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How to Get Violence Right in Your Fiction

Photo credit: Louish Pixel via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Today’s guest post is by Fred Johnson (@fredbobjohn), an editor with Standout Books.

For new writers, throwing in a few combat scenes can seem like an easy way to add some excitement to a novel, but the reality is that violence can be incredibly difficult to pull off effectively.

There are many pitfalls writers will fall into when writing about violence—I want to talk about what they are and how you can avoid them. In their places, I’ve offered up two main alternative methods that I think work for ninety percent of combat scenes.

Violence: The Detailed Method

If you’re writing a fight or battle scene in genre fiction, detailed description will be the way to go nine times out of ten. This is because a fight scene of any scale and duration is likely to involve two or more people tied up in an incredibly fast-paced and complex process. Detailed description serves to guide the reader through the confusion and helps your readers suspend their disbelief.

Some of the worst combat scenes I’ve ever edited have read along the lines of:

“Bob disarmed the guard and killed the seven men behind him.”

What? How did he do that? He’s a single guy against eight assailants! Did he click his fingers and they all dropped dead?

Don’t be like the author of Bob’s brief fight—you need to make your readers believe it’s possible that your James Bond-esque hero shot his way through two hundred trained henchmen, despite what their brains are telling them.

Combat needs to be specific and it needs to be rooted in concrete actions. This is doubly true if it’s a case of an underdog protagonist surmounting impossible numbers—after all, for the reader to stay immersed in your book’s story, they need to be able to believe the story’s events. If those events are too preposterous, that’s it—you’ve lost your readers.

Take, for example, this scene from fantasy writer David Gemmell’s White Wolf:

When the death blow came it was so sudden that many in the crowd missed it. Agasarsis lunged. Skilgannon met the attack, blocking the lunge and rolling his blade round the sabre of Agasarsis. The two men leapt back. Blood suddenly gushed from Agasarsis’s severed jugular. The champion tried to steady himself, but his legs gave way, and he fell to his knees before his killer. Servaj realized that, even as he parried, Skilgannon had flicked the point of his sabre across the throat of his opponent.

Agasarsis pitched face forward to the earth.

Every movement and detail is picked apart here, slowed down, and recounted by a third-party spectator. The result is a climactic and vivid end to an important encounter.

It’s for the same reason that action movies favor slow-motion effects and sharp editing—the incredibly complex and unlikely actions presented need to be slowed down and examined to be believed. Imagine if, in The Matrix, Neo and Trinity simply arrived to rescue Morpheus and told him “Oh yes, we killed those fifty guardsmen downstairs. No sweat.” No—we need to see it to believe it. And this is much the same for books.

Violence: The Implicit Method

The alternative method to writing good violence only works in certain situations, and is favored in literary fiction and detective novels. The method operates around what is left unsaid; consider Myrtle’s death in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s enormously popular novel The Great Gatsby:

A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting—before he could move from his door the business was over.

The “death car” as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappeared around the next bend.

The precise moment of Myrtle’s death is lost here—we don’t see the impact or hear the scream, and yet we know with terrible certainty that Myrtle is dead. This kind of quiet violence gains power through how understated it is, and is totally reliant upon the power of context. When attempting an implied moment of violence yourself, your prose has to boil over. You’ll want short, punchy sentences and resonant concrete images. For example, this fight between two antagonists is from a fantasy novel I edited recently:

The final blow struck Samson hard in the chest. He reeled back, his knees trembling like aspens before giving way beneath him. The hooded woman watched him fall, saw his eyes widen. Slowly, she drew the long dirk from her boot and ran her finger along its edge. “You’re in for a long night,” she said softly.

It’s the equivalent of when, in a movie, the door swings closed on the man bound to the chair in the mafia den. The scene cuts off, and although we don’t see anything, we all know bad things are happening.

So there we have it. Now, reducing good violence down to two alternative rules might seem rather limiting–I have, after all, suggested either spelling everything out in candid, straightforward language or giving the reader just enough so that she/he can work out what’s going to happen. It could be said that I haven’t left much room for any middle ground.

But, of course, great writers will always find ways to flout these rules and guidelines, so don’t feel like you have to limit yourself–writing is an art, not an exact science, and there’s always room for experimentation. That said, to break the rules, you have to first be aware of them.

Now get out there and give your characters the violent triumphs they deserve.

On Tastemakers and Making

Today’s guest post is by Nell Boeschenstein, who is teaching a 5-week memoir writing class that begins April 17. Find out more.

Several years ago, a designer created a one-minute, forty-second video that animates a quote from an interview with Ira Glass on storytelling. The video itself is not remarkable. Because the transcribed text is the sole visual element, it seems more an exercise in animating typography than anything else. Nevertheless, it’s snappily-produced and the sentiment expressed in Glass’s trademark cadence, complete with rhetorical pauses on the off-beats, struck a chord. Or rather three million. After being picked up by a few prominent websites, the video went viral. Today it has more than 1.4 million views on Vimeo with a corresponding 12,400 “hearts” and an additional 1.65 million views on YouTube.

The animation begins: “Nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me, is that all of us who do creative work, like y’know, we get into it and we get into it because we have good taste, but it’s like there’s a gap….” Glass goes onto explain that when one first begins creating, the gap between what one knows to be good and the disappointing products of one’s efforts, is the point at which many people quit. He implores his audience to push past this point. He explains how reaching the level of skill and accomplishment to which one aspires takes years, that this is normal, that it took him – he, Ira Glass – years to get to a place that satisfied his own qualitative ambitions.

Temperamentally, I have a knee-jerk aversion to inspirational quotes. For me, they tend to oversimplify. That said, I’ll admit a fondness for this one. I like that, from the get-go, Glass included himself among those who have struggled toward mastery for years; I like that he places high stock in time, patience, determination, production. For these reasons, I am sure I am far from alone among English teachers when I say that I’ll cop to playing this video in class from time to time. When I do, I sense that my students appreciate it, that it softens the blows of teacherly criticism when they inevitably arrive.

Lately, however, the bulk of Glass’s sentiment has become muffled in the back of my mind as those first few phrases—the first thirty seconds of the video—have taken on a sharper pitch. That pitch reaches its peak with his articulation of the word “taste”. Taste. I have been thinking about taste. Specifically, good taste. Or as Glass calls it, “killer taste.” What is it, exactly? And what does it mean for our development as writers?

Well, first, it’s subjective. Jane Doe might love E.M. Forster and Jane Roe may prefer Graham Greene but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Forster is empirically better than Greene or vice versa. That is the very nature of taste. What rankles me about the Glass clip is that he seems to be implying that taste is a static, reliable inclination—that Doe will always prefer Forster and Roe, Greene. He seems to be describing a fixed endpoint toward which one toils away as opposed to a target that moves constantly over the course of a lifetime.

