Novelist Ditches Publisher at Book Launch for 'Condescending' Treatment

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This article, by Alison Flood, originally appeared on The Guardian UK site’s Books section on 9/15/11. In it, you’ll learn about novelist Polly Courtney, a successful self-publisher who was picked up by Harper Collins and subsequently decided to go back to self-publishing due to her dissatisfaction with Harper’s branding of her books.

Novelist Polly Courtney has dropped her publisher HarperCollins for giving her books "condescending and fluffy" covers aimed at the chick lit market.

Courtney self-published Golden Handcuffs, a fictional exposé of life in the City, in 2006 after quitting her job as an investment banker, following it up in 2008 with Poles Apart, about an ambitious Polish graduate who moves to London. Their success helped land her a three-book deal with HarperCollins imprint Avon, but at the launch of the third book, It’s A Man’s World, she announced that she would not be working with the publisher again.

Instead, she is planning to return to the world of self-publishing.

"My writing has been shoehorned into a place that’s not right for it," she said this morning. "It is commercial fiction, it is not literary, but the real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women’s fiction … Yes it is page turning, no it’s not War and Peace. But it shouldn’t be portrayed as chick lit."

It’s a Man’s World (given the tagline by Avon, "but it takes a woman to run it") is set in the world of lads’ mags, following the story of Alexa Harris, asked to head up a magazine, Banter, with an all-male editorial team. Subjected to "light-hearted" misogyny in the office, Alexa also finds herself the victim of a hate campaign by women’s rights activists.

"I’m not averse to the term chick lit," said Courtney, "but I don’t think that’s what my book is. The implication with chick lit is that it’s about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams. [My books] are about social issues – this time about a woman in a lads’ mag environment and the impact of media on society, and feminism."

 

Read the rest of the article on The Guardian UK site’s Books section.

My Lousy Stigma

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This post, by Pete Morin, originally appeared on his site on 9/12/11.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to revisit this whole canard about self-publishing suffering from a “stigma.”

Over at The Forum That Shall Not Be Named, the usual suspects continue their broken record. One of these people purports to be a “professional writer,” but I’m skeptical. “When my novel is done,” she assures us, she will pursue the traditional publishing route, and would never self-publish it, lest she be tainted with the stigma of self-publishing. I got news for you, lady. You’ll never be published.

So now that I am committed to self-publishing Diary of a Small Fish (after all those nasty traditional publishers have ignored it for far too long – **sniff**), these warnings take on a new dimension of absurdity, which I will explain. But first – a commercial message:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now then. It is indeed so that the digital libraries at Amazon, Smashwords, B&N and Apple are chocked with dreck. There is a clamor of noise out there in digital land, like singers auditioning for American Idol, peeling the paint off of Jennifer Lopez’s eyes, howling like sick cats. Do those singers diminish the quality of Carrie Underwood or Kelly Clarkson? (No wisecracks, please. I’m no pop music lover either, but talent is talent.)

A few more examples are warranted.
 

Read the rest of the post on Pete Morin‘s site.

9 Essentials For Writing Your Climactic Scene

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Every novel requires that final, explosive scene where the protagonist and his villain struggle with each other to the certain demise of one or the other. It matters not if you hero is a working mother trying to make ends meet, or the commander of the forces ready to invade Omaha Beach on D-Day. Every novel should have this climactic scene and you should consider certain criteria to make it as powerful as you can.

Here are nine tips to help you when writing that all-important scene.

This scene should be an epic confrontation with a clear winner and a clear loser. Someone gets the girl and someone goes home from the party by himself.

Your hero must confront his most worthy of adversaries. Secondary evil doers simply won’t do. Make this clash between the biggest and baddest.

Your reader expects your hero to win and so he should. However, his victory need not be what they expect. Regardless the sour taste of your hero’s success, a victory he should have.

Your hero should win something of value for his trials. It could be the realization that “The Girl” just ain’t worth the work, or it may be real estate garnered by an incredible battle. Whatever he learns or wins, it must make him a better person, or creature, as the case may be.

In this scene it is not the time for surprise arrivals of any sort. The cavalry, in any of its many forms, should not jump into the story at this point. All that should be set up earlier in your novel.

