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EngineerSean posted:Glitchtember has come and gone, I just published a book today and will continue to do so until January at least. I don't understand what any of this means.
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Oct 5, 2014 17:15
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glitchtember is the annual Amazon holiday month of glitches where they
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Oct 5, 2014 19:07
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I've got a BookBub 99 cent sale going today! 
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Oct 5, 2014 21:11
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Is there any search benefit to adding age-grade ranges? I don't want to alienate older readers if they see it listed as a '9th to 12th grade' piece.
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Oct 6, 2014 13:29
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Hijinks Ensue posted:I've got a BookBub 99 cent sale going today! Congrats!  quote:I don't want to alienate older readers if they see it listed as a '9th to 12th grade' piece. No real search benefit apart from the internal age ranges in KDP (which I think break down mainly for children's books). I think your cover and blurb will say more about your age range than anything else.
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Oct 6, 2014 14:55
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I've gotten back my manuscript from the editor and the artist tells me she will have something to show me cover-wise sometime this week. So I'll be hammering at the manuscript again. In the meantime, I am a complete virgin to self-publishing so what should I be doing to try and get the word out? I know people here put great value in advanced review copies and the reviews it gives you on Amazon, but how does someone who has no prior work to point to get someone interested in reading an advanced copy? I've also redone the blurb I posted a month back, incorporating some feedback: quote:Bybridge City boasts the world's largest population of superhumans, aliens and stranger things. It's also home for Carrie Collier, newly arrived with her father. Or it would be, if she weren't declared a security risk by the city's cyborg government bureaucrats. Things only get worse when her father gets kidnapped by a rampaging robot. With the aid of the undead, an aspiring mad scientist and a mob of insane chefs, Carrie must give chase and save her father from becoming a test subject in a supervillain's lair in the forgotten ruins beneath the city.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:51
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You find authors who write books like you and go after their fans with a
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Oct 7, 2014 01:00
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moana posted:You find authors who write books like you and go after their fans with a Exactly! This is another important reason to go through those "Painful Pre-Marketing Questions" from the OP. Once you know who your fan-base is, it's a hell of a lot easier to figure out how to market your book to them (and that includes giving them ARC copies).
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Oct 7, 2014 02:19
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I'm in the very beginning stages of writing a memoir about my life in 2012-2013, when it got particularly interesting. I believe I have an interesting and topical story with diverse characters, a narrative arc and some storytelling skill. I am not famous in any way and cannot bring a pre-existing audience to purchase my work. Am I a candidate for traditional publishing? Being nonfiction, this obviously can't be serialized and so I don't believe I'd benefit from the main financial draw of self-publishing. I'm also slightly disorganized, and so I believe writing an entire book proposal would provide a good structure for the eventual finished product (picked up traditionally or no). Could anyone help me out with a place to start? This will be the first thing I've ever written, and I'm in need of advice. I've been checking out the competition the last few weeks and can't really find anything in the same niche. There are travelogue memoirs, humorous travelogues, and the typical "Eat Pray Love" discover-yourself style memoirs, but mine is like a combination those. Maybe a little grittier and millennial, but not as gritty as a hitchhiker or drifter memoir. Terry-Gross-acceptable. i say swears online fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 07:33
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Explain this to me as your average reader: Why on earth would I want to read a book about you? (I'm serious - why? What distinguishes your 2012-2013 life from the other billions of people on this planet? What actually makes your memoir worth reading? If you have a good answer, maybe you can go somewhere with this. If not, well... probably not a good idea.)
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Oct 7, 2014 13:42
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Let me see if I've got this right. Your book is a special snowflake that can't be categorized by genre. It's a memoir, though, which means it's competing with the memoirs that every single retired person ever is writing. "I can't find anything like it." Rather than being unmarketable, though, that means it's special and obviously trad publishers would want it even if nobody would actually buy it themselves if you self-pub it. You have great storytelling skills, but this is the first thing you've ever written and you can't even figure out how to outline the story. I'd recommend Save the Cat but I think you're wasting your time completely. I say this with all the kindness in the world, because if you don't like writing (and you don't, or you would have written something in your life) you're in for a real bad time once you realize that coming up with the idea is the easy part.
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Oct 7, 2014 15:48
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So does anyone know of alternatives to Bookbub / Booksend? I've used both before, but I feel booksend has cooled for me, because it is the same leads that have seen my book before, and Bookbub is crap shoot in whether they'll approve my submissions. What kind of response have people seen over multiple submissions to email lists? Is it consistent or does it degrade over time? Also, when targeting users with ARC copies. Do ya'll use amazon or goodreads? I've mostly been using goodreads, resulting in a 1-3% review rate from cold calls. How does approaching users on amazon compare?
