Writing Wednesdays: 13 Tips for Writers

People contact me asking about options. They're working on a book but know nothing about getting published, or they know a fair bit but can't decide with so many options out there, etc.

Some new writers give the distinct impression they think that once they finish their book--wallah!-- some publishing company will want to publish it and suddenly they will be rich and famous. Sounds nice to me, but it rarely happens

Unfortunately, the realities are that there are companies that will want your book right away, but only if you pay them several thousand dollars first. You can have a published book in your hands, but you'll never be rich or famous if nobody knows about it. And with millions (literally millions) of books out there right now, no matter how you publish, you're going to have a lot of competition.

This isn't to depress you; it's to give you the reality so you can make a clear and knowledgeable decision about how to move forward.

In an effort to be as concise as possible, here are a 13 things I've learned along the way:

 13 Tips for Writers

1. If you want to be a writer, you have to be willing to learn, be rejected, and work hard.

2. Wherever you are at in your writing expertise, you have a lot more to learn. Be teachable!

3.There is an overwhelming amount of information and options on the internet. Find a few resources/blogs/people you trust and stick with them for most of what you need to know. It gets very overwhelming doing random searches for information, so do it sparingly.

Lady, put the computer down...it's not that bad...put the computer down...

4. Major publishers are harder to get in than ever. If you don't have a following of thousands of people already, expect it to be nearly impossible. I know that's disappointing, but I'd rather tell you now than tell you that after you waiting 6 months for a rejection letter.

5. Subsidy publishers are eager for your book, but that's because you will be paying them and so they will make money whether you do or not. I have not heard of one yet that has worked out to an author's benefit. Be very careful about any publisher that makes you pay them first--and that's not for printing books, it's for the actually publishing of your book (and possibly some "marketing" on their part, usually this runs in the thousands of dollars before you ever see your first book).

6. Self-publishing is easier, cheaper, and you get a book a lot sooner than other options, but know that you are the 100% sole marketer responsible. If you are self-motivated, have a great message, and believe in your book, this can work great for you. Self-publishing is also good for someone who only wants to run a few copies rather than ordering hundreds up front (if you do POD--Print On Demand-- rather than one that starts the print run in the hundreds of copies).

7. If you choose to self-publish, PLEASE create a good product. I can't tell you many books I've seen and read from amazon that have typos, grammatical errors, very homemade covers, or just aren't good writing. Kindle and POD have helped make self-publishing not the stigma of lack-of-quality it used to be, but books like that put the whole group down again.

8. Whatever you decide about publishing, get an editor, or have lots of people read the book before you ever put it out there. You can have 50 people read it, and the 51st will find that elusive typo everybody else missed. Believe me, it happened to me, except the person was about the 450th and the book was already on the market! Find people who will give honest feedback. This is one of my favorite parts in the process because I get to experience my book from a new reader's eyes. What was confusing? Did I get a fact wrong? Can I make this clearer? Is it age-appropriate?

Typos can really change your storyline...

...and they lived sappily ever after....oops, I mean happily ever after!

Let's eat grandma...or rather Let's eat, grandma.

He was doping...I mean hoping.

 

9. Print-On-Demand is the cheapest way to self-publish. I'd recommend Amazon's Createspace. They are user-friendly, have great customer service, and are connected with Kindle, so you can put it up easily on e-book as well. I sell about 3 e-books for every paperback, so getting in with Kindle is important.

10. Spend time on the extras. You may have a fabulous book, but if the two paragraphs on the back are boring, people aren't going to read it. Why spend so much effort on the inside and then fall short on your author bio or your back cover or the one sentence you put on the cover?

11. Invest in a great cover. People say you can't judge a book by its cover, but we all do. With Amazon especially you're not picking books off shelves and looking through them. People are scanning pages and pages of covers and if yours is boring, or worse, looks cheap, there are millions of better ones to choose from. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just go to amazon.com and check out the covers.

If you're a famous classic, you can get away with this. If you're a new author with a book nobody knows about...I wouldn't buy it. Would you?

12. Don't let rejection stop you. When I used to write a lot of articles for magazines and such, I began to expect 9 rejections for every 1 acceptance. Once I got the hang of who to write for and how, that number got better, but it was a realistic way to start. There are lots of reasons for being rejected that don't mean your work is bad. Keep going till you find the right readership. (Unless your work really is bad, in which case, learn and improve!)

13. Don't use God as an excuse for poor quality. That may sound mean, but agents and publishers get real wary when someone says, "God gave me this book," or "The words are Gods so..." and then proceed to say that's why the publisher really should want to publish it, or they won't take suggestions for improvements. If God had called you to build houses, He would still expect you not only to learn how to build houses, but to build them well. If you just started nailing boards together, telling people God told you build houses, you would get a bad reputation and actually dishonor your testimony rather than honoring God. So if God has told you to write, do so, but work at becoming the best writer you can be so your work honors Him.


There you have it. If you've learned some good lessons along the way, add to my list! It's always great to learn from someone else, especially someone a few steps farther up the path than we are. Helps us see potholes we might miss from our viewpoint.

