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

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

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

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Why Authors Need to Know about Book Sales Cycles

May your sales look like this...

May 26, 2016

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

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

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

Trend Lines Are Pretty Much the Same

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

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

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

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

Quick Links: What Are The Rules on Mixing Viewpoints?

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My current writing goals are to work on viewpoints and dialog. At Advanced Fiction Writing, Randy has a great post on the basics of viewpoints. Even seasoned writers might learn a thing or two. Head on over and check it out and let us know what you think.

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What Are The Rules on Mixing Viewpoints?

May 23, 2016
Of course you can have multiple points of view with the right character.....
Of course you can have multiple points of view with the right character…..

Can you write a novel mixing first-person and third-person viewpoints? Is that too stupid for words? How do you decide?

Dezaree posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m trying to write a book with my main character being seen through first person, and my second main character from third person. I separate them distinctly in the book and when they are together the story stays in my main characters first person. Can This Work? I tried writing it with them both in first person and without the second main character being separated that way. Both ways made me feel like it was either too confusing or missing to much information. So I want to write this book from two different points of view.

Also while I call her my second main character I really only want my readers to connect with the Main character.

If you don’t fully understand what I mean email me and I will try to better explain.

Randy sez: This is a good question that I’ve heard several times over the years. Before I can answer it, we’ll need to clarify some terms.

What is a “Main Character?”

When we talk about the “main character” of a novel, we mean that there is one single character who is most important within the story. The novel is this character’s story. The Story Question for the novel is a question about whether this particular character will succeed or fail.

Do you have to have a main character? No, of course not. Some novels don’t have a main character. You can write a novel with several characters that are all important, without any of them being the main character. But I don’t recommend that for beginning writers, because it’s hard enough to make your reader care about your story when you HAVE a main character. It’s much harder when you don’t. That’s my advice—follow it or don’t follow it, as you like.

What is a “Viewpoint Character?”

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

Quick Link: Secrets to Turning Your Facebook Page into an Epic Marketing Tool

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

More marketing tips today, dealing with one of the largest social media platforms out there – Facebook. Penny Sansevieri, guest posting on Writers In The Storm, gives us some excellent tips on how to turn up the volume on your Facebook marketing.

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Secrets to Turning Your Facebook Page into an Epic Marketing Tool

Penny Sansevieri

ThumbFinal_4.9.15May 9th, 2016

According to a recent New York Times article, users spend an average of fifty minutes on Facebook. Fifty minutes! And though this number includes Instagram and the Facebook Messenger app, you can bet that the lion’s share is still spent  on their main platform.  Now more than ever it’s really important to turn your Facebook Page into something that isn’t just getting you likes, but making you sales as well.

I don’t know about you but I sort of have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, when it works it works well but when it doesn’t work, well… crickets. The challenge is that Facebook is always changing and as it does, our strategies need to change as well. Whether you have a strong Facebook page, or want to try and up your engagement on an existing page let’s have a look at some of the new and exciting features Facebook offers.

Facebook Livestreaming

In the past few months many of you have probably seen the little icon for the new Facebook Live, which gives you the opportunity to do livestreaming video right onto your Facebook page. To start a livestream, open up the status bar as though you were going to write a new post and click the little head with the circles around it. This will push you into a cue to start your livestreaming. You will then be prompted to name your video feed and choose your audience, meaning you can choose to Livestream to everyone, or just selected followers. Once you do that, you’ll click the button to go Live and voila, you are now broadcasting to your Facebook audience.  Also important to note, you can save the video if you decide you want to share it later – so perhaps add it to your YouTube channel, etc.

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

Quick Links: What I Learned from Launching My First Best Seller

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Yesterday we learned what not to do, today we look at lessons learned from a successful book launch. Jeff Goins at The Write Practice tells us what he figured out from his positive experience.

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What I Learned from Launching My First Best Seller

by Jeff Goins
best practiceToday’s post is written by Jeff Goins. Jeff is the best-selling author of four books including, The Art of Work. His award-winning blog, Goinswriter.com, is visited by millions of people every year. Get his free book marketing cheatsheet here.

So you want to launch a bestseller. Great. Every writer does. But the truth is, before you can launch a best-selling book, you have to write a best-selling book. Here’s what I mean.

When my recent book, The Art of Work, became an instant bestseller, people asked me how I did it. They wanted to know the secret marketing tactic or promotional strategy I used. And those were the wrong questions to ask.

For the longest time, I wanted to be a best-selling author. I built my tribe, learned how to market, and assembled book launch teams. But it never happened. What was I doing wrong?

After four books, I finally did get a book on the bestseller lists. But it had nothing to do with timing or practice. With my fourth book, I actually learned how to write a book I believed in that would sell well. And any writer can do this, if they understand the process.

Just a couple quick notes, though, before I begin:

  1. This process works for writing nonfiction. I’m not a fiction author, so I can’t speak to that. This works for writing how-to, advice, self-help, memoir, business, and just about any other form of nonfiction.
  2. This is not about how to game your way onto a bestsellers list. I tried that. It didn’t work. This is about how to write a real bestseller, a book that continues to sell tens of thousands of copies every year.

