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Crowdfunding Usually Doesn’t Work for Writers—But It Can

Note from Jane: Today’s post is an excerpt from the upcoming book Crowdfunding for Authors by Bethany Joy Carlson (@bethanyjcarlson).

Crowdfunding can market and presell your book. Since most books fail to turn a profit, the ability to raise money and reader enthusiasm before expenses is a valuable resource.

However, authors have a poor track record doing it. Over 70 percent of author crowdfunding campaigns fail, and many authors who have tried crowdfunding have nothing to show for it.

What Is Crowdfunding?

Most people think money when they see the word crowdfunding, and that makes sense—funding is the second half of the portmanteau. But crowdfunding is much more valuable than just the funds raised.

First, crowdfunding centralizes and organizes your fan base. This is the crowd part of crowdfunding. Unlike when selling your book through brick-and-mortar or online bookstores, where buyer information is hidden from the author, you get all the contact information of everyone who preorders your book on your crowdfunding page.

If you have read even one marketing book, you know the power of having an email list of people that have bought in—in this case, literally—to your product. Instead of hoping your Facebook post appears in your reader’s feed, or paying to advertise in a periodical that may or may not be of interest to your reader, you can email your fans directly, and for free, to let them know about events and offers. You won’t have to hope that the people who care most about your messages will receive them—you will know.

This is important because later, when your book is actually published, sales are driven by rankings, and rankings are driven by algorithms. And algorithms are driven by volume and speed of reader activity. With your fans’ contact information, you can ask them to synchronize their watches to your book’s official publication date, and to go online all together to rate and review your book (and buy additional copies as gifts for family and friends). This kind of “clumped” activity is what has the potential to boost your book’s rankings in the algorithm, and create the visibility for potentially greater sales numbers.

Second, crowdfunding is book marketing boot camp and publication day training. Unless you are a natural-born hustler (and most authors are not), selling your book is hard. The only thing that makes it easier is practice, and crowdfunding is great practice. If you can sell your book before it exists, you can sell it once it does.

More literally, however, crowdfunding:

facilitates raising money for your book,
through a custom webpage,
where you can pre-sell your book for a set amount of time and a target dollar amount,
through a pitch video, words, and images.

Let’s look at each aspect more closely.

Facilitates raising money: Whether you are an established author looking to subsidize your next book tour or a debut self-published author readying to pay your first freelance editor, you don’t have to dip into savings now and hope book sales will recoup your costs later. Through crowdfunding, you have the money in advance. Crowdfunding works as an online shopping cart that allows visitors to pay you via credit card now and receive your book when it comes out later.

Through a custom webpage: Crowdfunding platforms, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, host online templates that allow you to customize the content (and to a limited extent, the look and layout) of a dedicated webpage to sell your book. You don’t need to know any code to make one. If you can post to Facebook or publish a blog on WordPress, you have enough technical savvy to set up your campaign. If you are “computer illiterate,” though, you will need help with this.

For a set amount of time: Unlike other online stores, crowdfunding campaigns don’t offer visitors the option to buy something indefinitely. Campaigns run until a predetermined deadline, set by you. Most data suggests that a campaign of about four weeks, within a single calendar month, during the spring or fall, has the greatest chance of success.

For a target dollar amount: Also unlike other online stores, crowdfunding campaigns prominently feature a meter that shows visitors how much money you have raised, and how close you are to the fundraising goal you have set. This means that visitors to your campaign are not asking themselves “Is this a book I’d enjoy at a price that’s acceptable?” but “Is this book a winner?” Managing this meter so that it sways visitors in your favor, rather than against you, is your number-one task.

Through a pitch video, words, and image:. For many authors, this is where the crowdfunding process breaks down. Your book does not sell itself, and words alone are not enough to reach your prospective readers. You will need a draft book cover and other compelling visuals, and you almost certainly will need help creating them.

What Is Crowdfunding Not?

Crowdfunding is not easy money. The vast majority (over 90 percent) of successfully crowdfunded authors raise up to $20,000. Compared with the multimillion-dollar campaigns that periodically make news, this doesn’t sound overly ambitious. And it’s not—if you’re willing to work as hard on your campaign as you did on your manuscript.

Crowdfunding is not fast money. Successful crowdfunding campaigns require three to six months or more of preparation. On average, preparation takes 100–200 work hours, the campaign takes 40–80 work hours, and fulfillment after the campaign is another 20–40. That’s up to an average of 10 hours a week for around eight months. In theory, you could launch a crowdfunding campaign tomorrow. But to run a successful campaign, you need time.

Crowdfunding is not free money. Crowdfunding does not sell concepts. It sells products. Crowdfunding will work for you when you have a book ready to sell. If you have an idea for a novel, that is not enough to get people to enter their credit card information on the internet for you. If they put down their money, they will expect a book in return—and they will want to know exactly what to expect in the mail, and when.

What Makes Crowdfunding Uniquely Difficult For Writers?

Writers fail at crowdfunding more frequently than other creatives. The statistics vary somewhat over time, but whereas around 38 percent of campaigns succeed, only about 29 percent of publishing projects fund. Crowdfunding may be more difficult for authors than for other artists because it requires four skills that most writers do not regularly practice. Your crowdfunding campaign is a great opportunity for acquiring and improving the following skills.

Brevity. You may think it’s impossible to respectfully boil your book down to a tweet. But if you can’t sell your book in 140 characters or less, you can’t sell it. Successful crowdfunding relies on the use of hooks—in your video, your tagline, your description, your emails, and your social media promotion. Hooks get recycled on your webpage, your book’s cover copy, and everywhere else prospective readers go to discover your book. Coming up with a good tweet that sells your book is hard work, and it takes time. You can expect to rewrite your hook scores of times before you settle on the one you use for your campaign.

Some authors find this process distasteful, but that is counterproductive. If you want readers to actually find your book in the information-age fog, you need a bright light. The shorter and better your hook is, the clearer the path from your readers to your book. An ethical hook is not a trick to dupe people who will hate your book into buying it. A good hook is a beacon that helps your fans find your book amidst the chaos.

