Hank Quense's Blog: Hank Quense's Blog, page 3

Stuff For Fiction Writers

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The Writers and Authors Resource Center (WritersARC) site has a growing list of useful modules for fiction writers. Here is a list of the current ones with a link to each.

Beta reader questionnaireCharacter design templateFiction writing workshop for kids (course)How to create a story (course)Mind-mapping a novel (course)Plots + scenes = emotional arc (course)Creating stories (book)Infographic guide to mind-mapping a novel (Book)Infographic guide to creating stories (book)

My most popular writing class is Fiction Writing Workshop for Kids. It���s based on content I presented to 7th graders for years (until Covid shut almost everything down).�� Here is a short video overview or it. https://youtu.be/nvQLUZqLssY

Check it out and find what you need!

Wanna Write A Book

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Current situation for aspiring authors

Writing a book is an awesome achievement. Once completed, the authors face up to getting it publishing. Typically, they buy a book on publishing. Once published, they realize they have to market the book so they buy another book, this one on marketing.

In effect, the author treats this as three separate projects. This approach is the result of the way stuff is explained. Books on publishing rarely, if ever, mention marketing. Books on marketing don���t mention publishing. Consequently authors treat these as separate projects to be worked on sequentially. In other words, they don���t have a plan!

The reality

The reality of the situation is that writing a book is a long-term, multi-phase, overlapping project. The phases are:

* Planning the book

* Writing the book

* Publishing the book

* Marketing the book

* Dealing with author business issues

Another factor that is ignored in the current situation is that marketing has to begin long before the book is published. And the business issues? They should be addressed early on, not after the fact.

To summarize: writing a book is best accomplished through an approach that integrates all five phases into a single project. Unfortunately, it is a rare first-time author who understands this situation because it is never explained this way.

My response

I���ve written, published and marketed books for over a dozen years. I know how newbie authors approach a book project and it���s a wrong approach.

A while back, I decided to document a different approach. One that incorporates all five phases into a single project.

Whiteboards

My initial work on this project involved white boarding. I chose this approach because I like to see information presented graphically rather than in a list or a table. To create the whiteboards, I chose to use Scrintal.com, a software app I often use for developing whiteboards. Ultimately, I needed seven whiteboards to adequately explain the project. The last one is a concept map that explains the author business from the time the book is written to the Profit & Loss statement. It links the entire process together.

The whiteboards are:

* Wanna write a book? (an overview of the entire process)

* Fiction writing workshop

* Publishing (Including initial marketing tasks)

* Marketing

* Author business

* Concept map for an author business

Whiteboard link

The seventh whiteboards is an overview with links to the other six whiteboards. You can find it here https://beta.scrintal.com/b/creating-your-first-book–f83yr

WritersARC website

Over the last five years, i���ve created a lot of content on all the phases of the book project. This includes books, courses, articles, videos, spreadsheets and checklists. Unfortunately, this material is spread all over the internet, much of it on obscure websites. I���m now accumulating this content to make it available on a single site ���https://hankquense.podia.com.

The objective of the site is explain this reality and to help authors address all phases of the book project.

Creating a book

Another project I���m working on is to turn the whiteboards into a book called: Creating Your First Book

A comprehensive guide spanning the entire long-term project: from planning through marketing and starting your author business.

Look for it in the Fall

Check out the WritersARC site. It���s loaded with great content and more is gettign added all the time.

Ebook Fair

My book Falstaff’s Big Gamble is now in an ebook fair along with a bunch of other fantasy books.  You can check it out using this link: http://ebookfairs.com/Fair/Book?id=8ISU8fhnokODoP-tmHwShQ

If you fill out an entry form, you may win a $50 Amazon gift card plus get some free books. Please share this post with your contacts.

Author Business Concept Map

I’ve been involved with publishing and marketing books for years. My current project is develop a guidebook explaining the process of creating a book from scratch through the business aspects.

I took a hard look at the business side.  Usually, an author realizes he owns a business after the book is published and involved in the marketing,  My analysis led me to conclude that a better time to start this business is when the manuscript is almost done and before the publishing process begins.

It’s the downtime while the manuscript is getting edited. With nothing to do on the manuscript for a while, why not get started on your business plans?

To help understand the author business, I put together a concept map.����It shows the business development required to move from the starting point to a profit & loss statement.����This is a partial screen shot.

