US Road Trip
)COLIN ANDERSON/BLEND IMAGES LLC / GETTY
Longing to hit the open road but unwilling to suffer the potential health risks at this uneasy moment in history? If months of self-isolation has left you feeling a bit restless—particularly in these temptingly bright days of early summer—you’re not alone. But you’re also not alone in your hesitancy to begin traveling again. And for all my fellow would-be explorers: you’re in luck.
Guest Post by Yen Cabag
Nowadays, writing is only one part of becoming a successful book author. The other part is something many aspiring authors frown upon, but it is absolutely necessary: Building an author platform.
Does every author need an author platform?
One way of looking at it is this: let’s say you were buying makeup or some other beauty product, and you went online looking for a website and couldn’t find any. How would that make you feel? Wouldn’t it make you wonder if the product was manufactured in some grimy garage? Chances are, you would think twice about buying it again!
As an author, you also face a similar challenge: Readers will be more comfortable buying books from someone they’re relatively familiar with. And the other side of the picture is just as important: Publishers and bookstores are always more willing to take on someone who has a solid following.
An author platform refers to the name you build as an author, which includes the number of people that you reach. The bigger your following, the bigger audience you have for anything you publish. This makes publishers more willing to invest in your book and gives you a greater chance for more people to know about your book!
Maintain a blog. The key here is to think of giving value to others. Creating a blog gives you a place where you can offer your thoughts for free. Focus on developing useful content, and the more people that you end up helping, the bigger the chance that they will be interested in anything else you have to say.
One important note: when you blog, be sure to learn the basics of search engine optimization (SEO), since that will help the public find your posts.
Offer giveaways. Connected with giving value, people love giveaways. Just make sure you present the giveaways as something celebratory, and not as a desperate ploy to get people to do stuff for you.
Build your email list. As you start your website and blog, find ways to build an email list. People who sign up for free reports or free inside information that you give away on your blog can be a good audience for future marketing programs for your book.
Remember to choose the book promotion sites that match your genre. Some book promotion sites focus only on specific genres, so knowing which ones work best for you can save you a lot of effort.
Be effective on social media. Different people have different views on the role of social media in building an author platform. In any case, choose the social media outlet that you are most comfortable with, as that will shine through in the way you post updates. For example, some authors prefer to use Facebook, while others are more comfortable with Twitter or Instagram. The key is to choose what you enjoy using, so that you can do it without any pressure.
When you write a series, you hope your readers will start the journey as you did — with the first book. That may not always be the case. Readers may pick up a book midway through the series or find one out of sequence that grabs their attention. As a writer, it’s your challenge to ensure that any book in a series is a satisfying, engaging experience.
This may seem contradictory to the concept of a series, but each book must stand on its own, two feet. Sure, readers in mid-series will miss a lot of what happened before, but you can’t bring all of that forward (Hopefully they’ll be inspired to go back and start at the beginning!) However, they’ll need to have enough backstory to get firm footing in that one, individual book. If it’s not there, they’ll get confused, frustrated, and set your book aside.
Informational lists are handy but not entertaining. Weave backstory in as part of a conversation, a physical description, or a particular place, date, or time. “Her mind alerted her to the trauma she’d endured the last time she was in the glade.” Now you have the perfect opening to provide some details the reader needs without knocking them over the head with them. “He had the telltale, mis-matched eyes of his biological father, not the one who raised him.” What about the eyes? Who is the real father? What happened to him? Now you’ve piqued the interest of your reader. The subtle bits you weave not only help your reader with the current book they’re reading, it can also inspire them to go back and learn more about your characters and their relationships in the earlier books.
As the name suggests, the concept of “self” publishing centers around the idea of an author bringing a book to market on their own.
It’s a fact that many writers covet the idea of being able to publish their fiction and non-fiction works without having to jump through the typical hoops, barriers and gatekeepers associated with the industry such as publishing agents and houses.
The advent of self-publishing has made it relatively easy for just about anyone to turn their thoughts and ideas into a manuscript that can then be published in print or digital format with just a fraction of the time, effort and money that it used to take with one of the more traditional avenues.
