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Jalumibnkrayal posted:You can actually bookmark your book's advertise and promote page. If you later make an update (like to the blurb) that puts it into review and locks the promo button, you can go to your bookmark and end your promo regardless. The student has become the teacher
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Nov 16, 2015 13:40
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My book is at #2234 paid store now. I'm hoping it can hover around there until the paid promo kicks in, which will hopefully get it lower and make me real money 
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Nov 16, 2015 14:31
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gerg_861 posted:
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Nov 16, 2015 17:11
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gerg_861 posted:
This blurb is really bad and full of punctuation errors as well as weird grammar errors.
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Nov 16, 2015 18:12
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:You can actually bookmark your book's advertise and promote page. If you later make an update (like to the blurb) that puts it into review and locks the promo button, you can go to your bookmark and end your promo regardless. Holy poo poo. This is awesome and I never knew it. Thanks!!!
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Nov 16, 2015 18:26
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Got a BookBub for next month. Yes! Merry Christmas to me!
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Nov 16, 2015 19:23
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Hijinks Ensue posted:Got a BookBub for next month. Yes! Merry Christmas to me! Congrats! Lucky! The bub keeps rejecting me 
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Nov 16, 2015 19:52
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i did it
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Nov 16, 2015 19:59
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angel opportunity posted:This blurb is really bad and full of punctuation errors as well as weird grammar errors. And thus I learn a valuable lesson about being more precise in asking for feedback. Thanks go out to Ravenkult though, I'll take the advice onboard and have another go at it. gerg_861 fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 22:03
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gerg_861 posted:And thus I learn a valuable lesson about being more precise in asking for feedback. Thanks go out to Ravenkult though, I'll take the advise onboard and have another go at it. Do it, report back, we'll go again.
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Nov 16, 2015 22:05
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ravenkult posted:Do it, report back, we'll go again. Alright, started pretty much from scratch. Read the top 20 google results for "how to write a blurb", then put together the below. In modern London, American ex-pat Julian Adler is struggling to balance a fast rising career in procurement, a young family and the incredible secret that he spends his sleeping hours slaying other people's nightmares. Meanwhile across the city at OMG Property Consultancy three young women are running a real estate firm with a difference – they're using magic to influence the minds of potential customers while they sleep. However when Julian's new assignment to buy a conference center brings the trio to him, his innate abilities set the legendary horror behind OMG's supernatural assistance free and reveal a devastating conspiracy to enslave the city's dreamers. Only Julian's lifetime of experience slaying imaginary terrors, his suddenly awakened mystical ability in the real world and Britain's largest collection of brains in jars have a chance to defeat OMG and the evil they've unleashed. Dream Job is an urban fantasy novel mixing magic, grit and humor that will keep you up all night. Any constructive feedback would be appreciated. Unconstructive feedback will be met with aloof assertions of intellectual superiority, or maybe just a bit of sulking. Thanks again for your time. Oh - and to contribute to the thread a bit, if there are any other Americans living abroad, and you set up a local company to handle your writing revenue then be sure that you are aware of IRS form 5471, which deals with foreign corporations owned by U.S. citizens. It's fairly new, and astonishingly difficult to fill out.
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Nov 17, 2015 01:35
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gerg_861 posted:In modern London, American ex-pat Julian Adler is struggling to balance a fast rising career in procurement, a young family and the incredible secret that he spends his sleeping hours slaying other people's nightmares. This series of things violates parallelism. You want to exploit parallel construction in blurbs, especially when you're trying to first build sympathy (young family! Career success!) and then finish with the clincher (dream job!). American ex-pat Julian Adler is struggling to balance building a prestigious career, caring for his new family, and hiding an incredible secret -- that he moonlights as a nightmare-slayer!
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Nov 17, 2015 01:46
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gerg_861 posted:Julian Adler is struggling to balance his career, his family and his incredible secret: that he spends his sleeping hours slaying other people's nightmares. This is so much better but it doesn't even work because I can't get a clear picture of what the gently caress it means to "slay a nightmare" Why the gently caress would you set up an overseas business for this? You get the first like 98k of income tax-free as an expat, there's no need to do anything other than report it as royalties when you do your taxes.