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Oct 7, 2014 17:34
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Sepherothic posted:So does anyone know of alternatives to Bookbub / Booksend? I largely use goodreads, bloggers, and existing fan-base for ARCs. Other possible submission sites are Kindle Nation Daily (expensive but okay), Kindle Fire Department, eReader News Today (very good), Pixel of Ink (supposedly good if you can get a listing), MyRomanceReads (genre, duh) and then the rest just sort of go to poo poo from there. If there are any other genre-specific ones out there worth pursuing, I don't know about them because I'm not active in those genres.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:15
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moana posted:Let me see if I've got this right. Your book is a special snowflake that can't be categorized by genre. It's a memoir, though, which means it's competing with the memoirs that every single retired person ever is writing. "I can't find anything like it." Rather than being unmarketable, though, that means it's special and obviously trad publishers would want it even if nobody would actually buy it themselves if you self-pub it. You have great storytelling skills, but this is the first thing you've ever written and you can't even figure out how to outline the story. Well yeah, I realize there are tons of memoirs out there. The first few hundred listed by new/popular on Amazon tend to fall into pretty distinct categories: finding God/purpose, being a Troop, overcoming a disability/disease/mental illness, dealing with death, long-form autobiographies and travelogues (which are further divided into ones written by Jane-Goodall-type experts and snarky thirty-something women). I've obviously had a difficult time finding a memoir written by someone under 30 who wasn't a teenage runaway. I spent twelve months working directly for the Nigerian presidential family, and I had the pleasure to experience a lot of things that are hitting the world news in the last year. Finding a memoir of a person working for a third-world leader has been impossible, unless they were published decades ago or by, like you said, retirees. I guess the closest thing I've found recently is "I have Iraq in my Shoe", but the author is incredibly myopic and never left her compound, whereas I'm chock full of stories of Femi Kuti, child slavery, typhoid, Goodluck Jonathan and cannibals. Thanks for your backhanded recommendation of Save the Cat, it really looks useful.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:55
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Getting reviews is a bitch. No matter if I offer ARCs, other ARCs for reviews of previous books or whatever, nothing seems to work.
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Oct 7, 2014 19:00
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Aliquid posted:Well yeah, I realize there are tons of memoirs out there. The first few hundred listed by new/popular on Amazon tend to fall into pretty distinct categories: finding God/purpose, being a Troop, overcoming a disability/disease/mental illness, dealing with death, long-form autobiographies and travelogues (which are further divided into ones written by Jane-Goodall-type experts and snarky thirty-something women). I've obviously had a difficult time finding a memoir written by someone under 30 who wasn't a teenage runaway. I spent twelve months working directly for the Nigerian presidential family, and I had the pleasure to experience a lot of things that are hitting the world news in the last year. Finding a memoir of a person working for a third-world leader has been impossible, unless they were published decades ago or by, like you said, retirees. I guess the closest thing I've found recently is "I have Iraq in my Shoe", but the author is incredibly myopic and never left her compound, whereas I'm chock full of stories of Femi Kuti, child slavery, typhoid, Goodluck Jonathan and cannibals. Thanks for your backhanded recommendation of Save the Cat, it really looks useful. Give me a sentence. "During 2012-2013, I was a ____________ and I'm notable because I did _________________." That's all I'm really asking for.  There are memoirs of everything from strippers to military leaders, and they might not sell a ton of copies, but done well, an interesting story can sell. (Whether you are capable of writing an interesting story is a separate issue entirely.)Nobody wants to read about meaningless drivel, though. Why are you interesting, and what can people learn from your experiences? Edit: From your little blurb there, you actually could have (minor) sales, maybe, done well. My brother published a documentary of his work in Namibia back in 2012 and has had some reasonable luck with people picking it up. He had a similar case of having lots of anecdotes from meeting with presidents, business leaders, etc, as well as an interesting story to tell. However, it's worth mentioning that most of his success with it has been in academic circles. Popular culture and Africa don't mix often, especially not sub-Saharan. I have no idea whether you are capable of writing it, but if you have an interesting story that you can tell in a compelling way about your time in Africa, you might get something small going with it. That being said, I'll be honest here: Africa 'real-life interest' is a small genre. It has its avid (academic) followers, but most people don't give the smallest of shits about that continent. You need to make it really compelling, because nobody cares. 