3 Lessons I Learned from Launching my First Best-selling Book

So with that said, I want to share with you my process, what I learned from watching other authors succeed and then applied to my own writing journey. I wasted years trying to figure this out, but hopefully you won’t have to do the same. Here are three things I learned from launching my first best-selling book:

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Quick Links: How I Failed at Promoting my Novel with Amazon Advertising

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Sometimes the best lessons are not the ones where you succeed but the ones you fail at. Those are the ones that you learn the most from, which means it isn’t really a failure, just a learning curve. Eliot Peper over on Reedsy.com shares his lesson’s learned with marketing through Amazon advertising. What tips do you have for getting the most bang for your dollar?

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How I Failed at Promoting my Novel with Amazon Advertising

May 12, 2016
Eliot Peper
This was when I realized, I was no Katniss Everdeen.
This was when I realized, I was no Katniss Everdeen.

At Reedsy, we like to stay on top of new marketing opportunities for authors. We covered Product Hunt Books when they launched. Advertising on Amazon (via Amazon Marketing Services) is not “new”, however it is still, largely, an untapped resource for authors. In this guest post, indie author Eliot Peper explains how he tried it out, and what the results were.

Marketing is a fraught subject among novelists. It’s often seen as outside of our purview and some look down on those who aggressively market their own work, seeing promotion as a corruption of the creative process. Historically, many authors outsourced their marketing to publishers along with other responsibilities like printing and distribution. But technology-driven changes within the industry are forcing authors to become ever more involved with marketing their books, whether because they’re self-publishing or because their publisher demands it.

But novels are not a straight-forward product to promote. I read about 50 books a year and I don’t think I ever bought a novel because of a banner ad. Book PR firms have an abysmal track record. Most growth-hacking strategies borrowed from the tech industry simply don’t apply well to fiction. At the end of the day, there’s a single factor that determines a book’s financial success: word-of-mouth. Most often, we buy a book because a trusted friend recommended it.

Some indie authors, like Andy Weir and Hugh Howey, have achieved blockbuster success without investing much direct effort into marketing. Others, like Mark Dawson and Nick Stephenson, have engineered semi-automated systems that introduce their stories to new readers and hopefully inspire additional word-of-mouth. My own activities fall somewhere in between these two extremes. When I’m writing and editing a book, it’s a purely artistic process. But once a book is published and out in the world, I look at it through a commercial lens just like any other product.

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Quick Links: How do you become an editor?

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Have you ever thought of becoming an editor and helping other writers shape their work? Roz Morris at Nail Your Novel shares the different types of editor and what it takes to become one.

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How do you become an editor?

Who What Why When Where Signpost Showing Confusion Brainstorming And ResearchRachel Anderson asks: How did you get into editing? Did you start writing first and then take on editing as a natural second, or was it out of necessity since there are more opportunities for editors than writers?

Oof, talk about cutting to the quick. It’s certainly tricky to make a living as a full-time writer. So most writers also use their wordsmithing in some other way – teaching or working in the publishing trade.

But does that mean all writers could be editors? Not necessarily. There’s a lot of difference between tidying your own work and shaping someone else’s to professional standards.

And you need different skills for the various strains of editing.

Copy editing and proof reading These are the nitpicky, forensic phases. Fact-checking and querying. Reading for consistency, clarity, correctness, house style, possible libel. The copy editor and proof reader are a human error trap – they have to catch anything that might be inaccurate, or would spoil the reader’s experience or undermine the author’s command. They have to spot anything that could possibly go wrong such as characters’ names changing half-way through, repeated passages from copy/paste mistakes, and snafus that no other human has yet encountered.

Rachel: I’ve been reading articles and stuff about developmental editing…

Aha – the creative stuff! For developmental editing, you need a mind for detail and a solid grounding in the mechanics of fiction (or non-fiction or memoir if that’s where you want to specialise – they need developmental editors too). Developmental editing is part diagnosis, part teaching. You need sharp radar for what isn’t working, and you need to explain this to the writer in a way that helps them solve it. Equally, it might be your job to solve it.

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

Quick Links: Six Ways To Self-Edit & Polish Your Prose

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I am a firm believer in hiring a professional editor.  That said, you want to put your best effort forward and do as much as you can. Lucky for us, Kristen Lamb is here to help us with self-editing tips so you can avoid the pants of shame.

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Six Ways To Self-Edit & Polish Your Prose

May 16, 2016

Editing your work has become a lot easier....
Editing your work has become a lot easier….

Kristen Lamb

Whether you are new to writing or an old pro, brushing up on the basics is always helpful. Because no matter how GOOD the story is? If the reader is busy stumbling over this stuff, it ruins the fictive dream and she will never GET to the story. So today we are going to cover six ways to self-edit your fiction. Though this stuff might seem like a no-brainer, I see these blunders ALL the time.

….unfortunately even in (legacy) published books.

When I worked as an editor, I found it frustrating when I couldn’t even GET to the story because I was too distracted by these all too common oopses.

There are many editors who charge by the hour. If they’re spending their time fixing oopses you could’ve easily repaired yourself? You’re burning cash and time. Yet, correct these problems, and editors can more easily get to the MEAT of your novel. This means you will spend less money and get far higher value.

#1 The Brutal Truth about Adverbs, Metaphors and Similes

I have never met an adverb, simile, or metaphor I didn’t LOVE. I totally dig description, but it can present problems.

First of all, adverbs are not ALL evil. Redundant adverbs are evil. If someone shouts loudly? How else are they going to shout? Whispering quietly? Really?O_o Ah, but if they whisper seductively? The adverb seductively gives us a quality to the whisper that isn’t already implied by the verb.

Check your work for adverbs and kill the redundant ones. Kill them. Dead.

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