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Nov 17, 2015 02:02
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moana posted:Why the gently caress would you set up an overseas business for this? You get the first like 98k of income tax-free as an expat, there's no need to do anything other than report it as royalties when you do your taxes. But parallelisms draw people in, hold their attention and create suspense. On the tax thing you're right, there is probably no benefit to your U.S. taxes of creating a business, but there well could be in whatever jurisdiction you're actually living in. For example in Britain setting up as a business would allow a bunch of things to be treated as business expenses for VAT purposes, which would be a benefit. My main point was actually to highlight that if you do go down that route there's ANOTHER tax form that needs to be filled out that you might not know exists.
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Nov 17, 2015 07:33
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gerg_861 posted:On the tax thing you're right
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Nov 17, 2015 07:47
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gerg_861 posted:But parallelisms draw people in, hold their attention and create suspense. Only if you're actually following the rules of parallel construction when you write; your blurb has numerous violations of parallelism. It's a key element of style that you should master.
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Nov 17, 2015 16:00
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LEARN TO ,USE ,A COMMA !!!
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Nov 17, 2015 17:17
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quote:In modern London, American ex-pat Julian Adler is struggling to balance a fast rising career in procurement, a young family and the incredible secret that he spends his sleeping hours slaying other people's nightmares. The first sentence just doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because you've basically balanced a procurement career with nightmare slaying. One of these two things is interesting. The other is one of the most boring careers you can possibly have. You need to build up the nightmares more (and actually explain it in a way that piques the reader's imagination). The second sentence is unnecessary. They're effectively antagonists (or unleash the antagonist [haven't read your book]), so build them into Julian's challenge. Third sentence is bad. You should combine #2, #3 and #4 in a way that doesn't make me want to go to sleep. The big problem (and this applies across your entire blurb) goes back to your "parallelism creates suspense" thing. I'm not going to touch the grammar part of this, but instead the fact that you don't have suspense in your blurb. You have a veiled plot that is not clear to the reader, rather than a suspenseful plot that makes the reader want to find out the ending. To put it differently, you want your readers to say "Oh my god, look at that plot! I wonder how it's going to end!" instead of "Oh my god, I can't tell what's happening in this plot! How mysterious!" Get the difference? Your current blurb is the latter, not the former. Line #5 is broken and people have punched you enough for it grammatically already. The other problem I have is that mixing humor and "gritty" writing rarely works in a book, and it almost never works in a blurb because you simply don't have enough space. Figure out which one is dominant in your book and rewrite the blurb to focus on that instead. If you want to still drive home the humor part somehow, get some blogger to comment on it in a bullshit review and then put it in as an editorial review on the product page. Even better, though: Don't do it at all.  Also, think about just how much harder your blurb has to work as long as your cover is solid blue. Again.. wrong type of suspense. "I wonder what this book is about" is the wrong type of reaction from your reader. Sundae fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 19:41
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Sundae posted:
Alright - blurb writing was delayed because a tree fell on my car. Is that karma for the previous blurbs? Probably. I really appreciate all the feedback, especially the bit above from Sundae. I hope I got the difference this time. Julian Adler is struggling to balance his career, his family and his incredible secret: that he spends his sleeping hours slaying other people's nightmares. Hurling lightning bolts and flinging hot lead he makes the most depraved monsters that his fellow Londoners can imagine fear him, then he rips a hole in reality and blasts them into oblivion. However Julian's grip on a normal life slips as he catches a trio of witches with a get-rich-quick scheme targeting his company. They summon a dream-demon to possess his coworkers, and when he invades its realm to set his colleagues free, no gun, grenade or lightning bolt that Julian throws at the unstoppable horror even scratches it. Each day the demon is growing stronger, and soon it could pose a threat to the whole city. But the summoning spell also unlocked Julian's potential, allowing him to bend the real world to his will, which leads him to devise an insane plan that just might even the odds...if he's willing to put his family in danger. Dream Job is an urban fantasy novel mixing magic, grit and horror.