Visual design. There are exceptions, but the greater a person’s facility with words, the poorer their skills at graphic design—and the bigger their blind spot to how amateur their attempts at creating visuals are.  Your writing does not sell your book. Your cover sells your book. Packaging counts. If your crowdfunding campaign has a boring pitch video followed by screens and screens of text, it will not raise the money you want for your book. Which brings us to the next skill writers should practice:

Collaboration. Often, writing is a solitary exercise. But producing and selling a book is a team enterprise. If there is one area where it behooves an author to spend money up front, it is professional cover design. This gives you a key visual, as well as color palette, font(s), and visual tone that become your brand. Your designer is a team member you will want a good relationship with early on. This is excellent practice for people like your editor, publicist, videographer, photographer, and others with whom you will be working to sell your book.

Self-promotion. Writers typically fall on the more introverted end of the spectrum. This makes selling hard. But it’s not fair to expect prospective readers to be more enthusiastic about your book than you are, or to somehow clairvoyantly intuit that it is for sale. Sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. The success of your campaign and the marketing of your book in general hinge on your willingness to embrace the role of your book’s number-one cheerleader.

Crowdfund with Plans, Not Dreams

The challenges are real—but they are not insurmountable. Over thirty thousand authors have collectively raised over $100 million for their books. Some can attribute this to luck, but most can attribute this to a combination of the following factors: they have prepared a solid communication plan before launch, paid for professional book cover design, and embraced their role as chief marketing officer of their book. They have organized and expanded their base of reader email addresses, social media contacts, and in-person meetings and events. Most importantly, they’ve taken the time to do it right and gotten the support to be consistent when the going gets tough. Adopt these practices, and crowdfunding can work for your book.

For more information on crowdfunding your book, check out Crowdfunding for Authors, a step-by-step guidebook by Bethany Joy Carlson, available for preorder on Indiegogo. Bethany is the owner of The Artist’s Partner, which has helped to crowdfund over $110,000 for creative projects, including over $70,000 for books.

Also, read Jane’s Q&A with Bethany.

Q&A about Crowdfunding for Authors with Bethany Joy Carlson

Since moving to Charlottesville, Virginia, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to get to know Bethany Joy Carlson, owner of The Artist’s Partner, which has helped crowdfund over $110,000 for creative projects, including over $70,000 for books.

This fall, Bethany is releasing Crowdfunding for Authors, a full-length guide on the topic, and she generously agreed to answer a few questions I have about her experience and expertise in helping authors successfully meet their crowdfunding goals.

JANE FRIEDMAN: I worry that some authors who are interested in crowdfunding don’t have the proper resources or network in place to run a successful campaign. While I don’t want to be discouraging at the start of this interview (!), are there situations where you advise authors to wait before they start a campaign—to ensure they have some essential components in place?

BETHANY JOY CARLSON: Most authors are surprised when I advise them to prep for three months to a year. Authors need well-organized reader contact information, a great draft cover design, and time for effective communication.

Crowdfunding is marketing, and that means it is subject to Effective Frequency, or The Rule of Seven: a person needs to hear a message seven times to act on it. So, authors need to communicate with their readers seven times before their book’s crowdfunding campaign launch. This means creative emails, posts, blogs, tweets, events, etc. about their campaign in the months leading up to launch.

I also remind authors that, just like with party or wedding invitations, not everyone invited will respond. In other words, not every reader invited to buy the book on a crowdfunding site will do so. If an author has an engaged email list, perhaps 10 percent will do so, and around 1 percent of their social media following will respond.

It really helps to line up a patron or two ahead of time who will take a big bite out of that figure—$500-1,000 or more—which cuts down the size of the email and social media threshold substantially.

Authors also need a good draft book cover to crowdfund their book. We hear the adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” precisely because that is exactly what people do. Sometimes authors attempt to design their own book cover, but that is almost always a bad idea. Authors should hire a professional book cover designer and budget to spend that money before they begin promoting their crowdfunding campaign. Depending on the book, workable drafts may cost between $30 and $1,500 (which is a reasonable max for a book cover draft).

For an author undertaking their first crowdfunding effort, about how many hours of prep time would you budget, and then how many hours per day during a typical campaign?

For a campaign of $20,000 or less, I would suggest six to twelve months of prep time. Budget five hours per week for the early months, ten hours per week the months before launch and during the campaign, with hotspots of forty hours the week before launch and the week before deadline. Time also needs to be budgeted for fulfillment—sending books and other goodies to backers—after the campaign is over. For an author who is already tech-savvy and great at communicating with their readers regularly, the prep time can be condensed down to three months.

You’ve helped your clients successfully raise more than $100,000, and you’ve got the process down to a near science. Your excellent posts on how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign elaborate on the number crunching you do beforehand. How much do you think it’s a numbers game?

Preparation is a numbers game, but the overall experience isn’t. The prep is based not on hope, but on hard figures.

The median crowdfunding campaign pledge is $25, and the average is $70; the typical email click-through rate to another website (like a crowdfunding platform) is 5–20 percent, and for social media is 0.5–2 percent, and people need to hear a message seven times to act on it.

If an author is raising $2,500, then they will need 35–100 people to pledge to their campaign. Doing the math, they need to communicate by email with 350–1,000 people or by social media with 3,500–10,000 people, or some combination thereof.

Authors need to identify twenty-five to fifty individuals strategically important to their campaign, and they need to budget two hours for individual conversations with each of them in the months leading up to the campaign. These are people who will perform one or more of the following essential tasks:

Pledge within the first 24 hours
Spread the word to a large number of the author’s readers
Pledge a significant amount of money ($500+)

Here are some other interesting stats:

The optimal length of a campaign is thirty days.
Campaigns in the spring and fall succeed more often than campaigns in the summer or during the winter holidays.
Campaigns without a great reward under $20 fail 72 percent of the time.
Pitch videos longer than 59 seconds don’t get watched all the way through.
Campaigns that aren’t at least 25–33 percent funded within 24 hours usually don’t fund.
Successful campaigns under $20,000 are usually 40 percent funded by a handful of generous financial patrons courted by the author before the campaign.

