If you are a subscriber to this blog, please go to http://tobecomeawriter.com/ (if you haven’t) and sign up to receive email updates…I’ve just written a great new post about indie authors and book sales that you won’t want to miss 
But you won’t see it here, you have to visit the new site.
This is the last post on this blog – I hope to see you all there!
I’ve been needing to move my blog to a new WordPress site for some time now, and I finally began this process yesterday – lo and behold, fricking 24 hours later, I finally have the new site up and running…
What Does This Mean For You?
I need to ask one thing of all my loyal followers – the new site does not allow me to transfer your subscription information to the new blog…this stinks, I know. What I would ask of all of you would be to visit the new site and sign up for the blog again (it’s on the right-hand side, midway down the page and it says “Subscribe via Email”) – I know your time is extremely valuable to you, and I do apologize for the inconvenience. It will only take you a moment, and then you’ll be able to receive great posts from me in the future (I have one planned for tomorrow in fact).
Here is the new site (it’s http://tobecomeawriter.com). All future posts will come from there and this site will soon be deactivated. The new site looks very much the same and it has all the old posts for your reference. I’ll see you over there!
Many thanks!
Renee
As independent authors, or indie authors, you have a challenge that mainstream published authors do not – you are the sole person promoting your book. I recently read a post by a mainstream published author and one of her comments was that indie authors (her term was self-published authors) have a much better understanding of book promotion and author branding. She felt that almost all indie authors do a much better job of branding themselves.
I had to think about that, and my conclusion was, maybe the indie authors in her circle were great at branding themselves, but that’s not what I see (I’m purposefully not revealing this person because I thought this author seemed to reflect a bit of snobbery toward the indie author). Many authors I interact with don’t seem to understand how to sell books – it’s the difference between being a writer and a marketer. And authors (who want to sell books) have to be both.
As yourself these questions:
Promoting your book is all about marketing your book, and believe me, too many authors don’t understand marketing.
Marketing Your Book – Branding
I write mystery novels. I have the Reed Ferguson mystery series (This Doesn’t Happen In The Movies and Reel Estate Rip-off), and Nephilim Genesis of Evil, a supernatural thriller, or I could call it a horror book. You’re saying to yourself – so what? Exactly! I’m just like thousands of other authors out in cyberspace (let alone at a bookstore). As the author, I have to make readers care about my books. I have to have a brand.
What does it mean to brand yourself? Too many indie authors (and certainly mainstream authors) don’t have a clue as to what this really means. Branding isn’t just saying:
Guess what? You and every other author out there is thinking the same thing. Search on Amazon and Smashwords and see how many indie authors (and mainstream authors) make statements like that. Now, please make sure you understand what I’m saying. These are fine statements and they may absolutely be true of your books. But everyone else is saying it, too. It doesn’t let your readers know what makes you different. It doesn’t tell the reader why they should buy your book instead of the other guy’s book. When you take some time to figure out what makes your works unique from everything else out there, you’re on your way to figuring out your brand.
Marketing Your Book – The Reader Won’t Find You
In my post Indie Authors Miss Golden Opportunity, I talk about how indie authors need to really understand what constitutes quality writing before they publish. Indie authors still fight the stigma that their books, by virtue of being self-published, must not be good. My first bit of promoting advice is to always make sure your book is worthy of publication before you publish it. Once you’ve published, if you want to make any money at it, you have to know how to promote your book as well. It’s naive to think readers will just find you (there were millions of titles published last year alone) – yes, genre authors and non-fiction authors (who have a platform) do better, but there’s just too much out there to expect readers to scroll through Amazon or Barnes & Noble and stumble upon your works. You have to do things to get readers to find you. You need a platform, but you need to use it effectively.