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Nov 18, 2015 04:56
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I know I keep harping on this, but if I read a blurb where the author shows he doesn't know how to punctuate properly, I am 100% not reading the book. If I had to read a whole book without commas where they need to be, I'd probably pluck my own eyes out. https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/607/ First sentence: quote:Julian Adler is struggling to balance his career, his family and his incredible secret: that he spends his sleeping hours slaying other people's nightmares. Hurling lightning bolts and flinging hot lead, he makes the most depraved monsters This is awkward as hell construction -->that his fellow Londoners can imagine fear him, then he rips a hole in reality and blasts them into oblivion. Taking Hard Luck Hank as a case study, you really don't have to be a super amazing writer to make money and do well at this. I hate reading books like Hard Luck Hank or what you are writing, but there's a lot of readers out there into these kind of comedy/satire genre stories. You really should just sit down and learn how to punctuate and poo poo, or just make sure you hire a good editor before you publish. The former option is cheaper and less work in the long run. It's probably a good idea to hire an editor either way, as I've learned, but having the cleanest thing you can in the first place will result in a much better final product. You can't start a sentence with "However," and then not put a comma after it like you did. Leaving out the comma creates a totally different meaning and sets the readers brain up to expect it: "However you want to do it is fine with me." "However you want to do it" is like a set thing here. If I ask you, "How do you want to slay the demon?" You can respond with, "I don't know, however you want to do it." If you said, "I don't know. However, you want to do it," then the meaning is totally different. The way you omitted the comma made my brain expect the "However you want" type of construction, but then when I realized it wasn't that, my brain had to backtrack and get confused. Basically it's just a bad mistake that you should know better than to do! ------- And now, the thing I pointed out as an awkward construction: Hurling lightning bolts and flinging hot lead, he makes the most depraved monsters that his fellow Londoners can imagine fear him. The core of this jangling sentence is: He makes the most depraved monsters fear him. This sentence is bad at its core, because "He makes monsters fear him," is a boring and passive sounding sentence. Compare to something like "When he hurls lighting bolts and flings hot lead, even the most depraved monsters cower and tremble." This sentence SHOWS the monsters are afraid, and it gives them an active verb to do. Avoid whenever possible: PERSON A makes PERSON B (do) VERB. There's almost always a more interesting way to say it that will flow better and attract the reader's interest more. Going back to your original construction, break it up into parts: Element 1: Hurling lightning bolts and flinging hot lead Element 2: He makes the most depraved monsters fear him Element 3: That his fellow Londoners can imagine I'm not even going to touch the ", then" part either, but just be aware it is throwing yet another thing onto a sentence that is already too complicated and awkward. What is the point of element 3? To show that these are monsters his fellow Londoners have created from their imagination? Try to show this in a more interesting way rather than jamming it into an already bloated sentence. When you shove it in there like you did, it is downplayed a lot and there's no real emphasis on it. The reader is going to barely process it amid all the other crap going on in this sentence, and since you placed it awkwardly in there and made it break up the flow and elegance of the sentence, it's less likely to accomplish its goal. You already mention in the previous sentence "other people's nightmares," but I do agree you need to clarify more that these nightmares have manifested into real monsters. I'd recommend just adding a very clear sentence along the lines of, "London's nightmares are manifesting as real monsters and demons, and only Julian can stop them." Then transition into "When he hurls lightning bolts and flings hot lead, even the most depraved of London's nightmares cower and tremble." I think it's fine to say "London" to avoid awkward stuff like "His fellow Londoners." I think "London's nightmares" is snappier and sounds pretty cool anyway. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Nov 18, 2015 |
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Nov 18, 2015 05:29
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Could we get a sample from the book because I'm wondering whether the problems here extend a bit beyond just the blurb. Possibly the book is not quite ready to be sold in good faith
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Nov 18, 2015 08:40