The latter is a more accurate description of what has been my own experience. The question clicked for me last June. I was on a writing panel and someone in the audience stood up and asked to which writers we found ourselves repeatedly returning. In past years, I would not have hesitated: Joan Didion, short and sweet. Yet sitting there, awaiting my turn, I realized that lately Didion had not been affecting me as she once had, that I was growing tired of her. Instead, I realized that I was increasingly rereading Zadie Smith’s essays, that Smith was my new Didion.

Such evolution is partly a function of age and the fact that the more we live the more we understand about life and thus the more of that understanding we bring to what we read. When I was younger Elizabeth Bishop’s famous villanelle “The Art of Losing” left me cold. Now, having lived longer and lost more, it devastates and astonishes me with its brilliance in equal measure. Aging aside, such evolution is also the definition of learning. While I will always love Jane Eyre and dislike Lord of the Flies, more interesting are the shifts in my taste, the slippages from Didions to Smiths that reflect my ongoing education. I worshipped at the altar of Didion at a time when I was struggling with the clarity of my sentences. Hers are crystalline and had much to teach me. These days, corralling complex thoughts while maintaining narrative and balancing tonal elements of gravity and levity are my intellectual albatrosses. Zadie Smith excels at this.

Instead of taste as the aspirational fixed endpoint described by Glass, a more apt analogy may be the horizon line – always ahead, never reached. This may sound defeating; it doesn’t have to. Is fulfilling one’s artistic ambitions not a recipe for a kind of complacency to be approached with as much skepticism as an inspirational quote? I know many writers—accomplished, wonderful writers—who have told me that every time they start something new they feel again like complete novices. There is likely some false modesty in this claim, but the deeper implication that mastery is never the goal, that one is always learning and relearning one’s craft, is more to the point. There are few feelings I love more than that of finishing a book or short story or poem or essay and being so moved that I sit dumbfounded and wondering, “How did he/she do that?” That mystification is, for me, part and parcel of the pleasure of reading something beautiful and dreaming up how match it. To lose that sense of wonder—that sense of admiration and aspiration—would leave me nothing short of bereaved.

I am reminded of the violin lessons I took as a child. Once a week, my mother would drive me to Mr. Lind’s studio and wait in her parked car for a half hour, while, over the years, he shepherded me through the Suzuki method, a classic memorization-based technique that takes students from the basics of bowing “Twinkle, Twinkle” to the gymnastics of Shostakovich, via a seemingly never-ending series of slim instructional volumes. Unlike the textbooks that occupied my academic hours, the sense of accomplishment I felt upon finishing one Suzuki book and moving onto the next was enormous. It was exhilarating. What would I do next? What fresh discoveries of my own abilities awaited? Which is to say, might we always look forward to that next book? Might we always look forward to what it has to teach us about our tastes—about ourselves?

Find out more about Nell’s writing class starting April 17.

The Myth About Print Coming Back (Updated)

This post first went live in June 2016; I’ve updated it with more recent industry statistics. If you enjoy this post, I highly recommend subscribing to The Hot Sheet, an email newsletter for professional authors that I write and edit with journalist Porter Anderson.

When I read mainstream outlets on publishing industry issues (such as The New York Times or The Guardian), few things are more frustrating than articles that tout the “resurgence” of print—as well as the related “comeback” of independent bookstores. Most of it is wishful thinking rather than an understanding of what’s actually happening. Here are the recent data points you should know about.

The ebook sales decline (to the extent it’s real) relates to traditional publishing and its high ebook pricing.

As you can tell from Nielsen’s graph above (which tracks sales of titles with ISBNs), the flattening of ebook sales started happening back in 2013. However, this decline is attributable to higher ebook prices from traditional publishers. Jonathan Stolper (formerly of Nielsen) said at Digital Book World in January 2017, “Price is the most important and most influential barrier to entry for ebook buyers and the increase in price coincided with the decrease in sales.”

If print is indeed is “back,” it’s because of Amazon. Since 2013, the traditional book publishing industry has enjoyed about a 3% increase in print book sales. However, print book sales grew largely because Amazon sold more print books. Barnes & Noble’s sales declined by 6% in 2016, and sales from mass merchandisers (Target, Walmart, etc.) also declined. But reports estimate that Amazon’s print sales in 2016 grew by 15%, primarily driven by their own discounting. (Their ebook sales are believed to have increased about 4%.)

When Amazon discounts the print edition, it often ends up undercutting the (high) ebook price. (It is not allowed to discount ebooks.) So it’s clear that consumers are unwilling to pay more, or about the same price, for an ebook as they do for print.

Two other unanswered questions:

whether book readers are transitioning from ebook purchases to audiobook purchases; that’s where most of the sales gains are happening for traditional publishers.
whether the most voracious ebook readers have switched to ebook subscription services such as Kindle Unlimited or Scribd.

Kindle Unlimited (KU), Amazon’s ebook subscription program, is estimated to represent about 14% of all ebook reads in the Amazon ecosystem. KU costs $9.99/month and is strongly dominated by self-published books—none of the major publishers participate. 

Ebook market share has drifted toward “nontraditional” publishers.

Above, we see how the share of Big Five publishers has declined by 12% between 2012-2015; small publishers and self-published authors gained 23% market share combined, due to their lower pricing. What’s even more astonishing is that Nielsen’s figures primarily give us a look at very traditional types of publishing, or books with ISBNs. There’s a whole universe of independent publishing that remains untracked because the titles don’t carry ISBNs—and most of those titles are not getting carried in your average bricks-and-mortar bookstore. They sell predominantly through Amazon.

Also, not many people are aware of what an active publisher Amazon itself is. Eight of the top 20 Kindle sellers in 2016 were from Amazon’s own publishing imprints, and Amazon now has 13 active imprints. In 2016 alone, Amazon Publishing released more than 2,000 titles.

Fiction sales are about 50% digital for traditional publishers

Often you’ll see figures that indicate that ebooks account for about 25% of all book sales for the major publishers, as in this recent graph from Nielsen, presented at London Book Fair in March 2017.

But note that’s an average across all genres and categories; if you look at fiction alone, sales are about half digital for traditionally published books. Once you factor in the nontraditional sales (self-published titles and Amazon Publishing titles), it would be within reason to expect about all fiction sales to be about 70% digital.

Barnes & Noble is losing market share to Amazon

Throughout 2016, the biggest bookstore chain in the United States struggled. During the holidays, the chain reported that comparable-store sales were down 9.1 percent versus 2015. The drop was attributed to various factors, including slower foot traffic in stores, the declining sales of adult coloring books, and no bestselling album by Adele.