Marketing Your Book – The Platform
Remember, you are the brand, and your books are an extension of the brand. At bare minimum, you should being using the following to promote yourself and your books:
Many authors still don’t have a blog, maybe because they don’t like the task of keeping up the blog, and that’s understandable, but you are missing out on a way of promoting your books, and your brand. But here’s the key with anything you are using for your platform. You have to use it, and use it well. If you are on Twitter and all you do is self-promote, it’s not going to work well. If you have a Facebook fan page, but you don’t ever post on it, people won’t come back. Your author website needs to look professional (this is so critical to understand that I’ll be doing a post on this soon). You absolutely need to be on Facebook and Google+. Now, I am not a fan of Facebook or Google (I’ve even harped on how I thought Google+ was not worth the time but I’ve changed my mind), but they are critical for promotion. Want to know why? Check back here because I will be showing you why they are important in future posts, but it comes down to SEO. If you don’t understand SEO, start learning. It may be the best way for readers to find you.
A Final Thought
Remember, there are tons of books out there. In this new age of publishing, there is a lot of crap out there, too. Laura Miller (senior writer at Salon.com) wrote an interesting piece about this in 2010. It’s a bit sarcastic, but it makes a great point about readers and bad writing and bad books. Just think where things are now as we near 2012, with so many more indie authors publishing books. There’s even more to choose from.
You are the brand. You have to promote yourself. You have to make it happen. Good luck!
REMINDER – contest for a FREE KINDLE – and I decided to throw in some free books! This contest is about to end so don’t wait! Mystery novels, great crime fiction, and horror books – how can you miss this? Visit www.reneepawlish.com for all the details.
Hey all, I’d like to take a moment to promote myself I am in a blog tour from December 5th through the 16th. This is a great opportunity to check out my Reed Ferguson mystery series (great crime fiction with a dose of film noir), and learn a bit about how I wrote my supernatural thriller (some would say horror book) Nephilim Genesis of Evil. Writing mystery novels is hard word, but promoting your books is even harder. I would greatly appreciate your help in letting your followers know about this tour. There are opportunities for free books and a chance to read some great interviews.
The Blog Tour Schedule
December 5: It’s Raining Books
December 6: Lisa Haselton’s Reviews and Interviews
December 7: Books Read ‘N’ Makeup Done
December 8: The Character Connection
December 9: Adventure Into Romance
December 12: Lindsay’s Scribblings
December 12: (2nd stop) Long and Short Reviews Guest
December 13: The Plot Thickens
December 15: REVIEW ONLY: Reviews By Molly
December 16: Kathryn Lively – Award Winning Mystery Author
I’ll be stopping by each one to interact with everyone. Check out some great sites where you’ll get a chance to learn a bit more about me, and of course, about the Reed Ferguson mystery series.
I hope you’ll stop by!
REMINDER – contest for a FREE KINDLE – and I decided to throw in some free books! Mystery novels, great crime fiction, and horror books – how can you miss this? Visit www.reneepawlish.com for all the details.
Promoting your books is just as important as writing the books. If you don’t believe me, consider my post Guerilla Online Marketing For Authors, where I shared that there were over a million ISBN numbers issued last year along (and this doesn’t include indie publications). If you want sales, you have to learn how to market a book. You have to help the readers find you. I am a mystery author – I write crime fiction and horror books. I have plenty of mystery stories available. But I have to tell people about me and Facebook is one way to do this.
How To Market a Book – Facebook Insights
I’ve created a short video that talks just a bit about landing pages (or welcome pages) and also about Facebook Insights. I hope that after viewing this, you’ll understand how far-reaching Facebook can be, and how much of an impact Facebook fan pages can have in promoting your books.
In the video, I mentioned a class I run on creating dynamic Facebook fan pages. If you would like more information, click here.
REMINDER – contest for a FREE KINDLE – and I decided to throw in some free books! Mystery novels, great crime fiction, and horror books- how can you miss this? Visit www.reneepawlish.com for all the details.
If you’ve been following my recent posts, you know I wrote one called Indie Writers Miss Golden Opportunity. I talk a lot about learning to write, so I thought I would do some posts about this topic because I am getting asked about writing techniques and writing skills. It seems like it’s time to address some of this for the indie writer (and other writers too). So let’s get the Writers Workshop started!
