Do you need an editor?
The biggest trap that most self-published authors fall into is believing there book is good enough if they write it once, have a few friends check it over and send it out.
The truth is that writers do not see their own mistakes.
It’s like looking in a mirror and thinking that the one-dimensional reflection is how we really look to other people.
Besides seeing ourselves in only one dimension we unconsciously put on a good face before that bit of glass. A pleasant expression. A smile. Do we see the frown, snarl, or grimace we make when someone cuts in front of us?
As a writer, you know what you want to say. That knowledge can get in the way of sharing what we want to say completely.
Remember the old kid’s game of Pass the Secret? You tell the person next to you a sentence about something. She repeats it to the next person. By the time it has progressed five or six times the sentence is completely unrecognizable from the original.
Surprisingly, the same thing happens in writing. Because you yourself know something you assume that the reader knows this as well. He doesn’t.
Recently a someone told me about a recipe she was given from a friend. The friend had carefully written out all the ingredients for the dish. It turns out though that she forgot one important ingredient: salt. Now, this friend had made the recipe a hundred times and she knew exactly how to make the dish, but when she wrote it out she forgot one of the most basic ingredients.
Writers do this a lot. Because so much time is spent thinking and living inside the character’s head we forget that we have not told our reader essential things that are important about our hero or villain.
Editing is more than simply catching spelling and grammar mistakes. If you want your book to be a success, take the time and expense to have it professionally edited.
At Wheatmark, we believe in helping authors with every step of the writing and publishing process. Whether your book is is in the beginning or final stages to tell us about your project, tell us about it.
How to create a basic plot for your novel
Writing a plot for your story is like planning a road trip.
You start at point A and you map out how to get to point B.
A plot is not the story. It is the highway that must be traveled to get to the end. The story is how the character goes down that highway to get to the destination.
When writing your plot you must first decide what the ending is going to be. Then you work backwards, charting each point to reach the end. Every step should build to the final climax but have conflict that must be worked through to move the story along.
To make your plot more interesting than “got in car, drove to store, got bread,” you build in points of conflict that must be overcome. In a novel, there is usually one major plot line of conflict and a series of subplots.
The main conflicts basically fall into four types.
- Man versus man: Someone is determined to kill the driver once he gets in the car.
- Man versus nature: Earthquake, avalanche, flood that must be overcome.
- Man versus self: Man is afraid of driving after being in a previous accident.
- Man versus man’s work: Man doesn’t take care of car and it breaks down or runs out of gas.
Before you start writing, chart the points along a timeline if the action will take place in a linear story. The points must be detailed enough in your mind that you don’t write yourself into a dead end. So each subplot must have a conflict idea and way it is overcome.
Each subplot should add to the story, adding just enough action and conflict to keep the reader involved and moving along but still working towards that final destination.
At Wheatmark, we believe in helping authors with every step of the writing and publishing process. Whether your book is is in the beginning or final stages to tell us about your project, tell us about it.
The super, simple secret to getting more exposure for your book
The super, simple secret to getting more exposure for your book…
Ready?
Here it is in a nutshell:
Comment on blogs in your niche.
You see, the way to build a new audience for your book is to go where that audience is already congregating and enter into the conversation.
Ask yourself these two simple questions.
- Who do you want to know you?
- Who do you want to follow you?
Now look around for blogs with those types of avid followers. Start commenting on their blog posts. When possible, try to comment as soon as the post goes live so that your comments are at the top of the list to get greater exposure.
Make sure your comment adds some spark and sparkle to the conversation. Don’t steal the light of the blogger with your own amazing story but rather highlight what they have said and offer positive feedback with sincerity.
Here are 3 powerful reasons to leave comments on other blogs:
- Many blogs let you share your website URL. That means that you add a new incoming link to your site, which is important for your Google ranking. Sites with no incoming links have little credibility. Incoming links from major sites register higher than small sites and leaving a comment is an easy way to get that link.
- When you comment on an article that’s on a popular site, your comment exposes you to that audience. If readers like the article and like your comment … they may very well click on your link to find out more about you.
