Dirty Secrets Self Published Authors and Publishers Never Tell, a Taste of My New Class

Reading my award winning flash fiction.

This coming Tuesday, March 10th, from 7:30 to 8:30 I'll be teaching a one night class in Navigating the New Publishing World for the Boise Community Schools. It will be at Timberline High School in Boise, Idaho. The fee is $8.95, cheap! Details and sign up here: Navigating the New Publishing World.

So this is a bit of a teaser for the class, but also two of the main secrets new authors need know while path finding a way through this amazing new biz of publishing. 

First secret: The huge majority of well-selling self-published authors are those authors who already have name recognition, a distinct brand, a platform and a large fan base. Such an author may have been traditionally published, popular in another media, or excellent at marketing, or in a very few cases, just plain lucky. But for almost all new self-published authors the way to sales is a difficult path.

Second secret: If you have sold your manuscript to a publisher, you have lost much of your control of that manuscript. The publisher is the one who edits to their standards, provides a cover and publication date, and sets price, including when/what and where to have the title on sale. True, many small indie publishers now allow authors to have a lot of input on much of this, but it's not the same as having total control. 

 

Though these two "secrets"  may be discouraging, the truth is that authors have more opportunities than ever before for success. We'll talk about those in class.

Now, I suspect that some of my author friends may be of a differing opinion, or may want to add to what I've said here. Please comment away!

Book Bundles, Promo Cookbooks and Free Books: Author Marketing that Works

Now through October 14th, Book Bundles, 20 reads for under 5 bucks! Get Prodigies of Mystery II here at iBooks, 99 cents for three full length novels!

How are midlist and new authors going to stand out in today's overburdened publishing biz? Here's a few recent methods I've found successful.

First up: Book Bundles. My publisher is running a special on five bundles, one of which, Prodigies of Mysteries II, includes my cozy mystery Starke Naked Dead. As a reader, I've noticed that I often buy these bundles because there's a lot of reading for cheap and it's a great way to find new authors. As an author, I discovered that Starke Naked Dead is coming up in the rankings considerably while offered in Prodigies of Mystery II. A  great way to get noticed and to brand your author name and series.

Here's another great way to get your name out there, thank you, Lois Winston, for this great idea. Bake, Love, Write is a compilation of dessert recipes with authors' advice on love and writing, 105 authors in all. Lois Winston is donating the proceeds to a worthy cause. The eBook is for sale for 99 cents, that's less than a penny a recipe! My recipe is easy, cheap and delicious soda cracker pie. Again, I often find myself buying just this type of book because I love to cook, love inexpensive dessert cookbooks and love finding other authors to read. Plus, with 105 authors, there's oodles of cross-marketing going on!

There's a lot of controversy about whether to ever have anything free, even promo cookbooks. The detractors say that being free only means that you are giving away content to people who may never read it, much less review it. However, I think there is a place for free, especially if it's a certain sort of free book. I've downloaded free short stories about a series and then gone on to buy books from the series. With my promotional cookbooks, I have found that after they're free that I do get reviews, perhaps because a cookbook is something that people do read after downloading. Plus, if you have a lot of downloads of your free book, Amazon will heavily promote it once it's no longer free. So, here's one of my cookbooks that introduces my Starke Dead cozy mystery series, Starke Deadly Delicious, and it's FREE today, October 8th!

So dear readers, what do you think? Do you do the same with these promotions? Or not? Do you think they work? Or not? Let us know in the comments!

New Venture! New Market for Writers too!

Above is the logo for my newest venture, Barbarian Books.We are an eBook publishing company. 


Why would a well-published writer, with contracts with other great publishing companies, L&L Dreamspell, Muse It Up Publishing and Freundship Press, for example, open an eBook publisher? Am I insane? I'm a writer, so of course. But not when it comes to Barbarian Books. My permanent boyfriend Bruce came up with the idea to answer several important questions. E-readers mean that it's a new world for writers. With, I believe, some tremendous advantages for us writers.


Since I'm certain the majority of my readers know about the publishing world here's a couple of thing in brief: The big publishers are no longer taking newbies, or often even trusted mid-listers. Anyone can self-publish for e-readers. And many, many do. How does an author stand out in such a crowd? Unless you're someone like Jim Murdoch and you have a great blog such as The Truth About Lies or Dennis J. Smith and know all about social networking, it's a struggle to promote your self-pubbed e-book. 

