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When writers apply visual thinking to their writing magic happens. This tutorial teaches you how to make your content clearer, vivid, and more persuasive.
Via Penelope
We can’t all be J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer, but if you’re working on a book, it’s nice to know what helps with success.
First, don’t get too long-winded: Surprisingly, the average length of a best-selling book is 375 pages. (Lord of the Rings is definitely an outlier here.)
As far as setting goes, most bestselling books are set in the U.S., with lawyers or detectives as main characters. Romance is, by far, the most lucrative genre. Romance books bring in $1.4 billion a year, with crime books in second place. Interestingly enough, people finish romance novels but often ditch religious books.
While the U.S. leads for its publishing industry, Germany, France, China, Japan and the UK also have large markets for authors. If you’re publishing an e-book, Amazon might be the best bet –– the company controls more than half of the e-book market. Authors also get to keep 70 percent of what they make on Amazon....
Fresh out of ideas on how to help your writing take off? You’re in luck. We’ve compiled a list of 89 book marketing ideas that will change your life, build your brand, and sell your book. There’s something for everyone on the list. Best of all, the list is free....
From William Faulkner to E.L. James this infographic has the answers. If you’ve ever wondered how long it took to craft some of history’s most famous books, you’ll want to check out this rad infographic from the kind folks at Printerinks. Tolkien takes top slowpoke honors for taking 16 years to write the Lord of the Rings while the quickest author on the list is John Boyne who wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in only 2.5 days! Check out the entire chart below
“I just wanted a story with a nice guy.”In late 2012, author H. M. Ward had an experimental manuscript collecting proverbial dust on her computer. It starred a woman named Sidney and a man named Peter—an impossible nice-guy combo of handsome, strong, smart, patient, and, oh, super wealthy. Ward had been writing since 2010 and had been down the traditional publishing route before, finding an agent and shopping her work around. Her instinct told her that publishers would have no interest in Peter. “If you take a nice-guy book to a traditional publisher,” she says, “They’re like, ‘That’s weird. Nice guys are boring.’” So in April 2013, she published her manuscript online on her own. “I just put it up out of curiosity to see what would happen,” she says. Despite reports that e-books are dying, Ward’s chance paid off, and continues to pay out today. According to the author, Damaged shot to No. 6 in Amazon’s Kindle store within a few days and held the No. 1 spot for several weeks. It spent a month on the New York Times bestsellers list for combined print and ebook. It was the first in two series of nice-guy books that would go on to sell 12 million copies in three years. Publishers took note. In the year after Ward published Damaged, she was offered a series of deals from various publishers totaling $1.5 million, by her estimate. She turned them all down, and by the time she said no to her last contract, she was making eight figures as a self-published author. “It would have been a colossal mistake to sign with them at that point, financially,” she says....
How do successful authors engage their fans on social media? And what can authors post on social media besides links to their own books?
Below you’ll find 23 ideas, along with examples from successful authors. Many of these tactics can help promote a book, but in more creative and engaging ways than simply posting a link to a book’s retailer page.
Publishers and agents, this post is written for authors. We encourage you to share it with your authors to help them build more engaging profiles.
Authors, we hope hope you find the list useful — and please share your great ideas in the comments!...
As we look forward to the coming year, the self-publishing world will undoubtedly present us with a few new surprises. As self-publishers, you probably have some thoughts on this topic as well. So, I felt it was timely to take a pause to collect a few 2016 predictions from some of the pros—those experts who have a proverbial finger on the pulse of industry changes. Many of these folks you will recognize as they have served us as reliable resources for BookWorks in the past. They include marketing strategists, publishers, and bloggers, in addition to the founder of Smashwords, one of the top self-publishing platforms in the world.
Learn about their prognostications and what they had to say when asked the question, “What do you predict for the self-publishing industry in 2016?”...
A number of famous novelists spent time in ad jobs—among them, F. Scott Fitzgerald (who worked at Barron Collier in New York, where he wrote the line, "We keep you clean in Muscatine"), Joseph Heller (once a copywriter for Merrill Anderson in New York) and Salman Rushdie (who logged seven years at Ogilvy London, after failing an interview test at J. Walter Thompson that supposedly included making up a jingle about seatbelts).
Those three authors are the subject of these amusing ads—showing client feedback on their famous novels—to promote a British fiction contest for advertising writers. "Write for yourself. Not for a client," say the ads.
Entries are closed for the 2015 Winston Fletcher Fiction Prize, unfortunately, but it is an annual thing. (You have to work in advertising, marketing or a related business to enter.) Check out the full ads below....
Last week, my seventh book, Philadelphia, was released. In many ways it is the best writing I have ever done, particularly in terms of fiction, and I thought the concept — a collection of short stories, a few op-ed essays, quotes, and lists, all relating to my beloved city of Philadelphia in one way or another — was interesting and appealing.
Clearly, very few people agreed because, well, it didn't exactly do Harry Potter numbers.Don't get me wrong. I'm not naive. This is my seventh time going through this process of self-publishing a book, so it's not like I wasn't prepared. I know the figures. I know that the average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime and that over 60% of self-published authors make less than five thousand dollars per year from their writing....