- While only one link will register for ranking, commenting multiple times will get the attention of the blog host. After 3 or 4 times your name will start to register. Keep doing it and make sure your comments offer something of value to the conversation. In time not only will the blog host come to know you but their readers will as well.
If you’re an author and feel stuck in your book marketing, get a jump start by learning about the best and latest book marketing strategies in the Authors Academy.
Which came first: The audience or the book?
Last time I revealed what to me was the most significant lesson learned during my last thirteen years running Wheatmark: that publishing success requires actively building an audience. A natural question many authors have about this is: Should I start building an audience for my book before or after I write it?
Ideally you’d write your book and build your audience simultaneously, so that your audience-building activities could inform the content of your book, and you could use your writing as a resource for your audience-building activities. But the deeper answer is: It doesn’t matter, because you’re going to have to do both to achieve publishing success, and you have to start somewhere! Let me illustrate this with two very different publishing success stories:
1. Start with an audience, then write a book: Just over a year ago, when Mark Baker published The Game Changer: A Simple System for Improving Your Bowling Scores, he was a renowned bowling coach with top-tier clientele, including several of the best bowlers on the PBA Tour. He had lots of fans and followers both online and offline. He’d been involved in bowling for over thirty years: as a competitive bowler earning four PBA titles along with numerous other awards and accolades, as a sales manager for Cal Bowling Supply, and as the developer of Camp Bakes, one of the premier bowling camps in the world. In short, Mark had an audience. As a direct result, The Game Changer sold over 2,000 copies in its first month after publication and 6,000 in its first year.
2. Write a book, then build an audience: Over twenty years ago, when Angelyn Miller first published The Enabler, she was not a recognized expert on codependency and enabling—the subjects of her book—nor had she published any books before. She wasn’t a degreed practicing psychologist with a large clientele, either. In short, Angelyn had no audience. Her first publisher, Hunter House, invested substantially in getting The Enabler placed in brick-and-mortar bookstores (in the age before Amazon mattered) and listed in the right catalogs. Angelyn pursued and obtained a master’s degree in counseling psychology. She appeared as a guest on several radio shows and at a conference. The Enabler was recommended in several nationally syndicated self-help newspaper columns. Angelyn has built a substantial audience since the first publication of her book, and it shows. The Enabler has sold tens of thousands of copies, including over 30,000 since its republication with Wheatmark in 2001. When Angelyn publishes her second book, her audience will be there, ready and eager to buy it.
So don’t beat yourself up if you’ve spent all your time writing a book and haven’t built an audience for it yet. Pat yourself on the back for the major achievement that having written a book is, roll up your sleeves, and get to the work of building your audience.
Which came first the chicken or the egg? It doesn’t really matter if you’re making a chicken omelet.
Sam Henrie: Why I Started Wheatmark
In the late 1990s I left my position as Director of Logistics at the mid-sized tech company I had worked at for nine years. I left with two great gifts: enough money to take some time off and the entrepreneurial bug. During my nine-year tenure I watched the tech firm grow from a local business with a handful of employees and under $1 million in annual revenues to a global enterprise with nearly a thousand employees and over $100 million in annual revenues. The experience had me hooked: I knew I would to start my own company. Doing what, I did not yet know.
At the time I was investigating the book publishing business; I wanted to understand why some of my relatives (I come from a family of writers) were having trouble getting their books published—books that were exceptional, and ones I was convinced had good chances in the market place. My research led me to a New Yorker article detailing how mightily the major book publishers were struggling to make a profit. Inventory costs were killing them—for historical reasons publishers, not bookstores, are responsible for the cost of unsold inventory. As a result publishers were becoming skittish, publishing ever fewer titles and taking ever fewer chances on new authors, not willing to risk the cost of bookstore returns and unsold inventory. That’s when I had a light bulb moment. Online bookstores didn’t need to carry any inventory to give readers all the information they needed to make their buying decisions, and print-on-demand (a new book manufacturing technology) allowed books to be printed to order. Combine these two innovations and presto you had no-inventory book publishing. The publishers’ problems were solved! In fact, without the need to invest in inventory, and given online bookstores’ access to a huge global market, authors could inexpensively self-publish and bypass the publishers altogether. My literary relatives’ problems were also solved!