The latest B&N quarterly earnings report showed a retail sales decline of 7.5 percent. Nook sales (which include devices, ebooks, and accessories) declined by 25.7 percent. B&N stated, “Despite post-holiday sales improvements, trends softened in late January and into the fourth quarter.”

Meanwhile, print book sales so far in 2017 show that the industry is not suffering that same rate of decline—so B&N is losing share to its competitors. The bookstore chain Indigo in Canada is showing growth, although that growth is from non-book merchandise. (Book sales remain flat at Indigo.)

Independent bookstores are doing OK, but just OK

Over the last few years, one of the feel-good publishing stories has been the rise of the independent bookstore. However, even though memberships at the American Bookseller Association (ABA) are up, stores still face issues of long-term sustainability.

For independent bookstores reporting to Nielsen, unit sales increases in 2016 were around 5%, compared to a 6.4% increase in all US print book sales. While independent bookstores have benefited from the “shop local” movement, better technology for store management and sales, and better terms from publishers, one has to be extremely optimistic to envision them growing in the face of a competitor like Amazon. (Amazon has been opening its own bricks-and-mortar bookstores across the country. They’re relatively small at 3,500 square feet; the average Barnes & Noble is ten times that size. All the books are face out, so the emphasis is on curation, and no prices are listed. Prices are variable and depend on whether the customer is an Amazon Prime member.)

At a recent conference, ABA CEO Oren Teicher said that the average profit margin of an independent bookstore is 2.4%. Therefore, even small changes in costs—such as wage or rent increases—can quickly make a store unprofitable.

To survive minimum wage increases, Shelf Awareness reported that booksellers seek to add products with a better profit margin than books: “Books Inc. [in San Francisco] has increased its sales mix from about 2 percent in gifts to around 15 percent currently. [They] would highly recommend that any bookstore not selling gifts do so.”

Additionally, booksellers are hoping for better terms from publishers, which isn’t necessarily wishful thinking; in 2016, HarperCollins launched the New Bookstore Development Program to support the opening of new independent bookstores or those expanding to new locations.

Bradley Graham, the co-owner of Politics & Prose, told Shelf Awareness that, despite the recent optimism surrounding indie bookstores, they still face serious challenges, and “the industry is not necessarily on firm financial footing for the foreseeable future.” 

Carry a big dose of skepticism, and look at possible underlying agendas, when you hear celebrations about print’s comeback. While I’m not at proclaiming the death of print or traditional publishers, few media outlets have an understanding of the big picture.

If you’re interested in ongoing analysis and information about publishing industry, start a free 30-day trial to The Hot Sheet.

 

5 On: Debra Eckerling

Debra Eckerling (@WriteOnOnline), founder of the writers’ support group Write On!, discusses common writer challenges, the value of blogs, what it means to take writing to the next level, tragic networking mistakes, and more in this 5 On interview.

Debra Eckerling  is the founder of WriteOnOnline.com, a website and community for writers, which focuses on goal-setting, troubleshooting, and networking. She is the author of Write On Blogging: 51 Tips to Create, Write, and Promote Your Blog and Purple Pencil Adventures: Writing Prompts for Kids of All Ages, an editor for Social Media Examiner, and host of Write On Online’s Guided Goals Podcast.

Debra writes and speaks on the subjects of writing, networking, goal-setting, productivity, and social media. She is co-producer of #140conf and hosts a monthly hangout for writers, artists, and entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, California.

5 on Writing

KRISTEN TSETSI: You write content now that aids other writers, but you began as a writer writing to write. What was the single piece, whether fiction or nonfiction, you most enjoyed writing?

DEBRA ECKERLING: The ones that stand out are usually the most recent (it’s fresh), the next (the excitement and anticipation), or the first. My first screenplay was so much fun, because, after so many years of being a movie-lover, I wrote a screenplay. My first novel, which I wrote during National Novel Writing Month several years ago, was super-cool, because what writer doesn’t want to write a novel? My first interview with a celebrity was John Cleese. I was living in the Chicago suburbs at the time, and he actually did the interview while flying from New York to Los Angeles, which made the experience even more memorable.

The story that most stands out in my mind I wrote long before any of those firsts. The essay question on one of my college applications asked, “If you could be anyone, who would it be?” They were likely expecting an historical figure or mainstream personality. I said I would want to be an animated version of myself, because I really didn’t want to be anyone else … and I believed everyone should know what it feels like to turn their head 360 degrees. It was so much fun to write. And, although it may have been my first experience taking an assignment and turning it on its head, it certainly would not be my last. I got into their creative writing program, by the way.

You wrote a book of writing prompts for young writers. Do you have a writing prompt (not for others, but for yourself as a writer) that stands out in your memory as a favorite, or as having consistently been the most inspiring?

I talk about journaling a lot. It is the first thing I mention after the introduction in both of my books, as journaling had a major impact on my development as a writer, and as a person, too.

During junior year in high school, my creative writing teacher made journaling mandatory: five pages a week. I typically exceeded that number by several pages, while some of my classmates exceeded it by a lot. (I have a vague memory of someone turning in 50 pages one week, though it may have been more.) It really helped me develop my style and tone, but also to work things out on paper and express myself.

The way I use journaling now is more like free-writing or what I call “directed journaling.” If I am stuck on something or even if I want to explore new ideas, I just start babbling on paper. I start by making a list, whether they are topics I want to write about or things I want to cover in a book or article, and then fill in notes as things come to me. That’s why I recommend variations of the process for my clients, and use a version for myself, too.

At WriteOn!, you help writers take their projects to “the next level.” What does it mean to take writing to the next level for a poet, a short story writer with a few published stories, a freelance writer for marketing publications, or an unpublished novelist?

The main thing that makes someone a better writer is more writing. Yes, you need to learn (take classes, read books, research online), so you can sharpen your technical skills. However, if you really want to be a better writer, you need to keep writing.

The next level is really the next step that will catapult your development, and it’s different for everyone.

Write On!, founded in the 1990s, is also a resource to help writers with troubleshooting. In the years since you founded the writers’ support group, what have you seen writers struggle with more than anything else, and what do you say to help them?

I think a writer’s biggest challenge is lack of support and encouragement. Not all writers have people in their lives who “get” how important writing is to them. These friends and relatives will downplay their loved one’s writing and treat it like a hobby.

I was fortunate to grow up with a support system. My mom always encouraged me to follow my passion.

People who lack support tend to make their writing less of a priority; they spend less time working on projects and honing their craft. They also have lower self-confidence and do not want to put themselves and their writing out there.

This is what I say: Only you can and should tell your stories. For some reason you are compelled to write. If you have something you want to say, you owe it to yourself and your readers to put it out there. I also say if you need more support or a nudge in the right direction, you know where to find me.

