Kelly Crigger's Blog - Posts Tagged "editing"
Writing is Only Half the Battle
Writing is only half the battle in publishing. Marketing is the other. In book publishing, a crappy book can sell tons of copies if it’s marketed well, while a masterpiece that isn’t marketed can go completely unread. In today’s digital world, information is brought to you at blinding speeds by literally billions of sources. Getting your right book in front of the right person at the right time in the right way with the right message is the only thing that separates bestsellers from bottom dwellers.
As an example of what I’m talking about, I wrote a book called Curmudgeonism, which was aimed at middle aged men and veterans. I did a bunch of marketing that had very little impact on sales, but then I did an interview with a small Florida paper called the Palm Beach Post and sales skyrocketed. Same when Blackfive.net posted a review of the book. I realized right away that these were the right types of outlets for my readership and continued targeting them. Here are a few marketing tips for new authors:
Getting your book in front of celebrities or people with a big social media following is always good, but don’t rely too much on social media like Facebook and Twitter. The shelf life of a tweet is 3 minutes and facebook has made it very difficult to get your posts seen in the average person’s timeline unless you pay for it by boosting posts. Instagram is more effective at generating sales than Twitter and Facebook. YouTube is even better, especially if you can create a character that people want to watch on a regular basis. Just look at how Nick Palmisciano from Ranger Up uses video to sell products.
Look into blog tours like Worldwindtours.com, but don’t get your hopes up too high. A virtual book tour is great to get 20-30 reviews of your book onto the web and generate SEO, but they rarely result in big sales spikes because the audiences they reach are not large. Focused marketing is what you need. It takes time, but do some research on the best sites for your book’s audience and reach out to them.
Become the expert in your field by getting excerpts of your book into similar media outlets. After Reed Kuhn wrote Fightnomics, he aggressively reached out to MMA websites and magazines and within a year was firmly entrenched as The Fight Scientist and widely regarded as the subject matter expert in that field. Reed provided statistics and excerpts from his book to hook potential readers wrote articles as a guest columnist that touted him as “the author of Fightnomics.”
More than anything, don’t get frustrated and recognize that generating sales takes time. Marketing is hard, but remember…Fifty Shades of Grey was originally self-published and self-marketed and look where that is now.
As an example of what I’m talking about, I wrote a book called Curmudgeonism, which was aimed at middle aged men and veterans. I did a bunch of marketing that had very little impact on sales, but then I did an interview with a small Florida paper called the Palm Beach Post and sales skyrocketed. Same when Blackfive.net posted a review of the book. I realized right away that these were the right types of outlets for my readership and continued targeting them. Here are a few marketing tips for new authors:
Getting your book in front of celebrities or people with a big social media following is always good, but don’t rely too much on social media like Facebook and Twitter. The shelf life of a tweet is 3 minutes and facebook has made it very difficult to get your posts seen in the average person’s timeline unless you pay for it by boosting posts. Instagram is more effective at generating sales than Twitter and Facebook. YouTube is even better, especially if you can create a character that people want to watch on a regular basis. Just look at how Nick Palmisciano from Ranger Up uses video to sell products.
Look into blog tours like Worldwindtours.com, but don’t get your hopes up too high. A virtual book tour is great to get 20-30 reviews of your book onto the web and generate SEO, but they rarely result in big sales spikes because the audiences they reach are not large. Focused marketing is what you need. It takes time, but do some research on the best sites for your book’s audience and reach out to them.
Become the expert in your field by getting excerpts of your book into similar media outlets. After Reed Kuhn wrote Fightnomics, he aggressively reached out to MMA websites and magazines and within a year was firmly entrenched as The Fight Scientist and widely regarded as the subject matter expert in that field. Reed provided statistics and excerpts from his book to hook potential readers wrote articles as a guest columnist that touted him as “the author of Fightnomics.”
More than anything, don’t get frustrated and recognize that generating sales takes time. Marketing is hard, but remember…Fifty Shades of Grey was originally self-published and self-marketed and look where that is now.