If you’ve already been flying solo with your book publishing efforts you may feel like you can find your success without help from anyone else. You definitely can, however, even the most independent self-publisher can benefit from combining their efforts with the efforts of others in order to achieve a mutually beneficial and common goal.
One example of this is using cross promotional marketing to improve the visibility of your brand and offers.
What is Cross Promotional Marketing?
Cross promotional marketing means targeting customers interested in a specific product with the promotion of a different but related product.
Here’s an example….
Imagine that you’ve just written a book that teaches readers about the basics of starting an online business. Next, imagine that you’d previously written a book that outlines the steps one needs to take in order to start a WordPress blog.
How Do You Market Using Cross Promotion?
If you’re wondering exactly how cross promotional marketing works and how you can use it to improve your book selling prospects, there are several different methods you can try that each have the potential to boost your business results.
Imagine for a second that you could double, triple or quadruple your audience overnight with just a click of a button? What would it mean for your business to have 4 or more times the pre-qualified eyeballs than you have now seeing your offers on a regular basis?
It is very possible if you partner with other authors and cross promote your offers to each other’s lists.
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| Examples of Proboscis in a sentence
“At the zoo I had the chance to watch an anteater use its proboscis to stir up the dirt and eat insects.” “The garden was planted with flowers known to have pollen to attract bees and other insects with a proboscis.” |
Today’s post is by Sharon Harrigan (@harrigan_sharon), whose novel Half is available now.
Writing about the people you are closest to can be one of the most rewarding experiences a writer can have—but also the scariest. This is a big topic, so I will cover it in two parts. First: what to put on the page. And second: how to deal with your subjects’ reactions to what you write about them.
Let’s start, as some of my favorite memoirs do, with a cliffhanger. Here is what you should not do: When your publisher gives you a January 1 deadline for submitting the final manuscript, you should not print out a copy for each of your family member-characters and send those copies all at the same time, which guarantees you will receive their responses right before Christmas.
But who would do that? Such recklessness would be really dumb, right? I know. At least I know now. But I’ll get back to my own experience later—so you can learn from my mistakes. First, let’s talk about best practices when writing about your family. (All quotes are from Writing Hard Stories, edited by Melanie Brooks.)
One way to invite writer’s block is to imagine the people you are writing about looking over your shoulder. “I try to just write alone and worry about the publishing part later,” Joan Wickersham says. “My feeling is you can write whatever you want, and then you think about it again when it’s time to publish.”
Richard Hoffman adds, “Writing and publishing are two different things. Don’t confuse them. As soon as you start thinking, I could never publish that, then the censor is in the room with you crossing stuff out as fast as you can write it. You can’t work that way.”
What kind of reactions will you get from your family—whether they see the memoir before or after it is published? I posed this question to an online group of memoirists and received a wide range of answers. Some told me their families had threatened to sue or cut them out of their wills. One writer said her sister refused to talk to her for a long time, but she thought the rift was caused by jealousy not injury. And sometimes people respond in surprising ways. Instead of wanting you to take them out of your book, they will complain because they are not in the spotlight more. Edwidge Danticat says, “My brothers asked why the book was all about me. I said, Because I’m the one writing it.”
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe first thing that authors often ask me is: “How do I get on the Today show?” When you ask this question what you actually want to know are some of the ways to get more big media exposure for your book, especially on a national scale. But if you take a look at the Today show or any large national show for that matter, you’ll see that most of them don’t showcase more than four books a year. That means that it’s really on you, the author, to find more creative ways to pitch yourself. This is something we’ll continue to break down in a series of podcasts and blogs.
Try to assume that you only get so many contacts with a single news outlet or with a particular individual, so make each one count! Educate yourself on your specific market and stay on top of that market as it appears in the news. What I recommend for our authors is to set up news alerts for the market they’re planning on targeting.