Concept map screen shot

And this link will display the entire map.

https://beta.scrintal.com/b/author-business–concept-map–0hs8q

The concept map looks a lot like a mind-map and on first glance, it can be more than a bit scary to many people.����To that end. I created a new version of the concept map using��Padlet.com��(Did I mention I love Padlet?����It challenges my creativity.����Challenge accepted!). I rearranged all the information from the concept map into tabular form on Padlet.����Now it looks like this.��

Padlet screen shot

Here is a link to the entire padlet: https://padlet.com/hanque/author-business-concept-map-v169brqwyu9cfgwu

The reason I did this is because the Padlet app will allow me to create a slideshow from all this tabular information.  That is what I wanted: to covert the concept map to a slide show, a more user friendly version but with all the same important content.

You can watch this slide show at https://padlet.com/hanque/author-business-concept-map-v169brqwyu9cfgwu/slideshow

Comments on the concept map approach will be appreciated.  Did I leave anything out?  Is some bit not explained adequately?

Fiction Writing Workshop for Kids

In the last month, this Udemy class of mine has received two 5-star ratings and one 4-star rating. Not bad, eh?

You can find this class and all my classes at https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?src=ukw&q=Hank+quense

And, all these classes are on sale!

Here is an introductory video on this class.

Class trailer

Fiction Writing Workshop

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I often give fiction writing workshops and lectures and  I just created an online version of it. (shown above partially and in miniature). When clicked, each card will expand to show the complete text, or show a video or a download of a spreadsheet or PDF file

The workshop is targeted at beginners who want to write a story but don���t know how or where to start.   My workshop will get them off and running in a short time. 

The workshop consists of ten lessons that can be taken in order or any way you wish. Here is a link to the material: https://beta.scrintal.com/b/fiction-writing-workshop–1taj0

An outline of the ten lessons in the workshop is listed below:

Lesson 1: Getting startedLesson 2:SettingLesson 3: Character developmentLesson 4: PlotsLesson 5: Character arcLesson 6: Scene designLesson 7: Point of viewLesson 8: Story-telling techniquesLesson 9: DialogLesson 10: Wrapping it all up

Each lesson ends with an assignment.  The assignment for Lesson 10 is: Write the story!

I chose Scrintal for this project because its blank whiteboard format lends itself to how I wanted to develop the workshop which is free for Scrintal subscribers.  A subscription also provides access to my other templates on self-publishing, book marketing and more.

If you wish to learn more about Scrintal, here is a link.

(Disclosure: if you subscribe using this link, I receive a small fee.)

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

Social media ads: Author rip-off?

When authors use social media ads to promote their books, they are getting ripped off. The ad campaign costs money and it will never (or rarely) bring in enough in royalties to cover the expense of the promotion

I���ve come to this conclusion after years of wondering why my social media promotions and ads never produced positive results. 

So let���s look at a few of my conclusions. What follows are my thoughts and I���m usually in the minority. Nevertheless, I write on.

Large corporations use social media and spend millions of dollars on ads and are happy with the results. But they have SEO and social media experts on staff and their job is make sure the promotions have positive results. Then there are us authors who are a bunch of f������-g amateurs. We know little or nothing about SEO and we���re not sure just what social media means. So all our promotional efforts are doomed to failure because we don���t know what we���re doing..

Another issue is targeting, an important ingredient in marketing. Promoting a book to the general population is a waste of money since about 99% of this population has no interest in your genre. To be successful a 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..

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.

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.

So what are your thoughts on this topic? I���d love to hear them.

Scrintal: Now an app killer!

Scrintal screen shot

A few days ago, Scrintal added four templates to the apps. The four are:

Daily Planner BoardPlanning BoardReading Notes BoardBrainstorming Board

My immediate reaction to the boards was to notice how clean, uncluttered and simple to use they are. They are quite different from templates at Notion, Clickup and other productivity apps in that Scrintal���s aren���t filled with junk that has to be deleted before you can use the template.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on how I liked the Walling app https://medium.com/@hanque99/finally-a-productivity-app-i-actually-like-faefca224301

Alas, the Daily Planner Board just replaced that app. Most of the information in Walling has been moved a new daily Planner Board.  This Planner Board now has my to-do list, a multi-column table for ideas and a third section for links I frequently use.

The remainder of the Walling information I moved to a new Planning Board for my current project: Publishing and Marketing whiteboards. So, good-bye to the Walling app.  I think some other apps will also be replaced.

 Planning Board template is a well-thought out approach to managing a project. It has a section for tasks in a familiar Kanban table. It has another section to delineate the project plan,. A third section concentrates on OKRs with Objectives and Key results.

I haven���t used the reading Notes Board yet, but a casual glance at it told me it will be ideal for researching a topic. I intend to use the board in the near future to gain an understanding of AI.

In summary, I have to say that the long wait for Scrintal templates was worth it.

Use this link to learn more about Scrintal.

Using Scrintal to examine and understand a complex subject

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.