|
Satan being a page full of SEO keywords is surprisingly accurate
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2016 16:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 16, 2024 15:16 |
|
|
How to get Reviews: build a mailing list and then ask them if they want to be a part of your ARC team. Trying to hunt down reviews for individual books is way too time consuming. I found great success by running FB ads to join my ARC team: people on FB love free books. Upwork: don't use the word erotic or erotica. Use romance, steamy, etc. They have to skirt around Google's content policies. Editors looking for work: check out Dirty Discourse, Romance Divas, and Writer's Cafe on Kboards. And/or advertise your rates here, I'm always looking for editors, but I'm price sensitive.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2016 17:28
|
|
|
I still recommend Bookside Manner for all your editing needs. She's fantastic.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2016 17:41
|
|
|
Sundae posted:I still recommend Bookside Manner for all your editing needs. She's fantastic. I'll second that. Bookside did a great job with my book. Really helped me cut through the b/s and get a product out the door. Also - taking other tips from this thread (like using social media and creating a website) did seem to help. My book was based in a particular area, so I dropped lines to various local FB groups, and saw half a dozen sales pop up later in the day. My sales weren't spectacular, but I'm happy enough for a first time self-pubbed author of a fringe genre. My final product is below - and it would have been way worse without your help, so thanks to everyone on this thread for the advice. https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Job-Dreamwalker-Chronicles-Book-ebook/dp/B01LG31ADK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1474842160&sr=8-1  Meet Julian Adler, twenty-something, married, and London's one-and-only Dreamwalker. Striding through the Dreamscape, he battles the worst monsters that a sleeping metropolis can imagine, but flinging fire and swinging steel he makes them burn and bleed. Slaying imaginary monsters doesn't pay very well though, so Julian spends his days at an ordinary office job. Ordinary that is, until a beautiful witch walks through his office door and tries to put a spell on him. When the spell goes wrong, an eldritch horror is unleashed into the real world, bodies start to pile up, and Julian's magic is the only thing that might be able to send it, shrieking, back into oblivion. Can Julian find a way to lure the demon back to the Dreamscape, or will it drag his family, his city, and the entire world into a nightmare that never ends?
|
|
#
?
Sep 25, 2016 23:25
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:I wrote an entire short story on my phone while pooping and that story made me some money. Makes me feel silly every time I'm browsing these dead forums on my phone. You're one of the most frequent posters in this thread but I never see you post any of your own work. Why is that?
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2016 23:12
|
|
|
If you don't know, you don't wanna know.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 01:17
|
|
|
Bubble Bobby posted:You're one of the most frequent posters in this thread but I never see you post any of your own work. Why is that? A lot of the people in this thread don't post their work, for two common reasons. #1 - A lot of them are refugees from the BFC thread and our (original, before they changed genres) content is banned from discussion. #2 - They make a decent sum and don't want to risk pen names being connected to SA names, real names, 1-star rush brigades, etc. It's just generally better to not do it once you hit a certain point. I'm not at Sean's level by any means, but for a while I was bringing in $10K-20K a month and there's no way in hell I was going to do anything to risk that income. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 04:08
|
|
|
Bubble Bobby posted:You're one of the most frequent posters in this thread but I never see you post any of your own work. Why is that? After the original BFC thread and what happened in there, there's no way in hell I'm ever posting my books on SA again.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 09:25
|
|
|
Bubble Bobby posted:You're one of the most frequent posters in this thread but I never see you post any of your own work. Why is that? People will buy them avatars and captions with saucy quotes from their books.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 13:15
|
|
|
Szmitten posted:People will buy them avatars and captions with saucy quotes from their books.  if that was the worst that could happen I wouldn't even mind. There were people in the original BFC thread that got doxxed, harassed, and even had assholes emailing and calling their place of work, telling their bosses about the erotica they were publishing.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 13:45
|
|
|
Bardeh posted:
Man, every time I get a little bit relaxed on this site, something happens or someone brings up something that reminds me that there will always be goons around who are the grossest of us all. Was this unique to the folks writing erotica? I mean... is it just that people couldn't handle their poo poo and felt the need to take it out on people who just wanted to have a good time and make some money writing sex?
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 14:17
|
|
|
Finger Wagon posted:Man, every time I get a little bit relaxed on this site, something happens or someone brings up something that reminds me that there will always be goons around who are the grossest of us all. Was this unique to the folks writing erotica? I mean... is it just that people couldn't handle their poo poo and felt the need to take it out on people who just wanted to have a good time and make some money writing sex? The only thing we all have in common is reading this dead gay website together.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 14:25
|
|
|
Wasn't at least one mod hounded away from SA because of all that?