Then the second light bulb clicked on: I could start a company that would provide authors with all of the services they needed to self-publish using the combined power of online bookstores and print-on-demand. I’d be scratching my entrepreneurial itch and helping some of the most interesting people on the planet—authors—to succeed. I setup a desk in my living room, got to work, and Wheatmark was born. Thirteen years, thousands of published titles, and two office relocations later, Wheatmark is still helping authors find success, though now not just by publishing their books, but also by helping them with the all-important work of finding and building their audiences.
More about that later….
An Amazing Resource: Picmonkey
A robust image and photo editor that can do everything can be overwhelming, especially when you’re staring at a blank canvass trying to figure out what kind of banner image would go well with your Facebook author page.
On the other hand, applications that focus on a single aspect of design, like PicMonkey, can inspire you and save you a lot of time in such situations.
PicMonkey is a free online photo editing service that lets you create stunning photo collages on the fly. Visit Picmonkey and start creating your collage, which then you can share on Facebook, Pinterest, or print it on any marketing piece.
As an example, we quickly put together these two collages using PicMonkey: one from our book covers, the other from stock photography.
Book marketing tip: A cheap and easy way to schedule your Pinterest pins
Pinterest is an amazing tool for authors but only if used regularly. Unfortunately, pinning can be a major time waster and may gobble up the precious minutes you should be … writing!
One way to get around this is to schedule your pins a week at a time.
There are programs available that will allow you to schedule your pins. The bad news is that the ones I could find are all subscription based, starting at $10.00 a month and going up to $100 for noncommercial users. While that might be affordable for some, it may not be for authors on a limited budget.
The bottom line behind scheduling is planning. Remember the old adage: for every hour you spend in planning you save three in work time. If you take an hour a week to plan your pins, you can then pop in the pins every evening in just three minutes.
The best time for pinning is in the evening hours after 8:00 p.m. EST. So that’s your first tip. Plan your pinning time to fit into that period.
Here are the guerilla steps to becoming an amazing pinner!
1. Create a list of pins, keywords, and #hashwords to use with pins.
2. Make a list of the different kinds of pins that you want to pin.
3. Create a spreadsheet or simple Word document.
4. Find the pins (your own) or repins and copy the link for each one. Put in your spreadsheet. Fill in the keyword and description for each pin.
Schedule a time every day between 8 pm – 1 am and pin one to five pins during this time. If you have done all the work ahead of time—collecting pins, keywords and composing description—it will take you no more than three minutes to pin.
While this is not as fun as having a program that does it automatically for you it gets the job done. If you set up a system, you will get the same results as paying for a subscription-based program.
Remember, even with a subscription program you still have to put in the time to find pins, keywords, and write descriptions. So, though you don’t have the convenience of having them sent out automatically, by making the process easy you are more likely to pin on a daily basis and get the same results as a paid subscription.
To learn about real book marketing strategies and to get a jump start on your marketing, check out the Authors Academy.
How to do book research using Google online forms to gather information
“Content is king.” The statement has been used so much it’s become cliché. Nevertheless, it is still true and creating valuable content means you provide information not available anywhere else.
One way to do this is to do your own research. Collect data online by asking a group of people to provide responses to a question or a series of questions. The information that you collect is uniquely yours so it can be a big selling point for making your book stand out authoritatively.
Let’s say you’re a historical fiction writer and you want to find out what people’s responses are to visiting a particular historical site. You could create a form with a question and then share it with those people who have visited the site by asking on Twitter or Facebook. A better way would be to connect with the historical site and ask for permission to survey their visitors. If you share the results of the form with them and acknowledge the historical site in your book in a positive way, they may be glad to share the form with their list.
There are many ways to create a form on the web. You can write your own if you have coding skills but, for most of us, the easiest way is to use an online form service. Some are free and others charge a monthly or yearly subscription.
One of the best options is using Google Drive. Under Google Drive, you have an option for creating a form that you can send in an email or post on a website or Facebook page. You can view a short video tutorial [3:31] that will get you up and running quickly.
The information gathered from your form can provide statistical information to write a chapter in your book or an article or news release.