Sundae fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 19:04
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ravenkult posted:Getting reviews is a bitch. No matter if I offer ARCs, other ARCs for reviews of previous books or whatever, nothing seems to work. It just boils down to a numbers game. Straight up shoe-leather marketing by the barrel full. Never hurts to pick peoples brain about more efficient methods though. Sundae posted:I largely use goodreads, bloggers, and existing fan-base for ARCs. I've tried Kindle Fire Department. It was okay. I'll look into eReader News today. I've tried Pixel of Ink before, but again I think that falls into "crap shoot" territory. Last time I did a promotion, I also submitted the date to a dozen or more kindle deal sites, but didn't notice any real bump.
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Oct 7, 2014 19:24
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Sundae posted:Give me a sentence. "During 2012-2013, I was a ____________ and I'm notable because I did _________________." I totally agree with your edit. That's why I'm mostly asking for advice, because I'd like to find an audience and I know nobody gives a gently caress about SSA. However, there's an increasingly large Nigerian diaspora, especially in Texas and the UK, and they're pretty voracious for tabloid-y stuff about politicians and celebrities. Nigeria's been in the news a lot, too. The main conflict of the story will be with me and the First Lady. She hired me to be the principal of her new international montessori school (and teacher of the oldest class, US third grade, AND to be personal mentor to the President's only daughter). She's essentially a Paris Hilton that had the power to have me shot, and micro-managed her school about as well as you'd expect. I think it's a fun story, and I've got a lot to say!
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Oct 7, 2014 19:25
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Aliquid posted:I've obviously had a difficult time finding a memoir written by someone under 30 who wasn't a teenage runaway.
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Oct 7, 2014 19:59
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Aliquid posted:I totally agree with your edit. That's why I'm mostly asking for advice, because I'd like to find an audience and I know nobody gives a gently caress about SSA. However, there's an increasingly large Nigerian diaspora, especially in Texas and the UK, and they're pretty voracious for tabloid-y stuff about politicians and celebrities. Nigeria's been in the news a lot, too. As interesting as it sounds to me, I'm still with Moana on this. I don't see that your audience exists in a targetable way.
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Oct 7, 2014 20:15
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Plan B: Right after I left Nigeria, I took my savings, built an old bicycle from parts, and rode it from Austin to San Salvador from this time last year to May 2014. I have pretty extensive journals from nearly every day on the road, and camped or stayed with locals for three thousand miles. Things got more interesting than I wanted at times, but that's the whole point. These types of books sell a lot better according to Amazon. The market looks saturated with similar travelogues, but there aren't many books by tour cyclists, especially not in rural Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. The advice from the two of you on finding an audience really is helpful. I'm not writing these for my grandkids; they're to help me save for the next bicycle trip. Does the second premise have more promise? i say swears online fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 20:32
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Aliquid posted:Well yeah, I realize there are tons of memoirs out there. The first few hundred listed by new/popular on Amazon tend to fall into pretty distinct categories: finding God/purpose, being a Troop, overcoming a disability/disease/mental illness, dealing with death, long-form autobiographies and travelogues (which are further divided into ones written by Jane-Goodall-type experts and snarky thirty-something women). I've obviously had a difficult time finding a memoir written by someone under 30 who wasn't a teenage runaway. I spent twelve months working directly for the Nigerian presidential family, and I had the pleasure to experience a lot of things that are hitting the world news in the last year. Finding a memoir of a person working for a third-world leader has been impossible, unless they were published decades ago or by, like you said, retirees. I guess the closest thing I've found recently is "I have Iraq in my Shoe", but the author is incredibly myopic and never left her compound, whereas I'm chock full of stories of Femi Kuti, child slavery, typhoid, Goodluck Jonathan and cannibals. Thanks for your backhanded recommendation of Save the Cat, it really looks useful. Is Goodluck Jonothan as much of a useless nut job as he seems?