Write On Blogging: 51 Tips to Create, Write, & Promote Your Blog offers a comprehensive list of steps toward getting a blog not only started, but looking professional. But if you could offer a single critical, must-have, word of advice to a writer about to start a blog, what would it be?

Do your prep work before you start your blog. Come up with your mission, your design, your expert slant. Decide what you are going to write about and how many blog posts you can commit to a week, post length, etc. Come up with a feasible schedule and stick to it for at least three months. Better to commit to one post a week or two per month and stay on schedule, than to say you will post three days a week, get bored, and quit within a month. You can always reassess, change things up, or expand your blog at some point.

That being said, don’t drive yourself nuts and wait for everything to be perfect. Just give yourself a good start.

5 on Publishing

You were a production editor in publishing, for a time. What was the most chaotic or stressful aspect of managing the evolution from unpublished to published manuscript, and what was the most fun?

I feel very fortunate in that, when I worked as a production editor, it was during the transition from typeset to digital. I worked on books that were produced both ways.

The most chaotic and the most fun were probably the same thing: working on multiple projects at once. I once completed five books within a ten-day production deadline.  These were all nonfiction, and ranged from coffee table books to crafts. My job was to make sure all of the deadlines were met in all departments—editing, art, typesetting—and to review as I put the pieces of all the books together. It was exciting to be a part of that.

I still enjoy that variety. I am always working on many different types of projects simultaneously.

You ask in many of the interviews you conduct with others, “What do you know now that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?” The same question to you, as it relates to generating an audience, marketing, and the use of social media.

Wow. I wish I knew that was such a difficult question.

One thing I have learned is that extra time is never going to magically appear. If I want to work on something new—a passion project outside of my ongoing deadlines and client responsibilities—I need to make the time.

So, if you have something you want to create, whether it’s a new writing project or social media marketing plan, don’t put it off. Commit to an hour a week and put it as an appointment on your calendar. Then keep those appointments with yourself.

Even a little time each week will add up. Before you know it you will make progress on that thing you keep putting off. You can have a novel, non-fiction book, screenplay, podcast, stellar social media presence, or more than one of the above.

You write in the introduction to Write On Blogging, “This is not a book on how to monetize your blog with ads and affiliate links. It’s on showcasing your expertise through content, so you get more business and sales.” How much practical sense does it make for a creative writer, or anyone whose book or other writing doesn’t fall into a niche, to write a blog?

A blog increases your visibility, while showcasing your expertise, no matter what your business. And that includes the business of writing. Furthermore, whether you self-publish or go the traditional route, you need to cultivate an audience. And if you are promoting yourself—which you will do even if you have a publisher—you need to get people excited about your upcoming publications. How do you get them excited? Allow them to get to know you and what is going on in your world. A blog enables you to do that.

Networking is one of the subjects you speak about, and you also address it at Write On!. What are the three most tragic mistakes a person can make in their efforts to network professionally, and what three pro-tips should they always keep in mind? Was there a mistake you made that taught you something you would never forget?

Here are the three huge mistakes people make in networking and how not to do them:

Not networking. Staying home is the biggest mistake. Yes, you can meet new people via social media, but nothing beats real life connections. Put yourself in situations where you can meet new friends and contacts, even if it’s just once a month—although once a week is better. Go to a variety of events, such as workshops, book signings, mixers, you name it.



Being salesy. Don’t pitch yourself in networking situations, unless of course that’s the point of the event. Instead, have conversations. When you meet someone new, find common ground. Talk about food, movies, books, your favorite local hangout. Make it personal so you are also memorable for when you follow up. It’s also a lot more fun.



Not following up. After you meet a new connection, offer your business card and get one from them, too. Then, within a few days, write a note and connect on LinkedIn and/or Facebook. For the people you really like, make plans to get together. Remember, networking situations are just a springboard for relationship development.

Everywhere you go and everything you do is a networking opportunity. I have become friends with people I met at jury duty years ago. And, thanks to Facebook, we still keep in touch. Not everyone will be a direct business connection. However, some could become friends, while others may to offer you an intro to someone you really want to meet.

As far as mistakes are concerned, and this isn’t necessarily specific to networking: Be careful what you publish and what you say online, because you never know who will read it.

Several years ago, I wrote dating articles for a newspaper in Los Angeles. In one column I mentioned someone I dated when I still lived in the Chicago suburbs. I didn’t mention him by name, but I included a recognizable situation. Well, we reconnected a few years later, and he asked what I had been up to. I told him I had been writing and said he could see some of my work on my website. I never heard from him again. Not tragic, but oops!

With so many possible ways to reach readers using social media, what outlets do you recommend for writers who only want one or two accounts to keep track of? Does it depend on what the writer writes, the writer’s personality, or both?

I do not think there is a best platform for social media, as it’s based on your genre or personality. However, if there is a network you already use regularly, that is the one you should be on. You want to communicate and engage on the social media platform where you are comfortable. That way, you can allow your personality to shine through.

That said, those who are social media shy and only want to use two platforms might start with LinkedIn and Facebook. Then, when you are ready, add Twitter to the mix.

LinkedIn. Since this is a professional network, a lot of people prefer to connect on LinkedIn after they meet a new business contact. Put up a profile and post on it just a couple times a week. Share your own links, as well as articles from others (tag the ones you are connected to when you share). If you want, experiment with putting posts up on LinkedIn Publisher. Since there is a lot less noise on LinkedIn than there is on other social media, and since fewer people actually post updates on the platform, it is more likely yours will be seen. Be sure to like and comment on others posts, as well, to increase your visibility.

Facebook. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch and top-of-mind with people you already know. Post article links, graphics, quotes, anything that relates to you, your writing, your genre, writing news, etc. As with LinkedIn, comment on other people’s posts and reply to comments on yours. Bonus points for those who want to experiment with Facebook Live. Stream live video when you have news, or are speaking, at a book signing, or are attending a fun writing event.

Twitter. Use Twitter to connect with new people. Follow your writer friends, as well as favorite publications, publishing houses, authors, agents, and more. Then, tweet not just your content, but content you think your followers would like, too. Want to write for a certain publication or ask someone to write about you? Follow them on Twitter, retweet them, and engage in conversations. Then, when you do outreach, they already have a sense of who you are. Need a source for an article? Tweet questions and see who responds. Or respond to questions from others.

How to Produce an Emotional Response in Readers: Inner Mode, Outer Mode, and Other Mode

Photo credit: jan buchholtz via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Today’s post is adapted from The Emotional Craft of Fiction (Writer’s Digest Books) by agent Donald Maass (@DonMaass).

