Essentials—Business
Essentials—Business

Essentials—Business

Building an ARC Team for Reviews

Getting reviews might be the single biggest determinant for how well your book sells. In all the studies I’ve seen, number of reviews has been rated highest for whether a reader will pick up a book by an unknown author. But it’s a catch-22. You need reviews for readers to take a flyer on an author they don’t know; but to get reviews, people need to read and review your book. The way around this conundrum is to use ARC — Advanced Reader Copies. The publishing industry has been using ARCs for years. They print uncorrected proofs, often missing some...

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Writing to Market — Keyword Interest and Bestseller Lists

In Writing to Market — Where to Begin, I talked about how I use Publisher Rocket’s category search function to identify potential categories to write in. We’re going to leave that program for now, and go to Amazon to look at the bestseller lists. Because nothing can kill a category quicker for you than a bad-looking bestseller list. As an example, let’s say you liked horror as a top tier category. And why wouldn’t you? It’s got a 41% pub percentage for a steady 12.5k in sales. The top books move big numbers. But let’s take a look at the...

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Writing to Market — Tropes, Tropes, Tropes

The theory of writing to market is that most people don’t want to read something completely new. They want to read something like the last book they enjoyed. A new story, but one that makes them feel the same way as they did the last time. Essentially, they want to read the same thing, but different. Strangely, this is not contradictory, and is fairly easy to accomplish. The way to do it is through tropes. Tropes Tropes are not quite cliches, but they are in the same ballpark. They are certain characters or situations that people are familiar with and...

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Writing to Market — Where to Begin

There’s a lot of confusion about what writing to market actually is. Let’s clear that up. Writing to market is actually a simple two-step process: you identify a good market, then you write a book that fits that market. Obviously, there is far more to it than that, but that is the basis of it. Find a market. Write a book for that market. And one must do both to successfully write to market. I have seen people find a great genre, then write a book no readers of that genre would enjoy. I have seen people write wonderful books...

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Going Wide

There are two schools of thought in the Indie Publishing world that you need to be aware of. I can’t tell you which will be right for your career, but you should understand both so you can make informed choices. *** YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN CAREER*** Option One is what we call narrow. Amazon has Kindle Unlimited (KU), which is a subscription service they offer. Readers pay a monthly fee ($12/m as I write this) and get to read as many books as they can digest. Think library where you finish one, download the next, and keep going...

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Why All the Genres?

I have run into a form of this question several times now since we have opened the site. People understand, of course, why we do all the genres, but they don’t understand why that is a good thing for them, in particular. “I write cozy mystery. Why do I care about a dark fantasy guide?” It’s actually a good question, with two answers. First of all, there is something to be learned from every genre. No matter what genre you write, you can write it better by borrowing aspects of other genres. I write primarily fantasy, but I studied thrillers...

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Narrowcasting and Newsletters

Originally, I intended to write about Newsletters as a thing, but realized as I sat down that I needed to back up a step and talk about what I think is the future of indie publishing. That turned into a whole series of thoughts on vocabulary—and you need a good solid grasp on words to understand how to work in this field—and I realized that I needed to start here. Broadcasting In the old days, everybody knew the term broadcasting. You transmitted a powerful radio signal that could be picked up at a significant distance by anybody with the right...

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Email Lists

There is no other marketing tool as effective as a list of emails people have voluntarily given you. Besides the fact that it is proven out by every metric tested, it just makes sense: people gave you their email, so they are receptive to your pitch. They may even be anticipating it. Email lists have the greatest success rate of any other "advertising" and their cost-per-click? Absolutely free until you have at least 500 subscribers, at which point it is profitable to pay for the mailings you are doing.

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The Indie Mindset

Let’s talk mindset. Many of you have come out of the Traditional Publishing (TradPub for short) world, either directly, or having been raised and trained to think that way. You see a specific career arc that you need to follow, in order to achieve success. Does this sound familiar? Start in short fiction, honing your craft at 5000-word stories until you think you have the ability to write a pretty good story for one of the periodicals in your genre. Then you start submitting them and to various open anthology calls until you start to achieve some level of success....

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