Create More, Succeed, Make Money Being Creative with NO Blame!

FOR GAIN, NO BLAME

This post is about a problem that has been bugging me for, well, forever. In this world of social media, it appears to be growing every day, a monstrous cancer destroying creativity.

Okay, maybe not that bad. Except...when we blame ourselves, it destroys our creativity. 

I'm not talking about refusing to take responsibility for our own personal stumbles as in "I drank too much today to create." Also, there are tons of helpful advice available  I'm talking about the insidious, continual "blame game" that some "experts" use to sell their books, podcasts, seminars, classes online and off, even life coaching.

The blame game goes like this (for writing, I'm sure it's similar for other types of creativity):

Your published writing isn't selling? Then you must be blamed because:

Your cover isn't good enough. (Buy this and we'll show you how to have a great cover!)

Your content isn't good enough. (Let us show you how, buy this!)

Your social media marketing isn't good enough. (buy...) 

To be more specific:

You don't have a good enough website. (On sale now! How to have a great website!)

You don't have a good enough email list. (Buy now! Learn how to have a great email list!)

You don't have a platform. (Pay here!)

You don't have a brand.

You're not tweeting enough.

You're not posting enough on Facebook.

You're not doing enough ads on social-media-site.

You're not posting enough and/or posting correctly on your website.

And one more example: You're not posting on your blog enough!

Or even the dreaded shoulds:

You should be only traditionally published.

You should be only self-published.

You should be a hybrid author.

Then there's the more insidious blaming:

You have to do the newest online-whatever right now to sell, whatever it is.

You have to spend a certain amount of time every day selling.

You have to not spend too much time selling. Instead spend your time creating more and more, as quickly as possible. Make sure your creations are fabulous. 

You have to be exactly like the successful people that are used as examples. 

Can you feel your will to create evaporating? Depression setting in? Blaming sucks the life energy out of our creativity. 

Add to all of this one DIRTY ENORMOUS SECRET:

Most creative people are not successful at selling their creations. 

Most books don't sell. Most actors don't have a big career. Most artists never sell their paintings/sculptures/art. Most bands never make it big. It doesn't matter if you're a jewelry designer or a singer or a clay-embedded-fingernails potter, chances are you won't "make it big and make tons of money." 

Does this mean never take a class or read a book about selling your work? No, of course not! Many books, videos, podcasts, classes, etc. are very useful for tips and ways to sell. Ideas that may save you time and money. My only caveat: avoid blame! Realize and remember that you are doing the work. If you're not...give yourself a break. You're only human. 

Make your creative life a no-blame zone and discover energy, time and inspiration!

Three Awesome Books for a teaser of Book Sale coming August 6th!

Fun, Fun, Fun!

There will be over 20! authors selling their books at the Book Extravaganza this August 6th. A wide range of genres and styles will be represented, enough for any reader to find much to read! 

Many will be on sale or offering other specials. Here's three to tease.

Register to win a FREE copy!

Finding hope in all the wrong places.

Rebecca is a well published author. In her Christian romances she demonstrates why. 

And all her titles at the book sale will be ON SALE for only $10 each! Plus you can register to win a free copy of her latest work, Winds of Change. Find out more about Rebecca and her wonderful writing at her Amazon author page.

One Brick at a Time, a heart wrenching and heart warming biography you won't want to put down.

One Brick at a Time is Elaine Oostra's life story. She shares her fond and sometimes humorous memories of childhood as well as the struggles and pain of growing up with a mom who suffered from mental illness. 

Want some fun, fast reading? Mild West Mysteries abounds in thirteen cozy mystery short stories of the West as never seen before. 

Also, I'll be running a Buy One Get One of Same or Lesser Price HALF OFF with all my four titles: Starke Naked Dead, Mild West Mysteries, The Mall Fairies: Exile and Write Short to Succeed. 

For more about me and my wacky Idaho adventures, visit my Amazon author page.

Hope to see you Saturday!

Back to School Deals: The Mall Fairies series! (Why you should go direct to publishers)

 Get The Mall Fairies: Exile and my other Mall Fairies titles for 30% off through September 30th!