There are three primary paths to producing an emotional response in readers. The first is to report what characters are feeling so effectively that readers feel something too. This is inner mode, the telling of emotions.

The second is to provoke in readers what characters may be feeling by implying their inner state through external action. This is outer mode, the showing of emotions.

The choice between inner and outer modes is a central one. Some story types, such as romance fiction, necessarily rely on inner mode. Others, like thrillers, either have no time to dwell on characters’ feelings or their authors regard such passages as artless and possibly repellant.

The third method is to cause readers to feel something that a story’s characters do not themselves feel. This is other mode, an emotional dialogue between author and reader. The reader reacts, resists, and sometimes succumbs, but thanks to the author’s skill, she can never escape the churn and ow of her own feelings.

All three paths to producing emotional responses in readers are valid, but all three have pitfalls and can fail to work. To successfully use each, it’s necessary to understand why each is effective when it is. Once you know the underlying cause behind the surface effects, you’ll know whether the approach that you are taking on a given page will reliably move readers’ hearts.

Outer Mode: Showing

Outer moments in many manuscripts can feel small and self-consciously “written”; in other words, arty more than artful. How can that be? Nothing is more valid and vivid than what we can see and hear, right? Human action is also driven by need. That need is sensed in subtext and revealed through what people say and do. That in turn should stir our own imaginations and churn up our feelings, shouldn’t it?

That’s not really true. When outward actions stir us, it’s not the actions we read that have stirred us but that we have stirred ourselves. Action is an opportunity for us to feel something, not a cause of feeling something. The distinction matters. It explains that when showing works the thing we should look at is not why it works but when.

Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook is a novel featuring a protagonist, Pat Peoples, who is certifiably crazy. Pat begins the novel in a neural health facility, from which he is released with the help of his mother. Quick knows the trick of making a mentally ill protagonist enjoyable to read about: Make him funny. Pat Peoples amusingly refuses to give up his dream of reuniting with his estranged wife, Nikki, and is convinced that their “apart time,” as he calls it, will end. All evidence is to the contrary, of course, as we see when Pat returns home:

When I finally come out of the basement, I notice that all the pictures of Nikki and me have been removed from the walls and the mantel over the replace.

I ask my mother where these pictures went. She tells me our house was burglarized a few weeks before I came home and the pictures were stolen. I ask why a burglar would want pictures of Nikki and me, and my mother says she puts all of her pictures in very expensive frames. “Why didn’t the burglar steal the rest of the family pictures?” I ask. Mom says the burglar stole all the expensive frames, but she had the negatives for the family portraits and had them replaced. “Why didn’t you replace the pictures of Nikki and me?” I ask. Mom says she did not have the negatives for the pictures of Nikki and me, especially because Nikki’s parents had paid for the wedding pictures and had only given my mother copies of the photos she liked. Nikki had given Mom the other non-wedding pictures of us, and well, we aren’t in touch with Nikki or her family right now because it’s apart time.

Notice that Quick does not try to convey what Pat is feeling in this farcical passage. There’s no need. Pat’s delusional refusal to accept that Nikki is not coming back to him is plainly evident. This objective, wry, reportorial approach serves Quick’s purpose well because if we were asked to swallow the inner emotional life of Pat Peoples, we couldn’t. It’s too crazy and painful.

The painful emotional lives of such characters need to become tolerable for readers. Humor and objective showing create a safety zone. In that zone readers can process their own response to emotional conditions that are extreme.

To put it simply, when character emotions are highly painful, pull back.

Inner Mode: Telling

Writing out what characters feel ought to be a shortcut to getting readers to feel that stuff too, shouldn’t it?

Actually, the truth is the opposite. Put on the page what a character feels and there’s a pretty good chance that, paradoxically, what the reader will feel is nothing. Here’s an example: His guts twisted in fear. When you read that, do your own guts twist in fear? Probably not. Or this: Her eyes shot daggers at him. Do you feel simmering rage? Meh. Not so much.

Such feelings fail to excite us because, of course, we’ve read them too many times. What gets readers going are feelings that are fresh and unexpected. Yet those feelings also need to be real and true; otherwise, they will come across as contrived—they’ll ring false and fail to ignite the reader’s emotions.

Skillful authors play against expected feelings. They go down several emotional layers in order to bring up emotions that will catch readers by surprise. There’s always a different emotion to use. A story situation is an emotional elephant. There are many ways of looking at and feeling about what’s happening at any given moment. Stop your story at any point, ask the point-of-view character what she is feeling, and it’s never just one answer. Ask two characters what they feel about what’s happening and neither will ever say the same thing.

Human beings are complex. We have emotions on the surface and emotions underneath. There are emotions that we minimize, hide, and deny. There are emotions that embarrass us, reveal too much, and make us vulnerable. Our emotions can be profoundly trivial or so elevated that they’re silly. What we feel is inescapably influenced by our history, morals, loyalties, and politics.

With so much rich human material to work with, it’s disappointing that so many manuscripts offer a limited menu of emotions. The feelings that writers first choose to write are often obvious, easy, and safe. These are the feelings writers believe they ought to use if their stories are going to sell. They work only with primary emotions because that is what everyone feels, which is true, but this is also a limited view.

So how does one create emotional surprise?

Here’s an example from a master of secondary emotions: Ray Bradbury. In Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag is a futuristic fireman who burns books. He enjoys his job until he meets a seventeen-year-old girl who awakens his mind. After his transformation begins he’s called to help burn a house full of books, and Montag secretly takes one. The house and its contents are then doused with kerosene. The woman who lives in the house is warned to leave but refuses and holds up …

An ordinary kitchen match.

The sight of it rushed the men out and down away from the house. Captain Beatty, keeping his dignity, backed slowly through the front door, his pink face burnt and shiny from a thousand res and night excitements. God, thought Montag, how true! Always at night the alarm comes. Never by day! Is it because fire is prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show? The pink face of Beatty now showed the faintest panic in the door. The woman’s hand twitched on the single matchstick. The fumes of kerosene bloomed up about her. Montag felt the hidden book pound like a heart against his chest.

A careless writer would have focused on Montag’s horror at what was about to happen. No! Don’t do it! Bradbury, however, knows that the obvious emotion will not have the desired effect. Instead he portrays a feeling that we don’t expect: Montag’s excitement. Remember that Montag is a reman who has enjoyed starting fires. He knows the thrill of watching books burn. The expression on the face of his chief, Beatty, ignites that feeling again, briefly, even while Montag’s heart is changing. Because Bradbury goes sideways from an expected feeling, we cannot help but feel something ourselves. In this horrific situation we are forced to measure Montag’s emotion against our own. How can we not? Is his excitement what we would feel? No. Or maybe yes, if we were Montag.