News alerts are a great way to ground yourself in how competitive your topic is, and who’s making the cut. It’s important to check out the people who are getting interviewed – I’m willing to bet they already have a solid platform behind them, that they’re putting out content regularly, and that they have at least one great social media account. Remember that successful people have put in a lot of work to get where they are.
Remember that you’re in the process of building your resume and that means that nothing is too small. In fact, lots of seemingly “small” opportunities particularly stand out when you take the next step, versus having nothing on your media resume and expecting somewhere like Today or the New York Times to take a big chance on you – spoiler alert: they want a sure thing!
Today’s post is by editor and book coach Sandra Wendel.
Today’s post is by editor and book coach Sandra Wendel.
Imagine the first writer’s block: perhaps a caveman with a rudimentary stick staring at a large, blank rock. Today’s equivalent of the blank rock may be a computer screen, and your process may seem like the pie chart below.
When you sit down to write (and there’s a problem right there; you may not do well sitting down), do you find yourself with a sudden urge to clean out a file drawer? Throw in a load of laundry? Search the internet for ways to clean wine stains out of carpet? Check the refrigerator for the third time? Bake a cake instead?
You have something to say, but what’s holding you back?
The audio learner may well be an audio writer. You are easily distracted by sound. So the birds chirping outside take your attention away from the computer. The furnace clicking on and off, the clock ticking, the refrigerator cycling, a hum from somewhere—all distract your brain from the task at hand.
The visual learner needs to see the big picture. These writers make outlines (outlines can turn into the book’s table of contents). They use index cards for ideas and shuffle them or lay them out on a table to visually see the story as it unfolds. Post-It notes do the same thing when placed on a board or table, as a storyboard. Others may simply draw out the plotline through time for each character
Neither visual or audio driven, the kinesthetic writer needs movement, which is why sitting down at a computer/laptop isn’t going to work well. So stand up. Put your laptop on the kitchen counter. Take a walk and then come back and dump your brain onto paper.
When you are wondering where to start, just jump in. Anywhere. Somewhere. And not necessarily at the beginning. Write what feels right at the moment without the pressure to start at the beginning.
People writing memoirs like to start at the beginning chronologically, and that’s fine to start with. But a smart editor can often see the big picture and move something life-defining to the opening chapter as a grabber for readers Continue reading
Today’s guest post is a Q&A by Sangeeta Mehta (@sangeeta_editor), a former acquiring editor of children’s books at Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster, who runs her own editorial services company.
Like everyone in the book industry, writers have experienced considerable change over the last few months. Although they might be used to working from home, being forced to do so has impaired creativity and made it nearly impossible for some writers to focus. For others, being under lockdown has provided just the right push for them to finally finish their book project and research agents and publishers.
Please note: Although both agents answered my questions as best as they could when the interview was conducted in May, it’s a very changeable situation. Still, their answers suggest that it’s possible for writers to thrive even during unpredictable times.
Stefanie Sanchez von Borstel: While we’re all still deep in the pandemic, I am advising fiction writers not to center on the pandemic. We’re inundated with COVID-19 news 24/7, and so much is changing week-by-week that it would be difficult right now.
For fiction projects, at the moment I’d prefer to represent feel-good stories and stories that explore our humanity rather than pandemic fiction. As we’re all trying to figure out how best to navigate work, school and family life, I think we can all use laughter, hope and happy moments.
Leslie Zampetti: My advice to writers stands firm: write what you need to write. Write what you’re good at. Write what excites you. Trying to chase trends will drive you crazy. I do feel that writing about the pandemic while in the midst of it is challenging. Getting your thoughts and reactions down while they’re fresh, as they happen, can be cathartic and provide material for a later book, but I feel that trying to write a novel based on the pandemic means writing about events and emotions none of us have fully processed yet.
Not writing about the pandemic doesn’t mean you’re not thinking about its impacts. Leaving out those impacts will place a book solidly pre-2020, just as details about flying place a book either pre- or post-9/11. Details matter. I’m advising my clients writing contemporary fiction to think about how the pandemic would affect their characters, even if they’re not writing about it yet.
Today’s guest post is by editor and author Ed Cyzewski (@edcyzewski).
