Blog – Page 40 of 451

One Important Element for Your Newsletter

April 6, 2018March 23, 2018Promo Tips, Uncategorized

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

A while back (far enough back that I can’t remember the source), I read an article that suggested writers should include their backlist titles in their author newsletter.

This surprised me. I think of my newsletter as valuable real estate. Did I really want to clutter it up with a list of 25 books? I also figured that most of the readers who signed up for my newsletter were focused on hearing about new releases…that they’d likely read most/all of the other books.

But the argument in this blog post I read was fairly convincing. For the newsletter that went out for my last release, I included (at the bottom of the newsletter) a full backlist of my three series, with each title linked to the specific book’s page on my website (which has complete ordering information for a variety of different retailers and formats).

To my surprise, when I read my newsletter stats, I saw that, aside from the link for the new release, the most clicks were for various books in the backlist…in particular, the first book in the Myrtle Clover series.

Since I write under several names, it occurred to me that maybe some of my readers weren’t even aware that I had other series.

Maybe some readers were clicking on book one to give it as a gift to a friend or family member to start them on a series that they enjoy.

Maybe some readers simply couldn’t remember if they’d read a particular book or not.

At any rate, it was something that took very little effort on my end (I just copy-pasted my back matter from a document I keep for that purpose) and it resulted in a nice bump in sales for my backlist.

As an extra step, you can link to a printable list of your backlist in PDF form (with ISBNs) for those readers who like to order from bookstores.

For more ideas on elements for your author newsletter, read “50 Ideas for Author Newsletter Content” by Zoe McCarthy.

Have you ever included a book list in your newsletter? What else have you included in your newsletter that has received a good response from readers?

One important element for your newsletter: Click To Tweet

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How To Develop Creative Receptivity

April 2, 2018March 23, 2018Motivation and the Writing Life, Uncategorized

by Nicky Blue, @itsnickyblue ‏

‘The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.’ — Sigmund Freud

When I lapse in dedicating time to developing creativity in my life, I end up becoming very driven by reactive thinking. What I mean by this is, my thinking process seems to get governed by existing ideas, prejudices and familiar anecdotes. It feels as though I am mainly operating at the level of the conscious mind. An assumption arises that ‘I’ am in control of the creative process. I have these ideas in my head, which I manically splurge onto a page. This can be productive in getting things done but I find it can produce quite mediocre work. Aspiration for creativity is that it taps into something much deeper. When I give time to my developing my creative process, I realise this is very possible.

There are of course, days when creativity flows through me and there seem to be no limits to my productivity. I kid myself life will always be like this. Then one fateful morning, I wake up and sit in front of the computer and nothing, diddly squat. It feels as if I don’t have a creative bone in my body. It took many cycles of this to admit to myself an obvious truth. The creative process takes work, dedication and time. It is an investment I have to make in order reap the rewards later down the line.

‘Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.’ — Rollo May.

A lotus will not produce flowers without the right amount of light, water and nutrients. Similarly, we need the right conditions for our creativity to bloom. Where I wanted to focus my attention, is the place that lies at the basis of all artistic endeavours, creative receptivity. I spent a long time experimenting with different creative exercises and spiritual techniques. After a while it became apparent to me there were some common themes to building creative receptivity. I have grouped these themes into three stages:Continue reading

Twitterific Writing Links

April 1, 2018March 31, 2018Twitterific

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Twitterific writing links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 45,000 free articles on writing related topics. It’s the search engine for writers.

Have you visited the WKB lately? Check out the new redesign where you can browse by category, and sign up for free writing articles, on topics you choose, delivered to your email inbox! Sign up for the Hiveword newsletter here. Happy Easter and Passover to all who celebrate!

New Stuff:

Thanks to Win Kelly Charles (@WinKellyCharles ) for our podcast interview on the Ask Win show! (Also on iTunes.)

Business / Miscellaneous

Conferences and Events / Miscellaneous

Creativity and Inspiration / First Novels

Tips for Young Writers: @the_writing_pal

Other Things to Back Up (Besides Our Writing)

March 30, 2018March 15, 2018Business of Writing, Uncategorized

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

It’s now time for my regularly scheduled reminder to back up your work.

This time I’ll make my post a little different by urging you to back up other files, too. Although we’d likely be hardest hit by losing our manuscripts, there are other important writing-related things, too.

I’ll start with our newsletter subscriber list since I know folks who have inadvertently deleted portions of theirs (and, in one case, the entire list). I use MailChimp and it’s fairly easy to back up. In fact, you can back up all of your account data (including templates, campaigns, subscriber lists, campaign reports, etc.) in one fell swoop. Step by step guidance can be found here.

If you’re like me and rely on your Google calendar for everything, you’ll want to back it up, too. My calendar has everything from guest posts scheduled on my blog to cover design meetings to podcasts. Backup Google calendar means exporting the calendar (then I usually will copy it to an external device of some kind, too). Instructions can be found here.

Book-related files are also important things to back up. You may think that backing up your current work in progress should be the main focus. But there are many other types of book files that you’ll want to keep track of:

Cover files. I back up my ebook, print, and audio book covers several different places.

Published book files. You never know when a new retailer or format will come along. It wouldn’t be fun to lose these old files.

Back matter. To speed up the publishing process, I keep my back matter (including list of published books, where to find me online, etc.) in a document that I can update and quickly copy and past into the back of the next book.

List of ISBNs. I keep track of all of the ISBNs for my different books (in all the different formats). It would be time consuming to recreate.

Last, but certainly not least, our current manuscript. If you don’t create backups because it’s a pain, think of other, easier ways to save your data. Email yourself a copy, copy to a small thumb drive that you carry on a keychain, use a cloud service like Carbonite.

What kinds of files do you back up? How often do you do it? Is it automated or manual?