Maximize Your Amazon Page
You've written your first book, loaded it on Amazon, launched an effective marketing plan, and now sit back and dutifully wait for the sales to roll in. Only they're not. Or at least they're not coming in as much as you had hoped. It could be the consumer isn't having a positive experience with your Amazon page because of that old cliche, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him buy a book. Or something like that. Convincing a customer to check out your book on Amazon is hard. Convincing them to buy a copy once they get there is just as hard, so authors need to maximize their book's page to complete the sale. Here are six things every author should do to strengthen their Amazon page and complete the sale.
1. Write a killer summary. Take your time on this and treat it as a piece of creative writing in itself. Your summary is the first thing readers usually look at so it has to be snappy, intriguing, and hook a reader. It shouldn't be too long or too short or give away too much while convincing someone to spend money on you. That's not an easy thing to do, so take your time to craft a killer summary that makes it impossible for readers to walk away.
2. Your author biography should mirror what you're selling. When I wrote Title Shot, Into the Shark Tank of Mixed Martial Arts, I wrote a biography that highlighted my writing accomplishments in MMA so I sounded like a guy who had been there and done that and was qualified to write a book about getting punched in the face. But when I wrote a completely different book called Curmudgeonism, A Surly Man's Guide to Midlife, I rewrote my biography to one simple line: "Kelly Crigger is an angry troll who lives under a bridge, eats goats that wander past, and throws their bones into the canyon of despair." This simple bio made it perfectly clear who I was and why I was the right guy to write a book about surly curmudgeons.
3. Have reviewers lined up and ready on release day. No one will buy a book with no reviews. No one. Before release day, send the manuscript out to as many friends as possible and have them post a review as soon as they can. Is this loading the deck? Yes, but the alternative is to wait for customers to post reviews months after the book is released while your sales ranking tanks. Having reviewers lined up and ready on release day (and not all of them 5-star) is just good marketing.
4. Add editorial reviews as soon as they come out. Amazon is very good about posting editorial reviews on your book if you forward it to them. No matter how big or small the outlet is from the new York Times to the Prairie Gazette, if someone writes "this is the greatest book ever" send that to Amazon and have them add it to the page. Peer reviews are a big selling point.
5. Respond to negative reviews. Someone once loaded a 1-star review of a book I wrote but their comments weren't directed at the book itself, but my co-author. It was a personal attack on Zak Bagans, so I took umbrage with the person and fired back. After a few back-and-forth comments I actually turned to person to my side and they became an apologetic follower. Now I'll be the first to admit there is a fine line when it comes to this. There's a razor thin difference between engaging negative people and feeding insolent trolls. Pick your battles wisely.
6. Don't let Amazon pigeonhole your book into uber-competitive categories. It's better to be #1 in a small, obscure category like Dead Languages Written by Assholes than #200 in Popular Fiction. Being at the top of any list is good, so make sure Amazon is putting your book into categories it can do well in.
Besides your book's page, make sure your author page is up to speed as well. Make sure Amazon is crediting you with the right books, you have a good photo loaded, a good bio written, and updated social media like twitter scrolling across your page.
Loading your book on Amazon is a must if you ever want to make a sale, but too many authors don't spend the time to maximize their Amazon experience. Remember, the Amazon page is the last step toward making a sale. It's your shop window. Don't bring the customer to your doorstep only to have them leave underwhelmed without buying anything.
1. Write a killer summary. Take your time on this and treat it as a piece of creative writing in itself. Your summary is the first thing readers usually look at so it has to be snappy, intriguing, and hook a reader. It shouldn't be too long or too short or give away too much while convincing someone to spend money on you. That's not an easy thing to do, so take your time to craft a killer summary that makes it impossible for readers to walk away.
2. Your author biography should mirror what you're selling. When I wrote Title Shot, Into the Shark Tank of Mixed Martial Arts, I wrote a biography that highlighted my writing accomplishments in MMA so I sounded like a guy who had been there and done that and was qualified to write a book about getting punched in the face. But when I wrote a completely different book called Curmudgeonism, A Surly Man's Guide to Midlife, I rewrote my biography to one simple line: "Kelly Crigger is an angry troll who lives under a bridge, eats goats that wander past, and throws their bones into the canyon of despair." This simple bio made it perfectly clear who I was and why I was the right guy to write a book about surly curmudgeons.