Okay, moving away from the numbers: I know there’s an art to this as well. What are elements you observe, on the qualitative side, that the author has to bring to the table to help ensure a campaign succeeds?

Process-oriented authors do better than outcome-oriented authors at crowdfunding. In other words, authors who focus on the daily items on the to-do list are more likely to succeed than those who stare at the meter showing how much money they’ve raised. It’s the difference between enjoying the act of cooking versus hoping the guests compliment the meal.

Some people are great at holding themselves to deadlines, others are not. If an author needs help staying on task, they should get help from a writing group, a friend, an assistant, a consultant, a spouse—someone who has the to-do list and will help them cross items off each step of the way.

What tools or resources do you find indispensable for managing a crowdfunding campaign?

A good email host. Authors need an email platform that allows them to segment their email list, track engagement, and incorporate visuals into their emails.

Lots and lots of great pictures of the author’s face—and other faces. It’s called Facebook, not Wordsbook, for a reason! Authors usually hate this. Too bad! People respond to faces over one hundred times more strongly than they do to text.

Basic image-editing software. Authors will want to create attractive slides and illustrated text, as well as crop and fix photographs, and sometimes combine images.

Read an excerpt from Bethany’s book on crowdfunding.

What to Expect When Hiring a Ghostwriter

Today’s guest post is from author and ghostwriter Stacy Ennis (@StacyEnnis).

When I see a new book by a celebrity or politician, my first thought is always the same: I wonder what professional writer behind the scenes helped make it happen.

That’s because I am one of those writers. I’ve written hundreds of articles and several books—almost all for other people. Sometimes I’m credited on a piece and sometimes I’m not; clients choose what works best for them. When you see a book “written by John Adams with Grace Allan,” for example, chances are Grace wrote most of the book but John was a close collaborator.

Ghostwriting is a fantastic option for people who have valuable ideas to share but lack the time, energy, or skill to put them into written form. Working with a ghost can have benefits beyond the final content, too. Many ghostwriting clients find that the interview process helps them develop clarity about their methods, business, and brand. Explaining their ideas to someone else forces them to articulate and clarify—something these busy professionals often don’t take the time to slow down and do. Often, powerful written content (like an article or a book) feels like a bonus.

It’s Absolutely Authentic

Here’s the thing: ghostwriting is far from inauthentic. The process of ghostwriting a book typically involves deep engagement by the named author. While, yes, someone else sits down and “does the work” of putting words on the page, the process requires a high level of intellectual involvement from both parties.

When I ghostwrite a book, I strive to embody my client’s voice. I pore over hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, looking for patterns. I piece together ideas. I build on my client’s genius. Although I write the initial words, we are very much co-creators. This is reflected in the fact that most ghostwriting clients leave the process feeling like they wrote the book—only they typically save more than 300 hours of time in the actual writing process.

How It Works

While every ghostwriting project requires a unique approach, here’s what the process typically involves for a book:

Initial meeting (phone or video conference): The client and ghostwriter meet and see if they have the right chemistry for working together. During this conversation, the ghostwriter often asks several questions to get an overview of the project.

Proposal: The ghostwriter sends a project proposal. This should be customized to the specific book, rather than a generic “plug and play” template. Once the proposal is signed, the project is a go.

Book outline: The ghostwriter conducts one to three recorded interviews by phone or video conferencing, which are then transcribed. From those interviews, the ghostwriter puts together a two- to ten-page (or so) book outline, which the client then revises. Typically, they’ll work through a few drafts together until it’s just right.

Interviews (in person): Over three to five days, the ghostwriter interviews the client, again recording for transcription. This will sometimes result in more than 400 single-spaced pages of transcripts!

Expanded book outline: After the interviews, the ghostwriter creates an expanded book outline, anywhere from fifteen to fifty pages in length, depending on the complexity of the book. Again, there is some back and forth before arriving at the final working outline.

Book draft: The ghostwriter then gets to do what she does best—retreat into a writing cave, only to emerge when the book draft is complete and ready to share with the client. This drafting process can take anywhere from three months to a year.

Author revision: Here’s where the client gets to be as involved or uninvolved as he wants. I encourage clients to “make it their own” by rewording, adding stories, and clarifying ideas. Some clients make thousands of edits and others make two (really, I’ve had that happen).

Editing and publishing: After the final draft is complete, the manuscript goes through editing and publishing. That’s a whole post in itself, so I’ll stop there.

Assuming everything goes smoothly, the typical turnaround from idea to final draft is around ten to twelve months, but it can go slower or faster based on project needs. I did one short book project in three months, and it was published a month later. Of course, that’s not ideal, but it can be done.

It’s an Investment

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that ghostwriting isn’t cheap. The return, though, is usually many times the investment. While most clients often won’t make their money back in book sales, publishing a (great) book will often yield bigger clients, better speaking engagements, and even entirely new business opportunities. I can say this from personal experience, both from publishing my own book and watching the success of dozens of clients over the years.

So, what does it actually cost? According to Writer’s Market, hiring a ghostwriter for a book that includes the writer’s name—the “with” or “as told to” on the cover—ranges from $22,800 to $80,000. If no credit is given, that range jumps to $36,200 to $100,000. These amounts can slide higher or lower depending on the book’s length and complexity. Hourly rates for shorter content like magazine articles or blog posts are right around $100 per hour. Keep in mind that ghostwriters for hourly projects bill for interviews, e-mails, and phone calls in addition to writing time.

Most professionals break the cost of large projects into three or four payments; you should never be asked to pay the full fee up front. And always be sure to get a complete project bid or explicit hourly fees before starting a project. It’s just good business.

Hiring versus DIY-ing

Should you hire a writer or do it yourself? Here are some questions to help you decide:

How long have I been saying I’m going to write a book? If the answer is a year or longer, you might want to consider hiring a writer. Most of my clients have been putting off their book for more than a decade, thinking they’ll find time “next year.”