Learning to Write
Let’s face it, learning to write is not easy – but many people seem to think it is. Crafting a quality novel takes a lot more than just a grasp of your native language. There are many subtle nuances that can improve writing and make your novel scintillating and hard to put down. Today we’re addressing…
Passive Voice
First, you have to understand the active voice: the subject of the sentence performs the action. In passive voice, the subject of the sentence is acted upon. This may not seem like a big deal, but read these two sentences:
Reed discovered that his neighbor was a thief.
It was discovered by Reed that his neighbor was a thief.
The first one is a much stronger statement, and usually in fiction writing, you want to have strong, powerful sentences that move a story forward. The active voice conveys much better than the passive voice (yes, there are exceptions). Certainly in mystery and thriller novels, my genre, you would want to use active voice because this heightens the suspense and thrills.
Writing Practice
In my last post, I said that a great, brave person stepped up and said he would let me post a snippet of his work for critique. He had submitted this to me personally and I gave my suggestions, and I’m sharing a bit here because it’s great to get real examples to work from. I hope that you will chime in with quality pointers yourself, but please be respectful – this is about all of us learning to improve our writing
Thunder boomed again and again, the thick clouds marched to its beat, effortlessly smothering the sun. Blayke’s fingers sank further into the darkening puddle until he was shocked by something rough and icy, too large to close his hand around; certainly not the frog he was hoping for. The young boy was afraid and tried to let go of the object but his hand was inexplicably stuck.
I’ve highlighted the passive phrases here – it’s a bit of a rewrite but my suggestions would be something like his hand struck something rough and icy. He jerked his hand away. This SHOWS the action and it gives the reader a more powerful visual than he was shocked does. I think the other two bolded statements could be rewritten as well.
When the last morsel was gone she stood, “Well Flux, I suppose it’s time to pack up my whole life. Do you think it’s too late to change her mind?” Flux didn’t answer, just led the way to the door.
Some might call this nitpicking, but what if the writer said when the last morsel disappeared…it’s a stronger way of saying the same thing.
Applying This To The Entire Novel
If you think about the above paragraphs, it’s easy to say this is just a little bit, no big deal. But a whole novel written this way is a different story (punny) all together. Yes, there are times when the passive voice is better, and maybe even necessary. But overall, you want to avoid this because it drags your writing down.
So, I again thank my anonymous writer for allowing me to use a bit of his work as an example. Please weigh in with your comments so we can all learn. Thanks!
REMINDER – contest for a FREE KINDLE – and I decided to throw in some free books! Mystery novels, thriller novels, horror novels – how can you miss this? Visit www.reneepawlish.com for all the details.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a very controversial post that I titled Indie Authors Are Killing Great Writing. For the record, I am an indie author with a number of well-received books. I am also a supporter of indie authors. Believe it or not, that’s why I wrote the post.
Independent Writers Have It Tough
Many people agreed with me. In fact, one tweet read: “At last! Someone finally says it!” Another said: “Indie pub = more responsibility on writer”. Again, I’m not trying to bash indie authors, I’m pointing out the fact that any author should hone his or her craft before publishing. Most authors don’t write something worthy of being published on their first try or even their second or third. It takes time to develop your writing skills before you truly know and understand how to write a compelling story. It’s said that to master a craft takes at least 10,000 hours – I wonder how many indie authors have put that many hours into their craft (more on this below)…
My point is that as an indie author, you have a lot of hurdles to overcome. There are millions of books being published each year. It can be difficult to find readers for your books, and you don’t want to, nor can you afford to, alienate readers by publishing something bad. If you don’t believe me, read this comment my other post received from someone who does reviews:
Renee, every time I see a novel full of errors, it drives me crazy. They are glaring and so obvious that it blows me away the author didn’t correct them. The vast majority of the time, it is indies who do this. For every ten indie books I read, at least seven will have this problem to some degree. Does it stop me from reading them? No, it doesn’t, but my expectations have been lowered because of it. You simply can’t expect as much.