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Oct 7, 2014 21:20
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Aliquid posted:Plan B: Right after I left Nigeria, I took my savings, built an old bicycle from parts, and rode it from Austin to San Salvador from this time last year to May 2014. I have pretty extensive journals from nearly every day on the road, and camped or stayed with locals for three thousand miles. Things got more interesting than I wanted at times, but that's the whole point. These types of books sell a lot better according to Amazon. The market looks saturated with similar travelogues, but there aren't many books by tour cyclists, especially not in rural Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. You can make money from Amazon affiliate sales for bicycle parts and travel gear so link to those in your blog posts and on your site. Then write up a few really informative blog posts, post them everywhere as free advertising. You might consider reading through the BFC thread on Blogging for Bucks: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3447030
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Oct 7, 2014 22:24
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moana posted:Usually, if you have a hard time finding a product, it means the market for the product isn't there. I'm not saying don't write the book - if it's something you'd enjoy writing, then write it, put it up for free, spam the poo poo out of it everywhere to try to get people to read it. You said it yourself - this clearly has no visible audience that you can target. Sorry if I'm being too blunt and not morally supportive, flowers and sunshine all over; I don't want you to waste your time sending out a hundred query letters to agents and publishers. This is very true. What I'd suggest is for you to hold off on writing the memoir for a while until you do find a market for it. Start a blog first, and get yourself a following before you try to write this thing. You said you haven't really written anything before, so the first thing you should do is practice writing. If you have a lot of interesting stories, turn some of them into personal essays. Get your work out there in shorter bits, and find people who like it before you try to market a longer work. You may even find that structuring your experiences as a series of personal essays (a la David Sedaris) will give you more of an audience than trying to write it as a memoir. I find with a lot of people who try to self-pub memoirs, there's sort of this perception that they can just write one and it'll automagically be amazing and get them onto Oprah's Book Club. Somehow, they seem to think they're just that amazing and inspirational that they can eschew the normal practice of writing (and especially EDITING), just write their memoir without regard for craft, stick it up on Amazon for a couple of bucks, and it'll do great. I'm not saying that's you, but those are going to be the type of people your book is going to be competing with. Self-pub memoirs are even more of a mountain of poo poo to dig through to find gems than fiction, because even people who don't normally write have a delusion that they can do it successfully. So if your intent is to self-publish a memoir, you need to do A LOT of work to establish yourself as a worthy writer with an audience BEFORE you write it in order to not just end up underneath all the dung. I'd suggest a timeframe of blogging for at least five years before considering publishing your work as a memoir, especially if you're going to try to self-pub it. That may seem excessive, but in my experience (I write mostly non-fiction, with a memoir planned eventually, although I won't get into details about it here since I write pseudonymously), it's pretty much necessary. You really do need both the practice writing and the audience you would gain from it. These days, some universities are starting to hold workshop classes in creative non-fiction, so that may be something you would want to check out. It's been immensely helpful for me to have that experience, personally. It tends to be pretty hard to find writing critique circles where non-fiction is welcome, otherwise.
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Oct 7, 2014 22:38
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Thanks moana & co!Mr. Belding posted:Is Goodluck Jonothan as much of a useless nut job as he seems? He's not crazy, he's just a schmuck. No ambition, backed into the presidency; I call him the Homer Simpson of West Africa. Spent more time cooking with his family than in domestic policy meetings, which is nice I guess if you're a family man.
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Oct 8, 2014 00:03
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Aliquid posted:Thanks moana & co! From what I heard his wife basically runs everything and he rubberstamps it. When I saw him interviewed he seemed... not smart. This is surely the completely wrong forum to discuss this, but I just became intrigued by him. He was such an oddball, and he is in a position of so much power over so many peoples' lives it just shocked me. Well, like everyone said. There's some people who would read that. I'm probably one of them. But if I ask myself who I'd recommend such a book to, I can't think of many names, and I'm a huge king nerd who only hangs out with nerds. I have like one friend who might be interested in that too. Probably hard to sell. I've strongly considered doing an Prudhoe Bay To Ushuaia road trip and writing about it. The travelogues sound more promising to me because there's already a market for them.
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Oct 8, 2014 08:16
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hey so I'm starting to get [back] into this whole self-publishing deal. I did a bit of erotica a few years back when that sorta exploded in popularity on here, but I haven't really done anything since. There's a lot of stuff I need to catch up on, I guess. (I mean Smashwords is dead and gone? Really? No one told me that.) I think for the moment I'm probably gonna read through the thread again and a bit more in depth to do some LEARNS. Here is my Amazon page http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00NUG8TE0 if anyone wants to give me some advice or anything, I guess? Otherwise I shall lurk away and come back when I've done more learns. Edit - oh also I'm currently writing a food guide/recipe book type thing, more as a hobby thing than anything else, although sales would be nice! but if anyone has any specific advice for that sort of thing or links to resources that would be fantastic. Qb Naith fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 20:27
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Smashwords is still around. I use it for my iTunes/Kobo/BN distribution. It's less popular these days but it works fine for me so I stick with it.
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Oct 9, 2014 04:13
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Mark Coker, is that you? Draft2Digital is sooo much better than SW, it's not even funny. Plus you can do preorders with them.
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Oct 9, 2014 04:26
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moana posted:Mark Coker, is that you? I'll admit I've been using smashwords but only because I wasn't aware that d2d were the current best for non-amazon publishing.
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Oct 9, 2014 23:58
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moana posted:Usually, if you have a hard time finding a product, it means the market for the product isn't there.