Does the investment make sense for me? For high-level entrepreneurs, thought leaders, celebrities, or anyone else with more money than time, ghostwriting is an obvious choice. For others, the investment is more of a stretch. If publishing a book will catapult your business or brand to the next level, consider hiring a ghostwriter.

Do I like writing? Does the idea of writing a book intrigue me? Some people really want to write the book themselves. If that’s you, consider instead hiring a book coach to guide you through the process. A book coach helps put together an outline and create a writing plan, as well as gives feedback on your writing and keeps you on track. Once your book is done, look for a skilled editor to bring your writing to its best.

How much time do I have—really? Although working with a ghostwriter for your book will save you hundreds of hours of work, it’s still a large time investment. If you’re routinely struggling to keep your head above water, don’t add a book to your pile. Instead, find something (or several somethings) to eliminate first. You can also consider starting small with two blog posts a month or one magazine article per quarter.

For more from Stacy Ennis (@Stacy Ennis), visit her at StacyEnnis.com.

If you’re interested in being a ghostwriter rather than hiring one, be sure to check out Roz Morris’s new online course, Become a Ghostwriter.

5 On: Rufi Thorpe

Author Rufi Thorpe (@RufiThorpe) discusses writing for men, what she calls her improbable path to publication, what she likes to see in a book review, and more in this 5 On interview.

Rufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. Her first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar, was long-listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Her second novel, Dear Fang, With Love, releases May 24. She lives in California with her husband and sons.

5 on Writing

CHRIS JANE: You said in a Tumblr interview,

I honestly didn’t know if men would find something worth reading in [The Girls from Corona del Mar]. One of the things that has surprised me has been an overwhelmingly positive and also surprisingly intense response from male readers. Each email from them begins with the phrase, ‘I wasn’t expecting to like this book,’ or, ‘I was pretty sure I would hate this book,’ or even, ‘I would never have picked up this book, but I went to high school with your husband,’ and then they would go on to say they stayed up all night reading and couldn’t put it down.

It is, unfortunately, a wonderful surprise when men will guiltily admit to enjoying fiction written by and featuring women (and it does come across as a guilty admission when the praise is prefaced with an explanation of why the book was picked up in the first place). But, as you also said in that same interview, “I think that women are part of the human experience, and if women can fall in love with reading Moby Dick, there is no reason men can’t identify with the characters in Pride and Prejudice.”

There really is no reason. Still, even in 2016, you’ll hear “my favorite authors” vs. “my favorite female authors.” When you write, do you write with the expectation that women will be your primary audience, and how important is it to you (if at all) to have a male audience?

RUFI THORPE: I think that when I was younger, still in college and even in graduate school, I wrote exclusively for a male audience. Claire Vaye Watkins has written so beautifully about this conundrum in her essay “On Pandering.” She writes,

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!

I wasted a lot of time writing about men getting boners. Writing female characters who were nothing but reflective surfaces, romantic images. I failed and I failed and I failed. I had one teacher who suggested we find our biggest fault and then do nothing but that. For him, he felt his dialogue was stilted so he wrote stories that were nothing but dialogue. “What is my biggest fault?” I asked him. “Oh,” he said, “I would say maybe the melodrama.”

The melodrama. Oh, I went home that night and sobbed and sobbed. It seemed such a female problem to have! I had been trying so hard to be stoic, so hard to write about nothing but boners and Cormac McCarthy, and there I was: a silly girl writing melodramas. I was, I think, less good at “passing” than Claire Vaye Watkins. I was not good at writing for men, I was never able to do it properly. And so, perhaps, that made it easier to give up.

In a way, you could say I write only toward women. And on a personal level, I can tell that my artistic center is my own pimpled, chubby, fierce, and dreamy eleven-year-old self. I think I write toward her, but also toward my mother, my grandmother, my best friend.

On the other hand, one of the things I most like about books is that you can never ever imagine, let alone control, who will read them. They are messages in bottles. I am quite certain that A. E. Houseman would be astounded and disturbed by me as a being, and yet I can read his poems and feel moved. He could not have dreamed me up, but I can feel an unexpected affinity with the ghost of his mind. In some strange way, I think the writer is always writing to this unfathomable, unknowable, secret reader. Part of what drives a writer to write is his very experience as a reader: that shock of finding a friend in a book written by someone long dead, the solace of being recognized by a text when you cannot find a reflection of yourself in daily life. And knowing this, that we can find our selves in unexpected places, I think writers always ultimately write to readers they cannot imagine but who they know are also, mysteriously, part of themselves, ghosts of themselves in the future. That’s a very bizarre answer, but that’s what I think. So I think as much as I write for women, what I love most about the construct of literature is the idea that some young man I cannot even fathom would find my book and see himself in it.

What jobs have you had that you would consider the most literarily interesting and that have either appeared in your writing or that you someday hope to fictionalize?

I think working as a waitress for so many years definitely gave me a lot of perspective about what sort of place the world was, and I think it informs my work, but at the same time waiting tables is not literarily interesting. I used to think you had to do that: have interesting jobs, travel, have raw aesthetic experience that you could turn into fiction. I think that less now. What you really need to do is examine the world and people and think deeply about it, and you could probably do that in your hometown working the dullest job imaginable.

You wanted to explore mental illness in Dear Fang. What about mental illness interests you as a writer, and what kind of research was involved to present and handle it as believably as possible?

I have had two people very close to me diagnosed with Bipolar 1, and over the years I have watched them struggle with it. I don’t just mean with the brain chemical imbalance, or the medications, or the damage to their self-esteem, the limitations on their lives. I’ve watched them struggle with the very idea that their lived experience might be non-valid. It is a terrifying idea: that your reality is not reality. This kind of Cartesian terror is, for whatever reason, a preoccupation of mine. I often have flashes of fear that I am wrong, that my perception of reality is wrong, that I should stop and wait and try to ascertain a realer reality.

So there is that. As for research, I think I really started with what I knew about bipolar already and then I did a lot of reading. I did a lot of reading of first-person accounts of psychotic breaks. It’s very sad but very interesting reading. I also contacted a psychologist in Lithuania who works in the particular mental hospital where the book is set and had her read it for accuracy, and I found a mental patient who had been treated at that facility and had her read it as well.