Here's one reason why I'm a hybrid author. My publisher, Muse It Up Publishing, is having a great Back to School Deal. What did I have to do? Write my Mall Fairies series as well as I could.

And The Mall Fairies: Exile, The Mall Fairies: War and the stand alone short story, A foodie Fairy's First Foray are not the only Middle Grade, Tween and YA reads you'll find for sale, there's lots more (and having read several, I can say these are often great reads for adults too!). 

The reason to go direct to publishers? Two reasons are here: you get an additional 30% off the eBook already discounted sale price and the authors get a bigger royalty percentage of the sales  (as the publisher doesn't have to pay vendors).

Here's the directions and links (or just click on my titles). Enjoy!

The Mall Fairies: Exile by Conda V. Douglas

Save 30% this month during our BACK TO SCHOOL Event

Use discount code MUSEITYOUNG2015 in your Muse cart, save, then finalize the order.

Perfect time to stock up your child’s eReader for the holiday season or begin your pre-holiday shopping before the hustle and bustle begins.

Special exclusive at MuseItUp Publishing $2.99 plus an additional 30% off with code
MUSEITYOUNG2015 until end of September

http://bit.ly/TheMallFairiesExile

Leave Politics, Agendas and Rants Out of Your Public Social Media: A Rant

All proceeds from sales of Romance and Mystery Authors on Writing go to libraries!

The newest publication I'm in, Romance and Mystery Authors on Writing, inspired me to this rant.

Nowadays if you're an author selling titles you have to be on social media. But there are some guidelines if you want to have a good effect, i.e. have people buy your books, when you are using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.

A major one: be professional and share only content that would be interesting/funny/informative to your public audience. Or at least not annoying.

Or to put it another way: if you are using social media in an "I'm an author" public way then no proselytizing of any kind about politics, religion or any agenda. No rants, she says ranting.

There's one simple reason for this. It turns potential readers off.

How can you know what the impact of any post will be? It turns readers off quickly if they don't agree with whatever. You're assuming your audience agrees with you in all ways. Or that you can change their minds by floggings by social media--which almost never if ever happens.

The surprising thing is that it turns potential readers off even if they agree with whatever it is you're ranting about. This is because of several things. The first is that there's a certain air of smugness, an "everybody thinks/believes as I do because I'm right and I know it" about those sort of posts. There's also sometimes an implied mild threat of "you'd better hop on board with this or else..." Or else what? You won't let them read your work?

Most of all, writers with an agenda can push that agenda to all exclusion of everything else, including good writing. Readers know this. Sure it's possible to write a powerful, award winning agenda driven manuscript, but it's very difficult to do. Most are rants.

If you have Facebook or Pinterest or whatever just for family and friends then go ahead and post those rabid political cartoons, get into a comment fight with your granddaughter about some news item, or whatever. It's a personal page and therefore limited, not an author page with a public persona.

There's one sorta/kinda exception and that is if the issue is part and piecemeal of what you write. For example, if you have a character who struggles with a disability, than news items about something particular to that disability might be okay to post. Or personal stories around the issue. Same might be true around a subject in your nonfiction titles, new nutrition facts if you write cookbooks--if you keep it specific and/or personal. The line between okay and annoying is thin.

So, dear readers, do you agree? Disagree? Rant away in the comments!

Three Reasons To Bundle Books For Author Success! (One you'll never think of until you do it!)

 The Mall Fairies Boxed Set

Tis the season, when authors are working maniacally hard to promote/sell their titles. One useful instrument is the eBook boxed set or bundle. Why? Read on.

1. You will expand your readership.

Because they love to read, readers are always looking for a bargain. Book bundles provide that bargain. For example, the book bundle above provides the first two novels in my Mall Fairies series, plus a stand alone short story, for an estimated 602 pages of reading, all for $1.99!

They are also looking to discover new authors with little risk. Bundles provide that, whether with a single author as above or with several other authors as in another bundle I'm in, Sirens on Death Starke Blvd. 

With five authors and four mysteries, and 825 pages for $1.99, why not?

Sirens on Death Starke Blvd.

I know this is all true because as a reader, I often buy bundles.