Have your hero save himself. Imagine if your hero is fighting the villain in hand-to-hand combat and just as the bad guy puts the sword to his throat, an unmentioned meteor streaks from the sky to obliterate the bad guy in a magnificent blaze of fire. Don’t you think your readers will be disappointed in that? Now, that’s not to say the beautiful model can’t Kung Fu in and save him earlier in the story, but at this time, he’s on his own.

There should be no flashbacks at this point in your novel. Flashbacks are tough anyway, but they break the tension and can kill the entire scene. Once the scene opens, focus on the conflict in that scene. Your readers’ interest should be at its peak and they deserve a healthy portion of suspense, action and conflict.

Speaking of action and conflict, this scene should be resolved with action and conflict. Let them duke it out, metaphorically, emotionally or physically, but get the tussle going. Make this thing as exciting as you can. (For more information on the difference between action and conflict, read this ARTICLE.)

Clarification of anything is death to this scene. This is the time for action and your readers should have already received any explanations they need, although mysteries might get away with this to a point.

And finally, this scene should end in a rational fashion. Make it suspenseful, but logical. You never want your readers to say, “Don’t buy it,” at the end of your story. If they do, they’ll tell their friends the same thing; “Don’t buy it.”

Now, are there any aspects to the climactic scene I’ve forgotten?

Until my next post, you know I wish you only best-sellers.

To listen to a podcast of this article, click HERE.

This is a reprint from C. Patrick Shulze‘s Born to Be Brothers blog.

Why $.99 E-Books Don’t Work for Me

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I’ve gone back and forth for months trying to decide whether to price the e-book version of my new release, The Arranger, at $.99 or $2.99…for the launch phase. The thinking is this: At 99 cents, I’ll sell more copies, the book will go higher on the Amazon charts, and I’ll get more exposure. But I won’t make much money…unless it hits the top of the charts and stays there for a long time. But can I count on that?

 

Of course not. In July, I conducted an experiment and priced all my Jackson e-books at $.99. They got a little bump in sales, then quickly settled into a slightly higher level than where they’d been at $2.99, for example 25 copies a day for one title compared to 15 at the higher price. The problem is the royalty. Amazon only pays a 35% royalty on books under $2.99, instead of 70%. So dropping from $2.99 to $.99 not only means earning a third of the price, it also means receiving half of the royalty.

Straight up math: I have to sell six times as many books at the lower price to make exactly the same money. And that’s hard to pull off. There are so many authors and publishers now offering their books at $.99 that it’s hard to gain much attention with that price, especially since my books have been on the market a while and already reached thousands of readers. (And thank you to all those readers!)

After only a few weeks, my experiment taught me this: I can’t make a living selling e-books at $.99. Yet, I have to make a living. I’m a full-time novelist now and I don’t want to go back to freelancing. If I were to start editing again to make up the cash difference, I would write less and disappoint my readers who are waiting for the next Jackson book.

So all my e-books are now back to the higher price, and The Arranger will be released at $2.99. It’s still a great bargain for readers, and the plan is to leave my prices set. Readers like consistency, and I’m sure they’re as tired of the price fluctuations as I am. I certainly hope this is my last post on the subject. If you want to read another blog about cheap e-books, written with a lot more passion, check out The 99 Cent Ghetto.

Readers: Are you willing to pay $2.99 for an e-book you want?
Writers: Have you experimented with price and found the optimum?

 

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

What Smaller Publishers, Agents, And Authors Need To Know About Ebook Publishing

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files blog on the Idea Logical Company site on 9/5/11.

As the shift from a print-centric book world to a digital one accelerates, more and more digital publishers are creating themselves.

The biggest publishers, with the resources of sophisticated IT departments to guide them, have been in the game for years now and paying serious attention since the Kindle was launched by Amazon late in 2007. But as the market has grown, so has the ecosystem. And while three years ago it was possible to reach the lion’s share of the ebook market through one retailer, Amazon, on a device that really could only handle books of straight narrative text, we now have a dizzying array of options to reach the consumer on a variety of devices and with product packages that are as complicated as you want to make them.

