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Month: April 2018

Plan

Plan

The old adage, “Plan your work, work your plan,” is a truism. You need a written plan to write and publish your works. And you need to follow that plan. Make yourself accountable to the plan milestones and deadlines you set. Get your thoughts on paper. Then arrange them is a simulated order. Write the book. Don’t worry about punctuation, grammar or wording. Just get it down. Edit. This takes the largest amount of time for writing your manuscript. Change words and sentences…

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BALANCE

BALANCE

You need to write balanced characters to resemble life and be believable. Some people might be dominated by anger, but have moments of compassion and understanding. Your characters should possess various traits to keep your work from becoming tedious. Keep your readers guessing how the figure is going to react in each scene. Is he in a good mood or bad? Is an argument ensuing or understanding? Conflicts make interesting writing. Have each conflict stem from different catalysts and end in different outcomes….

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The Super Secret Magical Formula!

The Super Secret Magical Formula!

Your email boxes and social media pages are blasted with authors selling their magical writing courses, marketers offering their secret formulas, and everyone offering you success for a price. There are no magical secret formulas!  The definition of secret is “not meant to be known or seen by others”. So that begs the question, “If all this secret information is available for cash, how long will it take to become common knowledge?” We are already at that point. Every site your book…

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Post Ads

Post Ads

All of us are trying to use social media to promote our books. Whether it’s facebook, linkedin, instantagram or your favorite media, your posts should be engaging, to the point and visually pleasing. Facebook for business has a great .pdf on ad copy. You can download it here for free. The key points: image and copy tell story speak to your audience keep it short and on point call-to-action tell price up front include sense of urgency Check it out. It is on point!…

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Content

Content

When you watch a movie, look at a picture or read a book, the message is in your thoughts. My mind sees the images projected in relation to my experiences, what I relate to or can rationalize as possible or fantasy. Your reader visualizes the little things. If you write, “the old man”, I see my grandfather. But your words control the character and paint the picture you want. The man’s lifelines etched deep into his soft face. His giant ears flap as he…

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Lurking

Lurking

Are you a lurker? Most of us are introverted. We slither around the web, watching, reading and failing to participate. The easiest way to get your name around the author community is joining in on conversations. Become a mainstay in groups and blogs. We all read them looking for support. Whether or not your comment or observation is taken or not, is up to the poster, but the more input is given, the greater the choice for them to find what…

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Pricing

Pricing

What price should you set for your book? I don’t believe you should undervalue your work. You’ve obviously spent time and effort and maybe many dollars creating, editing, rewriting, publishing and marketing. You are your own business whether or not you created it officially with a business license, set up your state tax board or opened a business bank account. In my years of self-employment, before my writing career, I encounter many entrepreneurs who charged a profit on their offerings but failed to…

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Marketing

Marketing

Marketing is the process of promoting your brand or product. Selling is giving a product or service in exchange for a reward, usually money. So in a nutshell, selling is a result of marketing. If your book is on Amazon, you want to market or promote your book while Amazon wants to sell it. Which is a result of your marketing efforts. IE: you put up social media blurbs to let people become aware of your book and refer them to Amazon to…

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Tenacity

Tenacity

People come and go as writers, as in any profession. The successful ones are tenacious. They are not the best qualified. The most intelligent. The most proficient. They are the most PERSISTENT! To become a skilled craftsman in any endeavor takes 10,000 hours learning and application. If you’re putting in 30 hours a week, that is 333 weeks or almost 6.5 years. The shortcut: Hire professional assistance in areas your lacking. Do it yourself method: Education. Read everything on the subject. Join writers groups….

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Publishing

Publishing

Where to start? I first publish to Createspace and order a proof copy. They are Amazon’s back-end for self-publishers. If you haven’t bought an ISBN number they will assign you one for free. By this time, I’ve done several rewrites, run grammar checkers and read a self-printed hard copy. When my proof copy arrives, I go through it to make sure the formatting is correct and looking for additional grammar and spelling errors. The grammar checkers I use are the free versions of…

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