Month: <span>January 2024</span>
Month: January 2024

Month: January 2024

Analyzing Story Beats

Whether it’s on your own stories or someone else’s, learning how to analyze the beats of a story can be an important tool in a writer’s toolbox. First of all, what do I mean by story beats? Story beats are not the plot. In fact, you can map out the beats of a story without talking about the plot at all. Story beats are shifts in tone, in action, in emotion. They are the highs and lows and the movement between those points that make a story enjoyable or tragic or comedic or whatever it is determined to be by...

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Finding Your Niche

Finding your niche is writing to market for people who aren’t comfortable in just writing anything. Which, frankly, is most writers. It’s hard to write in a genre you don’t love. We all have our favorites, our go-tos. And reading widely within the genre you write in is a near essential skill for writing successfully in that genre. If you don’t understand the genre, and at least like it or hopefully love it, most times the readers can tell. And in the end, it’s the readers who decide whether your books will be successful or not. Ignore them at your...

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Simple Guide To Social Media Promotion

This isn’t as tough as you might think, we promise. Listed below are the basics to any social media campaign and the specifics to the major ones. Study them, find the ones that suit you, and become a social media maven. Two Steps to Social Media Success If you want to successfully use social media to promote your books, you must begin to use it as a tool — not for fun, not to troll, not to find someone who is wrong on the internet and scold them, but as a tool for finding readers and turning them into fans....

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The Key to Keywords

When you publish your book on Amazon, you are given seven spaces for keywords. Notice that I didn’t say seven keywords, I said spaces. You can put more than one keyword in those spaces.  There are some things we don’t know about these keyword boxes, and some things that are frequently changed. But let’s start with the things we do know, that have been fairly constant for the last five years.  If you only put one keyword in a box, it is given slightly more weight than if you pack in as many keywords as possible. You get fifty characters...

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Making an Amazon Ad 2: Reading the Data

In the first Making an Amazon Ad Essential, I showed you how to start an Amazon ad campaign by walking you through starting one myself. It’s been two months, so now we have data to look at. Here’s how it went. Week 1 When you view your ads, you can adjust what shows on the chart and what boxes are visible by exing out or clicking on the top boxes. I have it set to: I would normally not adjust an ad after only a week, but this ad was clearly not getting it done. 99 impressions is brutal. Also,...

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Formatting Your Book

Before you sell your book, you have to get it into a format that people can buy and read. This will be one of the few times I recommend you spend some money. Yes, there are free tools you can use. If you want to go the free route, I’d go to Kindlepreneur and get the free Word templates for the setup. Then, I’d go to Calibre and get their free software to convert those into eBooks. But this takes a lot of time and effort, and the results may still not be what you’re looking for. You could also...

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Publishing Your Book

In this Essential, I am going to walk you through the steps of publishing a book. We’re going to do it on Amazon, as it is the biggest platform, but the steps will be essentially the same wherever you choose to put your book out. Before You Begin Before you can publish your book, you’re going to need several things, all of which have an article or essential dedicated to them The Golden Rule The last thing you absolutely have to know before we publish your book is that you do not have to pay to publish your book. Amazon...

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Promotion Basics

I want to start out by saying I don’t believe promotion is more important than writing a good book. Nothing is more important than writing a good book. But if you want to sell that good book, there is nothing more important than promoting it well. The Promotion Box Promotion opportunities exist in a four variable box, as pictured below. There are successful authors who occupy all sections of this box. However, most authors begin in the bottom left corner and move through several stages until they are spending money as well as doing both online and in person activities....

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Accounting And Taxes For Writers

So you’re a self-published author. Congratulations, you are now an entrepreneur. We know, you just want to be a writer. But the “just a writer” career path is quite rare these days. Instead, you chose to control your own financial destiny, which means that you have to actually deal with some financial stuff. If you’re still single, you may wish to marry a money manager or accountant so you can avoid all of this bookkeeping stuff. If you can’t do that, then welcome to managing your own income.  Taxes and Basic Business Accounting Paying your taxes quarterly is really the...

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Launching a Book with Kickstarter

Is Kickstarter right for you and your book? For many independent authors, the answer is a resounding yes. Before we start talking about how to run your Kickstarter campaign, let’s figure out if it’s the right platform for you.  Kickstarter is most useful if you already have some social media reach or an email list. It doesn’t have to be huge, but having a little head start can make a big difference. You can run a successful Kickstarter without a big audience, but it’s a ton of work and for probably  a small reward. You don’t need a huge following...

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