Oh, also, if you have a question about any of this, please add it below and maybe it will show up as a future blog post! (With the answer, of course.)

Happy Writing! And may you live sappily ever after. =)



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Writing Wednesdays: Writing A Memoir People Will Actually Want to Read!

           I started a memoir for two reasons. The first was my family history—or rather the lack of it. My grandfather was in World War II. My grandmother had to have a double wedding with her sister, even wearing identical dresses, because of difficult financial times. My grandparents went through the Great Depression. They lost their first baby. The served God, raised children, and gave us grandchildren a beautiful legacy.

            Only they never put it in any form we have to keep. I want to tell my own children their stories, only the stories died with them. I have hints of stories, but not enough facts to create a history from them.

            The second reason for my memoir was equally important. I had been having unusual, difficult health problems for over ten years. As I faced my second pregnancy under the category of high-risk, still with a confusing and undefined condition, I wanted our stories on paper for my own children and grandchildren to know and learn from—if I were not around to tell them myself.

            Life is fragile. And beautiful. And each of us has experiences worth recording.

            So if you are considering writing a memoir, here’s the question you need to start with:

Why do you want to write it?

1.      To share about family? (You don’t want to lose your own history?)

2.      To tell about an era or historical event? (You were in Vietnam and want the world to know what it was really like?)

3.      To become famous? (You know juicy secrets about a famous celebrity and this is your ticket to stardom?)

            Next, keeping in mind how you answered the above, there are different ways to approach writing a memoir:

1.      Chronological—in my personal opinion, this method is phenomenally boring. If I see “Chapter One: So-in-so was born on such-and-such a day in such-and-such a place,” I immediately want to close the book, or at least skip about three quarters in to the interesting part.

2.      Topical—this is when you tell your story from subject to subject. For example, all the love stories in one section, then the difficult stories, then the happy stories, etc. This can be interesting if, say, you are writing about the past four generations of your family, and reading about their similar experiences throughout different eras of history would be interesting.

3.      Random—like a blog, a random memoir goes along like a conversation, with you giving incidents as they come to mind. This works if you want your memoir to be casual, or if you have a lot of great stories within specific topics that might get too much if you keep them together.

4.      Event-based—these are best when memoirs are created from an important event people are interested in. When the author of “Let’s Roll” wrote a memoir about her husband, people were interested because he gave his life on September 11^th saving the lives of others.  In that book, the chapters bounced back and forth, starting with the event people were most interested in, then going to the person’s life story, back to the event, then back to the person’s life, until they combined in the culmination of the person’s story as well as the event.

5.      Historical or Era-based—this chronicles your journey through historical events or eras that resonate with the reader’s memories. Say you were actually there when sliced bread was invented, you planted a victory garden during WWII, or were at Woodstock, or JFK’s funeral. Your story, told through the eyes of history, pulls readers into the history with you.

            Regardless of how large or small your audience will be, you will want your memoir to be, well, memorable—and for good reasons, not bad ones! Therefore, you want it to be well-written, and presented in such a way that, like any other written piece, makes the reader want to read to the second sentence, to the second chapter, through to the end.

            You likely have a story worth telling. If so, it is worth the effort to turn it into a story worth reading!

            So once you decide what type of memoir you want, what next? Find out next week!
  

 This was published in Southern Writer's magazine earlier this year!

Writing Wednesdays: 21 Ways to Market Your Book on Amazon

I'm a pretty lousy salesperson. I don't like pushing something on someone who may not want whatever I have to sell.

However, I do love passing the word about something good or helpful I've found to people I think would really benefit from it. And I'm learning, from all this research on marketing, that passing the word sells things better than me trying to be a salesperson. Go figure.

Today I'm passing the word on a Kindle book titled:

Marketing Your Book on Amazon:

21 Things You Can Easily Do For Free
to Gain More Exposure and Sales

Link to Author's Blog

If you don't have a Kindle, never fear--you can download it straight to your computer. You need to have it on a computer for a reason which I'll get to later.

If you find general information about social media marketing overwhelming, or you're just getting started and you need to know where to start first, I believe this book will really help you. It focuses only on Amazon and how to increase your visibility and sales through that avenue. 

This isn't just about getting on the Amazon Bestseller list. Even though my books are Amazon Bestsellers already, I still learned a lot of great new tips of how to use Amazon to get more people finding and buying my book. In fact, I went to a writer's conference that taught me some of these tips, but I learned more from this book than I did from the conference!

I especially like how, by reading the Kindle version on my computer, I was able to follow her instructions immediately by opening new windows and going step-by-step through the process she presented.


Well, there you have it. I was able to click links actually in the book that took me directly to what she was talking about, so I could follow her instructions right then (while they still made sense!), then move on to the next instruction.

This is a definitely helpful resource if you have a book for sale on Amazon but don't know how to utilize things like the Amazon Author Page, Author Central, etc.

So what are you waiting for? Here's the link below so you can check out this resource right away!

Marketing Your Book on Amazon