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Glad I found this thread. I first heard about self-publishing ebooks from one of those Udemy "classes" How to Skirt the Edges of Plagiarism Using Your High School and Community College Last-Minute Essay Writing 'Skills' in Information Marketing and Make Thousands of Dollars PER YEAR in Passive Income!! (I was curious and the "class" was marked down to $9.99 from $500 and I hadn't yet realized what an awful place Udemy can be) Just checking in I suppose. I have a lot of stuff on paper and in my head, but for some reason I'm a lazy fuckwit when I'm at home. I've started a sci-fi....thing, whether I can expand into a novel or just a short story is yet to be seen, and also written a handful of disassociated scenes from a fantasy novel, which I'm feeling will end up being a Game of Thrones Lite type of deal. And since I started reading/writing again, I wrote a loving poem, something I've not done in..like...15 years? A few actually. And about a hundred haiku. I'm thinking of doing a few things here, like a short story collection, a novel, and a poetry book. There's also a weird sinister part of me that wants to do non-fiction information marketing underneath a pen name, because wouldn't that just be loving...gross to do both? I want to publish for the sake of art or whatever, and to take that risk, and see if I can actually create something good that people will like. There's also that (unlikely)hope that somehow my poo poo will take off and I can just have like 50 books on the kindle store and just walk to the mailbox every week and not work a lovely factory job anymore. Looking forward to getting help and helping others itt
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Nov 18, 2015 10:07
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If you want to make a living at this, you have to target what people want. Right now, that's paranormal romance. Soon it'll be something else, but right now, it's that. You are absolutely entitled to write whatever you want, just be clear if you're doing this for fun or to get paid. If you want both, there have been many people who have wandered in trying to do both, failed and then argued with the people who were trying to help. E: to clarify that last point, there are too many people self pubbing now for works to get by without being 100% polished. If you want it to compete, and therefore make money, you have to turn out a polished product. Short stories only sell if they're smut. We don't discuss themes or content in this thread. We discuss the marketing of it, briefly make jokes about it, but never discuss content. Splitting your pen names is absolutely a good idea, otherwise your fiction fans will just get pissed off when they autobuy a book and it's not their usual genre. The people in this thread know a lot, and are an invaluable resource. Listen to them. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Nov 18, 2015 |
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Nov 18, 2015 11:08
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Bobby Deluxe posted:You are absolutely entitled to write whatever you want, just be clear if you're doing this for fun or to get paid. If you want both, there have been many people who have wandered in trying to do both, failed and then argued with the people who were trying to help. I'm kind of in the middle of these two extremes. While I certainly wouldn't turn down money, I'd be happy if I could make an extra $10k a year. I'd be ecstatic with $20k. Is that a reasonable expectation for something outside of the current trend? Also, huge thanks to everybody posting great advice in this thread! This has been an invaluable resource for trying to wrap my head around how all of this works and figuring out how to get started. It's also a great motivator seeing how many goons are actually doing this successfully. I look forward to having my cover and blurb torn to shreds if I ever finish the sci-fi romance I'm writing. On that note, does anybody have good recommendations for books to read in that genre? I mostly read non-fiction and sci-fi short stories, so I know I'd benefit from reading something closer to what I'm trying to write. My current plan is to keep my writing momentum going as long as I can, then read through a book or five before doing any extensive editing.
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Nov 18, 2015 12:24
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I was making about $1k a month by the end of my first year writing in multiple genres with multiple pen-names (none of them erotica or romance) so it's definitely possible. Or at least it was in 2012, but I was tremendously prolific my first year and put out a lot of material. This was before Kindle Unlimited, and back when Barnes & Noble was earning me as much money as Amazon, and these days I still get by but it's mostly sales to my core group of dedicated fans. Reaching new people has become more difficult. I'll be doing more marketing and upping my production schedule in 2016, but if that doesn't do it I'll have to look into getting a day job.
