Hank Quense's Blog: Hank Quense's Blog, page 2
October 24, 2023
Recent reviews for Creating Stories
I commissioned a blog tour for my book recently and here are extracts from some of the reviews the book received.
As a lifelong reader and half a decade professional reviewer, I have been interested more and more about writing my own book. However, I had no idea how, when or where to begin. I jumped on the opportunity when I had the chance to read Creating Stories. The author, Hank Quense, did a great job in answering some questions I have had on how to get started. He explains the ideas and design that is important for story telling. As well as, the importance of character development and the depth of the main and sub plots. He includes illustrations, graphs, charts, and diagrams to back up his explanations, tips, and advice. They were quite useful for me to understand in depth in what he was explaining to his readers. I found the book made me feel more inspired and confident on jotting down my ideas on creating my own story. I will be holding on to my copy to keep it handy as I navigate into this new journey for me.
https://amybooksy.blogspot.com/2023/09/book-tour-and-giveaway-creating-stories.html
Complete with illustrations to assist writers in navigating the planning process, Creating Stories provides a comprehensive guide for successful writing.
https://novelsalive.com/2023/09/28/5-star-review-creating-stories-by-hank-quense/
I like the way Quense explains in vivid details the steps from thinking of your story to finally have it written. He takes time to explain what potential writers need to do before they even start writing. This book is really for those who are serious about following this career. I don’t have any thoughts of writing a full fiction or non fiction book but I would enjoy writing a children’s book. And this book would be wonderful for a children’s book author. Anyone who seeks to be a published author. I’m giving this book Five Stars. It is a fantastic read for the writer wanna be!
High school and college writing instructors may want to consider this book as a textbook. The information in this book could help students become better writers, no matter the genre they are interested in.
https://splashesofjoy.wordpress.com/2023/10/04/creating-stories-by-hank-quense/
Creating Stories concentrates on story design and storytelling, but goes further to explain than other books on writing have. The author has a very good grasp of the basics and shares with his readers well. In some parts, he even goes into the explanations with diagrams.
Not only does he cover the main points of story writing but goes more in-depth in explaining them. The author writes in such a way and explains so that a beginner can understand.
I highly recommend adding this book to your writing library and referring to it often. It’s one of the best I’ve read.
Creating Stories could easily be added to a K-12 Christian school non fiction section. High school students interested in writing would benefit from reading this book.
https://kid-lit.library-lady.blog/adult-review-creating-stories-non-fiction/
Creating Stories concentrates on story design and storytelling, but goes further to explain than other books on writing have. The author has a very good grasp of the basics and shares with his readers well. In some parts, he even goes into the explanations with diagrams.
Not only does he cover the main points of story writing but goes more in-depth in explaining them. The author writes in such a way and explains so that a beginner can understand.
I highly recommend adding this book to your writing library and referring to it often. It’s one of the best I’ve read.
https://bizwingsblog.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-of-creating-stories-by-hank.html
The Author Maps Out Creating Stories in a Very Useful, Well Organized Manner. This writing guide is packed with helpful information for fiction writers. While the material is more suited to new writers- or those still developing their writing voices and crafts- there are pieces within each section that could certainly serve to re-focus writers still seeking improvement tips and guidance. The author is very systematic and structured in his story creation style. Just as he offers tips and suggestions to readers, he provides examples and insights into his own writing processes, character, and story development. This book could be read section by section–but it will also prove helpful to use as a resource or reference guide while working through the writing of a fictional piece.Chock full of vital information for the writer, yet relatively sleek in page size, Creating Stories left this writer feeling energized and ready to tackle the exciting, painful, joyous and rewarding task of writing. If you’re a novice author, this book should absolutely, positively be on your desk or shelf. What are you waiting for? I can’t recommend it enough.
https://whatthebookreviews.blogspot.com/2023/10/creating-stories-by-hank-quense-and.html
In summary, “Creating Stories” is a must-read for anyone with a desire to write novels, short stories, or any form of creative storytelling. Hank Quense’s book provides a comprehensive and enjoyable guide to the essential elements of crafting compelling narratives.
https://ginaraemitchell.com/creating-stories/
You can find out more about my Creating Stories book on Amazon.
October 12, 2023
The importance of a landing page and other matters:
Recently, I took my notes on landing pages and created a video out of them. I also included a brief overview of how social media marketing works.
Next, I make a video on the author platform. The landing page is about the book; the author platform is about the author and it complements and supports the landing page.
Finally, to conclude this burst of activity, I created a third video about publishing and marketing scams I’ve come across.
Here are links to each of the videos:
Book marketing basics: Landing pages https://youtu.be/rtUrpbaKilk
Book marketing basics: Author platform https://youtu.be/jYfCGNCqdHc
Self-publishing and marketing scams https://youtu.be/5J5c4htp_cg
Check them out. Give each a thumbs up if you like them
Writing about a complex subject is difficult using words only. It’s difficult for the writer to explain the subject and it’s difficult for the reader to comprehend what the writer said. One solution to the complexity problem is to use a graphic of some sort to clarify the issues.