3. Have reviewers lined up and ready on release day. No one will buy a book with no reviews. No one. Before release day, send the manuscript out to as many friends as possible and have them post a review as soon as they can. Is this loading the deck? Yes, but the alternative is to wait for customers to post reviews months after the book is released while your sales ranking tanks. Having reviewers lined up and ready on release day (and not all of them 5-star) is just good marketing.
4. Add editorial reviews as soon as they come out. Amazon is very good about posting editorial reviews on your book if you forward it to them. No matter how big or small the outlet is from the new York Times to the Prairie Gazette, if someone writes "this is the greatest book ever" send that to Amazon and have them add it to the page. Peer reviews are a big selling point.
5. Respond to negative reviews. Someone once loaded a 1-star review of a book I wrote but their comments weren't directed at the book itself, but my co-author. It was a personal attack on Zak Bagans, so I took umbrage with the person and fired back. After a few back-and-forth comments I actually turned to person to my side and they became an apologetic follower. Now I'll be the first to admit there is a fine line when it comes to this. There's a razor thin difference between engaging negative people and feeding insolent trolls. Pick your battles wisely.
6. Don't let Amazon pigeonhole your book into uber-competitive categories. It's better to be #1 in a small, obscure category like Dead Languages Written by Assholes than #200 in Popular Fiction. Being at the top of any list is good, so make sure Amazon is putting your book into categories it can do well in.
Besides your book's page, make sure your author page is up to speed as well. Make sure Amazon is crediting you with the right books, you have a good photo loaded, a good bio written, and updated social media like twitter scrolling across your page.
Loading your book on Amazon is a must if you ever want to make a sale, but too many authors don't spend the time to maximize their Amazon experience. Remember, the Amazon page is the last step toward making a sale. It's your shop window. Don't bring the customer to your doorstep only to have them leave underwhelmed without buying anything.
Streamline Your Writing
Nothing turns away a reader faster than overwriting. Using four sentences to say what you could in one slows the writing down and in the end, makes your story cumbersome and unmemorable. A golden rule of fiction is to keep the story moving forward, so resorting to flowery prose, unnecessary metaphors, and long descriptions weakens the story and ultimately makes it harder for the reader to stay interested.
Besides using too many words to make a point, going off on tangents will also lose the reader and no matter how good the rest of the story is, you won’t get him back. "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel is notoriously long winded and although I loved "The Deceiver" by Frederick Forsyth, his later novel, "The Afghan," had so many lengthy flashbacks and side stories that I could never remember what the main storyline was or why I was reading it.
If you’re writing fiction then it’s a given that you need to bring the reader into the scene. Smells, sounds, sights, feelings in the air…all these things are necessary to create a sensory image for the story to take place within. But there’s a fine line between creating the backdrop for a scene and making it so agonizingly long that civilizations rise and fall before the reader can get through a chapter. Here’s an example from my own novel that ended up getting cut because it just wasn’t necessary.
“As much as Ki-Hwa adored staring at the great ocean, gazing out toward the horizon every day left her despairing; memories of the life she’d known seemed as evanescent as foam in the wake of the Kinai Maru and trying to decipher what lay ahead was as like trying to predict hold long the embers of a fire would smolder. Some nights, looking up at the rabbit in the moon, she wondered whether her mother or perhaps Jung-Hwan was looking at it too, wondering where she was. Still, she seldom felt anxious and when anxiety did manage to grip her heart, reason shooed it away. She was homesick but crying was pointless, especially since she wasn’t sure what to cry about anymore.”