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At every writers conference or self-publishing panel the question that almost always inevitably comes up is: “How much will self-publishing really cost me?” Because the book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, it’s going through a quick transition. As a result of this shift, authors no longer need to go through the traditional gatekeepers to publish high-quality books and are instead moving toward self-publishing. Launching a book is like launching a startup. Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited, then formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it. Below, I break down the costs of how much professional services will cost you for a high-quality book....
With the growing popularity of self-publishing, there is one recurring question I get from almost every aspiring author: “How much should I budget?” This is a really hard question to answer because the term “self-publishing” encompasses a wide range of very different possibilities. For example, let’s say you’ve written a first draft of your novel and just uploaded it to Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. Technically, you’re “self-publishing.” And your only monetary cost is the formatting to get the required .mobi file, which can be done for free via several online tools. Now, if you want to have a chance of selling that book, you need to replicate at least some of the steps of traditional publishing and ensure a certain level of quality and professionalism. This means having your book properly edited, typeset and proofread, and hiring a designer to create an eye-catching cover. Depending on your genre and your writing ability, these can cost more or less. It’s impossible to say, “Self-publishing your book with cost you $X.” However, it is possible to find average costs for the different steps that go into producing a book: editing, design and typesetting. And this is what the data and infographic below focus on....
JODIE ARCHER HAD always been puzzled by the success ofThe Da Vinci Code. She’d worked for Penguin UK in the mid-2000s, when Dan Brown’s thriller had become a massive hit, and knew there was no way marketing alone would have led to 80 million copies sold. So what was it, then? Something magical about the words that Brown had strung together? Dumb luck? The questions stuck with her even after she left Penguin in 2007 to get a PhD in English at Stanford. There she met Matthew L. Jockers, a cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab, whose work in text analysis had convinced him that computers could peer into books in a way that people never could. Soon the two of them went to work on the “bestseller” problem: How could you know which books would be blockbusters and which would flop, and why? Over four years, Archer and Jockers fed 5,000 fiction titles published over the last 30 years into computers and trained them to “read”—to determine where sentences begin and end, to identify parts of speech, to map out plots. They then used so-called machine classification algorithms to isolate the features most common in bestsellers. The result of their work—detailed in The Bestseller Code, out this month—is an algorithm built to predict, with 80 percent accuracy, which novels will become mega-bestsellers. What does it like? Young, strong heroines who are also misfits (the type found in The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). No sex, just “human closeness.” Frequent use of the verb “need.” Lots of contractions. Not a lot of exclamation marks. Dogs, yes; cats, meh. In all, the “bestseller-ometer” has identified 2,799 features strongly associated with bestsellers....
As an author in the digital age, Twitter is probably a part of your online platform. It’s a great way to foster relationships with readers, connect with other authors, and build your personal brand. But there are some common mistakes even the most successful authors make on Twitter....
At every writers conference or self-publishing panel the question that almost always inevitably comes up is: “How much will self-publishing really cost me?” Because the book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, it’s going through a quick transition. As a result of this shift, authors no longer need to go through the traditional gatekeepers to publish high-quality books and are instead moving toward self-publishing. Launching a book is like launching a startup. Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited, then formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it. "Not having an editor is like not QA’ing a software product or not testing a drug before it goes out into the marketplace." Below, I break down the costs of how much professional services will cost you for a high-quality book. (For the purposes of calculation we’ll assume you have a manuscript that is 70,000 words.)...
The first sign that Reif Larsen's Entrances & Exits is not a typical e-book comes at the table of contents, which is just a list of chapters titled "Location Unknown." Click on one of them, and you'll be transported to a location (unknown) inside Google Street View, facing a door. Choose to enter the house and that's where the narrative, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure string of vignettes, begins. As the book's description reads, it's a "Borgeian love story" that "seamlessly spans the globe" and it represents a fresh approach to the book publishing industry.
Larsen's book is one of the inaugural titles from Editions at Play, a joint e-books publishing venture between Google Creative Lab Sydney and the design-driven publishing house Visual Editions, which launched this week. With the mission of reimagining what an e-book can be, Editions at Play brings together the author, developers, and designers to work simultaneously on building a story from the ground up. They are the opposite of the usual physical-turned-digital-books; rather, they're books that "cannot be printed."...
For many authors, self-publishing is a first option instead of a backup to traditional publishing. Two years ago I broke down the costs to self-publish a high-quality book. The costs covered how much a traditional publisher typically spends on a book.
The book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, and things are constantly in flux. What worked yesterday might not work next week.
Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited and formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it.
The rise of new tools, platforms, and new entrants to the publishing space have made it even easier and faster to get a book out into the world. As a follow-up to my first piece, I’ve written a piece on how to publish on a budget....
What exactly goes on your author website—especially if you're unpublished?I strongly advocate all authors start and maintain a website as part of their long-term marketing efforts and ongoing platform development. But one of the first questions raised when you get started is: What exactly goes on your author site—especially if you’re so far unpublished?Before I answer that question in detail, I’ll set a few ground rules....
Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited e-book reader subscription program caused a real commotion in the publishing industry last month. But how will this “Netflix for books” model affect the self-publishing industry? Is Kindle Unlimited the best, or should self-publishers join the Scribd or Oyster programs instead? How do you get in? Read on for a comparison of these top three reader subscription programs and best recommendations for self-publishers who are looking to add these channels to their revenue streams....
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