And who do readers trust to find good reads at a reasonable price? 


The answer is: small publishers. There are a number of legitimate small publishers out there. If you've written a good book, there'll be a spot for it with a good small publisher.


This is the great thing about this new world--you can write what you want and it'll find a place. Every publisher is looking for something somewhat different. For example, Barbarian Books is looking for genre fiction (no children's or erotica). We're looking for novel length crime (including mystery), horror, romance, science fiction, westerns and cross genre. We'll open soon for other lengths and genres. And we're looking for that great, unclassifiable and unusual novel that might fit our philosophy that there are a great many readers looking for great reads.


So, if you have a finished product, do your homework (i.e. read the publisher's websites and contracts, go to Duotrope, Absolute Write and Preditors and Editors) and then submit!

Happy Halloween--NaNo coming up! EEEK!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

This post is going to be quick--I'm alive, I'm alive. And I'm doing NaNoWriMo! Why? Because this year has been crazy and my new book is aching to burst forth ala Alien.

On one of the NaNo threads, someone asked me about healthy edibles during long hours of engorging pages with words. My favorites: plain yogurt with cinnamon, yum, and peanut butter (only a tablespoon or two, max!) with cinnamon--the cinnamon lowers blood pressure (easier to think) and the peanut butter and yogurt are packed with healthy stuff to keep you healthy--add half an apple and you've got great fiber as well to keep you going. Add a couple of cups of green tea with a bit of lemon and you'll live forever--or at least be undead enough to finish NaNo!

Good reading, a new publisher market and a short story of mine

Thanks to Carol and Ann.

Carol Kilgore of Under the Tiki Hut tagged me, ahem, a bit ago. So did Ann of Long Journey Home. Thanks to both of you--although life got away from me and I never did my bit.

Speaking of Carol, she has a great, fun story in the anthology Map of Murder called "Buñuelos for the Beach." Good work, Carol (and the rest of the anthology is good too).

This is a market call from my friend Jane Freund (her last name means friend!) http://www.janefreund.com/freundship-press.html:

I am looking to get as many high caliber writers and authors to publish e-articles and e-books (non-fiction and fiction) as a part of my November 1 kickoff of the newly redesigned Freundship Press website and mission. If you are interested, contact me at jane@freundshippress.com.

The writer gets a percentage of each sale--and Jane is looking for all sorts of things, give it a try!

And last, I've had a couple of requests for a short story of mine to read, here's a link:
http://www.untiedshoelacesofthemind.com/Issue3/sweet.php

Next post may be from my vacation in Manzanita!

Take Time to Eat the Flowers

Baxter enjoying the lilies--by eating them!

Have you ever had a time in your life when you're so busy there's no space to breathe? If not, why not?! How do you live? I'm asking because I need to know--this whole summer has been swamped--I'm mired in projects and behind on all of them. Next week is even busier as I'm camera person and editor for a film project.

How to find time to eat the lilies?

Jester's Folly, A review

I've just read a delightful short story by my friend, Aubrie Dionne over at Flutey Words: Jester's Folly, published by Gypsy Shadow Publishing. It's a 6300 word story in her CARNIVAL OF ILLUSIONS series. This is the first one I've read and now I want to read more of her stories.

It's always useful to see what another writer does right. Aubrie draws you into the world of the Carnival and her main character, immediately (can be difficult to do). Her main character is sympathetic while being unusual and her problems are great (good writing here). There's plenty of excellent action, an unexpected event and a satisfying ending rounds it all off. With a touch of a twist to boot!

What might be missing? Not to give it away, but one relationship seemed a little...too easily resolved. It's hard to have too much complexity and conflict in 6300 words, but I wanted a bit more struggle between two characters.

Overall, a fun engaging read.

Aubrie also writes novels--so my novelists out there, what do you think about writing both novels and short stories? I find doing so to be useful. But I have friends who find it only confusing, switching from one format to another.

Of this and that and t'other

This is my dear friend Kathy's of Well Placed Words daffodil, thank you Kathy!

This post is a spring mix of various blossoms and one weed.

First up: a couple of FANTASTIC contests if you're looking for an agent:

Sarah with a chance is holding a contest with several great prizes, including lunch with well-known agents! This contest closes Sunday, April 25th.

