Market Your Name

This week one of my friends posted an interesting article from Sarah McIntyre about crediting illustrators. Illustrators are often overlooked by authors and award judges when it comes to promotion. It is time that we remembered that a great picture book has an author and an illustrator working in collaboration and so they both should be equally credited when it comes to promotion. Sarah came up with the #picturesmeanbusiness campaign.

Darcy Pattison has a guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog about the promotion of children’s books and how she is using Pinterest as an experiment because children’s books are about the visual. 

Anne R Allen has a great resource blog for writers. This week she writes about the care and feeding of THE MUSE for writers. There is lots of great advice in here.

Going to conferences can inspire you to new projects. Joanna Penn talks about attending the ThrillerFest conference and what she learned there. This is a really fascinating article as Joanna is exploring the hybrid author position here. She also has a great interview with a publishing futurist…what might be around the corner and coming soon to an author near you... 

Following along on this theme is Porter’s think piece - finding and building fans of books is the most important thing an author can do ... here he reports on some big thinkers in the publishing game on this kind of marketing.

Jane Friedman has been getting serious of late with email marketing. She has written two excellent blog posts on email newsletters for authors and how to improve the newsletter to make it relevant. I’m interested in exploring this from a children’s writer point of view. Who do we send newsletters to...

I don’t subscribe to many newsletters but one I do and try to read frequently is Larry Brooks. His Storyfix website is great. His newsletters are direct and punchy on the craft of writing. Larry recently had a melt down moment which is worth reading. Writers you need to study your craft... figure out some stuff then apply it. If you write then you should read this.

Four important questions that agents ask writers in the pitch session... and yes you should be able to answer them...

In the Craft section,

Goals Conflict Stakes- Janice Hardy (Bookmark)

Copyediting –it’s not rocket surgery- The Book Designer (Bookmark)

Writing Terrible first drafts

Fishing out your manuscript hook- Kate Moretti (Bookmark)

How to write a synopsis- sorta- Ava Jae (Bookmark)

9 ways to use point of view to strengthen characters

4 Revision Goals- Darcy Pattison (Bookmark!)

In the Marketing section,

Does it pay to do a print book- Molly Greene

The unexpected effect of perma free- M Louisa Locke- Bookmark

Marketing Books as an Indie author

12 secrets to selling books

10 mistakes authors make that cost them a fortune

Cleaning up your Amazon Central Book Page- Elizabeth S Craig

How to sell more copies of a book you published years ago- Bookmark

Offering free ebooks to subscribers- Elizabeth S Craig 

Website of The Week

Every now and then you come across a web comic that exactly illustrates the writing life. Chances are you have seen an Inkygirl comic. So you really need to check out her awesome website where she has other great helpful tips. Inkygirl is also promoting the #picturesmeanbusiness campaign to recognise picture book illustrators on metadata and awards.

To Finish,

Mark Coker of Smashwords recently put up his Slideshare deck ... 6 hours of concentrated workshopping on publishing ebooks. You don’t have to wade through all of it. Just look at the transcript and scroll down to the section that interests you. This is like a Master class in eBook marketing.

Maureen

@craicer

Pics From the fabulous Inkygirl

Transparency and The Muse

Last week I was writing my blog from my writing retreat where I wrestled with The Muse... the Manuscript and the madness of Editing while writing while analysing three books. Next time I will schedule my time better...  (cue manic laughter.)

This week back inside the madness of school holidays, I’ve finally wrestled the computer out of the kids hands and can concentrate on getting back up to speed with what is happening in the publishing world.

Today Harper Lee broke some records on First Day sales of a book. Her sequel, Go Set A Watchman which was really her first book which was then rewritten to be How To Kill A Mockingbird has got writers thinking about their own literary estates... should bad first books see the light of day even when you are famous... publishers just after the money... or this great post from Stephen Pressfield on the amazingness of Lee’s editor and Lee herself that she could flip this book on its head and write HTKAM from it.

Writers are beginning to report on what hit (if any) they are taking with the Amazon pay per page read.  Molly Greene talks about her stats and what has changed. It is a great service to the writing community to show the money side of your business... and I appreciate the willingness of authors who do this. We all learn and it contributes to understanding and the need for the industry to be transparent....

Which leads to a timely and thoughtfilled post from Kristine Rusch on Transparency and the battles on the horizon. Take the time to read this. She covers the Authors Guild call for the DOJ to investigate Amazon (again????) understanding the writing business and how the music industry battles are preparing the way ahead of us...

This week, The Bookseller’s weekly chat looked at the reports from UK and US that author incomes are falling and the calls for fairer author contracts. One traditional publisher has moved to ebook royalties of 50% and 5 year contracts... is this a sniff of change?

Last week, The Bookseller was looking at why you should charge schools for author visits... something that has been exercising the thoughts of children’s writers here in NZ.

The Guardian thinks the pseudonyms are on their way out... we should be able to stand or fall with our own names. I find myself automatically thinking that initials mean a female author.

Paul Dale Anderson explores how you can tell what sort of writer you are... kinesthetic... audio…etc  and how you can use these traits to make yourself a better writer...which leads right into Joanna Penn’s great post on writing habits and productivity...

Book Riot has written a great blog post on the overuse and abuse of The Love Triangle. This device seems to be exclusive to the Young Adult market. Book Riot calls it out as sloppy unrealistic plotting (the teen in this house was agreeing... Not Real Life)

And so to Criticism - should you read those 1star reviews?  Catherine McKenzie has written an interesting post for Writer Unboxed on why you should.

In the Craft Section,

How to create a convincing good guy- A J Humpage

The power of what is left unsaid in dialogue- Janice Hardy

7 tips for balancing backstory- Shannon Donnelly (Bookmark)

Edits vs Revisions – one on one death- Janice Hardy

How to write the passage of time.-  A J Humpage

In the Marketing Section,

Nine things authors should be doing on Twitter

Joanna Penn on Sampling and how it sells books

Publishing Perspectives on Contracts and how you should compare them (From UK Soc of Authors)

Website of the Week

Digital Book World is a website that looks at the big picture of digital publishing. Authors often forget that Digital Publishing covers the whole spectrum of words online. This week DBW have been running a series on the future of publishing. Yes it is aimed at publishers but authors should run their eyes over these sorts of articles to keep themselves informed of what might be coming up behind them.

To Finish,

Chuck Wendig has written a neat post on writing and the power of failure... and there are no warnings on this... just great advice.

And Maggie Stiefvater echoes this with a punchy talk about how much you should want to write.

maureen

@craicer