 

Free or very inexpensive service offerings through web interfaces suggest to every publisher of any size, every literary agent, and every aspiring author “you can do this” and, the implication is, “effectively and without too much help”. Indeed, services like Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) service, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!, and service providers Smashwords and BookBaby, offer the possibility of creating an ebook from your document and distributing it through most ebook retailers, enabled for almost all devices, for almost no cash commitment.

Is it really that simple? One suspects not, since literary agencies are creating ebook publishers (for example: The Scott Waxman Agency’s Diversion) and baskets of services (for example: The Knight Agency in Atlanta) and consulting to help their authors. And a bit further upstream, ebook distribution companies (for example: MintRight) and ebook-first publishers (for examples: Open Road, Rosetta, and the granddaddy of them all, Richard Curtis’s e-Reads) are creating more alternatives, sometimes propositions explicitly addressed to the agents. If publishing ebooks to all channels were really a simple matter of uploading a file, it would hardly seem necessary to build all this infrastructure.

We know that small publishers, literary agents, and authors are becoming publishers at an astounding rate. Two years ago when I was trying to organize a panel of literary agents to talk about working with authors on a charge-for-services basis instead of a share-the-royalties basis, it was hard to get volunteers to discuss new models. Two weeks ago, a major agent outside New York said to me, “we all have to think about it now; we have no choice.”

In short, it isn’t just the big publishers who are compelled to develop a digital strategy to adjust their businesses to changing times. Their smaller competitors, the agents they depend on to deliver their content, and even the authors that have always just depended on the publishers to handle the business of getting a book from a manuscript to a purchase, are all assessing the new landscape. They are considering what new approaches might reduce or eliminate their need for a publisher, or at least reduce the publisher’s share of the take.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files blog.

5 Ways to Publish a Book for iPad, iPhone, and iPod

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This post, by Dana Lynn Smith, originally appeared on the BookBuzzr Blog on 4/22/11.

There’s no doubt that ebooks are hot. Although Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader is the most popular ebook reading device, many readers also enjoy books on Apple devices. Here are five ways of publishing a book for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

1. Publish to the Amazon Kindle store.

It may seem strange to talk about Kindle in a discussion on publishing a book for iPad and other Apple devices, but Amazon offers a free Kindle reading app for iPad and for iPhone and iPod Touch. The apps allow readers to purchase and read Kindle books on these Apple devices.

 

The Los Angeles Times reported that 31 percent of iPad owners consume ebooks using the Kindle app rather than Apple’s own iBooks app, so having your ebook in the Kindle store certainly makes it available to iPad users. Among avid readers who go through 25 books or more a year, 44 percent prefer using the Kindle app on the iPad. And according to a study by JPMorgan, 40 percent of iPad owners also own a Kindle.

To learn more about publishing ebooks for the Amazon Kindle store, read April Hamilton’s free guide. Go to http://indieauthorguide.com/?page_id=24 and click on “Indie Author Guide To Kindle Publishing.”

2. Use an ebook publishing service.

Another way of publishing a book for iPad is to use an ebook publishing service that will
get your book listed in the ebookstores for Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony and more. My favorite ebook publishing service is Smashwords. There’s no upfront cost and you receive a hefty percentage of the sales price as a royalty. Get general information on Smashwords here and learn more about publishing a book for iPad on this page. Be sure to download and read the Smashwords Style Guide.

Note that both Apple and Sony require ebooks listed in their stores to have a unique ISBN (different from the print version of the book). Smashwords can provide a free or low cost ISBN, or you can buy ISBNs from your country’s ISBN registrar (Bowker in the United States) .

Smashwords works well for novels and other books that are made up of plain text with some subheads. If your book needs special formatting, you may need to hire an ebook formatting service and publish directly to the various ebookstores.

3. Publish an ebook directly to Apple’s iBookstore.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes three more ebook publishing options, on the BookBuzzr Blog.

Who Believes In You?

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This post, by Sean Platt, originally appeared on his Writer Dad site on 8/1/11.

Were you ever the only person who really believed in you or saw where you wanted to go?

Three years ago, that was me.

Everyone thought I was crazy.

The parents at the preschool Cindy and I were running, friends, family, our accountant, and anyone who opened their ears to the dream. Even most of the people who said, “Go for it!” weren’t so sure.

It was easy to see the Is he nucking futs?!? behind their eyes.