You said in a Publishers Weekly interview that the character of Lucas, the father in Dear Fang, is the closest you’ve come to a self-portrait, that “a lot of him came from trying to look at myself, which is easier to do with a character who’s not female.” Your two female characters in The Girls from Corona del Mar also drew from you, though, in the sense that you would imagine yourself reacting to situations they’re in in order to write their reactions. What parts of yourself tend to come out more freely when writing women, how are they different from what’s revealed about you when you write men, and why do you think those differences exist in the way they do?

I think most writers imagine themselves as each character, and in this way the characters are aspects of self. For Lucas, what I meant specifically was that I gave him a lot of biographical detail, which is, to me, different than personality or self. I gave Lucas my background at Exeter, I gave him my fatherlessness, I gave him a kind of version of my mother, even. I told my mother I was going to put her in a book, and she said, “That’s fine, but I require that you make me tall and thin with curly hair.” “All right,” I said. “And I want perfect pitch!” “Deal,” I said. So I just gave Lucas a lot more of my stuff. But I’m not sure that means he wound up with more of my spirit. I don’t think his dilemma is necessarily my dilemma. I relate a lot—to feeling a fool, to not knowing how to be who you want to be. But that isn’t necessarily my core problem right now in my life. I’m not actually sure what my core problem is right now. But it’s manifesting as a lot of not-done laundry.

But there is a deeper element to your question, which is: what does a woman get out of writing herself as a man? Donna Tartt famously does this, and I think Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is another intriguing example, a novel about four male best friends written by a woman. In an interview for Salon, Tartt points out that having the narrator and protagonist be male allows him to interact with other male characters without the issue of attraction collapsing the novel into a romance: “But that novel would never have worked with a female narrator because then you would inevitably have the question of whether she was attracted to some of the male characters … it would just never work. It would have been a different book.”

I remember being seventeen and lounging around with my best friend, hanging our heads off the bed, smoking, listening to Bob Dylan, bemoaning the fact that we could not be men. We discussed the mustaches we would grow, the risks we would take, the travels and the adventures we would seek. We did not want our entire lives squashed down into the question of who we would marry. To imagine ourselves as men was a fantasy of freedom, and I have to conclude it was a seductive fantasy for these other female writers who have chosen to write in the voice of male protagonists as well.

What kind of writing-related pressure or doubt do you struggle with at this point, if any?

Sometimes I read a writer who is very different from me, and I am just filled with this longing to be them. I don’t think writers really get to choose their material. What obsesses you is what obsesses you. But there is always the concern that what obsesses you is perhaps stupid, not to the point, narrow. And there is always the desire to set down your boring problems and exchange them for fresh, new, interesting ones. So, on an existential level I think I exist in a sort of superposition where I feel at once completely unsure that what I am writing is worthwhile at the same time as accepting that I cannot really change it and so I might as well carry on. You can really only try to write the best book you can and leave it at that. To worry about whether or not you are talented is as useless as worrying about whether or not you are beautiful. You cannot go to God begging for more. As my three-year-old says, “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” They tell him that at school. A useful if troubling phrase. The half rhyme bothers me.

5 on Publishing

Your first novel (your first to be published, but the fourth novel you’d written) was published by Knopf. (My genuine punctuation feeling: !) What was it like to get word of that acceptance, and what was your path to publication? (How many agents queried? And when you started querying, had you already developed a network in the publishing community through the MFA program and teaching and writing, or were you approaching as a relative stranger? Did you experience any disappointments or setbacks?)

My story is an improbable one, but here it is. I had done my MFA and I had failed to publish even a single short story in a real literary magazine. I was waiting tables in California, and eventually I transitioned to teaching composition, first at a community college and then at a private college that was really wonderful. But I certainly had no connections, not to anything. I had thought going to an MFA would give me connections, and it sort of does, but mainly it gives you connections to your peers, so you sort of have to wait for their careers to sprout as well. Years went on this way.

My husband and I had our first child and moved to Washington, D.C., and the cost of daycare was roughly the same as my annual income, so we decided I would stay home and try to finish and sell the novel I had been working on when I was pregnant. I sent it off to one agent and I got back some feedback that didn’t make any sense to me, and I just felt so discouraged, like no one would ever get the book, and maybe the book wasn’t even get-able, and maybe I wasn’t get-able, maybe I was just, you know, a bead lost under a big cosmic sofa.

But I felt this huge pressure. I had this one year home with my baby, and after that I would have to make a living and my chances to actually ever get published would be virtually zero. It was go big or go home. So I decided to figure out who my absolute dream agent would be. Who I would want if I could have any agent in the world. Obviously, it was Molly Friedrich. Jane Smiley, Elizabeth Strout, Karen Joy Fowler—they were the writers I was obsessed with, whose new books I read the second they came out. As an agent, Molly was way, way out of my league.

So obviously I wrote her an insane, highly emotional, personal, and long email, which is absolutely not how you should query an agent. But I think she could tell that I knew a lot about her and had read a lot of her list, and maybe she could guess from the fact that I had gotten an MFA that I wasn’t completely talentless, so she wrote back and said, “You are very lucky that it is a Friday and I am in a generous mood. Send me your novel.”

I did. She had some extremely insightful notes, the kind that you hear and think, “Oh, of course, it always should have been that way.” I spent a few months making the changes. I sent it back. She called me, and she started telling me all the things she loved about the book, and I remember I fumblingly asked, “Does this mean you’ll represent me?” and she laughed and laughed, and was like, “Yes, that’s what this phone call is.”

Ten days later she sold it at auction.

It was by pure chance that my best friend happened to be in town on the date of the auction, as we had planned the trip long before we even knew there was going to be an auction, and it was also by pure chance that we all got the worst stomach flu any of us had ever had before or since. The baby got it, I got it, my best friend got it. We lived, at the time, in a kind of damp, airless basement apartment, and with all the vomiting going on, it was truly disgusting and depressing in there. I remember I got the opening bids in an email and I was so surprised that I actually fell out of the bed, and it was a high bed and the tile floor I fell on was very cold and I sort of screamed and thrashed there for a minute and it woke up the baby.