Other Mode

None of readers’ emotional experience of a story actually comes from the emotional lives of characters. It comes from readers themselves. Yes, showing and telling are part of what provokes readers to feel, but they are only a part. Other things on the page also provoke readers, and these things are the greater part of the equation.

It might seem that you shouldn’t worry about what readers feel; they’re either going to feel what you want them to feel or not. But that way of thinking surrenders too much to chance. It leads to the erroneous idea that emotional effect is accidental. While it’s true that you cannot control what each reader will feel while reading your work, what you can control is whether they will feel something in the first place and how strong those feelings will be.

What is actually happening inside readers as they read? Each reader has a unique emotional response to a story. It’s unpredictable but it’s real. Readers read under the influence of their own temperaments, histories, biases, morality, likes, dislikes, and peeves. They make judgments that don’t agree with yours. So how can a writer predict, never mind control, what readers feel?

Psychological research can help us, to a point. Research shows that consumers of entertainment are seeking, more than anything, to have an experience. That should come as no surprise. Does “an experience” sound simplistic? Yes, but it’s also important. An experience, sure, but what kind of experience? Research shows this: Readers expect their experience, naturally enough, to be a positive one.

But is that what authors want, too? Sometimes, but not always. Authors want to challenge readers. Research shows that readers want this, too. Entertainment works best when it presents consumers with novelty, challenge, and aesthetic value, which in turn cause cognitive evaluation. In plain language that means thinking, guessing, questioning, and comparing what is happening to one’s own experience. Medically speaking, this is actually necessary for human health and well-being. When readers chew on a story, they are getting not only what they want, but also something good and healthy. This chewing effect has another benefit: Readers are more likely to remember a story when it has made them chew.

What all that means is that readers fundamentally want to feel something, not about your story, but about themselves. They want to feel like they’ve been through something. They want to connect with your characters and live their fictional experience, or believe that they have.

Creating that type of experience for readers requires more than just walking them through the plot. Characters’ emotional states also, by themselves, are limited in their impact. Other mode is not a single technique or principle. It is a vast array of elements tuned like the instruments in an orchestra to create a soaring emotional effect. When all the instruments work together, they lift our hearts. They transport us to a realm of wonder. We are open.

Do you hope that your fiction can change people or maybe even history? Your hope is not in vain. It actually can. That power, however, cannot exist unless and until a story has a strong emotional impact.

To learn more about how to make a strong emotional impact in your fiction, check out The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass.

How to Land an Agent for a Self-Published Book

One of the most frequent questions in my inbox is: “I’ve self-published, but now I want an agent. How do I get one?” Usually the writer wants an agent because they’ve been disappointed by their sales or have experienced frustration in getting readers. Other times, the author’s plan was to self-publish first and magically attract attention that would lead to a traditional book deal—something that is even more of a rare occurrence than landing a book deal through the slush pile.

If you’ve given up on the self-publishing route and want to try traditional, then there are several approaches you can take.

1. Query agents as if you didn’t self-publish.

This is the most sensible approach if you put very little time or effort into self-publishing your work, haven’t been on the market very long, and believe self-publishing was a mistake. (I would also advise taking the work off the market entirely before you query, but that’s not required.)

Prepare a query letter and synopsis (or a book proposal for nonfiction), and research agents who are interested in your genre, just as you would for an unpublished work. Then pitch and see what responses you get. If you’re able to secure interest, you should disclose the history of the project; if the agent is genuinely interested, that history is unlikely to affect their enthusiasm for the work, especially if the work received little or no attention while it was on the market.

2. Query and mention your self-publishing effort.

If your self-publishing effort has resulted in some recognition or sales, then you should query agents just as you would for an unpublished work, but mention in your query what success you’ve enjoyed with the project. It’s important to note when you released the book, what price it’s selling at, how many copies you’ve sold, how many reviews you have on Amazon or Goodreads, and your average rating. Do not send a copy of the book with your query. Instead, wait for the agent to indicate in their response what they’d like to see—the first chapter? First 50 pages? The entire book? Be prepared to send the work in manuscript format if requested.

If interested, the agent will closely scrutinize the work on Amazon and Goodreads—and probably thoroughly research your online presence—so make sure that you’ve spiffed up your website and are putting your best professional face forward.

3. Continue marketing your self-pub work.

The honest truth is that most agents (and publishers) have little or no interest in acquiring self-published work unless it’s receiving significant attention in the media or hitting bestseller lists. In other words, if you’re doing well enough to merit a traditional deal, agents and publishers will come to you, not the other way around. Usually, your best bet is to continue looking for ways to gain attention and visibility for your work—to try and make waves. If that seems like an exercise in futility, then…

4. Query with a new project.

Aside from hitting bestseller lists, perhaps the best way to land a traditional deal for a self-published work is to secure an agent for a brand-new work. Should that happen, the agent will have a conversation with you about your vision for your career and all of your existing work—and will strategize with you to decide how to handle your existing self-published oeuvre.

Approaches to avoid

As stated before, do not send the book to the agent unless they specifically request it.
Do not attend writers conferences or industry events with your self-published book in hand and try to sell agents or publishers on it in person (unless there is an explicit invitation to do so).
Do not lead your query or your pitch with “I self-published this book and thought you might be interested.” The immediate reaction will be I am not interested in your self-published book. In other words, the fact that you self-published is NOT a selling point. It is a negative or at best a distraction if you’re addressing someone in the industry. Pitch the merits of the work, not its self-published history, unless you can say, “I self-published this book and have sold 50,000 copies so far.”

For more advice

Should You Self-Publish or Traditionally Publish?
How to Secure a Traditional Deal by Self-Publishing
Self-Publishing to Land a Book Deal

Improve Book Sales Through Better Descriptions and Keyword Targeting

Over the weekend, I was proud to be a participant in the London Book Fair edition of Indie Author Fringe, sponsored by the Alliance of Independent Authors.

My free half-hour session was on Improving Your Book Descriptions and Audience Targeting. I answer such questions as: Is it better to have a long or short book description on Amazon? What should go in the first line of your description? How do you research appropriate categories and keywords?

I review principles and tools to help independent authors master the power of descriptions and reach their target market. If you don’t see the video below, click here to watch for free.

How to Improve Book Sales Through Better Descriptions and Keyword Targeting

Over the weekend, I was proud to be a participant in the London Book Fair edition of Indie Author Fringe, sponsored by the Alliance of Independent Authors.

My free half-hour session was on Improving Your Book Descriptions and Audience Targeting. I answer such questions as: Is it better to have a long or short book description on Amazon? What should go in the first line of your description? How do you research appropriate categories and keywords?

I review principles and tools to help independent authors master the power of descriptions and reach their target market. If you don’t see the video below, click here to watch for free.