Fortunately, there was one person who believed above and beyond reason. My wife, Cindy.

Cindy is the one who handed me the pen, then urged me to keep it moving. Despite the odds, despite the detractors. Despite my own occasional doubt, Cindy always had faith.

We knew things would get bad.

And they did.

Worse than we expected. But we also knew they’d improve. And they have. Better than we hoped.

We would find our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but we’d have to slog through endless buckets of rain before there was enough to hit the sun and color our sky.

I always knew there had to be something more than running a flower shop or a preschool. While those businesses were successful, it was growing harder and harder to make a living. And I wasn’t really doing what I wanted.

My inner entrepreneur longed for the Internet’s unlimited possibility. Though I’m a writer, I’ve always been a businessman first. The potential results of well-placed words and smart strategies are far beyond anything I could imagine with a brick-and-mortar business.

My ideas are now my best asset, each a new seed with the potential to grow profit.

I had to become a better thinker.

 

Read the rest of the post on Sean Platt‘s Writer Dad.

How To Write Fight Scenes With Alan Baxter

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In today’s interview I get very enthusiastic about writing fight scenes with the brilliant Alan Baxter who combines his martial arts life with writing.

Alan Baxter is the author of Realmshift and Magesign, speculative fiction novels published by Gryphonwood Press as well as a podcaster with Thrillercast, on writing and reading thriller novels. Alan is also a martial arts instructor with 25 years experience and has published “Write the Fight Right” in order to help authors write more effective fight scenes.  **warning – there are a few mild swear-words in the interview**Video interview is below the text.

  

Podcast: Download (Duration: 43:12 — 25.7MB)

 

If you want to improve your own fight scene writing, you can join our Fight Scene MasterClass – click here to register your interest.

In this interview, you will learn:

  • Constant improvement in both martial arts and writing. You never finish becoming a better writer or better at martial arts. There is discipline in both. Alan has always done both and the book has sprung from a workshop he does for writers which combines both of his loves.
  • I went to a Krav Maga class last weekend and got my ass kicked and we talk about this and how I was completely out of my comfort zone. There was a lot of adrenalin and I’m covered in bruises but it was good experience.
  • What is it like when a non-fighter is in a fight? What does it feel like when you don’t have the experience of fighting? From a character’s perspective, you need to understand responses. There is  the classic fight, flight or freeze. If you have no experience and are not aggressive, you will react differently. It is also surprising how people react when threatened. From a writer’s point of view, take the character’s personality and how they would react in other situations e.g. being upset, angry – would they just run away? The situation also makes a difference e.g. defense of a child vs. self-defense.
  • What does a professional see and feel? It’s important to relax which is very difficult when under stress. The more relaxed you are, the more control you have over yourself. Constant training for peripheral vision is important. It happens in normal life but when threatened, there is tunnel vision and you lose peripheral vision. A good fighter will see a punch or a kick coming which comes from practice of watching how the body moves. You can see from other signals how they will move. This will give more time in the fight which untrained people don’t have.
  • The attraction of violence for writers and ‘normal’ people. It is partly escapism as most people haven’t had a fight. Fighting is awful and the first defense is run away. When you are writing action, it is good fun and adrenalin on a fun level whereas if we were actually in that situation it would be awful. It’s also the natural extension of conflict in stories. You don’t need to write what you know. You can write what you find out about. Research is one of the most fun things about writing, especially in thrillers as you can go rent a fast car, or go shooting (and it could be tax deductible!)
  • Movie fight scenes vs writing a proper fight scene. The movies are a visual genre and the fight scenes are awful. They are choreographed for 2 dimensions and so are a turn-based arrangement. People never take turns in fights. People regularly punch each other at the same time. It is chaos, not choreographed. In writing, we don’t have a 2D environment. We can be in the heads of the people, we can explore sounds and smells as well as visceral contact. Fighting is barely controlled chaos.
  • Fight scenes should also not be blow by blow physical description, a bit like sex scenes – don’t make it too clinical. It should be fast and furious and chaotic. It’s good to have a bit of experience through classes or something. Have the writing match the pace e.g. shorter sentences, less detail. When you’re fighting, you don’t have that detail. If you saw the punch coming, you would move or block. The writing cannot be slow.
  • Is there an internal sense when writing fight scenes? There is no dialogue while fighting. It never goes like that. You don’t have time, although there may be a few sharp words but no conversation. An experienced fighter will have a bit more time for internal dialogue but all a novice will do is not think or panic thoughts. There is very little coherence.
  • Training is about knowing how it feels. Something happens, we react without thinking. By practicing, you can understand how adrenalin feels and how to react but most people don’t have this.
  • Gender differences in fight scenes. Alan’s wife is a martial arts instructor as well. In books, women are often beaten on and defended by guys but I have a female protagonist who kicks ass. Can women beat a guy? Yes and no. It depends on training but there is always an advantage in big, heavy and strong. That’s why there are weight differences in pro fights. Skill and training, speed and footwork, learning the right targets to hit – these can all balance out the difference. More vulnerable targets are smaller, harder to find but women would maybe have to hit there. Women can defeat big guys but they are at a disadvantage. Women also take longer to get used to hitting anything, even pads in class. It is more confronting for girls to be violent but once they get into it, they are usually enthusiastic! So give your female protagonist some training and they will have a better chance!
  • Creating a setting that will make a fight more interesting in your writing. Whatever environment you are in, you need to use and make it real. In a bar, you need to have lots of chairs, other people, bottles, glass – use the environment. When writing, you can set up a good place to fight that is more interesting e.g. restaurant means you can move into kitchen with knives, hot water etc vs/ a field with nothing interesting to use.
  • What is the role of bystanders in a fight? How do people react? In this day and age, the first reaction is to pull out a phone and start filming for YouTube. Then some people will have nothing to do with it, they will leave or ignore it. Or the people who will call the police or try to stop it. It depends on the person and also their experience. If you do get involved, it may be dangerous. There are gender differences in reactions as well.
  • What happens after the fight? I was shocked by how exhausted I was and bruised just from a class. How do our characters feel afterwards? (in a fist fight, not a gun or knife) Chinese saying – When two tigers fight, one limps away horribly wounded, the other is dead. If you fight, you will get hurt. You will absolutely have physical results and many movies show people carrying on fine, even after concussion. You need to have a realistic recovery period. Adrenalin also has a long lasting effect on the body. That happens with real fighting too but the adrenalin will always be there. If you even get in the one punch that finishes it, you will likely hurt your hand. Being hit in the face means you can’t chew or eat. The first time a person gets hit, it is a shocking experience and many people break down. It’s unsettling. There are always effects.
  • On writing fight scene cliches. When you write the scene, go back and check whether you have transcribed a movie fight scene and rewrite. Get more chaotic and less removed from the fight. Engage emotion. Some of the cliches are true e.g. tunnel vision – so it’s more about how you deal with them. Keep the writing fast.

You can find “Write the Fight Right” on Amazon and other online bookstores. You can find Alan and his other books and short stories at AlanBaxterOnline.com and on twitter @alanbaxter

If you want to improve your own fight scene writing, you can join our Fight Scene MasterClass – click here to register your interest.

 

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

Yet Another Reason To Die As An Indie Author

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This post, by Passive Guy, originally appeared on his The Passive Voice blog.

Another good comment to the What Happens When an Author Dies post, this one from author Christopher John Chater:

My grandmother died in 2004 and had 22 published romance novels. We are now in the process of getting back her rights from Richard Curtis so the family trust can publish the work as ebooks and POD.

The contract for ereads ran out after seven years, but guess what, I asked for copies of the contracts and, now more than a month later, have yet to find them in my mail box. My aunt had an old copy of a contract and now the heirs are going to write a letter to ereads asking for the rights back.

An author has more clout with his/her agent or publisher than any of the author’s heirs who are not terrifying attorneys. Even a downtrodden and mistreated author has ways of pitching a fit that will gain some notice.

One of the many strange aspects of the publishing world is that, almost uniquely among reputable 21st century business enterprises, publishers and agents feel no need to respond to emails, calls and/or letters. Think about it. If you send an email to a large pharmaceutical company asking for product information, you’ll receive some sort of response. Ditto for Ford Motor Company, Costco and the National Guard.

Other than publishers and agents, who doesn’t promptly respond to reasonable communications these days? Al Qaeda and Mexican drug cartels come to mind.