This article is about such a complex subject. In it, I explain my journey to develop an alternative marketing solution for my books and other stuff.
To explain, my efforts to sell my books haven’t been very successful over time. Rather than continue to do the same type of marketing campaigns, I decided to stop and rethink what I was doing.
When faced with an issue like this I always open a mind-mapping program and start dropping ideas into it. My go-to app for these cases is Scrintal. It allows me to add thoughts, ideas and possibilities and to organize them in a meaningful way.
Over a period of time, my thinking evolved into recognizing that I needed an ecosystem for my content. This content includes books, articles, checklists, video classes, email courses and other material. A further complication is that this content is spread all over the internet.
My first attempt to establish the ecosystem resulted in an expensive failure. Learning from the failure, I tried again with similar results. I’ve always felt that failure is a learning experience, so I updated the Scrintal mind-map with the latest information and started rethinking my approach. This time the mind-map led to a Eureka moment.
I needed a way to organize all this material in an easy-to-read catalog with links to the various internet sites. Ultimately, the catalog became a small ebook called My Stuff. You can download a copy here.
Now I faced the issue of how to explain what I did to others so they could emulate the process. Once again, Scrintal came to the rescue. Starting with the same mind-map, I cleaned it up and deleted out-of-date content. After that, I rearranged the map into columns so it could tell my story in a graphical and easy-to-follow way. That final mind-map is what the beginning of this article referred to. Rather than write a long-winded explanation of my ecosystem solution, I’m relying on the Scrintal mind-map to save me the legendary thousand words. A screen shot is shown at the beginning of this article.
My Ecosystem board can be found here:
https://beta.scrintal.com/b/ecosystem-lecture–r5dds
Visit here to learn more about Scrintal.
What you can use Scrintal for is only limited by your creativity and imagination.
Book Marketing Basics: Social Media:
I’ve been publishing and marketing my books for more than a dozen years. I’ve had some successes and I’ve been ripped off a few times. In the last six months or so, I’ve spent a lot of time just think about social media marketing and how I’ve used it. I’ve come to a few conclusions that I’ll share in this article. By social media, I mean sites like Facebook, not sites like Medium, Wikipedia, Lands End, Best Buy and so on.
Warning: my thoughts are a bit controversial.
How social media works
In the 21st Century, authors use social media to try and influence potential readers to buy a book. As an author, do you know how social media works? Probably not. I used social media for years to promote my books without much (or any) success. That got me thinking: Why am I spending all this money without getting any positive results?
This question led me to examine exactly how social media works and that led to this diagram.
What the diagram shows is that when you commission an ad on a social media platform like Facebook, you create a few lines of text, a graphic and a link to the book page (or the product you’re selling). If someone sees the ad and is interested, they click on it. This transfers the clicker to the book’s landing page. Usually this is Amazon or some other book seller. From this analysis it’s apparent that the book sale occurs on the landing page, not on the social media ad. Thus, the purpose of the ad (and social media marketing) is to deliver the clicker to the landing page, not to sell books.
Landing Page
From this, it becomes apparent that the landing page is the most important piece of marketing content that you own. If this page is lackluster or dull, the clicker will click again to leave the landing page site and the potential sale will be lost.
So it stands to reason that the landing page is where you have to invest your maximum creativity. If you have a publisher, it will create a landing page for your book. If you self-publish, the landing page is your job. You have to write the page elements before you upload the book to the packager. You can also strengthen it after it is published. If you have a publisher, you may want to see if your landing page can be improved and work with the publisher to do that
The vitally important question is: How to use social media marketing to get more visitors to the landing page?
Targeting
Another issue is targeting, an important ingredient in marketing. Promoting a book to the general population is a waste of money since around 98% or more of this population has no interest in your genre or product. To be successful a social media promotion has to be targeted to the tiny sliver of the population that reads your genre such as romance, or fantasy or mystery. But you can’t target that sliver using popular social media ads. Using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. you can’t come close to targeting your sliver. Consequently, the money spent on the ad is wasted on people who will never buy your book. This concept is depicted in the diagram.
To be effective, a fiction promotion must be targeted at your specific genre. For non-fiction, it must be targeted to the problem the book is solving, such as plumbing problems or modernizing a kitchen.
SEO
Let’s look at another important social media concept: SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a complex subject that requires a lot of study and work to master. Mastering SEO is not the stuff that authors want to do. Authors want to write books, not take college level courses to understand the intricacies of SEO.
