Yallen1014

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05 Apr 13:42

Tattooed Writer's Method for Making Sales

by noreply@blogger.com (The Tattooed Writer)
I've been asked by quite a few people to repost this. It was originally on the Lair last year, but I took it down when some moron decided to incorporate it into a booklet and sell it. Remember you saw it first here first, folks, and for free.


Kindle Unlimited Addendum
When I originally wrote this post, KU was just a twinkle in Jeff Bezos's eyes. Now that KU is here, I would add that to maximise the number of readers, and give your new series a good chance of ranking highly in the store, you should put all parts into KU.

So, here is the original post, back by popular demand...


Anyone who knows my history in writing and self-publishing knows I am not an overnight success. It has taken me 3 years of hard work to get to where I am today…and there is still a long road ahead. 

I like to think that during those 3 years, I have gained some knowledge about how to sell books. Not the only way to sell books, but a way.

A lot of the people who email and message me are writers just starting out on their journey or writers who aren't getting the sales numbers they want and are ready to try something different.

So, for what it's worth, here is Tattooed Writer's Method For Making Sales.

From what I have learned, I believe this method would give a writer the best chance to make sales, gain readers and earn some money. It should also give a good return on investment. But remember, no method can promise overnight success.

Prerequisites
-you can write an entertaining story
-you have enough skill to make your own covers or you have a designer who will give you exactly what you want
-you are willing to put in some work

What You Are Going To Do
-write 3 stories of 25k-35k words. Any genre.

Huh? How is That A "Method"? It Sounds Easy
I didn't say it was going to be hard. To be effective, something doesn't have to be difficult. What you are going to do with these 3 stories is attempt to gain as many readers in your chosen genre as possible. You are going to do that by tapping the power of series.

What's Different Between these 3 Stories And any Other 3 Stories I Wrote?
You are going to link these 3 novellas together. Not as a serial, not with cliffhanger endings, not as a single story chopped into 3 parts. They are going to be 3 complete stories. Each novella will be standalone story with a satisfying conclusion.

But the 3 stories will be connected.

Connections: everyone lives in the same town or everyone works for the same company or the main characters are members of the same family. Or your connector could be the same character appearing in each book. A detective, for example, who takes on 3 different cases.

Whatever you choose as your "connector" will be the name of the series. So if your connector is that everyone lives in a town called "Sleepy Moor" for example, the books will be subtitled "Sleepy Moor, Book 1", "Sleepy Moor, Book 2" and "Sleepy Moor, Book 3".

If, for example,  each story follows a brother from a family called the Cunninghams, then the books will be subtitled "The Cunningham Brothers, Book 1", "The Cunningham Brothers, Book 2" and "The Cunningham Brothers, Book 3".

If your connector is the main character (like the detective mentioned above), then the character's name will be the series name.  e.g. "Joe Finn, Book 1", "Joe Finn, Book 2", "Joe Finn, Book 3".

I'm sure you'll be able to think up you own names for towns, families or detectives. 

The Writing
Now, you need to write three stories that are connected by the "series connection".
As well as the main connector, put in events that might be mentioned in each story. So let's say you set your stories in a small town and in the 1st book, one of the local bars is blown up. In the 2nd book you might have the characters drive past the ruins of that bar and mention how it got blown up last summer or whatever. The event doesn't have a direct impact on this story but is mentioned to give your series a cohesive feel.

Or you might have a restaurant where everyone in town goes to eat. So the characters of your first book would go there and so would the characters in the 2nd. Populate that restaurant with a minor character (a waitress, let's say) who appears in both books (and might even be in a later book as a major character). You make sure your description of the place is consistent in every book. Again, it gives readers who read more than one of the books a deeper sense of setting for your series.

These things are fun to think up and connect. You can even have characters from different books at the same event. So there might be a scene in one book where a cop shoots a fleeing criminal on the main street. In a later book, you mention that your MC was going to a job interview one morning when she was pushed over by a criminal who ran past her before being gunned down by a cop. In another book, you might have an MC who is a cop who is traumatised by the one time he had to use his gun and kill a criminal on Main Street. That sort of thing. Just a generic example. You'll be able to think situations up that are unique to your stories.

Your actual plots will be determined by the genre you are writing in. Use your imagination to come up with 3 entertaining stories that readers of the genre will love.

Covers
I can't stress this enough. Just as your stories are connected, so must your covers be connected. If a potential reader sees your books on Amazon, there must be no doubt in their mind that the books are in a series. Use a template so the fonts, title placement and author name are identical on every cover. Use a graphic that is identical on each cover.

This subject seems to be misunderstood. I've seen series books on Amazon that look like totally separate books. This isn't about putting 3 separate pieces of pretty, unconnected artwork on your covers just because you like the pictures. This is about making the cover work for you. A cover has a job to do. It must convey the genre and be clearly connected to the other series books.

Whatever your genre, look at the best-selling books in that genre. You want the readers who read these books to see yours and say to themselves, "These are the kind of books I read. I'll try them out."

If you write a series and your covers are not clearly in a series, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

The goal is to get more readers and build a fan base. Create a mailing list and make sure you put the link in the books so it's easy for readers to join. The idea is to get the "net units sold" number on your report as high as possible.

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The higher that number is, the more readers you have reached.