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 14:32
|
|
|
docbeard posted:Wasn't at least one mod hounded away from SA because of all that? Yes, she was the one who unfortunately bore the brunt of it. There are lots of awesome authors (I can think of at least two HUGE names in romance that used to post here) that left and have never come back.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 15:13
|
|
|
Bardeh posted:
That's understandable then. Never underestimate creepy people on the internet.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 23:02
|
|
|
I got an email from a review publication I submitted to asking for either a hard copy or e-galley of my (not yet published) book. Yay for reviews, but what is an e-galley? Is it just the same thing as a digital ARC? I want to make sure before I send them a PDF or Kindle file like a doofus if that's not what they're after.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2016 02:38
|
|
|
Did anybody else's KDP just update itself to look different? Mine is now heavily pitching the a beta for some thing where Amazon creates paperbacks of your work for you via CreateSpace, and now my earnings report is a table with all kinds of crap I don't want. edit: the beta thing looks really interesting, because they basically print on-demand and you don't have to pay anything (they just take a bigger chunk of the royalties it looks like), so it seems like free money - EXCEPT they "re-review" all new or existing KDP content submitted for content guidelines. So I'm guessing people who write books with loving in 'em are going to get the old 'hell no'. Popular Human fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Sep 30, 2016 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2016 02:48
|
|
|
Blue Scream posted:I got an email from a review publication I submitted to asking for either a hard copy or e-galley of my (not yet published) book. Yay for reviews, but what is an e-galley? Is it just the same thing as a digital ARC? I want to make sure before I send them a PDF or Kindle file like a doofus if that's not what they're after. Googling it turns up https://s2.netgalley.com/ which is a site you hear authors trying to rent out their slots on. It sounds like a wickedly overpriced way to get reviews, though it seems like it has other functions?
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2016 16:40
|
|
|
It is an overpriced way to get reviews but it is considered more respectable.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2016 19:06
|
|
|
Yeah, I know some writers who do Netgalley co-ops, and it always seemed expensive even to share. I looked around some more and it just seems like an e-galley is just the digital version of your book that's going to be published. The reviewer told me a PDF was fine, so if anybody else gets that request, it seems to be just another way of saying ARC. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2016 05:04
|
|
|
Has anyone tried to self-publish a "literary fiction" novel and had it do well? Is self-publishing something that isn't genre a fool's errand? Should I try to get my novel traditionally published?
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2016 18:52
|
|
|
Define 'literary' - are you talking Zadie Smith or Finnegans Wake? You can publish it (and good luck to you, sincerely!) It's just that between the three of them, Romance, Thrillers and Sci-Fi/Fantasy make up something insane like 80% of the self-publishing market. So you're already competing for a very small number of dollars. I've also noticed, as someone who occasionally downs a "literary" novel along with my cheesy horror books, that people don't tend to seek out 'literature' as much unless some gatekeeper (like the Man Booker people or some other prestigious lit group) pushes it on people. See: all the people who wrote goddamn amazing novels that were never popular in their lifetimes until decades later when small but intellectual groups were like "wow, this is a great book, we should add this to our recommended reading lists." So you'd have to promote the everloving gently caress out of it, and I would think people who pride themselves on reading 'great literature' would be the first people to look at something and go "oh, I'm not reading that - that's self-published."
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2016 19:58
|
|
|
Just a heads up everyone, apparently it is a known issue that KU reads are not working properly. There's a thread now on K boards, and in more... knowledgeable forms. people have been complaining about it for a few weeks. Romance writers seem to notice it more than others, since page reads is such a huge part of their (and my) income. Amazon has been silent when people have emailed about it, other than saying it was a server issue. Thought I'd mention it in case others have had a rough couple of weeks. Who knows if it's actually just a server issue or if they are actually planning on putting out K.U.3.0 or something. This in no way is meant to be a panic post, just something people have been grumbling about. Also, the best theory I've seen is that they may have changed it to pages actually read, over pages you've skipped past. I know I've always borrowed my own works, and then skipped to the thank you in a way to quickly get more pages. Until now that's worked fine.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2016 20:15
|
|
|
I've self-published a contemporary/literary novel, and the sales weren't quit-the-day-job good but it always earned back on its promotions and made me a profit. It's all about what you want to achieve. If it's a story you want to tell and you aren't relying on the book sales to keep the roof over your head, go for it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 01:17
|
|
|
Thanks for the encouragement! I don't need the money because I still have smuhbux rolling in. Writing something personal seemed like the best way to break up the monotony of tab a into slot b.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 01:46
|
|
|
Got my form R from Angry Robot Books at long last. Time to spiff another dumb book up again and put 'er out there myself.  It's been almost nine months, I coulda popped out a kid by now.My KU numbers have flattened out and are almost suspiciously even, so I'm keeping an eye on this dumb underreported page reads situation. I asked the weirdly solicitous support agent who calls me (  ) but he didn't actually answer that question.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 02:45
|
|
|
