Claire Luana's Blog, page 11

Five Ways to Market Your Book Daily (That Don’t Feel Like Marketing!)

Check out my guest post on the Book Marketing Tools blog: Five Ways to Market your Book Daily (that Don’t feel like Marketing)! These are some of the small things I do on a weekly basis to feel like I’m making positive efforts on my book marketing efforts, while still working full time!

Featured image by chintermeyer, CC Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

Is Following your Dreams a Pipe Dream?

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” I love that quote by Kurt Vonnegut, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he was a writer. To set out to write a novel for the first time is a cliff-jump. Anytime you set out to try something you’ve never done before it’s like jumping off a cliff. With no parachute and no wings. Except the ones you grow on the way down.

When I talk to friends and acquaintances about the fact that I’ve written a book a...

The Novella: a Short Post on Short Novels

In preparation for launching Moonburner in a few months, I am drafting a short e-novella to accompany it. It will be a story that takes place in the same world as Moonburner and features a few of the same characters, andI plan to give it away for free to folks who sign up for my email list.

I’m about 5,000 words in and hit a bump in the road. I’ve never attempted to write short stories or novellas, so I wasn’t sure what the typical structure looked like. Time for some research!

What is a Nove...

Writing a Killer Back Cover Blurb

I received the edited first half of Moonburner from my publisher this weekend. It’s starting to look like a real book!

Here it is all laid out on my computer screen!

Now it’s my turn to spend some quality time with my Chicago Manual of Style and make sure the text is perfect.

In the meantime,the cover design and marketing efforts are moving forward. Today before I dove into editing, I spent some time thinking about my Back Cover Blurb.

If a book’s cover design is the first chance to snag a re...

Marketing: Doubling Your Odds of Success

Thanks to Randy Ingermanson’s Advanced Fiction Writing E-Zine for this great article that applies to so much more than book marketing…

Anyone will tell you marketing is hard. Your odds of writing a best-seller are tiny. In any given year, more than a million books get published. A handful of those, sometimes as many as ten, will sell more than a million copies. Most books sell far fewer copies.

It’s very hard to predict all the books that’ll be the big winners, because every year, a few block...

Book Review: An Ember in the Ashes

Check out my review of Sabaa Tahir’s young adult debut, An Ember in the Ashes, on The YA Shelf! An Ember in the Ashes was is Amazon’s Best Young Adult Book of 2015, so would be a great place to start reading if you’re unfamiliar with the genre.

The Importance of Reader Book Reviews

I’ve recently revealed my secret identity (this website and blog) to a whole host of folkswho know me through my regular life. And while I have been immersed in thinking and learning about writing, publishing, and marketing books for the last year or so, most of you reading this only think of books from the eyes of a consumer—what should I read next? This got me thinking…If I could share one piece of wisdom that I have gained through my new author lens, what would it be? Most definitely: the...