We’ve all heard the statistics of the odds of getting published as a writer. The stat most often thrown around is less than one percent of stories submitted for publication are ever actually accepted and published, let alone make any money from it.

Some look at the act of being published like a lottery, like it’s a matter of chances and getting lucky.

My friend was in the pro rodeo bareback circuit (ranked in the top 10 in the US by winnings) and happened to have a layover in Phoenix, so he delayed his connecting flight and went out to the little rodeo in my town. I took the family to see him ride. Now I’ve been to a few rodeos and enjoy the events but know very little about form and technique. I’d tell you he rode well because he didn’t fall off during the eight seconds, but beyond that, I couldn’t tell you why his score was significantly higher than the others that also didn’t fall off.

After the event, he told me that the other riders hated that he showed up because usually those with his skills and winnings stayed away from the small time rodeos, giving others a chance to start winning something. I guess it’d be like Stephen King entering a local writing contest and making off with the grand prize of $100.

I asked him what he did that the other riders didn’t do and he tried to explain that he was scraping the bronco high on the shoulder with his spur and that made the animal jump higher and buck better in a sort of pattern. He definitely knew and understood his craft, though it made little sense to me.

As an aspiring writer, I thought my craft was great until a writing group set me straight, and a friend, and an editor, and another, and another. My point is that as I’ve grown as a writer, my understanding of my craft has changed and now I see that my work from a couple years ago was just awful.

A writer might have as much chance of getting on the pro rodeo circuit as getting published, but it isn’t a lottery. It’s a matter of getting back on the horse every time and writing better. Those one percent didn’t just wake up one day and decide to write a publishable piece. They wrote, got rejected, wrote some more, improved, got rejected some more, and improved some more until they developed enough skill to get published.

There is a great writing seminar to add to one’s proverbial belt, where Kevin J Anderson discusses his popcorn theory. To get the full gist, you’ll need to attend Superstars and it’s so worth it, I’m going again, so maybe we’ll see each other there. But in brief, the seminar gave me an idea that I should take every chance I came across to write. “I can do that,” as Kevin put it.

And I have done that. I was invited to guest post with the Fictorians and then invited back several times. I went out of my way to be on time and do a good job, which probably led to their inviting me to write for the Fictorians as a full fledge member.

I also started a personal blog. It’s a journal of sorts and discusses my personal spiritual journey, but there seems to be a niche for it. I’ve tried to post about once a month and each posting receives around five hundred hits. If I ever get anything published, these five hundred may be interested in reading something else that I’ve written.

I’ve also been asked to write articles at work. I’m in finance and my main job is as a CFO of a biotech firm. I’ve written a couple articles for the firm (and it’s a great source for research and ideas related to my sci-fi stories).

Not to long ago I took on a client that deals in antiques. There was a local paper known as the Antique Register and I wrote an article for it. They liked it so much that they asked if they could put it in their national paper known as the Country Register that distributes from California to Rhode Island and Canada. So now I’m on my third article. They’ve sent me dozens of the different editions from all over the nation and Canada each with my articles in them.

This led to me submitting articles for two other papers.

In the meanwhile I’m working on a couple novels and searching for an agent that can help me sell a finished historical fiction.

My goal is to get published and I can see that I’ve come along way and I think I am getting close, but I still continue to improve and write and work at bettering my craft. And I do that by writing wherever, whatever, however I can. If there are enough popcorn kernels in the pan, something is bound to pop eventually if I keep stirring it up and adding heat. I’ll see you on the pro circuit.

I live in Arizona with my family, wife and five kids and a little dog. I write fiction, thrillers and soft sci-fi with a little short horror on the side. I’ve got an MBA and work in finance for a biotechnology firm.I volunteer with the Boy Scouts, play and write music, and enjoy everything outdoors. I’m also a novice photographer.You can visit my author website at www.jacekillan.com, and you can read some of my works by visiting my Wattpad page.

Getting Noticed

June 13, 2015

fictorians

Branding Business Guest Posts Interacting With Fans Marketing Professional Behavior Sean Golden 2 Comments

A guest post by Sean Golden.

You’ve done it. You’ve finally finished your first novel. After months or years of tears, sweat and blood, your baby is about to meet the world. But if you are self-publishing, or have an Indie publisher, you may find yourself not only the author, but also your book’s primary marketer and promoter. So what do you do?