If you do a web search on SEO, you’ll uncover a ton of articles “explaining” how to use SEO. Most of the articles will display a to-do list for effective SEO usage. Unfortunately, the to-do list will be exactly that: a list of items to work on without any clue as to how to implement each item. To implement the list an author will require a ton of research and a lot of time.
What the big kids do
Large companies spend millions of dollars on social media marketing and are successful at it. Why is that? Because they have SEO experts and social media marketing experts on staff and those experts make sure the campaigns are successful. Consequently, when these companies run a campaign, it precisely targets the customers, the SEO is exact and the copy and graphics are professionally created.
What authors do
Some of us authors may attempt to use SEO in our marketing but we know little or nothing about SEO and many of us aren’t really sure just what social media means. So all our promotional efforts are just a guess and are doomed to failure because we’re a bunch of amateurs who don’t know what we’re doing.
If an author wants to learn SEO, she’ll have to take college level courses. Will she do that or write another story? She’ll write the story.
The answer
So what’s the alternative? Hire an expert and let her run the promotions. This will undoubtedly be expensive, but it might be cheaper in the long run than dropping $50 or $100 at a time on useless promotions. And the results with the expert can’t be worse than doing it yourself.
Of course hiring an expert comes with risks. This is because some ‘experts’ are really scam artists who talk a great game and use marketing doublespeak to sound authentic. Thus, research is required to keep from getting rip-off.
So what are your thoughts on this topic? I’d love to hear them. If you are a writer or an author, you should visit the Writers & Authors Resource Center.
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Using Scrintal to Organize a Complex Project
I recently signed up for a blog tour. What makes this unusual is that the tour is for two of my non-fiction books, instead of the single book that most tours cover. The two books are Creating Stories and Self-publish A Book In 10 Steps. The blog tour consists of reviews for the books and blog posts (articles really) that I would write. The blog tour company is https://www.ireadbooktours.com/ and specializes in getting book reviews.
A two-book tour means that a lot of blogger websites will be involved on each day of the tour which goes on for two weeks. It became apparent to me that I needed a way to organize and track all the websites involved as well as my responsibilities. These chores included visiting the websites on the appropriate day and writing articles for a number of the sites.
My go-to app for a situation like this is Scrintal. Its most attractive feature to me is that it provides me with a blank screen. There is no pre-assigned junk to delete. I just start adding whatever I need where ever I want it to be. In this case, I designed a template to hold all the data I’d need.
The next step was to load the template up with data on the blog tour dates, websites and what I was required to do at each site.
Data stuffing took a bit of time as you can imagine and the final board looked like the graphic above except the columns extended down a lot further. Another feature of Scrintal is the cards. A new card is as blank as the opening screen. You fill it up with whatever data or details are appropriate.
This is what a review card looks like. Some of the information can’t be filled in until the review appears on the website.
Another set of cards (the green column) detailed the articles I had to come up with. A typical card in this column looks like this.
[image error]The completed project board is located here https://beta.scrintal.com/b/blog-tour-organization–dtag0
It has a total of 33 cards in it.
So what app do you use to organize your complex projects?
If you are an aspiring self-publishing author, visit my new site: Writers & Authors Resource Center
September 30, 2023
Reviews: Self-publish a book 10 steps
One from��https://whatthebookreviews.blogspot.com/
reads in part: As a writer myself, I consider Self-Publish a Book in 10 Steps and Market It! a valuable resource that will have a permanent place in my library. It’s an easy-to-read step-by-step guide that will assist any writer in self-publishing their book. I would not hesitate to recommend it.
The second one is from��https://www.fundinmental.com/
I found Self-publish a book in 10 steps to be chick full of vital information and all the things necessary to market and publish your book but that doesn’t mean you can take a pass of doing your own research. It is a daunting task but worth the effort to make your book a success.
This review earned 5 stars on Amazon
Grab a copy of the book from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Self-publish-Book-10-Steps-Blueprint-ebook/dp/B09L6DZCMH?
September 28, 2023
Creating Your First Book
The Problem
Creating a book is an awesome achievement, but it isn���t achieved without a lot of effort and that effort is expended over a lengthy period of time. Many authors, when creating their first novel or book, don���t appreciate or understand exactly what they are getting into: a multi-phase, long-term project.
This project can be outlined this way.
Phase 1: Planning the novel
Phase 2: Writing the novel
Phase 3: Publishing the novel
Phase 4: Marketing the novel
Phase 5: Managing a novel
What each phase involves is explained below.
Phase 1: Planning: For a novel, this activity is called Story Design. It���s where you embed all your creative ideas into the story elements such as characters, plots, settings. For a nonfiction book, the planning mostly involves research, sometimes extensive research, and organizing that research into a logical order.
Phase 2: Writing: In this phase you spend your time banging on the key board and cursing at the screen or staring out a window.
Phase 3: Publishing: These days an author has options to chose from. These range from the traditional way involving an agent and a publisher to self-publishing with several options in between.