Other people may disagree with me here, but if you have a book you are looking to publish in the next few weeks and you can afford to do so, I'd recommend holding off on publishing until the dust settles on this possible reporting bug.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 02:48
|
|
|
I don't disagree.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 02:51
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:Other people may disagree with me here, but if you have a book you are looking to publish in the next few weeks and you can afford to do so, I'd recommend holding off on publishing until the dust settles on this possible reporting bug. Dunno if you mean me or in general, but I agree that if it's possible to wait, do so. Though I'm not feeling very hopeful about fixes before November, since this has been going on a while now.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 02:51
|
|
|
I didn't mean anyone specifically, I just didn't want to sound overly authoritative on this because I haven't researched it as much as others. I have a book that will be done on Friday though and I'm not planning to even book promo for it until something happens with this bug.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 02:58
|
|
|
My income is like half of what I'd expect - and while I can afford to wait in terms of having money in the bank and being able to pay my bills, I feel really leery of waiting another whole month and risk losing readers who have already been waiting a while for the 3rd book in a series which is pretty much ready for release. Lots of people are saying that Amazon is getting back to them within a few days with some sort of answer, but who even knows with the Zon's tech support, it's loving useless. People have been emailing them with definitive proof (or as close as you can get without actual borrow numbers) that something's off, and only now are they admitting that maybe there's some sort of technical problem on their end. Bardeh fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Oct 4, 2016 |
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 13:24
|
|
|
There has been a small change. Please read this new Amazon blog post. https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/abpto3jt7fhb5oc And the new guidelines. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=14279631 Book authors and publishers may continue to provide free or discounted copies of their books to readers, as long as the author or publisher does not require a review in exchange or attempt to influence the review.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 17:18
|
|
|
 So this basically means nothing will change in terms of ARCs. Instead of saying 'In exchange for an honest review', you say 'An honest review would be very much appreciated' and then remove people who don't leave one, much like most of us already do. E: Oh, and the fact that you have to have spent $50 on Amazon using a debit/credit card, not including Prime payments, to be able to leave a review. This will likely cut the pool of reviewers down reasonably significantly.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 17:58
|
|
|
Bardeh posted:
Hear that sound? It's the sound of 250 different $50 Visa Gift Cards purchasing poo poo on Amazon, while the review mill owner cackles and adds a zero to the end of his price.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 18:50
|
|
|
Has anyone ever had a story sit 'In Review' for FIVE days? I've even published another story since, and that story has already gone live. I've had stories sit for a bit and get blocked before, but never for five drat days. Via the magical alchemy of complaining about it on SA, the story is now publishing! (That was why I complained in the first place). Popular Human fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Oct 5, 2016 |
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 23:39
|
|
|
Sundae posted:Hear that sound? It's the sound of 250 different $50 Visa Gift Cards purchasing poo poo on Amazon, while the review mill owner cackles and adds a zero to the end of his price. The end of that thing also says advance review copies remain a-okay. I'm sure there will be much dickery w/r/t whether a reviewer received an advance copy, though.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 20:37
|
|
|
So I am seriously looking to get into self-pub for money since I am working part-time from home and have a lot of free time. I am currently doing genre research and reading through this thread in order to put a plan together before I start writing. I remembered that I purchased Nimble Writer on steam during a sale a few years back so I opened it up in order to decide if that was the program I wanted to use going forward. When I opened it I found about 500 words I apparently wrote when I first bought it that I do not remember writing at all. It seems to be an opening to a book idea I had at one point. I would like to get some feedback on what I wrote. I realize there are a lot of things I can clean up (I already pasted it into Hemingway), so I am not looking for specific critiques of things like sentence structure or passive voice. I just want to get some feedback from goon writers on whether my writing is poo poo or not. Assuming I nail the whole marketing/book cover stuff, is my writing at a sufficient level where I can expect to make sales? This has not been edited at all, so assume I would go through that process before publishing as well: quote:
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2016 19:17
|
|
|
D-Pad posted:stuff you wrote too many pronouns; dunno who you're talking about half the time.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2016 19:20
|
|
|
ketchup vs catsup posted:too many pronouns; dunno who you're talking about half the time. Agreed. In the old Transformers cartoon, they would always call the robots by name, excessively so. That was so the audience would remember and be able to buy the toys. It was really successful and I try and emulate it in my writing. Establishing some guy named Bill is one thing, but the more you write Bill's name the more the audience connects with him. Example; He had to get help right now or it would be trouble. Bill had to get help right now or it would be trouble. Who do you care more about?
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2016 19:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 16, 2024 15:16 |
|
|
Thanks! That is excellent feedback. Keep it coming!
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2016 19:42
|
|