If you’re an author and feel stuck in your book marketing, get a jump start by learning about the best and latest book marketing strategies in the Authors Academy.
How to grow your author fan club
Behind every successful author is a dedicated group of fans. Let’s call it your author fan club.
This club may not include card-carrying membership with dues, name tags, or annual parties, but it does exist in some form or other. As an author, you need a faithful group of followers to ignite your book sales, show up at your events, and promote by word of mouth everything that comes off the press.
I do realize that when you start out, this fan club consists of your closest family members. They do come to your events, don’t they? No matter how small a fan club you have, the truth is, you do have one, and your task is to make it grow.
The easiest way to get started is to start collecting email addresses from your author website.
Of course, all that is much easier said than done.
Collecting email addresses from casual website visitors with nothing but “Sign up for Updates” is not going to happen unless you’re an A-list celebrity author. We’re all overwhelmed with too much email clamoring for our attention already. Our mailboxes overflow every morning with stuff we know we should read, would like to read but simply don’t have time to read every day.
To entice people at a local event or website visitors to give you their email addresses you must give them an irresistible offer such as a free (downloadable) book, a sample, or a report they want to read.
Then you want to be in touch with them regularly via email.
Then, to keep your email subscribers from hitting the unsubscribe button after the initial fervor wears off you must commit to providing valuable ongoing content or they will drop like flies once the initial offer lands in their email box.
So how do you get your author fan club to take off and grow?
There are many offers out there that promise you a massive list in a short time but I’m not sure that works for most people. The only way I know that does work is to consistently provide something of value and to be as available and responsive to every fan as you can be.
It’s not easy but it pays off.
Share consistent content on your blog by writing helpful and informative articles. Link to other relevant websites and articles on your author blog. On Twitter, share both your blog’s and other people’s articles. You can do the same on your other social media accounts as well: Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, or LinkedIn.
It’s easy to be discouraged in the beginning when you realize that no one is listening. The way to get out of that mindset is to make creating content something that you actually enjoy doing! Don’t make it feel like work.
If you have fun sharing great pictures, if you think sharing tips, resources, and information with others brings a smile to your face and someone else, then you will keep doing it simply because you enjoy it. Keep providing this value for the few fans you have now, and in time you will be providing it for many, many more. To get a more detailed overview of how all this works, be sure to view the webinar “The One Way to Market Your Book” in the Authors Academy.
5 basic tweets for building your author platform
Building your author platform is a daily exercise every author must commit to for a book’s success.
If Twitter is part of your social media routine, coming up with interesting and relevant tweets can be a chore. One way to make this task easy is to create a tweet subject list.
To get started, decide how many tweets a day you will do. Three to five is usually a good number to start with. Leaving it up to whatever happens happens usually means that nothing will happen. So get yourself a piece of paper and let’s get started building your author tweeting program.
For this example, I am going to help you plan for five tweets a day. You can shorten it if you like to three or four.
When tweeting, a good practice is to offer tips, links, and interesting news items that will be of interest to your followers. Obviously, you want to promote your book, writing, and projects you are interested in, but make sure you have plenty of other tweets to balance them out. A good ratio I have often heard recommended is to offer one self-promotion tweet for every ten tweets.
Five possible tweets
1. Blog post update. This one is easy and can be done automatically every time you post. Every time you write a new blog post, let your followers know.
2. Inspirational quote. Keep it on topic about writing, books, book marketing or from an author. Create a list and add to it as you read books, news articles, etc. It’s okay to use a quote from places such as Inspirational Quotes or BrainyQuote, but you will have more impact if you can say you just read it or just found it somewhere.
3. Great image or picture. Great or fun pictures from around the web are okay, but including your own content from time to time will result in making a better connection. If you’re tweeting to build your author platform, keep your photos focused on something to do with your book most of the time.
4. A helpful resource. Share what matters to you. If something inspires you, there’s a good chance it will do the same for someone else as well.
5. Share a lighter moment. Something funny, a witty joke, or a comment you just heard.
If you’re an author and feel stuck in your book marketing, get a jump start by learning about the best and latest book marketing strategies in the Authors Academy.