As a book reviewer, I have gotten very frustrated with authors nagging my reviews or even commenting on them just because I pointed problems with their work. If they can’t handle criticism, then they shouldn’t release their writing to the public and ask people to pay for it. If I’m spending my hard-earned money (even if it’s only 99 cents), and using my limited time for reading, I expect the author to have produced a quality product for me to enjoy. Yet some of them get angry at me for saying even one thing is wrong with their book. This causes quite a bit of frustration, but I haven’t given up. Finding those Indie gems makes it all worth the trouble, even if some readers aren’t as patient as I am and will only read trad published books. Yet it shouldn’t be such a difficult process to find good books. You are absolutely right that standards seem to be considerably lower for what everyone thinks is good enough to be published since the advent of ebooks.
That’s just one comment. Believe me, there are a lot of people who feel this way. And along with alienating readers, why would you want to put out a story before you’d had some neutral feedback, quality editing and so on? Don’t you want to put out something of quality?
But Mainstream Publishing Companies Publish Crap
What’s wrong with pointing out that there is a plethora of indie crap out there? Some say this is not supporting indie authors. I disagree. Authors need to be self-critical. They need to hear the bad – that’s how they improve.
Now, many pointed out that there is crap being published by mainstream publishing companies, and I responded there, and now here, that this isn’t the point. Who cares if there is crap from mainstream presses? But as I’ve thought about this more, I also think there is another response.
Remember Roxanne, with Steve Martin? The bully in the bar picks a fight with Martin by calling Martin Big Nose. What is Martin’s response? “You have this in front of you, and all you can think of is Big Nose.”
Indie Authors Miss a Golden Opportunity
We have bad publishing by way of the mainstream publishers. Our response shouldn’t be just to point that out. We have a golden opportunity here! We should be trying to rise above that standard, not meeting it. Wouldn’t it be nice if people thought, “Wow, an indie author! I love reading indie authors because they consistently publish works that are better by far than what I get from the mainstream publishers!” But this isn’t the case. In my opinion, you have tons of bad stuff out there – it far exceeds the occasional gem. And that’s unfortunate because:
This is the BIGGEST point that I’m hoping to help some of you (who care to listen) to avoid. I wrote on a previous post about an author who published something, got numerous reviews about how he needs to work on his writing, and in his author bio section he asked his readers to stick with him and that he was going to get the book edited and people could read it again. It’s too late! You’ve lost your readers. I know, some of you are going to point out that some readers will check back. Maybe, but the vast majority won’t. And you, the author, have lost market share. Maybe that doesn’t matter to you. But if you do want sales, and you dream of quitting your day job, you can’t afford to alienate your readers. That’s why I’m encouraging you to know that your book is great before you publish it.
How to Master Your Craft
As I pointed out above, it’s said that you need 10,000 hours to master something (Stephen King and JA Konrath talk about this, as do many other respected authors). How many of you have mastered writing before you publish? How many of you publish your first book? I have news for you – if you publish the first book you wrote, statistics would say it’s probably not very good. I’m speaking from my own experience here, as well as from hearing from multiple published authors that I’ve visited with at conferences. My first two books are written well, meaning I have a grasp of the English language and I don’t have tons of grammatical errors, but the stories don’t really work. They don’t engage the reader. They run off on rabbit trails that don’t advance the story. They use passive voice. They switch viewpoints when they shouldn’t. And so on, and so on.
Have you mastered your craft? Do you even know? Are you scared of rejection? Is your ego in the way of hearing positive criticism? These are things to ask yourself.
What Makes Good Writing?
A reader of my other post asked for some feedback. I gave it to this person, and he has agreed to let me share a few paragraphs of his writing. I’ll be posting this soon and I hope you’ll join in the conversation, both to help this other author and myself – let’s face it, there are always learning opportunities.
Before You Bash Me
Yes, I agree that there are wonderful indie authors out there. I would include myself on that list (based solely on reviews and sales). Yes, if there was only mainstream publishing, readers would miss out on many great reads. Yes, the ebook revolution is giving us indies a chance to get our works out there. Those are not and never should be arguments for publishing a bad novel.
We have a golden opportunity to rise above the bad books out there. Let’s make the BEST of it!
REMINDER – contest for a FREE KINDLE (and I decided to throw in some free books)! Visit www.reneepawlish.com for all the details.
Bert Carson’s Blog