Run on sentences can kill a story’s tempo and pace. If a reader has to go back and read a very long sentence more than once, then you’ve failed as a writer. There’s nothing wrong with using periods and breaking up a thought into 2-3 sentences. Here’s one very long sentence from a book I couldn’t finish:
“Understand that I was very excited by the spectacle and not until my ride home, as I began to settle into my bones, and feel the limiting contours of perception close back in like the nursery curtains that stifled the views of my youth, did it occur to me that I had, for the first time in my life, found a way out of this, my own skin.”
Overwriting can also take the form of trying too hard to sound smart. Here’s an example from a book where a woman is trying way too hard to describe the experience of going to her first professional MMA fight:
“My experience echoed precisely descriptions handed down to us in the writings of Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, and Artuad in which ia disturbing ritual – often violent – rendered each of their senses many times more acute, as if the dull blunt body were momentarily transformed into a tuning fork, alive, as Schopenhauer put it, “to sensations fine and fleeting.” Some have called the feeling ecstasy. I believed in this spectacle-provoked plentitude of sensation as one believes in Pangea and plundering Huns.”
In the end, fiction is a fickle beast that is very hard to tame, but overwriting is not the way to do it. Keep the story moving forward, take it easy on the prose, limit tangential story lines, watch the run-on sentences, and don’t try too hard to sound smart. These are only a few tips. There are many more, but I don’t want to overwrite. ;)
Curmudgeonism: A Surly Man's Guide to Midlife
Besides using too many words to make a point, going off on tangents will also lose the reader and no matter how good the rest of the story is, you won’t get him back. "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel is notoriously long winded and although I loved "The Deceiver" by Frederick Forsyth, his later novel, "The Afghan," had so many lengthy flashbacks and side stories that I could never remember what the main storyline was or why I was reading it.
If you’re writing fiction then it’s a given that you need to bring the reader into the scene. Smells, sounds, sights, feelings in the air…all these things are necessary to create a sensory image for the story to take place within. But there’s a fine line between creating the backdrop for a scene and making it so agonizingly long that civilizations rise and fall before the reader can get through a chapter. Here’s an example from my own novel that ended up getting cut because it just wasn’t necessary.
“As much as Ki-Hwa adored staring at the great ocean, gazing out toward the horizon every day left her despairing; memories of the life she’d known seemed as evanescent as foam in the wake of the Kinai Maru and trying to decipher what lay ahead was as like trying to predict hold long the embers of a fire would smolder. Some nights, looking up at the rabbit in the moon, she wondered whether her mother or perhaps Jung-Hwan was looking at it too, wondering where she was. Still, she seldom felt anxious and when anxiety did manage to grip her heart, reason shooed it away. She was homesick but crying was pointless, especially since she wasn’t sure what to cry about anymore.”
Run on sentences can kill a story’s tempo and pace. If a reader has to go back and read a very long sentence more than once, then you’ve failed as a writer. There’s nothing wrong with using periods and breaking up a thought into 2-3 sentences. Here’s one very long sentence from a book I couldn’t finish:
“Understand that I was very excited by the spectacle and not until my ride home, as I began to settle into my bones, and feel the limiting contours of perception close back in like the nursery curtains that stifled the views of my youth, did it occur to me that I had, for the first time in my life, found a way out of this, my own skin.”
Overwriting can also take the form of trying too hard to sound smart. Here’s an example from a book where a woman is trying way too hard to describe the experience of going to her first professional MMA fight:
“My experience echoed precisely descriptions handed down to us in the writings of Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, and Artuad in which ia disturbing ritual – often violent – rendered each of their senses many times more acute, as if the dull blunt body were momentarily transformed into a tuning fork, alive, as Schopenhauer put it, “to sensations fine and fleeting.” Some have called the feeling ecstasy. I believed in this spectacle-provoked plentitude of sensation as one believes in Pangea and plundering Huns.”
In the end, fiction is a fickle beast that is very hard to tame, but overwriting is not the way to do it. Keep the story moving forward, take it easy on the prose, limit tangential story lines, watch the run-on sentences, and don’t try too hard to sound smart. These are only a few tips. There are many more, but I don’t want to overwrite. ;)
Curmudgeonism: A Surly Man's Guide to Midlife