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Nov 18, 2015 17:16
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Could we get a sample from the book because I'm wondering whether the problems here extend a bit beyond just the blurb. Possibly the book is not quite ready to be sold in good faith Angel, thank you for the honest feedback and analysis. In my day job I provide advice to people on technical contract matters. When I see them consistently committing the same basic mistakes it annoys the crap out of me. You're probably in a similar position when you keep reading my blurbs, therefore the detailed explanations are appreciated. I've favorited your link. Sulla, how might you suggest I provide a sample? Just posting a big chunk of text into this thread isn't something I've seen done in this topic before, and perhaps I'd be better off taking that off forum or in another topic? I don't want to de-rail the rest of the conversation. In any event I won't barf this book out upon the world tomorrow. The feedback I've already received has convinced me that I need to make at least one more pass through myself. Hiring an editor to review the manuscript is quite a daunting commitment at the moment, as the total length is just shy of 120k words.
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Nov 18, 2015 18:39
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seorin posted:I'm kind of in the middle of these two extremes. While I certainly wouldn't turn down money, I'd be happy if I could make an extra $10k a year. I'd be ecstatic with $20k. Is that a reasonable expectation for something outside of the current trend? That almost-a-pyramid-scheme Udemy class I signed up for said that if you make it into the top 1000 best sellers in your genre you can rest assured on $10k/yr. Bobby Deluxe posted:If you want to make a living at this, you have to target what people want. Right now, that's paranormal romance. Soon it'll be something else, but right now, it's that. I have notes/guidelines taken from 2 Udemy classes on marketing nonfiction/information, if anyone is interested. Keep in mind I've not tried anything myself but have a little bit of seemingly useful info. Also, are you all familiar with this?: http://www.lulu.com/titlescorer/ Basically it puts your book's title into an algorithm based on statisticians' analysis of bestsellers throughout the ages and gives you a rough idea if you've got a good title or not. Could be nonsense, but it's fun to play with. Titles like "fuk u" and "Frothing Binary" scored fairly high.
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Nov 18, 2015 18:44
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seorin posted:I'm kind of in the middle of these two extremes. While I certainly wouldn't turn down money, I'd be happy if I could make an extra $10k a year. I'd be ecstatic with $20k. Is that a reasonable expectation for something outside of the current trend? Despite all the doomsaying, this is extremely easy and realistic if you apply yourself. You REALLY need to look at yourself and your goals and define clearly what you want to accomplish. Is the goal to make $20k extra per year, or is the goal to make $20k extra per year doing sci-fi romance? What would you consider a bigger success, making $20k extra per year writing stepbrother/badboy romance, or making $10k extra per year writing sci-fi romance? Which would be more fulfilling to you? http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Mine-Romance-Planet-Barbarians-ebook/dp/B017KRJ1UK/ref=zg_bs_158566011_56 Look at this book, then look at the also boughts. Look at anything that has a ranking of #2,000 as lower for your example to emulate. Don't focus too hard on outliers...like if there is one single book at rank #200 and it deviates from the style of everything else around rank #1,000, you probably want to focus more on the books that all are more similar and also at higher ranks. Having a book at rank ~#2,000 is about $50/day before tax. If you always have at least one book sitting at that rank, you'll make close to $20,000/year. When you are looking at books to emulate, check the publication date as well. You ideally want to emulate books with sub-2,000 ranking released in the last month or two. Back to my question of what your goal is, to make the most money possible, or to make the most money possible while writing sci-fi romance. Sci-fi romance is definitely a thing, but it's 90% romance and 10% scif-fi, from what I've read at least. Do those little extra sci-fi trimmings: like having the dude hit the lady with a belt--but on a SPACESHIP--or having her land on a planet where all the guys are 7 feet tall with 8-pack abs--do those little things make it a lot more fun for you to write the book? How much fun do you think you'd have writing badboy romance or shifter romance? Look at the top 100 http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/158566011. There is A LOT of badboys, a fair handful of shifters, and only a few aliens. As far as getting high rankings, choosing to write into a wildly popular genre is like starting a single-player computer game on "easy mode," compared to starting on "hard" or something. It's not actually EASY, but you're giving yourself the best shot possible to hit good rankings. I think Sean throws around the number with pure sci-fi, that it's 10x less popular than romance in general. Sci-fi romance might be 5x less popular...I don't really know what that number is though. I just know that you don't see a lot of sci-fi romance in the top 100. This means that if you choose to write into sci-fi, hitting that sub-2,000 rank will be much more difficult for you than if