We celebrated by going to Whole Foods and buying soup. I remember I bought the most expensive bottle of wine I had ever bought. It was fifty dollars. We were so sick it tasted disgusting, like blood, but we drank it anyway, delirious and happy.

You’ve said of the “agony of publishing’s incredibly long pipeline” that it helped you to have previously made a steady habit of writing, because it meant you were able to get to work on your next idea (Dear Fang) while waiting about a year for the The Girls to publish. Also within that year, did your publisher expect you to write side projects to help market the book (interviews, guest blogs or articles, essays, etc.), and what is your creative/mental management system when pressing, time-sensitive projects interrupt a novel you’re working on?

With The Girls, it worked out that I wrote the entire first draft of Dear Fang before the pub date of The Girls, but this time [for my third novel], in part because I had another baby and a cross-country move, I started making notes and doing research, wrote the first sixty pages, and then it became clear that I would need to set it down in order to start working on essays and Q&As for Dear Fang.

However, I’m also unusually squeezed for time—my only writing time is the two hours of my baby’s morning nap. If I had a bigger chunk of time, it’s possible I could do both. For me the issue isn’t in keeping two threads going at one time, it’s in being forced to abandon one of the threads and pick it up months later. That said, I daydream about whatever I’m writing or writing next pretty constantly. I’m also doing a lot of the research, note taking, etc, and so in that sense I’m still working on it. I’m just not expecting myself to produce polished pages at the same time I’m writing essays or doing publicity work. But it’s basically a terrible feeling—to be needing to write a book and not writing it. It’s a form of spiritual constipation. But if you’re lucky enough to need to do publicity work, how on earth can you complain?

Having established a reliable author identity with one well-received novel and another gathering positive industry reviews, do you have any plans to revisit any or all of your first three novels to ultimately submit them for publication?

I don’t think so. They aren’t very good, and I don’t have the patience to go back and make them good. I was learning on them, and I’m grateful I got to mess them up so badly without anyone reading behind me and saying, “Boy, real missed opportunity there! What was she thinking?” Plus, every writer thinks the new thing they are working on is the best thing they have ever written; otherwise we would all be too afraid to write at all.

How do you know when you’ve read a good review? And by that I don’t mean a positive review, but a thoughtful, well-considered critique, whether positive or negative.

It’s always exciting to see someone engaging with the actual themes and material of the book; whether its good or bad, there is always a surprising nakedness to it, like you didn’t know anyone could see you. At least that’s how I feel. It’s a profound spiritual gift when someone reads you like that. Even if they hate what you’ve done, they have done you the honor of taking you seriously. It’s incredible.

You said soon after publishing your first novel that you were “shocked by the publishing industry,” which you said appeared to be “made up entirely of people who genuinely love books.” Before any of this started, when getting published was merely a hope, what did you imagine it would be like, and what are the most notable differences and similarities when compared to what it is actually like?

Well, see, I think I just never thought very deeply about it. I had very vague ideas that publishers would be business people, which is really a mental stand-in for “rich people who would scare me.” I suppose I thought the whole thing would be more rigged than it is. That the houses would sort of closed-room decide which books were the big books of the season. I had no idea how much more it is a gamble, and how little publishers themselves can predict or control which book will suddenly take off.

I think perhaps I grew up in a time when publishers really did know what would make a book a success, like a rave NY Times review, or being chosen for Oprah’s book club, but I entered publishing in a time when all the old wisdom was being shuffled around. Sometimes a rave NY Times review makes a book a best seller, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s Amazon reviews, sometimes it’s book bloggers, sometimes it’s Twitter that makes a book catch fire. There isn’t really a silver bullet anymore, which makes it much clearer to everyone involved that what really makes a book sell is people reading it and loving it. Which is as it should be, I think.

Thank you, Rufi.

Building an Author Website on WordPress: How to Start Smart

Note from Jane: This Thursday, I’m teaching a 2-hour online class, Create Your Author Website in 24 Hours or Less, that teaches the principles of good author websites and serves as an introduction to WordPress. The class is run in partnership with Writer’s Digest; register here.

Last week, I featured an insightful post from Ron Bueker that compared the pros and cons of WordPress and Squarespace.

I have long been devoted to WordPress, going back to 2006. My decade of experience has made me very comfortable building sites on it, plus it gives me an advantage in terms of cost. I’ve learned enough over the years to maintain my own sites, and to recognize when I should spend money for themes, plugins, or support.

But I am not a coder. I have never taken a coding class, and my coding knowledge primarily involves basic HTML and CSS, all self-taught. But I am comfortable enough to copy and paste code into the right places when given good directions.

I recognize that few authors are as comfortable as I am when it comes to WordPress. Still, I think it can be a very cost-effective option that becomes more powerful for your online presence, over time, if you’re willing to commit to learning it.

If you’re considering WordPress as your platform of choice, here’s what you should know as you prepare to build on it.

1. Use WordPress.com as a low-pressure, easy way to begin, with confidence in its long-term prospects.

It’s often hard to explain the difference between using WordPress.com and a self-hosted version of WordPress (sometimes referred to as “Wordpress.org”).

First and foremost, WordPress is a content management system that is free to use. It can be used as the basis of any website, and by anyone. Because it underpins about 20% of the world’s websites, it’s a very well-known technology. This is good for you as as site owner. As an analogy, think about the iPhone and how many apps are developed for that platform. Just about everyone is eager to have something that’s iPhone compatible. WordPress is similar.

WordPress.com is a place you can go to start a WordPress-based site, without the cost of hosting (or development), in a safe and secure environment that is run by the company who developed WordPress in the first place. They have lots of tutorials and support that are geared for beginners to website building.

However, because you’re building in their walled garden, there are certain limitations. You can’t choose any theme you want. You can’t totally customize the site without buying upgrades. And so on.

That doesn’t negate the fact that it’s still WordPress, and you’re learning a system that’s been around for 10+ years, and is very prevalent in the web development world.