But PG digresses.

One of the lessons we learn from Christopher’s comment is to make certain you retain copies of publishing and agency contracts old and new. Ditto for every royalty statement you receive. Remember, you’re dealing with copyrights to your books that last for 70 years after you die. These days (shamefully) publishing/agency contracts also tend to last that long.


Read the rest of the post on The Passive Voice.

We Remember

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When 9-11 happened I was working at KTRE in Lufkin,

 

 

 

 

Texas, I was upset I wasn’t covering the story more up close

 

and personal. It was my day off and my phone rang several

 

James Michael Doughty

 

4

 

times, waking me up. I listened to the messages, one of which

 

was my sister telling me she was praying for me. I turned on

 

the TV and fell to my knees. I said a quick prayer and went to

 

work. All those children left without a mother or father—it

 

was the first time I realized I wasn’t alone as the only kid

 

who would grow up without a dad.

An Indie Publishing Cost Analysis : Part 1

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The Creative Penn has a post about the cost of indie publishing wherein she describes a sliding scale of possible expenditure by the indie author. At the low end, the enterprising and spendthrift indie can publish a book for about five bucks.  At the high end, an enterprising and astoundingly wealthy indie can spend over thirty thousand to achieve basically the same thing.  Note that I said basically, not exactly; the quality and distribution channels that come with a 30K price tag will surpass what you get for five dollars.  However, really great stories remain great, even if they’re written on free napkins with a stolen pen.  The problem there is that any work published that way is not only greatly limited in circulation, but limited in lifespan, too, because napkins have their ways of getting soggy or destroyed.  While I don’t intend to release  jewel-encrusted print editions, I want something a bit more accessible and lasting than a napkin:  I want a paperback and various electronic formats.

I’m more enterprising than I am astoundingly wealthy, so even my highest expenditures must be magnitudes lower than 30K.  But how low can I go? How low should I go?  What expenses can I cut, and still get what I want?  What is the least I can spend to get a version of my book to market?

This is an excerpt from Aniko Carmean‘s blog.

How To Build A List Of Readers For Your Next Book Launch

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So you’ve written a book and you’re about to publish it. Maybe you know you’re going to write another, maybe you have six more planned in the series, or maybe you have no idea what will come next, but you think perhaps you should know who your readers are. These days we all have to market ourselves and if you can market directly to people who love your work, it’s that much easier.

You are in the most powerful position right now to capture information about your market.

If you have no website, no twitter following, no social media presence at all, no speaking platform – nothing else at all – you can still start building a list of people who like your writing.If you have all these things, you can still capture a specific list who love your books.

Simply add to the end of the book a link to a website with a sign up list.

You can do this inside your print book or at the end of your Kindle book. Even if your book is out there, you can modify your files for print on demand or ebooks. So it’s not too late for anyone.

The example right is at the end of Pentecost and www.ProphecyNovel.com points to a signup page.

How do you actually set up list-building software?

Read about the basics of list-building here. I use Aweber (affiliate link) which is one of the best and most highly reputable services as well as being easy to use. You also need a site to put it on (you can use a wordpress.com free site) and a URL if you want an easy to remember one. This one just points back to a page on this blog so nothing too exciting there but I will point it to a special page once Prophecy gets going e.g. free chapters etc.

This has the obvious benefit of giving you a list of people who liked your book enough to sign up for the next one. You can email them directly when you have your next book out or send out information prior to get the launch started early.

It also has the added benefit of giving you a kick up the ass! I get emails daily showing that people are signing up for Prophecy and every day, I think I could have made another sale. There is great power in the backlist, and great earning potential and this is a daily reminder I need to get on with the series.

How are you building a list of readers for your next launch? Does this help?

 

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

19 Ways to Get More Readers for Your Author Blog

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Author blogs are an intrinsic part of your author platform. You can get more readers for your blog. You may have read many of these ideas before, but let me ask you: How many have you done in the last 30 days?

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. You are building a media asset, and that takes time. Many of these techniques take a little effort and can be done in a few minutes a day. There is never going to be a day when you do them all at once, so look at it more like a menu.