2. You will add to your brand.

Book bundles are one strong way of promoting your brand, especially when you have a one author (you) bundle. It's another way of having the readers find you. It sends out the message that you are not a one book wonder and can be trusted to provide more reads, always important to readers.

If you are in a bundle with other authors, your brand is strengthened by association with those authors' brands. For example in Sirens on Death Starke Blvd., it is obviously a mystery genre bundle, and if you like one book, you'll like another. It brands me as a mystery author.

3. And least thought of: Oddly enough, bundling my books led me to more story ideas! I never expected that. But seeing three of my Mall Fairies books together reminded me of what the whole series was about...and what the next could be about, or wait, here's an idea for another short story. Sometimes revisiting the prior work provides inspiration.

So dear readers, do you buy book bundles? If you're an author who has a book bundle out? If so, provide a link in the comments!

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!

Free eBooks, free audio books, No eReader? No Problem!

The new edition with added bonus recipes and FREE today!

It has come to my attention that in this time of eBook prominence, there are a lot of people who still believe they can't participate in the wonderful world of FREE and cheap eBook promotions, including audio books, because they don't have an eReader. But these people usually have computers, cell phones and/or tablets and laptops (I know this because they complain to me that they can't get my books when they are free) and they can get all this and more! (EBooks are also usually cheaper to buy than print, just saying.)

Here's the secret: Download the apps to whichever device (or devices) to getting all sorts of great reads, for example go to Amazon and search for Kindle app (if they haven't already asked you if you'd like the Kindle app!) and Amazon will take you through the download step by easy step. Same for Barnes and Noble and Smashwords. They want it to be EASY to buy eBooks!

I've downloaded oodles of great stuff to my cell phone. I've got great reading wherever I go! AND when I'm doing a recipe from my cookbook I just set the screen to be on for the maximum time. It works great!

AND: if you visit The Cellophane Queen today and comment you'll be entered to win a copy of either The Mall Fairies: Exile or The Mall Fairies: War, the first and second in my Mall Fairies trilogy!

What works and what doesn't with marketing books

 The re-release cover of my cozy mystery novel, Starke Naked Dead!

Best thing about this new publishing world: No longer do authors have their books pulled from the shelves after a measly 3 to 6 months. All the marketing authors do online stays online and continues to market.

Worst thing about this new publishing world: No longer do authors only have to worry about a book's release for the three months before and after the release date. Books remain published and available for years and the pressure is on to promote each title all the time they are available. Plus, authors are always grinding out "content" for all the social media and other online sites, while reading the arguments pro and con for this site or that strategy, on and on. When do we write?

So what's an author to do? Relax, there's help for us all! I've found a secret through the marketing maze. And it's simple, if three different steps.

First step is to do what you enjoy. Okay, I can hear you all saying, "Yeah, right." But there are numerous social media sites that all provide a different approach and will get your name out there. You can't do them all, trust me, I've tried. If you choose one that you enjoy, you're much more likely to visit, post, comment, whatever more often and get more followers, views, whatever. For example, I adore Pinterest and so visit it daily. Daily I repin and pin (it's like having hundreds of great teapots, all for free and none that need washed, ever!). As a result I have 1300 followers and more people follow me all the time.

Second step is to provide content that is pertinent to your interests (see teapots above) and not only around writing or selling product. Yes, I have writing boards on Pinterest, but most of my boards are about my interests, jewelry and jewelry making, recipes, fitness and of course teapots. Some of these are tangential to my novels, I have a main character who is a jeweler, for example, but not most. This avoids the dreaded "Buy my book!" syndrome as well. People will "discover" you as an author instead of being annoyed by endless pitching.

That brings me to the third step, which is think outside the promo box. It's a different world because of eBooks, so don't be trapped inside of "you must belong to Facebook and Twitter and Google+ and post daily, etc. etc." My example? I love writing reviews, all kinds. I have over 80 reviews on TripAdvisor. So what, you ask? So I've had 19,000+ people read my reviews. Since I've placed one of my book covers on TripAdvisor as my profile photo, that's 19,000+ people who've seen my name and cover. If only a tiny portion of them register this ...

What do you think, dear readers? Useful ideas? Or?