If and when you decide to “graduate” to a self-hosted site (I outline this further here), the WordPress.com support team can help you make that transition successfully. They want you to keep using their technology, even if it’s not in their special walled garden.

This is one of the reasons that WordPress.com is so great for beginners. You get ease of use, but the ability to expand and add complexity if and when your growth demands it. Plus, you have a stable environment, with confidence that it will be a viable platform for years to come. (For example, users of Apple’s iWeb site building service know the pain of having to start their site from scratch when their platform goes the way of the dodo.)

As a WordPress user with a self-hosted site, I’ve never had to worry about what happens if my website platform goes out of business or changes hands.

2. Invest a lot of upfront time researching what theme or theme technology you want to use.

Whether you’re using WordPress.com or not, one of the keys to a good WordPress experience is your choice of theme.

Think of a theme as a skin for your website. It dictates the aesthetics—the colors, the layout, the fonts, the styles, and more. Some themes also come with some rather incredible customizations and additional functionality, while very simple themes might have little or no additional functionality at all. This is why your choice is so important—it affects your overall site design but also some of your capabilities to customize your website or push it further without knowing code.

Not all themes are created equal—they can be created by anyone, anywhere and made available with very little testing. Always check the ratings and reviews for each theme at WordPress, as well as if it has been recently updated or developed. You can also see how many people have downloaded the theme—and popularity works in your favor. The more people who are using a theme, the more likely the bugs are getting worked out and few conflicts exist with other third-party stuff you might use for your site. It’s also helpful if the theme has a support community where you can go to ask questions. Very new themes should generally be avoided by beginners unless it’s from a developer who has many other respected themes.

For WordPress.com users, you’ll be limited in your choice of theme—for good reason. You’ll be presented with well-tested and robust themes that are free or premium (premium themes cost you money). If you’re running a self-hosted site, then you can choose any theme you’re able to find in the WordPress universe, which can sometimes be paralyzing. I recommend researching as many author websites as you can, and when you find one you like, look for information about what theme they’re using. You can tell by looking at the source code. (In Chrome, go to View > Developer > View Source.) Look for the URL that indicates the theme name. For example, here’s a snippet of the source code for Bella Andre’s site:

This tells us that the WordPress theme is Divi.

Many people like the idea of drag-and-drop website builders, such as Squarespace. It is possible to have the same experience in WordPress if you choose a theme or plugin that offers that functionality. Just run a Google search for “page builder WordPress themes” or “drag-and-drop WordPress.” Here’s a recent roundup of such tools.

3. To add e-commerce functionality, invest in premium plugins or themes.

If you plan to accept payments directly through your site (known as e-commerce functionality), that’s when you should consider investing in premium plugins or themes, to help ensure a streamlined experience. WooThemes and WooCommerce are a popular choice for authors who want to accept or process payments through their site. I use Gravity Forms + Stripe because my needs are very simple right now.

(Keep in mind that, if you do accept payments directly, you need a secure site. Check with your site hosting company about how to do this.)

4. Cheap hosting is OK for low-traffic sites, but outages may be common, and support not so supportive.

Years ago, I started out my website on a very cheap hosting plan from GoDaddy. It worked fine and did the job for less than $100/year, but eventually I bought a better hosting plan from MediaTemple with additional functionality, such as site staging (so you can easily build a site without it being live), automated nightly backups, and improved caching to improve my site speed. I pay a baseline of $200/year to host several sites; my total traffic is about 200,000 visits per month.

With cheap (or cheaper) hosting, you might not find your site uptime as reliable, and the support might be lacking. With managed hosting plans—which tend to emphasize their service and support for site owners who aren’t techies or experienced web developers—the added expense can be worth it for peace of mind.

5. Only use plugins that you really need. Research them just as you would themes.

Plugins are bits of functionality that you add to your site. They may be extremely simple, such as a widget that shows the most popular blog posts at your site, or they can be very complex, such as message boards and forum systems.

Whatever functionality you’d like to add to your site, you can bet there’s a plugin that does it—probably a dozen plugins! And therein lies the challenge. It’s up to you to figure out which one might look best or work best on your site. Plugins may or may not work well with your theme, or they may cause your other plugins to be disrupted. You rarely know what the outcome will be until you try. That’s why it’s important to research your plugins just as you do your themes; especially if you’re a beginner to site building, choose plugins that are popular and regularly updated, and preferably offer some form of support.

6. Always login to your site at least once a week to check for updates and make sure everything looks as it should.

Some author websites don’t need to be updated that often—maybe not even once a month. With a self-hosted WordPress site, however, it’s important to check in at least once a week or so, to see if any new updates have been released for the WordPress core system, or any of the themes or plugins you’ve been using. These updates can be critical to your site security and are important to process around the time they release. Some managed hosting services will take care of such updates for you.

Aside from updates, it’s just a good idea to check in, especially if you have any comment areas open, and to see that everything looks just as you left it.

7. If you encounter roadblocks or problems, Google it first.

This is my No. 1 secret web development tip. I solve about 90% of my website problems or frustrations by searching for error codes, error phrases, or simplistic explanations of the problem I’m having, along with the keyword “WordPress.” More often than not, I find someone else who has encountered the same problem and solved it. If that doesn’t work, I resort to the support community provided by my WordPress theme developer.

Final word

If this post has created more doubts and anxieties about building or maintaining your own site, then you’re likely a very good prospect for WordPress.com, or a service like Squarespace, which can help make some of this tech headache go away.

Note from Jane: This Thursday, I’m teaching a 2-hour online class, Create Your Author Website in 24 Hours or Less, that teaches the principles of good author websites and serves as an introduction to WordPress. The class is run in partnership with Writer’s Digest; register here.

Starting an Email Newsletter: Why to Do It and Which Service to Use

by U.S. Department of Agriculture | via Flickr

Today’s guest post is the first in a series about growing an email list, by author Kirsten Oliphant (@kikimojo).

More and more authors now talk about the importance of growing an email list of readers. But I also hear from many people who are totally frustrated with email, from growing the list size to increasing open rates.