you write badboys or shifters. Also keep in mind that what's popular changes as time goes on, so if you go with badboys, there's always a risk that this genre will fade down and wane in popularity. You'll then have to decide if you want to make a new pen name, or add whatever is new and becoming popular onto your existing one, etc. If you do shifters, and shifters as a whole just wane, but some other supernatural thing picks up, you can likely just stay with your pen name as it's "paranormal." If you go with sci-fi, and if aliens become less popular but starship crew love triangles become popular, you probably can keep it on that pen name. You don't really want to do badboys and shifters on the same pen name, however. Nor do you want to have aliens and badboys on one pen name. I've seen some people with shifters and aliens on the same pen name, but I probably wouldn't do that either. Basically you want to research your chosen genre by reading the good sellers in that genre. Once you have done so, try to write something very similar to what is selling. Don't try to make a unique and clever spin on it that you've never seen before. DON'T DO THAT Write it so it reads like one of the books in the top 2,000. When you aren't writing, join some off-sites like Dirty Discourse, and read through their forums. There are threads where people outline everything they are doing: marketing strategies, covers, etc. etc. You want to read through as many of these as you can and keep asking questions. Get to know other authors, and try to find someone who is where you want to be. Then badger them without being too annoying, and basically take anything they tell you as gospel. They know better than you do, so just shut up and do what they tell you. When I started erotica, I was doing this with Sundae basically. He told me I could realistically be making $10,000/month in the space of a few months. He told me "Write ten shorts, then get back to me." So I just started writing as fast as I could to get ten shorts, then I got back to him. I basically just did everything he said, and had KU 2.0 not happened, I'm sure I would have been making $10,000/month by the third month. People told me that keywords are these top secret thing that people don't share, but I badgered a guy on an offsite who was doing the same type of erotica as me but selling way better, and he just copy/pasted his keywords to me. I used those as a base for all the keywords I did in erotica. Don't listen to everyone's advice. Weed out bad advice. If someone has a bunch of books that are like #10,000+ ranking, and if their new releases don't hit the ranks you want for the money you want to make, then avoid listening to them. They might be right about certain things, but they are doing something wrong, and you don't want to emulate them. Emulate people who are doing everything right. On the off-sites, most people will have their book covers with amazon links in their sigs, if you see a lovely looking cover, click it and look at the rank. Just do this regularly and you'll start to develop a sense of what stuff sells and what doesn't. Read A LOT of blurbs. Read way more blurbs of stuff at various ranks than you do books. When you see something that came out less than 30 days ago with an awesome cover but a poo poo rank, check the blurb. Try to always figure out why a certain book is at the rank that it is. Then, when you're ready to release your book, do everything possible to make your book exactly like a book you see at the rank you want to achieve. You want to match: Length, plot structure, level of humor, beats hit in blurb, amount of sex, cover appearance, premise and setup (for instance almost everything in the top 100 is going to have 'forced proximity' between the hero and heroine, so make sure your book has that). There's a lot of stuff you want to match, and you don't want to outright copy--not at all--but you want your book to be like the books people are buying a lot of. Someone who buys the #500 ranked book should read your book and think it's just as good: the cover, review quality, and blurb should all look like a #500 rank book. With all this said, if the thing you have already started writing isn't following a winning formula, I'd seriously just scrap it and start fresh. You can start a pen name from nothing in the space of a month if you really need to, and the book can come out and start making the level of money that you want right out of the gate. If you get stubborn and stick to something that probably won't work, you'll waste a bunch of time, release it, feel disappointed, and then you'll have to decide if you want to kill the pen name or stick with it. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Nov 18, 2015 |
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Nov 18, 2015 19:19
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angel opportunity posted:With all this said, if the thing you have already started writing isn't following a winning formula, I'd seriously just scrap it and start fresh. You can start a pen name from nothing in the space of a month if you really need to, and the book can come out and start making the level of money that you want right out of the gate. If you get stubborn and stick to something that probably won't work, you'll waste a bunch of time, release it, feel disappointed, and then you'll have to decide if you want to kill the pen name or stick with it. This is one of the hardest lessons to take, but it's well worth paying attention to. Seriously. If you could see how many half books are in my "can't throw it away but can't possibly sell it" drawer...  Throw it away early before it takes on a life of its own. 