No matter how brilliant your novel is, if nobody sees it, nobody will buy it. How do you break out of the gray mass of obscurity and catch the attention of potential buyers? My first novel didn’t break any sales records, but if a couple thousand sales in the first four months sounds interesting to you, here’s the approach I took, broken into three main areas:

Proper presentation (cover, blurb, categories, etc.)
Social media
Reviews

Proper Presentation:

Presentation starts with the categories and keywords you associate with your book. Categories and keywords determine the genre lists and search results in which your book will ultimately appear. There are few decisions you will make that will ultimately impact your sales more than which categories and keywords you choose to associate with your book. Paradoxically, the more you sell, the more important this is due to the algorithms online book sellers use to present readers with purchasing options. Choosing the wrong categories and keywords is like presenting a selection of shoes to a shopper looking for hats. Amazon.com provides this excellent guide to categories and keywords.

Once you have your book appearing in the appropriate lists and search results, the next thing a reader will see is your cover. A good cover is more than nice artwork and title text. To get your cover to stand out, I suggest that it accomplish three specific things:

Be readable in the most common online thumbnail sizes
Match genre expectations
Have dynamic, eye-catching artwork

The purpose of your cover is to encourage a reader to click on it. Nothing screams “self-published” like an amateurish cover. If you can’t create professional quality art yourself, find someone else to do it for you. Keep in mind that your art will be scaled down in the thumbnails. Once a reader clicks on the thumbnail, they will be presented with your book’s summary page, which is where they will (hopefully) read your blurb. If the blurb catches their imagination, there’s a chance they’ll click “Buy.” It’s beyond the scope of this post to explain how to write a good blurb, but here’s one article with excellent advice.

Your book’s presentation should be viewed as the bedrock of your strategy. Everything else you do will drive people to the page with your book cover and blurb. Even if you can tease them with an online ad, if they get to your book summary page and the cover is lackluster, not genre specific, or the blurb doesn’t sell them, they won’t click “buy.”

Social Media:

Let’s assume that you have that foundation in place. The next goal is to get people to land on that summary page. This is where social media comes in. And social media means more than just Facebook and Twitter. My daughter, Sarah Golden, is my social media guru. When I first self-published Warrior, I did a short post on Facebook letting my friends and family know that I had a book out. I dragged my Twitter account out of mothballs and started Tweeting. But that only gave me a small boost in sales for about a week.

Then Sarah jumped in. She either created, or had me create, accounts on multiple social media platforms including an author page on Facebook. Here’s the page she created for my novel on Pinterest. I also joined Goodreads and created an author and a book page there. Then I joined other reader or author blogs, such as KBoards. The results of Sarah’s social media campaign were striking. My sales went from a few per day, to twenty per day and higher. Pinterest allows me to give my readers content that lets them see a lot more about the story than I can squeeze into a Facebook post. It also allows others to post their own content.

The real value of social media is that it allows readers to get to know the author. I try hard not to use my author blog as merely another way to ask people to buy my books. I try to give them an idea of who I am, what I enjoy, what I’m doing and how I write. The more human and approachable I am to readers, the more likely they are to be interested in what I write. I also try to interact in the reading/writing community, attending conventions, writing blurbs for other authors, etc. Kevin James Anderson gives a lot of great advice, but perhaps the best advice he has given me is “Don’t be a jerk.” And that means online as well as in person.

Reviews:

While reviews don’t immediately get you noticed, they are part of your book’s presentation whether you like it or not. Self-published books have a reputation for poor grammar, plot holes and other ills that traditional publishers work hard to avoid. If your book has reviews warning about those things, savvy readers will shy away even if you have a great presentation. Reviews that are critical of your plot or story are painful, but readers expect that. What will kill your sales are reviews saying the book is difficult to read due to poor writing or editing. If you get such reviews, revise and re-publish your book.

Final Thoughts:

If there is one thing that you take away from reading this, I hope it is the importance of presentation: cover, blurb, category, and keywords. All the effort and money spent on driving readers to your book’s landing page will be wasted if the reader gets there and isn’t convinced the product is worth their money. Good luck!

Sean Golden Bio:

I’ve had a long and varied career outside of writing, starting as a construction worker putting glass in high-rise office buildings while I was working my way through college seeking a degree in physics. After graduation I ended up writing Macintosh programs and creating a Mac software product for a software company. Eventually I took over as Publisher of all of the software products before leaving to become a project manager of software development in a Fortune 500 company. That led to a 20 year career in corporate software development that ended in December of 2014 when I decided it was time to retire from the corporate rat race.During all of those years I wrote and published technical articles and stories for the local newspaper. But I never published my first novel until January 2015. Now I am writing full time and intend for this to be my last career. I have had stories half-written or outlined in my desk for decades, and now it is time to get them on paper and out to the public.I am happily married, and have been for almost 30 years now, and have raised two kids. My literary interests are varied, but I primarily read and write science fiction or epic fantasy.