On the QueryTrackernet.blog, they're having a one line pitch to an agent contest starting April 27th.

And speaking of great places, great places to go to find agents are QueryTracker.net and Agentquery are both excellent resources.

Now the one weed: I doubt if the spammers will get this message, BUT--here goes. At least I'll feel better. I vet every comment on my blog and say yay or nay on it's being posted. I allow anonymous comments because I have some family members and friends (Hi, Cynthia!) who don't have a screen name. However, if you're trying to sell me something that enlarges a part of my anatomy that I don't even possess, or trying to sell me cheap, bizarre drugs from some other country, or marry me to become an American citizen, or post something in gobbledygook, I reject your comment. I don't post it. Nyah, nyah.

There, vent over. I do feel better. Does anybody have a better way of handling this problem?

Sunday Places--Books and Odd

The last few Sunday posts have covered a wide range so I was going to cover books with this post but my good friend Kathy of Well Placed Words just blogged about books and her choices are fantastic. I'd add Writer tells all : insider secrets to getting your book published  by Robert Masello and Thanks, but this isn't for us : a (sort of) compassionate guide to why your writing is being rejected by Jessica Page Morrell.

Here's a link to a one line pitch contest with an agent at the Query Tracker blog: http://querytracker.blogspot.com/ thanks to Suzette Saxton of Shooting Stars. Thanks, Suzette.

Next, why I've been absent the past couple of weeks because of an unexpected event.

Sunday Places--Classes

Hi all,

This week has been one of computer problems and taxes. Hence, my absence from the Web. I'm baack...this time with some classes to increase writing skills.

First, the online classes:
WritersOnlineClasses.com offers inexpensive (usually $30.) on a wide variety of subjects with excellent writing coaches.
WriterUniv.com offers different classes (again usually $30).
The Romance Writers of America's Suspense and Mystery offers classes ($30--this seems to be a standard).

Writing advice, much of it fantastic, abounds on the Internet. A couple of my favorite sites:
WritersWeekly.com has a wealth of articles interesting to the writer (and markets).
Margie Lawson's newsletter contains great lessons and contests to win her lecture packets.

Now, before I'm knocked off the Web, I'm headed over to visit some of my favorite blogs, some of which are listed in my sidebar (more soon).

Any classes or sites, dear readers, that you'd like to add?

Sunday Places--Cautionary and a Contest

Two great sites to check for scams, bad contests (only looking for the fee money) and really bad agents (remember anyone can say, "I'm an agent")  are Preditors and Editors and Absolute Write. Both contain a wealth of info about legitimate agents, contests and markets as well.

And here's a blog contest with oodles of great prizes that's easy to enter (but hurry, ends Monday): Author Michelle McLean. In general, Michelle's blogs are chockablock full of info too!

Sunday Places--A Couple

First off, here's one that's new to me, www.storypilot.com. This is for the genres of sf, fantasy and horror and is not always updated, but I spotted a couple of markets I'd never heard of before.

Last week I mentioned a contest on Guide to Literary Agents, a blog on Writers Digest.com and I realized that Writers Digest.com also provides a wealth of information, articles, markets, contests, all for free! (Although, an aside, Writers Digest's own contests have fees. I consider WD contests about the only "fee" contests that a newbie might consider entering, because of their reputation.)

That's it for this Sunday!

Sunday Places

This first post on various places to go to find contests and markets is focused on the short story. Jim Murdoch of The Truth About Lies pointed out, one of the best places to go is Duotrope's Digest. This site is user friendly and updated often. A blog that is fantastic for short story markets is Sandra Seaman's My Little Corner, again she posts new places often, including flash and contests, plus interesting news and tips about the writing world.

Finally, yes, this market listing is a whole big dollar an issue, BUT Kathy Ptacek finds and lists so many different markets in a vast array of formats (e-publishers to anthologies) all organized for quick referral that she deserves a mention here. And because I've found several markets last year alone that I sent to and sold to. So check out the Gila Queen's Guide to Markets.(For my artist fellow bloggers, her listings include artwork.)

Most of all write, so you can submit! And because you are writers!

What do you think, dear readers, does this, my first "Sunday Places" help? Or not? Something else you'd like to see? Or add? Let me know.