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Nov 18, 2015 21:11
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angel opportunity posted:When I started erotica, I was doing this with Sundae basically. He told me I could realistically be making $10,000/month in the space of a few months. He told me "Write ten shorts, then get back to me." So I just started writing as fast as I could to get ten shorts, then I got back to him. I basically just did everything he said, and had KU 2.0 not happened, I'm sure I would have been making $10,000/month by the third month. People told me that keywords are these top secret thing that people don't share, but I badgered a guy on an offsite who was doing the same type of erotica as me but selling way better, and he just copy/pasted his keywords to me. I used those as a base for all the keywords I did in erotica. Is erotica truly this lucrative? Honestly it was the first thing I ever wrote, even as a teenager, and I was good at it.
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Nov 18, 2015 23:47
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Omglosser posted:Is erotica truly this lucrative? Honestly it was the first thing I ever wrote, even as a teenager, and I was good at it. It's not quite the same anymore. Most people will not hit those values under the new payment system, and they almost certainly won't do it with the old "1-2 shorts a week" approach that worked a few years ago. The rules of the game have changed quite a bit.
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Nov 19, 2015 00:55
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Omglosser posted:Is erotica truly this lucrative? Honestly it was the first thing I ever wrote, even as a teenager, and I was good at it. Previously, you used to get paid around $1.30 every time one of your titles was borrowed. This meant that you could knock out 3k of smut, slap on a cover, blurb and keywords and then promote the crap out of it to Prime / KU customers. They get 'free' smut, and you get paid. Full length authors didn't like this, because they were slaving away for months to get their magnum opus released and making a pittance, while smutsters were releasing one a week and laughing all the way to the bank. They whined and pushed and pointed out the less savoury subjects the short authors were doing, and eventually Amazon caved and agreed to pay authors by pages read rather than per borrow. This has obviously flipped the whole thing on its head and now it's the novelists who are making the big bucks from Amazon, and the smut authors are either switching tactics or bundling everything into connections. The good authors adjusted and the bad ones didn't. I'm limping along somewhere in the middle mostly through personal issues, but I get by. So to summarise, it is not that lucrative now, but it was once.
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Nov 19, 2015 00:58
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angel opportunity posted:With all this said, if the thing you have already started writing isn't following a winning formula, I'd seriously just scrap it and start fresh. Thanks for the huge post with lots of detailed information! It's extremely useful and I appreciate you taking the effort. The quoted part is the hardest to hear, but painfully relevant. I need to do more reading and market research before I put in too much wasted effort. How long does it take you guys to churn out a 200-250 page novel? About how many words per day on average? Most of my writing has been short form, so I've been trying to practice just getting more words on the page. It's harder than it sounds, at least for me. I'm guessing it goes a lot quicker when you're just following an established formula? Anyway, sorry for the annoying newbie questions. I've got lots of reading to do before I can make good use of most of your advice.
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Nov 19, 2015 10:25
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seorin posted:How long does it take you guys to churn out a 200-250 page novel? About how many words per day on average? Use word counts as targets, not time limits. If you set a time limit you'll dick around and procrastinate. Set a word limit, and you're not leaving the keyboard until the words are down.
