Business
Business

Business

These articles concentrate on the business of writing. Use the menu on the right to get more specific or just browse them sequentially.

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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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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From Idea to Book

(Originally appeared as “Taking a Book from Idea to Bestseller” on the WrittenWell front page) There are bits of advice scattered all over the internet on how to write a book, how to market it, how to outline, how to write a great ending. But seeing it as a linear process will help you to do everything in the right order without missing a step—and that is something I don’t see anywhere else.  What I can’t do in this article is explain how to do every step. That would take, well, an entire website. But seeing the steps will help...

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What Does ‘Write To Market’ Mean?

You will often hear the phrase “write to market” from independent authors. But what does it really mean? Everyone has different ideas about how exactly to do it, but one thing is clear: writing to market is absolutely essential if you are going to have success publishing your own work.  The Two Pieces Of Writing To Market In order to make money as an independent author, you must sell a significant quantity of books. That means you need two things. A big enough market, meaning enough people who want to read that type of book, and market penetration, meaning that...

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Establishing Yourself As An Expert

For many genres of nonfiction, especially self-help or instructional books, readers want to hear from an expert. Are you an expert in your field? Would you like to be? Establishing yourself as an expert is easy in most areas of expertise.  The first question is, what qualifications are necessary in your field? When I was establishing myself as an expert in the poker world, all that I needed to do was provide good information, backed by solid math, present myself confidently as an expert, and be a winning player.  If your area of expertise is related to the law, medicine,...

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Speculative Fiction — The Big “If” Umbrella

More and more, books and publications that were once exclusively science fiction or fantasy or horror are calling themselves “speculative fiction.” But what is speculative fiction and why does it matter? Though the term “speculative fiction” has been around for a long time, it really came into vogue within the last few decades. And whereas at its inception, it was purely a replacement term for science fiction, it has come to mean most any genre that falls into the category that I call the “What If?” genres. These genres ask the “what if?” questions, where the supposition is definitely not...

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Using Short Stories to Grow Your Business

You’re probably not going to make a lot of money writing short stories. Not by directly selling them, anyway. But they are quite useful in a number of other ways, and if used—and written—well, they can help grow your writing business. Reader Magnets A lead magnet is a sales term for something you give away to get contact details so you sell to the person later. When that thing is a piece of writing, we call it a reader magnet. Why is it so important to gather contact details? So you can have an email list to send your newsletter...

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A Publisher Wants My Book!

So a publisher wants to publish your book? That is so exciting! But before you get carried away, let’s take a look at that contract. Unfortunately there are a lot of shady “publishers” out there who just want to take advantage of the fact that there are tens of thousands of writers desperately hoping to be published.  Because you’re a member here at Written Well, we’ll assume that you already know that the old dream of finding a traditional publisher and riding a road to riches was incredibly rare even twenty years ago, and now it’s almost unheard of. Self-published...

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