5 Things Nonfiction Authors Can Get Sued For

Today’s guest post is by attorney Brad Frazer, who has also written about fair use, copyright and trademark for this site.

Nonfiction is a dangerous genre. Admittedly, few people ever speak the words “dangerous” and “nonfiction” in the same sentence, but from a lawyer’s perspective, a nonfiction author can incur significant legal liability unless a proactive approach is taken when writing and editing such works. Unlike pure fiction or fantasy, nonfiction is grounded in the real world, with real people, real names and real places, and this inevitably creates an environment where a legal misstep can occur.

A major premise of this post is that it does not matter whether you are right or wrong. (See my article, It’s the First $50K That Kills You. Even if you are right, it costs a lot of money to get to the point where you finally get to make your defensive argument to a judge. Thus, it is better never to get sued at all. In that spirit of avoidance, here are the top five things nonfiction authors get sued for:

1. Defamation

Defamation gets called lots of things, like libel and slander, but at the end of the day it means that:

you have stated something to another person as a fact about someone who is alive,
the thing you said is both objectively bad and demonstrably false, and
the person about whom you spoke was damaged by your statement.

If you wrote, “I know for a fact that my former boss, Silas Greene, is a pedophile” when he in fact is not a pedophile and your work containing that statement was available for other people to see and read, Silas Greene, if he were still alive, would have a pretty good defamation lawsuit against you. There are many, many subtleties and nuances here, beyond the scope of this post, like opinions and the doctrine of innuendo and the First Amendment and public figures, but remember that if you are ever going to state something about a living person as factual, make sure you can prove it is true. Truth is a defense to a defamation lawsuit.

2. Copyright infringement

Copyright infringement occurs when you post or display or reproduce someone else’s tangible works that you have presumably copied or obtained from another source. We should always start from that premise: that any such use without permission is copyright infringement. From there follow three questions:

Will you get caught?
Will you get sued?
Will you have a defense (such as Fair Use) in that copyright infringement litigation that will permit you to win the lawsuit?

For example, assume that you want to copy text and photos from a pre-existing work into your nonfiction book. If you do that without permission, it is copyright infringement, and we have to move to the three questions. Every nonfiction author should ask those questions liberally each time they reproduce preexisting materials in their nonfiction works. For more on some of these defenses, see Is It Fair Use? 

3. Right of Publicity violation

Everyone has a right to control the commercial exploitation of their name, image and likeness. This is called the “right of publicity.” For example, if you were to find a picture of LeBron James on Google and print a bunch of T-shirts with that image on the front to sell on Etsy, that would be a right of publicity violation since you are commercially exploiting LeBron James’ image without permission. (On these facts, it is also likely be copyright infringement as well since you copied a pre-existing photo!)

Nonfiction authors who refer to real people and use their names, images or likenesses in their books without permission (sometimes called a “Talent Release”) might be exposed to a lawsuit for a right of publicity violation. And unlike defamation, most right of publicity lawsuits can survive beyond the death of the person named—sometimes for decades. (In Indiana, it lasts for 100 years.)

But right of publicity laws vary widely from state to state, and litigation against nonfiction authors and journalists for using someone’s name alone to refer to them or tell a story are very rare. Some states, like New York, also have an express liability exemption for non-advertising use.

4. Breach of contract

If a nonfiction author has at some point signed a contract such as a Non-Disclosure Agreement (“NDA”) or a Confidentiality Agreement and then in their work they disclose or describe something protected by the agreement, that is a perfect fact pattern for a breach of contract lawsuit against the author. For example, if you worked at Exxon for 30 years and now want to write an expose on its shameful environmental practices, if Exxon reads your book and finds something in it covered and protected by an NDA you signed at orientation 30 years ago, they will likely sue you for breaking that agreement.

5. Trademark infringement

This is less likely, but should still be considered. In general, if you use someone else’s trademark to sell your own goods and services, that’s trademark infringement. So if you wrote, “My former boss at Exxon Silas Greene liked to smoke Winstons,” that would not be trademark infringement (or copyright infringement or defamation, but it might be a right of publicity violation!). But if you develop a training program and call it, for example, “The Seven Habits of Perpetually Optimistic People,” that would likely be an infringement of Stephen Covey’s trademark.

Every publishing contract I have ever read contains two important provisions relevant to this discussion: warranties and indemnification. These sections state that if your publisher gets sued because your nonfiction work contains one or more of these bad things and they get sued, you have to hire the lawyers and defend your publisher—in addition to defending yourself. Being mindful of—and editing for—these offenses will help you sign a publishing contract truthfully and with less fear of legal consequences.

How to Publish an Ebook: Resources for Authors

About the only thing that remains constant in ebook publishing is that it changes—everything from the services to marketing strategies. Here, I regularly update best resources I know of related to learning to publish an ebook, finding the right e-publishing distributors and services, and staying on top of changes in the industry.

Creating Basic Ebook Files

Assuming you have a finished and polished manuscript ready to be published, your first task is to create an ebook file; EPUB is the industry standard ebook format accepted by nearly all retailers. Unfortunately, this cannot be done through a simple Word export, but many tools and services will help you prep an EPUB file. (While most retailers and distributors try to offer good Word-to-ebook conversion, results and quality vary tremendously. Use them with caution.)

Vellum: easy-to-use software for Mac users only to produce EPUB files

PressBooks: a WordPress-based system for producing both EPUB and print files

Scrivener: this writing software is not free, but it can export EPUB files

Apple Pages (can export EPUB files)

Sigil: an open-source software for producing EPUB files, requires some tech savvy

Reedsy: you can copy/paste your work into its free online editor, then export EPUB files

Draft2Digital: you can upload your Word doc for EPUB conversion even if you don’t use them as your distributor

If you don’t want the headache of creating your own ebook files, check out the services at eBookPartnership.

Creating Enhanced, Multimedia, or Full-Color Ebooks

If you’re publishing a highly illustrated work, such as a children’s picture book, an enhanced ebook, or need to have a fixed layout book—where text doesn’t reflow from page to page—you’ll either need to hire someone or use a special portal for publishing and distributing your work.

KDP Kids’ Book Creator: for creating children’s picture books

Apple iBooks Author: will limit you to Apple iBookstore, but the software is free; supports multimedia

Blurb: produces print + digital full-color books, with distribution to major retailers

Book Creator: iPad app for illustrated books, great for children’s authors
Again, if you need assistance preparing your ebook files, try eBookPartnership.

Choosing Your Ebook Retailers and Distributors

Ebook distribution to major retail outlets is free and fairly straightforward, at least once you have ebook files ready to go. (Your upfront costs are almost always connected to the effort of designing, formatting, and producing those files, whether the cover and the interior—not distribution.)

