Category: Business of Writing

Backing Up, Organizing, Managing Time

Business of Writing, Tools for Writers

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigIMG_4741

Although there are so many things that we can try to help us manage parts of our writing careers, I’ve found that some of the best are the smaller, quieter things.  It’s easy for me to get distracted by trying Facebook ads or working over my metadata…and these are both really good things to do.  But sometimes I need to return to the basics, especially when I’m very busy and don’t follow some of my own best practices.

Here are a few:

Backing up:  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard nightmares about losing content. Too many! It’s like a horror story for writers.  We hear all the time about backing up our work in progress, and that’s certainly important. But it’s also important to have previous projects backed up, covers backed up, contracts backed up. I just went through and backed up a ton of stuff and shuddered when I realized how much time had passed since my last backup.  I usually do it daily.Continue reading

Preorders

Business of Writing, Promo Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigCruisingforMurder_ebook_Final

I’m not one of the front-runners, ever, on promotion-related things.  I tend to be a lot more cautious.  Or, really, it’s more that I’m super-protective of my time and jealously guard it.  I want to make sure there’s plenty of data that something works before I spend the time figuring it out and pursuing it.

I’ve been hearing for the last year or so about the importance of preordering.  But I didn’t see how it would be something I wanted to pursue. When I was on the trad-published email loops, authors would complain about how preorders killed their chances for the bestseller lists and watered down their release day/week sales.

I also kept reading that preorders on Amazon didn’t make any sense because the visibility we gained on the site was only at the time of the order…not accumulated and toward release day sales.Continue reading

The Secret to Sales Without Selling: Your Author Newsletter

Business of Writing, Tools for Writers

by Joel D Canfield, @SomedayBox700

I once surveyed all the authors I knew about what they wanted most for their writing.

The universal response was “Someone to do my marketing for me.”

I considered setting up an affordable and effective marketing service and then trying to sell it to all those people, but that’d be like Henry Ford giving us faster horses.

What authors really want is a way to spend more time writing and less time marketing, but still sell books. And if possible, to do it without hating themselves in the morning. Or being hated by everyone around them.

I’ll state my premise up front: the way to do that is follow these two steps:

  1. Write more top-quality books, and
  2. have a great email/newsletter list.

Authors who write more good books sell more books.

Authors with a newsletter email list full of fans sell more books.

And they do it with less marketing, more writing.

Here’s how.Continue reading

The NINC Conference—Interesting Points

Business of Writing

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigdownload

The Novelists, Inc. or NINC, conference in St. Pete Beach, Florida, was chock-full of interesting speakers and takeaways.  Looking around the conference rooms, nearly everyone was jotting down notes on paper or their laptops.  And…the weather was wonderful there. I was happy to escape the dismal weather North Carolina has had lately.

A few takeaways I wanted to share (these are from sessions I attended, but you can hear from others if you go to @Porter_Anderson or @JaneFriedman’s #NINC15 tweets on Twitter:Continue reading

Overcoming Snags and Blocks. And a Few Updates

Business of Writing

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

A favorite blog topic among writers is writer’s block.  I can’t imfile7521243186318agine how many articles I’ve seen on the topic…from the debate over whether it actually exists, to how to combat it if it does.

I believe that sometimes I’m experiencing more of writer’s hesitation than a writer’s block. My hesitation usually results from one of a couple of reasons.

One common reason for my hesitation is that my story has hit a snag of some kind.  I’m reluctant to work on the story because there’s something wrong with it.  Since I don’t allow myself to avoid writing, it means I have to immediately diagnose what’s wrong.  Usually I’m finding the scene boring or redundant in some way, or else I realize something is off with my character motivations.  During first drafts, I don’t fix problems.  So I flag the part in the story where I’ve realized things were going wrong, make a note of the change(s) that I’m making going forward, and pick up with the story as if the problem had been fixed in the previous pages.Continue reading

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