Writers and Social Media

Business of Writing, Promo Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigblog 3

I recently read an interesting post, “My Social Media Mid-Life Crisis” from writer and publishing consultant Dan Blank.  In it, Dan talks about how he went from being an early-adopter of social media, to becoming somewhat disenchanted with it, to finding a good solution to help him enjoy using it again.

I’ve experienced similar transitions in my relationship with social media. I started out much more gung-ho and on quite a few channels.  I expanded into more channels, more group blogs, more exposure.  Then, after several years  I started trimming down my activity on sites and blogs. At one point I had social media platforms under my name and a pen name, was forcing myself to be active on sites I didn’t enjoy, and was part of four or five group blogs.  I was overextended to the point where the overwhelm spilled over into everything I was doing.

If you’re new to building an author platform, a few tips:Continue reading

Reader Influence in Our Stories

Business of Writing

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig92NsiOmr

I’ve always been interested in what readers thought and allowed it to influence my writing. That’s because my goal was to be as commercially successful as I could be within my genre constraints.  Before I even started writing a couple of my series, I read the reader reviews on Amazon for similar series to get a feel what readers liked and didn’t like in the hopes that I could deliver it.

My Myrtle Clover series was slow to adapt to this method because I started it first and then kept on the track it had already started down. I wrote it as I wanted and luckily readers responded well to it.Continue reading

Twitterific Writing Links

Twitterific

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Twitterific writing links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engineBlog (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 30,000 free articles on writing related topics. It’s the search engine for writers.

CS Lewis with writing tips for new authors:  http://ow.ly/Vtp7o  @Goodereader

#FutureChat 11aET, 4pGMT (now): Creating apps from books–does the writing still matter? http://ow.ly/VKW5l @Porter_Anderson

4 author bio mistakes:  http://ow.ly/VtpXJ  @sandrabeckwith

How to Give a Presentation People Will Remember:  http://ow.ly/VtpQF Continue reading

Scheduling Our Upcoming Year

Business of Writing

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I’m not so much of a fan of New Year resolutions. They seem too ephemeral for me…like a bucket list or something. There’s no meat to them. It’s a wish list. Instead I take what I want to accomplish, create a production plan, and put dates and ‘to dos’ on my calendar.

Although this makes me sound like a wonderful planner, I’m only a halfway decent planner. The truth is that I need to get on the calendars for my production team—in particular my cover designer.

Next year’s releases: At this point, I’ve also announced upcoming titles to my readers in both the backs of 2015 releases and on my website. This holds me accountable to my schedule and keeps me on track as well as ensures that readers are looking out for more launches in the series they’re reading.Continue reading

Control and the Self-Published Writer      

Business of Writing, Publishing Changes

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigSales

Much has been written about the control that a self-published writer has over their career and their books. It’s usually portrayed as a good thing. We can choose when our book comes out, when its sequel comes out, what vibe our cover is sending out, when to run sales, how much our book should retail for.

Sometimes we’ll hear about the flip side of having this control—the overwhelming nature of it, the high learning curve in handling it, the realization that when our book seems to flop on release that it was related to something we did. Because no one else was in the driver’s seat.

What I have recently discovered is that the control…the good, the bad, and the ugly of it…is completely addictive. Until we feel, I think, a lot more ownership and responsibility for a book, even when we don’t have any control over it.

I’ve come a long way with how much control I’ve wanted to have. I remember when my editor at Penguin told me that a sequel for a book in my Memphis series was approved for release in 2013. That was two years after the previous book in the series launched.  I had serious reservations about this and I didn’t understand it.  I can write a book in three months, easy. If you push me, I can, technically, write a book in about 5 weeks.  I’ll be stressed out and snapping at family members, but sure, I can write it. So why the delay? Or, really, why not ask me to write a book sooner?  Why not ask me in 2011 to write the book, then decide if you want to publish it or not later?  It could have started its year-long production process a lot sooner. If they didn’t want it, I could probably have reworked it to fit a different series.Continue reading

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