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Oct 13, 2014 12:38
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DukeRustfield posted:I'm going to disagree with this. While you might be correct statistically, basically you're saying always be a follower. There are break-out products in every field. You can't say, "oh, there's never been an iPhone before so there is clearly no market for phones with the computing power of a PC." Or there's never been a 50 Shades (or at least not a big market). One of the reasons products can explode is precisely because it's a new market. Write the Generation Next Religious Memoir of Financial Accounting. It'll sell a million. "Being a huge unexpected break-out success" is a nice fantasy but a lovely business plan.
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Oct 13, 2014 16:04
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50 shades is a bad example, because EL James already knew there was a massive audience from her fan fiction days - all she did was change the names and setting in oder to sell it and bingo, it's a hit. Come to think of it, the iPhone's a bad example too, if you take into account the gradual market shift towards touchscreens via things like the Samsung u900 and the G1, and the astronomical amount of market research and product testing apple did pre-launch. Spending that much time writing a novel which has neither a market waiting nor any evidence of one just to see if it might sell is a pretty massive gamble when you look at the time invested and the likelihood of success. e: side note so as not to double post. You can swear in Kindle titles, right? Specifically the word 'bastard' Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Oct 13, 2014 |
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Oct 13, 2014 16:17
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Bobby Deluxe posted:
I imagine dropping an f-bomb will probably get you filtered, but a quick glance shows a decent number of books with "bastard" in the title, both self-pubbed and trad-pubbed, so I can't see that one being an issue. Someone with more knowledge of Amazon's inner workings can probably chime in, but I'm guessing there are certain words which will automatically hit you with an adult filter, and some which depend on the context in which they are used. If your title isn't super vulgar it's probably not an issue, though.
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Oct 13, 2014 17:56
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gently caress will most certainly get you filtered. Can't speak for anything else.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:00
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psychopomp posted:"Being a huge unexpected break-out success" is a nice fantasy but a lovely business plan.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:22
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DukeRustfield posted:I'm going to disagree with this. While you might be correct statistically, basically you're saying always be a follower. There are break-out products in every field. You can't say, "oh, there's never been an iPhone before so there is clearly no market for phones with the computing power of a PC." Or there's never been a 50 Shades (or at least not a big market). One of the reasons products can explode is precisely because it's a new market. Write the Generation Next Religious Memoir of Financial Accounting. It'll sell a million. Look at it this way... if nobody knows that a product (in this case, a book) like yours even exists, they're not going to know what to search for to find it. If they don't know it's possible to find a book like yours, they're not going to go looking for it. So while yes, it's certainly possible to break new ground, there's a lot more preliminary work that you have to do before you can be successful with it. You can't rely on established genre tropes/rules. You have to go out and popularize the kind of thing you're working on yourself. In some cases, you might even have to invent new words to describe the kind of thing that you're doing. But neologisms don't catch on unless they get popularized and accepted by a large group of people. So think of breaking new ground as inventing a neologism: you have to do whatever you can to get it to catch on. It's wise to do that work BEFORE you publish!
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Oct 13, 2014 22:17
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Yeah, I have nothing (in theory) against trying out something new as a 'break out' sort of project. However, in reality I have very limited amounts of time and bills have to be paid. I can write something that breaks the mold (and is more likely to fail miserably than be a super hit), or I can write something fitting a pre-existing concept that is all but guaranteed to net me $8-20K before I move onto my next project. When I have a nice buffer built up, I'd love to write some more experimental stuff. Until that happens, I have to stick to 'tried and true' styles. Gotta pay bills.
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Oct 14, 2014 01:02
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Well, I guess it depends on what you're shooting for. I will say it works quite well as a business plan in nearly any business. If you apply to a company, let's say Google, and tell them, "I just do what everyone else does," you won't get the job. If you tell your prospective agent, "I just want to make C+ grade work," s/he is likely not going to be interested. There's a huge gulf between making carbon copy poo poo and being an A#1 blockbuster overlord. This reminds me of an old article from Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio (Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek, et al). http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp06.Crap-plus-One.html
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Oct 14, 2014 11:04
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DukeRustfield posted:Well, I guess it depends on what you're shooting for. I will say it works quite well as a business plan in nearly any business. If you apply to a company, let's say Google, and tell them, "I just do what everyone else does," you won't get the job. If you tell your prospective agent, "I just want to make C+ grade work," s/he is likely not going to be interested. These are not apt analogies. Would you spend months or years honing yourself for an interview at Google without knowing what Google was looking for? That's ridiculous.
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Oct 14, 2014 14:15
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