Marketing 101

June 12, 2015

fictorians

Business Doug Dandridge Guest Posts Marketing No Comments

A guest post by Doug Dandridge.

I’m not sure if you can call me the world’s greatest expert on self-marketing. However, since I am closing in on 130,000 book sales in thirty-four months, I must be doing something right. I have made over $300,000.00 in that time period, and am a full time working author. In this blog, I will give a quick rundown on some of the things I have done. I will go ahead and plug a book I wrote which is available on Amazon called How I Sold 100,000 Books On Amazon. I’ve heard from some people who read the book and reported increased success. I don’t have time to go into everything in this brief essay, but will cover what I think are the most important points. Of course, most important is to write a book that a lot of people will want to read when you put it out there. But that is of no use if you can’t attract people to give it a try.

Establish a web presence. You want your name, not just the name of your book, to take up the top slots in a Google search. There are several things I did here. First, I established a web site, with a lot of outgoing links, which hopefully will help generate more incoming links. This will raise it up in the search algorithms. Next I established a blog. I was able to get domain names for both blog and website that were my name, dougdandridge, one with a .com, one with a .net. I went on Amazon and Goodreads and rated a hell of a lot of books I had read, and left actual reviews for most of them. Blog when you can. It doesn’t have to be daily, and don’t just blog on how people can buy your book. Blog on things of interest around the topics of your books. I do blogs on armor, modern and future weapons, tropes, movies, all kinds of stuff, and then also do a couple of blogs, with excerpts, whenever I put out a book. And don’t let the number of subscribers put you off. I only have about a 150 subscribers, but my blog, published about every other week, gets hundreds of views a day. That’s because I also tweet the blog, with hashtags, and post it on a number of Facebook pages frequented by people interested in fantasy, scifi or ebooks in general. Also do blogs for other people when asked, and ask them if they don’t get around to it. I have done blogs for people like David Farland, and for people who have less than fifty subscribers. I feel like it is a reciprical effort, helping both parties. The result is that I have the top twenty slots on Google for Doug Dandridge now. When I started out I was on page two with one entry, and there aren’t that many Doug Dandridges out there to compete with.

Advertise your other books in each of your books, with hyperlinks to make it easy for readers to get to them. I also have a newsletter, which, while it has slightly less than 300 subscribers, has a much better than average opening rate. The newsletter is probably responsible for a couple of hundred early sales of each book, driving them up the genre charts, which gets even more attention. Reviews are important, probably as much as anything. Not actually what they said, but how they rate you, and the average of those ratings. Do not buy reviews. Repeat, do not buy reviews. But if anyone compliments you, on Facebook, your blog or by email, ask them if they will give you a review. One review I got was a three star for another series, but he complimented me on my Exodus series, and I asked him is we would be kind enough to write a review for one of those books. I got another five star review out of that transaction.

I got started with Amazon giveaways. I have given away almost 16K ebooks, and several of those giveaways have driven my sales. The trick is to not just do the giveaway, but to advertise those dates. I use Author’s Marketing Club, which has a free page where you can visit sites that let you advertise your free book. Most of the sites are free, some charge a nominal fee, but it’s worth it. You also blog and tweet the giveaway. How well have they worked? In September of 2012 I gave away 4,100 copies of The Deep Dark Well, a book which has sold almost 6,000 copies since. When I released the first of my Exodus: Empires at War books, it started flying off the Amazon servers. In May 2014 I did a giveaway of that very Exodus book, just after releasing book 6. I gave away 4,900 copies of book 1. The five Exodus books were selling between fifty and a hundred books a month at that time. After the giveaway, each volume sold over five hundred copies in May, including the one I had just given away. Over two thousand books, for over six thousand dollars in royalties. Cha ching. So they are still useful, if done properly.

Twitter is a big part of my platform. And twitter doesn’t work well at all when you’re just starting out. What I did was join an indie author’s site, Independent Authors Network, and started retweeting the tweets from some of their most followed authors. Eventually I was tweeting about fifty authors, and when I started to tweet my own books, I was being retweeted to several hundred thousand followers. And I learned about hashtags, which get your tweets in front of people who are not following you or anyone you know. Hootsuite was also useful in scheduling tweets around the clock, so I could get my message in front of fans in Australia.

And those are my basic steps for getting some notice. Some may work well for you, some may not. Among the strategies that don’t work are paid advertisements. Among others that work well are volunteering to do essays on other blogs, like this one. Or, as Kevin J. Anderson says when offered an opportunity that might help, “I can do that.”