Because you want to attract a large amount of readers to your series, price the books at 99c. This will mean that readers of the genre will be more likely to try out your books. Three books well suited to genre and priced at 99c have a good chance of hitting the hot new releases and/or Top 100 in the genre and therefore attract even more readers.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: Don't make any judgements on whether the method worked or not until the 3rd book has been out at least a week.Questions? Leave a comment.

Ready to go for it? Good luck! Let me know your results!


24 Jun 18:45

How to Give Yourself Writer's Block

by Amanda Hocking
Yallen1014

awesomeness!!! lol

I get this question a lot: "How do you get over writer's block?"

But I decided to do the opposite and write a blog called "How do you create writer's block?" It occurred to me to write this because I was feeling creative, about to do some work, and then managed to completely kill it.

So here are some tips on how to stifle the creative juices:

-Read reviews, of your own books perferably, particulary negative reviews, although positive cans freak you out, too. If somebody loved one of your books, it means that your next book has to be even better, because nothing's worse than taking somebody who loves you and turning them into somebody who hates you. Oh, and confuse your books for yourself. When somebody says, "I didn't like this book," they really mean, "I didn't like you, the author, and I think you, the author, are terrible and awful and this review is totally personal."

-Read reviews of other books (or films or poems), especially your favorite books. Find a really scathing review of whatever book you consider to be the greatest book ever written, and then realize that if somebody hates the GREATEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN that much, what chance does your book every have?

-Read glowing reviews of fantastic books, and realize again, that there are truly, insanely, almost painfully brilliant books that exist in the world, and yours will never, ever, ever, EVER be anywhere close to that good, so why even bother?

-Check your sales rankings. If they're low, obsess over why they're low and fear what that means for future books, your career, the college fund for your children, and any other plans you'd thought of making for the future now that you'll have to find a new job and everyone will laugh at you for being a total public failure. If you're rankings are high, assume that it's either a) a glitch, or b) your rankings can't stay high forever, and soon they will plummet, and so now you begin to panic trying to come up with ways to sell books well forever, when in reality you never even really knew how you sold any in the first place.

-Think about money. How much you have, how much you don't have, how much soliders and teachers make, how much money is wasted on crap things, how much spent on a pair of flipflops at Walgreens and then you didn't even wear them because they were uncomfortable, and there's people in Africa that don't even have clean water, and millions of people die every day from starvation, and you put on 2 pounds last week, and the whole world is completely terrible and awful and you're not doing enough to make it better.

-Check Facebook. Not for anything particular and most of the stuff you see will annoy/irritate/bore you, and you don't even know why you're looking or why you're friends with a lot of these people, but you look anyway, compulsively. A few things amuse you, but most things won't, but you. Just. Keep. Looking.

-Go on Twitter. Twitter is better. You like Twitter because it's funnier, the links are smarter, and it's just generally a better experience. This cheers you up after you've thought about how terrible your writing is, how bad your sales are/will be, how the world is ending, so it's better than Facebook, which only depresses you. But just like Facebook, you check it compulsively and achieve nothing.

-Watch videos of Heath Ledger on YouTube. There really is no good reason to do this, but you find yourself doing it anyway, and getting sad remembering that he's dead, and then getting sad remembering that River Phoenix is dead, and getting sad remembering that Joaquin Phoenix is getting weird, and how everything changes and time keeps on  moving and people die every day and are you really accomplishing anything?

-Wonder if everything you do/think/feel/love is terrible and pointless, and even as you wonder it, you know it's true. In the scheme of things, all your obsessions and thoughts and worries are totally pointless, and in the blink of an eye, you'll be dead, and everyone you know will be dead, and in hundreds of years, they won't even remember you, and nothing you do really matters because you don't do anything that matters. You could, but you don't. And that should be liberating, and it is - a little - but then you get depressed again.

-Compare yourself to other authors. But don't stop there. Compare yourself to all kinds of people. Celebrities, Noble prize winners, doctors, presidents, sick kids, the poor, the rich, Kanye West, your mom, a kid you went to high school with, a cashier at the supermarket, a walrus, Juliet Capulet - it doesn't matter who it is, as long as you are comparing yourself to somebody and coming up lacking. And if you're doing it right, you can come up lacking against anyone. Sure, Hitler was evil and awful and slaughtered millions of innocent people, but he took over most of Europe and he was a vegetarian. You ate chicken nuggets and complained about getting up before noon today.

-For bonus points, assume that all other authors hate you, that everyone who has ever read anything you've written hates the words you write. In fact every one who has ever thought of you or knows of your existence thinks you're a joke and a hack and wants you to stop writing words.

Congratulations! You've killed all your creativity. Or if you haven't, you're a better man than I am, and let's face it, you probably are. 

It's also safe to say that since all of these things kills your creativity and also your will to live, that doing the opposite of those things will make you feel better. Don't read reviews. Don't worry about sales. Don't compare yourself to other people. Turn off Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.

Better yet, don't be a neurotic asshole like me, and write anyway, cause who really gives a crap what anyone else thinks?
09 May 00:49

4 Words a Writer Should Never Use

by Amy Lamont
We’ve all heard about the overuse of adverbs and words that indicate passive writing. But that’s not what I’m talking about when I mention words writers should never use. I’m referring not to the words we put on the page, but rather the words we use when we talk to ourselves. If you’ve read my […]