Phase 4: Marketing: No matter how the book is published most, if not all, of the marketing responsibility falls on the author.
Phase 5: The business: After all this activity, many authors are shocked to discover they now own a business. This sudden promotion to CEO of a business to market and sell the book can be upsetting.
Another facet of reality is that writing the book does nothing to prepare the author for the daunting tasks of publishing, marketing and organizing a business. The usual remedy is to do a lot of research and/or studying as each phase of the project unfolds. Too many times, the next phase comes as a surprise to the author.
There has to be a better way!
The Solution
I���ve written over 30 books, most, but not all, self-published. I���ve stumbled through all of the phases listed above a few times before I mastered the process. Recently, I decide to develop a thorough explanation of all the phases in a comprehensive way that would save new authors from experiencing the frustration of trying to figure out each phase as it unfolds.
The initial part of the project involved whiteboards instead of books. This took a bit of time and the whiteboards became quite expansive. Over all, the whiteboards have in excess of 475 cards with each card containing a piece of information such as text, video or a downloadable file. I used the Scrintal app as the software to develop these whiteboards and I ended with a total of eight of them. You can find the master whiteboard with links to the other whiteboards here: https://beta.scrintal.com/b/author-ecosystem-master-board–bnrgc
I also rearranged the phases this way:
Phase 1: Planning the book
Phase 2: Writing the book
Phase 3: Starting the author business
Phase 4: Publishing the book
Phase 5: Marketing the book.
One of the principle objectives in this project was to arm the new author with the information needed to understand the entire scope of creating a new book. In other words, I wanted to eliminate surprises for the author.
Understanding the scope of the entire project has an interesting side-effect; it lessens the possibility that the new author will fall prey to scam artists. These scammers prowl the web searching for such authors and ���offer��� to help them. The reality is that their ���help��� is only aimed at emptying the author���s wallet or purse.
In this revised arrangement, the author starts the business after the manuscript has been completed and is getting worked over by an editor.
While whiteboards are a great way to display vast amounts of information visually, unfortunately, they have a very limited exposure. You can���t, for instance, put the whiteboards on Amazon where everybody can find them.
This conclusion led me to decide to use the whiteboards as models for a series of short ebooks packaged under a single title.
My objective with all this work is to simplify the job of the new author by explaining the complicated process of creating the book.
The ebooks listed above were created one at a time. For a brief period, I thought about publishing them as individual books, but that represented a waste of resources and money. The series would require a lot of ISBNs, covers, etc. For economic reasons, I decided to package the series into a single book.
Creating Your First Novel is the result of all this activity. It���s slanted toward fiction writers rather than nonfiction writers but it has a lot of content on publishing, both traditional and self-published, marketing and business.
The book is available in print and ebook editions. You can pre-order the ebook until October 15.
The book is part of an author ecosystem I���ve been creating. Another part of the ecosystem is my website called Writers & Authors Resource Center or WritersARC. The link to this website is: https://hankquense.podia.com/
September 10, 2023
Comma Placement
I am comma challenged. Where ever I place a comma, editors remove it. And editors add tons of commas that I neglected to put into the text.
To rectify this situation, I���ve hired an assistant. This new assistant will be in charge of all comma placements in my writing from now on.
Meet my new assistant. His name is Otter and he can���t possibly do worse than me.
[image error]I hired Otter from a rescue/adoption agency. He���s originally from Louisiana so he barks with a drawl, like “Woof-y���all”. Very cute
August 28, 2023
Fiction writing Workshop For Kids
Do you want your middle-schooler to learn how to create a story? The Fiction Writing Workshop For Kids is the way for them to learn how to do that. And it’s on sale! https://hankquense.podia.com/0381c4b3-dc47-4a27-a905-95986998ff01
The video course guides them through the process of creating three stories with themes that will appeal to the kids:
Your pet has superpowers storyA story about a questA story about superpowersAfter these three stories, the budding author is challenged to create their own story.
Watch this brief video to learn more.
workshop trailerAugust 19, 2023
Free book marketing checklist
Hey all! We’ve got something special for you today! We’ve put together a free book marketing checklist that will help you plan, strategize, and execute a successful book marketing campaign – and it’s available to you for free! So, what are you waiting for?
Download your copy today: https://hankquense.podia.com/book-marketing-basics-cheat-sheet
August 12, 2023
Book Marketing Basics: Social Media
On August 22 at 6:00 PM I���ll host a webinar on social media marketing. This is another of my Book Marketing Basics webinars.
In this webinar, we���ll discuss how social media works and what it will do and won���t do when it comes to selling your book.
This webinar is perfect for authors who are struggling to sell books by using popular social media sites.
Secure your spot today and join us for this webinar on Book Marketing Basics: Social Media!
https://hankquense.podia.com/book-marketing-basics-social-media
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