Doug Dandridge Bio:
Doug Dandridge is a Florida native, Army veteran and ex-professional college student who spent way too much time in the halls of academia. He has worked as a psychotherapist, drug counselor, and, most recently, for the Florida Department of Children and Families. An early reader of Heinlein, Howard, Moorcock and Asimov, he has always had a love for the fantastic in books, TV and movies. Doug started submitting science fiction and fantasy in 1997 and collected over four hundred rejection letters. In Decmeber of 2011 he put his first self-publishing efforts online. He currently has 26 books on Amazon, with two more due out over the summer. After a slow 8 month start, he has sold over 125,000 copies of his work in a 33 month period, and his Exodus: Empires at War science fiction series has placed five consecutive books at the number one rank on the Amazon.UK Space Opera and Military Science Fiction lists, and top five on Amazon.US. He has been published in Kevin J. Anderson’s Five By Five military science fiction anthology, and has been invited to submit to several others. He quit his day job in March 2013, and has since made a successful career as a self-published author

Goodreads Giveaway

June 11, 2015

Frank Morin

Frank Morin Giveaways 3 Comments

There are lots of pros and cons to Goodreads, and everyone who uses it has an opinion. If you’ve never used Goodreads, it’s explained as a facebook-like social media for readers. You can track books you want to read, you’re currently reading, and those you’ve read. You can rate books, leave reviews, join chats, and browse many lists. There are a lot of good features.

The cons to Goodreads usually tie back to bad behaviors of other Goodreads users. I won’t go into that since I’ve been lucky enough not to run afoul of any of the Goodreads trolls I’ve heard so much about. I’ll just say, it can be a useful site but, as with everything, tread with caution and don’t allow others to dictate how you feel about yourself.

For me, Goodreads has been a good thing. I enjoy seeing what friends are reading and following other authors I enjoy. One of the features of Goodreads I was slow to take advantage of is the Goodreads Giveaways, but they can be great for readers and for authors.

For readers, it’s easy to sign up for many giveaways, entering for chances to win free physical copies of books that look interesting. It’s a no-risk way to perhaps explore a new author’s work.

For authors, setting up a giveaway is a very inexpensive way to reach hundreds or even thousands of potential readers. How do they work?

First, you have to decide how many copies of your book (ARC copies or final, published copies) you plan to give away, and to which countries you’re willing to ship to. The cost of the books and the shipping is all yours to swallow.

Next, design your giveaway.

The simplest approach is to add your cover, title, and a brief blurb. That’s all you need and you can launch the giveaway. You specify the start and end dates of the giveaway, and let it rip. This works, but there are tons of giveaways running, and the downside is it’s hard to find a specific book among the long lists of giveaways. So it’s easy to get lost in the flood. I’ve found that most of the readers you snag to sign-up for your giveaway are won in the first days and in the final days of the giveaway, when it’s near one end of the list or the other. It’s easier for people to find them.

There’s a simple way to increase your discovery rate and boost the number of readers who sign up for the giveaway. To do so, you must make a secondary giveaway image.

As you can see, it’s a pretty simple thing to put together. But this image displays larger than the basic cover and helps pop out from the long lists of plain giveaways when readers are scanning the page, helping to draw their gaze. If you have a great cover and an enticing one-liner, you can get them to add the book.

For Set in Stone, my first giveaway, over 1000 people signed up for the giveaway – 2 signed hardcover copies. Even better, over 500 people added Set in Stone to their “To Read” queue! Not everyone is going to eventually buy the book, but by clicking that they want to read it, the chances are higher. That’s five hundred potential sales by investing a few minutes in setting up the giveaway, plus the cost of a couple of hardcovers plus shipping. If I hadn’t listed Set in Stone in the giveaway, none of those people would have known anything about it and none of them would have even considered reading it.

I did a local book launch for Set in Stone and did everything I could to let folks in my circles know about it, but the Goodreads giveaway allowed me to reach beyond my normal circles. The book has sold pretty well in its first month since being released, and I believe that at least part of that success is due to the Goodreads giveaway helping me reach a wider audience.

Here’s the image we just designed for the giveaway of Memory Hunter, an alternate history novel I’m releasing July 24^th. It’s an awesome book with an incredible cover, and is available already for pre-order here. I’m hoping it will catch a lot of readers’ attention.

Anyone interested in checking out a currently live giveaway, or even signing up for the free hardcovers, here’s the link to my giveaway.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Memory Hunter

by Frank Morin

Giveaway ends July 17, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

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