 

  1. Write more often—if you don’t have enough traffic, write more often. This is not necessarily good news, since you may feel you already have enough to do. But when you’re growing a blog, there’s no better way to increase the energy flow to your blog than increasing the amount of energy you put into your blog.
     
  2. Write better articles—look at the last 10 articles you’ve posted to your blog. How many did people really care about? How many did you write for yourself, more than your readers? If you have to, and in contradiction to #1 above, write less frequently but better.
     
  3. Do something different—give readers a reason to come to your blog. If you’re doing what everyone else in your niche is doing, why should they? What is it that no one has done? What angle is uncovered? What insight is lacking in the conversation?
     
  4. Do something big—create a big list, a smashing resource directory, an exhaustive collection of tools, a survey of every viewpoint on a subject. Whatever it is, make it useful, the kind of thing you yourself would link to or bookmark for future reference.
     
  5. Kidnap a celebrity—interview the biggest star in your niche, or the most controversial, or the person with the biggest blog in your field. Aim as high as you can, you will be surprised. Make a regular feature of profiling or interviewing movers and shakers in your industry.
     
  6. Start an argument—disagree loudly with an established authority in your field, an “A-list” blogger, or the institutional overseers of your domain. Demand a response.
     
  7. Rant—find an injustice in your field, something blatantly unfair or a monopolistic company taking advantage of the little guy. Rant about it, invite others to contribute.
     
  8. Guest post—take your show on the road. Create a goal to contribute to someone else’s blog on a related topic once a week, once a month, whatever you can do. Query bloggers and read their archives. Fashion a headline for an article they’ll find irresistible.
     
  9. Comment—leave comments that add to the discussion, that amplify what others have said, that disagree respectfully with the author, that bring something to the table. Pick 5 or 10 blogs and stay in touch with them, commenting when appropriate.
     
  10. Upload articles—put some articles on articles sites like ezinearticles.com and make sure you link back to your blog. Use the same keywords you use in your blog posts.
     
  11. Explore your analytics—dive into your blog’s analytics to find the keywords people are using to arrive at your blog, then. . .
     
  12. Research keywords—use keyword tools to find as many keywords related to your blog as you can. Compare different forms of common terms in your field, since they can have radically different search volumes. Use this information when you write your blog posts.
     
  13. Curate content—serve up links to content elsewhere that you’ve checked out. Use your expertise and the time you spend surfing to collect links that others will find useful. Use social media to spread these links and do link posts on your blog to save others the time of finding great content.
     
  14. Run contests—have a regular contest, giveaway, prize, sweepstakes, awards or some way to create an event. Use your blog to promote it and ask participants to link back.
     
  15. Frequent forums—make a habit of commenting on forum threads that concern your topic. Like commenting, aim to improve, amplify or otherwise contribute to the ongoing conversation. Don’t forget to put a link to your blog in your signature that shows up when you post a comment.
     
  16. Give something away—put together an e-book, a PDF, a template, a checklist, a special report, a worksheet or anything else that others can get real value from. Give it away every day, not just once. Make sure people know they can share it with everyone, and remember to put a live link back to your blog in the giveaway.
     
  17. Write list posts—write the top 7 things, the best 9 widgets, the 5 things people haven’t considered, the 9 top places to get stuff, the 5 best tools for the job, and the 3 reasons list posts beat all others.
     
  18. Take a course—there are several excellent blogging courses that will teach you a huge amount about blogging and gaining traffic. Blog Mastermind is the one I used to grow this blog, and you can find others. Invest in yourself, it pays. (affiliate link)
     
  19. Ask readers—run a survey, ask for comments, ask your readers what they need, what articles they would like to read, where they are stuck, what they need help with.

Blogging is more fun, and more effective, when you have more readers. Every blogger wants more readers, but you have to spend time on more than just your writing to get that blog traffic.

Pick a couple of these ideas and put in 15 minutes today. It takes many little streams to build to a river.

Got something to add to the list?

 

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

A Book Is a Book — Or Is It?

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This post, by An American Editor, originally appeared on that blog on 9/7/11.