Assuming you have ebook files ready to go, you have a choice to make: Would you rather deal with each online retailer directly, or would you rather reach them through an ebook distribution service?

Working directly with online retailers usually means better profits, more control, and more access to marketing/promotion tools (but not always).
Working with ebook distribution services usually means giving up a percentage of your profits to the distributor, in exchange for the centralized administration and management of all your titles. Some ebook distributors can also reach outlets you can’t on your own, such as the library market, and may offer you helpful tools to optimize book sales and marketing.

The good news is that you don’t have to choose between working directly with online retailers and using ebook distributors, since it’s rare for any distributor to demand exclusivity. For example, you could choose to work directly with Amazon KDP to sell your ebooks on Amazon, then use an ebook distributor such as Draft2Digital or Smashwords to reach other retailers. Or you could choose to distribute directly to Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and Nook (by using their do-it-yourself portals), then use Smashwords to capture the rest of the market (such as Scribd and libraries).

You could even choose to use two ebook distributors. For example, you might sign up with Pronoun (because they offer the best royalties on Amazon ebook sales), but then add in Smashwords to get the library market that Pronoun doesn’t cover.

Bottom line: There’s no one right way to go about it, since it depends on your time and resources, your books, and your marketing strategy. You can also change your mind at any time (although not without some administration hassle and sales downtime).

Most important ebook retailers in the English-language markets


Amazon. Probably sells 60-80% of all ebooks, more for some authors and titles.

Apple iBookstore. Widely considered the No. 2 ebook retailer in U.S.

Barnes & Noble Nook Press. Sales have been dropping significantly over the last couple years.

Kobo. Gaining ground, international presence. Important for the Canadian market.

Key ebook distributors


Smashwords. The largest ebook distributor of self-published titles that’s been around the longest and has the widest reach, particularly to the library market. No upfront cost; they take a cut of your sales.

Draft2Digital. Similar to Smashwords, but smaller and more customer-service focused. They take a cut of your sales.

Pronoun. An ebook distributor that reaches the key players: Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Apple, and Google. They also offer data-based marketing insights and tools to help you better sell. You pay nothing upfront and they do not take a cut of your sales.

Optimizing Your Product Page and Description

When you upload your ebook to retailers, you need to craft strong book descriptions, research your best categories and keywords, and do whatever you can to increase the likelihood that someone who sees your book page on Amazon will make a purchase.

Writing Your Book’s Back Cover Copy (Jessi Rita Hoffman)

The Importance of Categories, Keywords, and Tags (M. Louisa Locke)

How to Improve Your Amazon Book Description and Metadata (Penny Sansevieri); also here’s another article by Penny on the same topic


Amazon Sales Rank: an explanation of what it is and what you need to know about it (ALLi)

Sales, Marketing, and Promotion

By far the hardest part of ebook publishing is making readers aware your book exists—then convincing them to buy it.

Indie author Nicholas Erik offers loads of advice on book marketing and promotion


Is Amazon Exclusivity Right for You? (Rob Kroese)

How Authors Can Find Their Ideal Reading Audience (Angela Ackerman)

Hit the eBook Bestseller Lists with Preorders (Mark Coker)
Social Media Marketing That Reaches Your Audience

Six-Figure Book Promotion Strategies for Authors (Written Word Media)

How to Write and Market Romance with J.A. Huss (The Creative Penn)

98-item list for planning a book launch or re-marketing your book (BookBub)

How an Enterprising Author Sold a Million Self-Published Books (Copyblogger)

How to Self-Publish Children’s Books Successfully (Darcy Pattison)

Giveaways and Discounts

Most self-published authors gain visibility in the market by giving away their work or offering discounts. To work, it has to be done thoughtfully and strategically.

The Strategic Use of Book Giveaways (Jane Friedman)

Do Goodreads Giveaways Work? (J.M. Ney-Grimm)

Read in-depth analysis and overview of major book promotion and discount sites (ALLi)

Getting Reviews

Wondering how to get readers (and others) to review your book?

Putting Together an ARC Team and Getting Lots of Reviews (SFF Marketing Podcast)

The Ultimate Guide to Goodreads for Authors (The Creative Penn, Mayor A. Lan)

10 Ways to Find Reviewers for Your Self-Published Book (Empty Mirror)

The Indie Reviewers List (The Indie View)

Author Tools and Promo Sites (Martin Crosbie)

7 Strategies and 110 Tools to Help Indie Authors Find Readers and Reviewers (Digital Pubbing)

Are Paid Book Reviews Worth It? (Jane Friedman)

Facebook Strategies

Facebook has more than 1 billion users and can be an important part of your book marketing arsenal. But it requires you to acquire new skills if you don’t want to waste our time and money.

5 Ways to Use Facebook Groups to Build Book Buzz (BookBub)

Facebook Advertising for Authors with Mark Dawson (The Creative Penn)

How to Get Your Book Sales Moving with Facebook Ads (The Creative Penn)

Advertising and Other Monetary Investments in Book Marketing

Before you pay to hire help (or to advertise), make sure you’ve identified very specific goals you want to attain (beyond “sell more books”), and a very specific audience you’ve decided to target.

Why (Many) Publicists Don’t Work With Self-Published Authors (Dana Kaye)

Top 5 Money Wasters in Book Publicity (Dana Kaye)

Using Amazon KDP Ads to Sell Your Ebook on Amazon (Rob Kroese)

How to Sell Books With BookBub (Skipjack Publishing)

Case Study: Using NetGalley and Goodreads for Book Marketing and Publicity (Jane Friedman)

Excellent Book-Length Guides on Self-Publishing

These guides give you an overview of what you need to learn and accomplish to sell books, in any format.

Write. Publish. Repeat. by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant

How to Market a Book by Joanna Penn

Let’s Get Visible & Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran

Your First 1,000 Copies by Tim Grahl

Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success by Mark Coker (free)

To Find Freelance Help

Usually a referral is best; ask successful authors in your genre who they recommend. Otherwise, here are a few options for finding editorial and marketing assistance.

Reedsy, a vetted marketplace of publishing-focused freelancers

Bibliocrunch, another marketplace

Editorial Freelancers Association, where you can post your jobs on their job board for free

Great Sites That Cover Self-Publishing and Ebook Publishing

Alliance of Independent Authors
Joanna Penn
Joel Friedlander

Sell More Books Show (podcast)
David Gaughran
Kristine Rusch
Lindsay Buroker

News & Trends About Ebook Publishing

Digital Book World
The Digital Reader

The Independent Publishing Magazine by Mick Rooney
Mike Shatzkin

Kindle Boards Writer’s Cafe (popular hangout for self-publishers)

The Hot Sheet (my email newsletter for authors, subscription required)