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Nov 19, 2015 12:26
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Question about Amazon ads. There's the ad that appears on someone elses product, right below the pricing on the right, or the list that appears just below the also-boughts.  Then there's another style that appears on a keyword search.  I know how to create my own ad that's beneath the pricing, through Amazon Marketing Services. But the other Sponsored links takes me to Amazon SellerCentral where nothing seems to function the same. How do I add my book to those sponsored lists?
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Nov 19, 2015 13:43
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seorin posted:How long does it take you guys to churn out a 200-250 page novel? About how many words per day on average? Most of my writing has been short form, so I've been trying to practice just getting more words on the page. It's harder than it sounds, at least for me. I'm guessing it goes a lot quicker when you're just following an established formula? 2,500/day is my goal but I go over almost every day. I've found that 65k is a pretty good number for a novel length romance. I can churn one out in about three weeks, then it takes some extra time for ARC reviews and editing, etc. So I'm on something like a 5-6 week release schedule. I wish I could do it in 4, but I have a day job and that's also kindof a brutal pace. I think 1k/day is a good place to start. Once you get into a habit (and make sure it's a habit, do it every single day and don't skip your words no matter how quiet the ~muse~ is that day) you'll eventually start writing more and more. It's like anything else. Just practice and you'll improve. Look into trying the pomodoro technique, I found that was really helpful for me when I was starting out. But really just sit your rear end down and write your drat words. That's all it is.
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Nov 19, 2015 14:39
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I've been doing this (uploaded from mobile so gently caress knows if it worked properly). Since I've been doing NaNoWriMo, this has been really good at keeping me on track for the 1667 words a day necessary. It's good at telling me what happens when I gently caress off for two days like on 11/6 and 11/7, and it's telling me that when I go over for a few days, I can take a breather. For example, I could piss away the entire day today and still be in the green for monthly word progress. I realize that this is a really simple thing and probably not helpful to most people but it's worked for me and I haven't been writing consistently for over a year until this month. After I finish the sci-fi romance novel I've been cramming out, I'll probably use this when I go back to romance/super romance.
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Nov 19, 2015 14:53
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Yooper posted:Question about Amazon ads. Long story short: You can't unless you're part of the lucky few. Those ads are in small group testing right now and are only open to trad pubs, a select set of KDP users, and people who gave Amazon waaaaay too much money for their personalized marketing campaigns. If you have permission to do it, it'll show up under "Promote and Advertise", then go to the advertising tab, and then you'll have a ratio box for advertising by keyword. If you only have product and interest, then you do not have access to those ads.
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Nov 19, 2015 15:21
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Sundae posted:Long story short: You can't unless you're part of the lucky few. Those ads are in small group testing right now and are only open to trad pubs, a select set of KDP users, and people who gave Amazon waaaaay too much money for their personalized marketing campaigns. If you have permission to do it, it'll show up under "Promote and Advertise", then go to the advertising tab, and then you'll have a ratio box for advertising by keyword. If you only have product and interest, then you do not have access to those ads. Thanks Sundae! That answers that. Though it makes you wonder about the viability, I mean if we're already adding keywords this just puts the book into a bidding war. Which I guess makes Amazon more money, so, welp, answered my own thought. This is starting to feel like the company store....
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Nov 19, 2015 16:21
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I did a book giveaway on goodreads, got a lot of activity from it, including a review and three book ratings. (Somebody gave it one star? And didn't bother to write a review to back it up? If you're that passionate about something, I'd assume you'd want to elaborate.) My kindle numbers have been going up, so that's also a good thing. This weekend I'm doing a 30-minute facebook event. A FB book release party or some poo poo? I honestly have no idea what it is but a lot of authors on FB say it's a great way to get exposure. I feel like grandpa looking at an iphone asking "where the gently caress do I dial the number?" Next month I'm going to record the audiobook of my book. Has anybody done that? Has it paid for your beach house? Because I am counting on that.
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Nov 20, 2015 19:27
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