If we look back to the beginning of the agency model in ebooks, which began a little more than one year ago, we can find the publishers’ claimed rationale for changing models (which occurred with a mighty push from Apple): to protect ebooks from becoming mere commodities and to prevent consumers from establishing a mindset that $9.99 is the right price point. Okay, that was the rationale, coupled with a fear of Amazon becoming too powerful, that was bandied about. The question is: Were publishers successful in preventing the commoditization of books?

The reports from the Agency 6 indicate that ebooks are rapidly becoming a significant source of revenue for publishers, perhaps even their primary growth area. Latest reports show growth in ebook sales (Barnes & Noble reports 140% rise in digital sales; Hachette reports ebooks as 20% of U.S. sales and 5% of worldwide sales; Penguin and Simon & Schuster report digital as 14% and 15% of revenue, respectively; Bertelsmann/Random House reports digital sales in the first six months of 2011 as exceeding all digital sales in 2010);  and a significant decline in mass market paperbacks (down 14%). Profits are up slightly, even though volume appears to be down somewhat. All of which seems to favor the notion that the publishers did the right thing.

What we don’t know, of course, is how the sales are breaking down by price point. I can relate anecdotal evidence that the agency pricing scheme is a failure on several levels, but no data has been released that enables a careful analysis.

I’ve mentioned it before, yet it is still true: Whereas before agency pricing I bought a lot of hardcover books and ebooks from the Big 6 publishers, my purchases have declined since the institution of agency. Whereas I used to visit my local Barnes & Noble at least once a week and buy a few books each time, it has been nearly five months since I last visited the store and bought an Agency 6-published book.

If the Agency 6 intended by their action to make me accept spending more than $9.99 for an ebook, they have failed — and failed miserably – because I am pretty unwilling to accept even $9.99, let alone a higher price point, as the sweet price point. Instead, I’ve gotten used to the indie author price points of $5 and less, with less being the dominant word.


Read the rest of the post on An American Editor.

Author Ethics: A Practical Guide

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This post, by Julie Ann Dawson, originally appeared on her Tales From The Sith Witch, a Bards and Sages blog, on 9/3/11. It serves as an introduction to a more thorough project of research and analysis on the topic, so please be sure to click through on the ‘read the rest’ link at the end of this excerpt to view the supporting research notes and related essays.

 In 2004, I self published my first full length book, September and Other Stories.  I immediately began to contact some review sites in order to obtain reviews.  Some never responded.  Some responded with a “we’re sorry but we’re backlogged” excuse.  One, however, responded very firmly that “I no longer review ANY self published books.” 

It seemed like a curiously worded rejection, but reviewers have a right to review what they want so I let it go.  Since the site also offered advertising, I queried about the cost of placing a banner ad.  The response was even more firm. “Look, I don’t do business with self publishers.”

Being new to the industry, I thought I must have done something wrong and upset the site owner.  That hadn’t been my intention, so I sent her an apology for whatever it was that I did.  A couple of days later, she sent me an email apologizing for overreacting.  This led to a startling conversation. 

The reason she had stopped reviewing self published books was because she was terrified of self publishing authors.  She had received several threatening and harassing responses to perceived negative reviews of self published books.  The most recent incident and the one that convince her to stop reviewing self published books altogether, was a man who threatened to find her and rape her daughter.  She was in the process of getting a restraining order, because the man had called her house to let her know that he knew where she lived.

I wish I could say over the years this was an isolated incident.

Bad behavior is not unique to self-publishing authors.  I think most horror readers remember Anne Rice’s rather public meltdown on Amazon.com regarding negative reviews of Blood Canticle*.  John Lott used the fake persona of Mary Rosh to anonymously defend his own work and post reviews of his book More Guns, Less Crime*.  In April 2011, Dilbert creator Scott Adams admitted to engaging in sock puppetry to defend his work*.  These incidents grab our attention because of the celebrity status of those involved, but also because such public displays are thought rare.

But the media doesn’t report on public meltdowns of self publishing authors.  Nor do bloggers spend their hours unraveling the elaborate astroturfing schemes of self publishers.  Yet there is a general acceptance of the belief that such unethical behavior is far more common among self publishers than it is traditionally published authors.  And not only is it more common, but more extreme. 

*footnotes are provided for these references on the source post


Read the rest of this post about Author Ethics, and also see the supporting research notes and related essays, on Julie Ann Dawson’s Tales From The Sith Witch blog.