Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 51
April 23, 2017
23 Ways to Celebrate World Book Day
Time once again to celebrate World Book Day. What’s with the blank look? Did the holiday sneak up on you this year? Wait—you say you’ve never even heard of World Book Day? Well, this is the right blog post for you.
According to Wikipedia, World Book Day (WBD) was “organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), to promote reading, publishing and copyright.”
Now that you know that, let the celebrations begin!
Um…you don’t know how to celebrate WBD?...
April 9, 2017
Writer, Know Thyself
How well do you know yourself? I came across a wonderful post on this topic by Joanna Penn, guest-posting on WritetoDone. I’d like to take her basic idea in a different direction.
As Joanna said, the phrase “Know Thyself” has an ancient lineage, going back at least to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece, but possibly further back to ancient Egypt. It has various interpretations, but for today, I’ll take it to mean that wisdom begins by looking inside.
If you aim to be a writer, a...
April 2, 2017
Should Your Book be an Audiobook?
What’s the deal with audiobooks? The market for them seems to be rising, with improvements in delivery technology, reductions in price, and increases in reader’s demands to enjoy books while multitasking. Today’s question: are audiobooks a good thing for authors, like you?
From the Reader’s Perspective
There’s something different about listening to a story, isn’t there? Something olden, even ancient. People told stories verbally for millennia before developing writing. When Edison invented th...
March 26, 2017
Wagging the Long Tail
A few authors sell vast numbers of books, while most authors sell very few. If you could amass accurate data on that, it would probably look like a decaying exponential curve. It would have the Pareto property, where 20% of the authors sell 80% of the books—those on the left. However, today we’ll focus on the right side of the curve. Statisticians, with their penchant for arcane, hard-to-understand terminology, call that part “the long tail.”
The curve I present here is approximate and inten...
March 19, 2017
Getting Inside Their Heads
How do you write a story about a character who’s completely unlike you? How do you get inside his or her head enough to make your story credible? Don’t we all admire authors who can do this well? Conversely, isn’t it boring (and confusing) when every character in a story thinks and speaks the same way?
I’ve blogged before about creating convincing characters who are the opposite gender from you. But there are many ways besides gender to be different—age, race, tim...
March 12, 2017
How Do Readers Discover My Books?
Like most writers, I’m curious about how readers come across my books. By what means do they discover them? If I had good information on that, I could focus on the marketing methods that work and abandon those that don’t.
Fortunately, author RJ Scott showed me how to do this. In one blog post, she published the results of a survey of her readers, in which she asked how they found her books.
I decided to do the same thing. I sent out thousands of e-mails to my fans (and acquaintances, and rand...
March 11, 2017
Read an eBook Week – It’s Almost Over!
Now you’ve gone and done it. You dithered, procrastinated, dallied, delayed, hesitated, vacillated, dawdled, and wavered, and look what happened. Today is the very last day of Smashwords’ Read an eBook Week.
It’s insane, really. Smashwords slashed the price for every single book in my What Man Hath Wrought series. The ones that were $3.99 are now $2.00 and the ones that were $2.99 are just $1.50. But only for the rest of today.
Oh, you meant to pick up one or more of my books at half price. T...
March 5, 2017
My Books, Now Half Price
Yes, the rumors are true. This is Read an Ebook Week, and all of my books listed on Smashwords are half price!
Hard to believe, but it’s a fact. Read an Ebook Week runs from today until March 11. My entire series, called “What Man Hath Wrought,” might as well be called What Man Half Wrought” since the titles that were $3.99 are now $2.00 and the ones that were $2.99 are just $1.50.
You read that correctly. Get The Wind-Sphere Ship, Within Victorian Mists, A Steampunk Carol, and The Six Hundre...
Analysis of Writer and Non-Writer Morphs
A significant proportion of the Homo sapiens species does not write fiction, leaving that task to a tiny sector of the population that writes all of it. Today we examine this phenomenon and these particular creatures, and draw what conclusions we can from the available data.
Observations indicate the vast majority (greater than 99 percent) of adults within this species do not write fiction. The fiction-writing and non-fiction-writing fractions have not split off as separate species, and seem...
February 26, 2017
5 Signs of Leximania, the Love of Words
Most writers love words. They adore the sound of them. They revel in learning new words. They marvel over a well-turned phrase. Do you?
I’ll define Leximania as an intense love of—bordering on obsession with—words. It’s not necessary to have leximania to be a writer…but it helps. After all, to a writer, words are like a sculptor’s clay, a composer’s musical notes, a painter’s palette and brush. Words are the tiny bits of noting which, when joined, make literature. They’re the atoms of a write...