It’s not ideal to release a book during a global pandemic with quarantines, social distancing, and limits on group gatherings.
It’s especially not ideal to release my current book about the many unintended and unforeseen consequences of smartphones and social media at a time when we are especially dependent on social media and digital devices to stay connected!
Authors throughout my networks are cancelling appearances at conferences, bookstores, and other events. As a small-time author in a small Kentucky town, working with a relatively small press, even I have had to dramatically change the marketing plan for my latest book Reconnect: Spiritual Restoration from Digital Distraction.
Reconnect talks about the ways social media manipulates us, how our digital activities shape us, and how spiritual practices can lead us to greater freedom and health. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working hard to avoid a dependence on social media for my book’s marketing.
That all changed with the many lockdowns and “healthy at home” policies.
Nevertheless, when local friends asked how they could buy a book from me in person, I decided to figure out a simple way to safely host an event in our small western Kentucky town. Sitting in our local coffee shop with my mask on and a healthy distance separating myself from other customers, I hatched an idea.
1. At best, half of the folks wore a mask. While a mask is not a guarantee of safety, studies have shown that widespread mask usage makes transmission of COVID-19 far less likely. For whatever reason, many folks didn’t wear a mask even though the event posters and invites asked everyone to wear a mask.
1. A good mix of foot traffic and book event guests bought a book. Having the event at a public place like a cafe made up for the people who didn’t show up.
If I did this again, I would try to host the event a little closer to the farmer’s market on a Saturday in order to increase foot traffic. It helped that a number of people had heard of me or my books through my press release in the local paper or through word of mouth, and they took the opportunity to buy one when they saw my table set up.
Since I write spiritual nonfiction books, I myself wouldn’t get a spot right at the market since I don’t fit into the more general audience of a farmer’s market. But that same audience may be more receptive to a novel with a wider appeal. Continue reading
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You’ve edited and revised with your editor — now it’s time to hear from your readers. Once you’ve published Book One, read reviews online and send a survey to your mailing list asking for reader opinions. Look at these as objectively as possible — that’s the best way to deal with negative reviews and still maintain your confidence. It’s a gentle balance, but you’ll get there in time. Continue reading
This post is based on episode 86 of the ProBlogger podcast.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been talking about beating writer’s block. I’m sure every bloggers faces it sooner or later, and to be a successful blogger you really need to know how to deal with it.
We started off by learning about the different types of writer’s block, and how to identify which one you’re dealing with. And last week we talked about how to deal with a major one – running out of ideas.
But now that you know how to keep coming up with fresh ideas, it’s time to take the next step: getting the words flowing and turning those ideas into posts.
So here are ten things you can try to not only get the words flowing again but also keep them flowing.
Now this is going to mean different things to different people. I like white noise, and so I used to head to a nearby café quite a bit. I found the clinking of glasses and the nearby conversations helped me get into the flow of writing.
But I understand that might sound like your worst nightmare, and that you need a much more controlled (and probably quieter) environment. My wife Vanessa loved going to our local library, not only to get out of the house but also to get away from the noise and distraction of our children. (And me, quite possibly.)
So if you’re finding it hard to get the words flowing where you are, try creating a different environment. That could mean anything from changing your location to having music or even the television playing in the background.
It can also mean creating a distraction-free environment by disconnecting yourself from the internet and switching your phone to silent.
Make sure you schedule regular writing time into your week, ideally at the same time every day. That might mean every day, every weekday, or perhaps every Saturday or Sunday.
And try to choose a time that best suits your writing. My ‘golden hours’ are in the morning, and so that’s when I schedule my writing.
The most important thing is to make it a regular thing so you can get into a rhythm with your writing.
My final tip is to do something that might have people thinking you’re a little bit crazy: compose your blog post by speaking out loud.
I go for a walk most days. And during those walks I often recite the blog post, talk or keynote I’m working on out loud. I’m sure my neighbors all think I’m a little bit crazy, but sometimes I think best out loud and need to say it before I can write it. Continue reading
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