub-categories that the Nook has, which also makes it difficult for a book by a relative unknown such as myself to become visible in them. I was facing the old chicken and the egg problem (how do you get a book up high enough in a category for people to find it without sales, but how do you get sales if no one ever sees your book?) This is where I hoped Kobo’s free option would help––as it has helped so many authors who have used the KDP Select free promotion option.

However, when I put my short story, Dandy Detects,up as free on Kobo, I found that Kobo has a very ineffective method of making free books visible. While I don’t know how the Kobo ereader itself works, if you are using the Kobo ap there is no way to find free books because there is no way of finding out what books within a category or subcategory are free. This is true for the on-line Kobo bookstore as well.

For example, in Barnes and Noble’s Nook ebook store, if you click on the mystery-women sleuth category, you find 2338 books, and you can order these books by price, with the free books showing up first (15 of them). By the way, my short story Dandy Detect, which should be in this category as a 99 cent book, isn’t there (sigh).

For Kindle, if you look on the device at the best seller list under the “mysteries-women sleuths” you can look at the free list separately for this subcategory, and in the online store you can see the paid list to the left and the free list to the right in this category. Today the free list for this category is 53 books––so it is easy to have your book visible if it is in the midst of a free promotion. Visible not just to people who are looking for free books, but visible to people who are looking at books that are for sale––maybe the newest Anne Perry––and just glance over to the right and notice a free book that looks intriguing.

In the Kobo store, the mystery-women sleuth category (3303 books) can be sorted by price, but the lowest price is 99 cents, so no free books are visible. Instead, you have to click on the free books link on the home page of the estore, a link that is not available on the ap (I don’t know if it is on the Nook itself). Then there are two options. The most straightforward––on the surface––is a link to one of 6 categories, one that is called “Free Mysteries.” But when you click this link only 20 books show up, most of them public domain, and none of them Dandy Detects. Dead end, and frankly if I was a consumer I would try this category once, and never again.

The second option Kobo gives you is to follow these 3 Step instructions

Step 1: Perform a search using any keyword

Step 2: Filter your results by “Free Only” from the pull-down menu

Step 3: Select your download from the search results

This does work, and Dandy Detects did show up under key words like mystery, historical mystery, fiction historical, but the separation from paid books and the browsing categories means that this method isn’t going to produce the traffic that it would get in either the Kindle or Nook stores where there is a connection between the paid and the free listings. In addition, the Kobo method depends on the consumer to come up with the right key words.

I suspect that these problems (no way to find free books through the Nook ap, limited free books under the Free Mystery link, and the lack of connection between paid and free books) have meant that Kobo readers aren’t accustomed to looking for free promotions the way Kindle readers have become since the introduction of KDP Select.  Even more frustrating, when I downloaded a free copy of Dandy to my Nook ap I discovered that the dashboard for WritingLife doesn’t report free book downloads so I had no way of knowing if anyone is finding it.

The only evidence I have that a few people eventually found the story (probably because I have been tweeting about Dandy being free) is after a few days a small number of other books started to show up in the “You Might Like” listing on Dandy’s product page. But I don’t know how many copies have been downloaded, I don’t know when they were downloaded (so I can’t connect up with my marketing), and, so far, putting Dandy up for free hasn’t translated into anyone buying either of my full-length novels or even the other short story. I also haven’t seen any movement in the total ranking of Dandy in the categories––so I don’t know if I put it back to paid if it would show up any higher in these categories. In short, at this point the Kobo option of putting a book up for free doesn’t seem to help sell books.

While I imagine that the Kobo techs, who have responded to my questions (unlike Barnes and Noble), will try to solve some of these problems, until they do and Kobo readers get used to looking for free books, I don’t anticipate free promotions being as successful as they are currently on Kindle.

Again, as with the Nook, I will keep my short stories in the Kobo store, keep Dandy free, and see if over the next few months some of these problems are resolved. But I don’t want to continue to let my sales on Kindle stagnate on the promise that the conditions for selling in either the Barnes and Noble or the Kobo stores will improve dramatically in the short term.

So…Back I will go to KDP Select next week, when my books have been successfully unpublished in the other stores, and then I can get back to writing and doing an occasional KDP promotion.

Obviously, I would love to hear if any of you have tips on how to get books in the right categories for the Nook, or have had better success with selling on Kobo. But meanwhile, if any of you are Nook or Kobo owners, my novels will be available for these devices until Sunday, August 12, and my short stories will continue to be there indefinitely.

 

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

Kindle Lending Library vs Lending Kindle Books (Hint: They’re Different)

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This post, by Moira Rogers, originally appeared on her site on 8/10/12.

Most of my corners of the internet have been ablaze over the piracy witch-hunt that shut down legal lending website LendInk.  I have seen pitchfork-wielding mobs gather many times in the past, but this one was fast, vicious and amplified by careless RTing and a lot of authors who seem to know nothing about ebooks or how they actually work.  This is terrifying to me on so many levels: that people agreed to the Amazon ToS without understanding them, that people jumped to the worst assumptions without taking time for research, and then that they went and made “legal” threats based on those assumptions.

But that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about a misconception so common I’ve seen it on both sides.  I think Amazon is to blame in some ways for not giving two completely different functions slightly more distinctive names.  There are two types of “lending” on Amazon–one that is Amazon-to-Prime-Customer and one that is Paying-Customer-To-Non-Paying-Customer, and people seem really confused over what they both mean.

Kindle Lending

How it Works

Kindle lending (like Nook lending) is a customer-to-customer transaction.  Someone who has legally purchased an eligible kindle title can lend that title to anyone else with a kindle account.  The option shows up on eligible books:

The LOAN THIS BOOK text as seen on a product page on Amazon.com

Ebook lending is meant to mirror the act of physical lending–the book “disappears” from the lender’s account and “appears” in the lendee’s account. The lending period is restricted to two weeks, and a book can only be lent once.  In many ways, it’s far more restrictive than its physical counterpart, even if the internet allows you to easily use your one lend on people outside your immediate geographic area.

Which books are eligible?  For larger publishers, that’s their call.  Lots of the Big Six books are not eligible. Anyone using KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), however, is automatically opted in to this lending service if they select the 70% royalty option.  (Note: this is NOT related to KDP Select. This is just about 35% vs 70%.  To receive the 70% royalty, you have to do many things that make your book more useful to Amazon, including opting in to lending and agreeing to stay within a set price range.)

This is the option LendInk was using to arrange book lending.  User A would say, “I have a copy of Cipher by Moira Rogers that I am willing to lend” and User B would say, “I’d like to read that book!”  LendInk would give User B’s e-mail address to User A, and User A would go to Amazon, click the “Loan this book” link and the standard (legal) transaction would occur.  If User C wanted to borrow Cipher, too, they would be out of luck. User A can only loan that book once.  However, User C might click on the “Buy this Book” link and purchase the book.  That would give the author royalties and give LendInk a small referrer fee.  That was the business model in play.

Royalties

 

Read the rest of the post, which also explains the Amazon Prime Lending Library and author lend compensation, on Moira Rogers’ site.