Often people start a list without knowing exactly why or what to do with it. (This is exactly how I started my first list four years ago, by the way.) Email can be your most powerful asset as an author, but you need to be intentional if you want results.

In this series, I’ll walk you through some of the places people get stuck to help you get the most out of your list. To start, let’s take the conversation back a few steps to discuss why email is important.

The Why of Email

With new social media platforms cropping up every month, email seems a little redundant—or even oddly ineffective, since it doesn’t have the same reach; you may have 200 email subscribers and 2,000 Twitter followers. We also know just how crowded our inboxes are. I delete plenty of emails per day without even opening them. So why spend time or money on an email list? Here are a few significant reasons.

Email Is Permanent

Social media is a fantastic tool for authors. We can connect with our readers in ways that were not possible even ten years ago using Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest. The problem is that we don’t control the connections. We are subject to each platform’s changes and algorithms. My Facebook page, for example, typically shows the posts I write to less than 10 percent of my followers.

There is no algorithm on an inbox (usually!). You have access and control that you have on no other platform. You can download a spreadsheet of your email subscribers and their emails at any time. In that sense, you own your list—something you can’t say for your Facebook likes or Twitter follows.

Email Is Personal

Even though email is a one-to-many message in terms of experience, it feels like one-to-one. We don’t tend to let too many people in our inboxes, crowded though they are. We pass out follows on Twitter or likes on Facebook much more easily, knowing we will not be bombarded with content as a result. When someone signs up for your list, they are taking one more step to connect, which means they are likely a more engaged fan.

Email comes to that most personal space. An email from your favorite author could sit in your inbox right next to an email from your mom. If you have your email set up so replies go directly to you, then that one-to-many communication really does become a one-to-one conversation. The private nature of the communication lends itself to a more real and lasting connection to your readers.

Email Is Effective

With low open rates (20 percent is a pretty decent open rate across industries) and even lower click-through rates, email can seem just as difficult as fighting with the Facebook algorithm. However, while you don’t have control over whether someone opens your email, at least they will at least see it.

You can improve your effectiveness by establishing trust, setting expectations with your readers, and sending valuable content. Ultimately, the control is in your reader’s hands to open or not, but creating an email strategy and being intentional can up your open rates and engagement.

After spending a year really working on my content and the relationships I have with my readers, I have seen my open rates double to an average 40 percent or better. This spring I made $500 in a single afternoon sending one email to a small, targeted portion of my list (less than 200 people). In his book Your First 1000 Copies, Tim Grahl shared that, in helping an author with marketing, for every one book the author sold on social media, he sold ten through his email list. Once you get your list working, it has a much better return on investment than most social platforms.

Getting Started with Your List

In case anyone is totally new to this concept, I want to be clear that when we talk about an email list, this does not mean sending an email through your Gmail or Hotmail account. The CAN-SPAM Act outlines a clear policy that you need permission to email people with marketing-type content and that there should also be an easy unsubscribe option. Using an email service provider not only increases your deliverability rate, but it keeps you on the legal side of things by handling permission and the unsubscribe links.

Email Service Providers

We are in an age of choice. You could easily choose from a half dozen reputable email service providers (ESPs) and have just as many people telling you which one is the best. The real question you need to answer is which ESP best suits your needs, long-term goals, and budget. Each provider has its own strong points and different price points. I’ll do a brief breakdown below of some of the most reputable ESPs.

MailChimp:  free for up to 2,000 subscribers (does not include all features)

MailChimp is a great starting point because you can grow up to 2000 subscribers on the free plan. It is very user friendly and has easy templates with lots of great features, such as adding social share icons or creating clickable buttons. If you want to use features like autoresponders (a series of emails that send automatically in sequence when people sign up), you will have to upgrade to a paid plan. Once you get to 2,001 subscribers, you’ll jump to $30/month.

Mad Mimi:  free for up to 100 subscribers, then jumps to $10/month

Though Mad Mimi is owned by the giant GoDaddy, it seems to fly under the radar as far as ESPs go. This is another cost-efficient provider with a much better customer service plan than MailChimp (live chat during the week that is quick and helpful), and it comes with all the tools. The templates are not as intuitive as on MailChimp, but it is still very easy to use and affordable.

ConvertKit:  $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers

ConvertKit is a fairly new kid on the block, but in the past year ConvertKit picked up steam when influencers like Pat Flynn jumped on board. With advanced features like tagging, detailed analytics on each signup form, and other automation, ConvertKit has the power of a larger ESP like Infusionsoft (which starts at $199/month) and the ease of MailChimp. If you want to be super targeted and detailed with your list and break up subscribers into different categories easily, ConvertKit has an amazing arsenal of tools. (Read more about why I use ConvertKit.)

ActiveCampaign: $17/month (if you pay annually) for up to 1,000 subscribers.

ActiveCampaign is another ESP with great features like tagging and automation to help you be more intentional and targeted with your readers. Like ConvertKit, this is an ESP with some real power.

AWeber:  $19/month for up to 500 subscribers

AWeber has a solid reputation and is a favorite of marketers. They have fabulous customer service, but I feel like the back end is more than clunky in terms of creating custom signup forms and even in the email templates.

Constant Contact:  $20/month for up to 500 subscribers

Constant Contact is another trusted provider with good customer service and features, but they start out a little pricey. I signed up for a free trial and found that they lived up to their name: I received four phone calls in one week. That was a little too much constant contact for me.

Before making the choice, you should dig a little deeper, as some of the ESPs that start out a little cheaper become more expensive quickly. The threshold for price increases is different for each ESP, so one that starts cheaper might take a big jump in price earlier. You can always change providers as your needs grow and change. Think about price, but also think about your long-term goals.

Clarifying Your Goals

To choose a provider and create a successful list, consider the kind of readers you are trying to find. One of the biggest email myths is that all lists will grow at an equal rate or hit a certain milestone. This puts undue pressure on you and may put your focus too much on quantity and not quality of subscribers.

The reality is that some lists are harder or slower to grow. Lists for fiction don’t always grow at the same rate as lists that teach people how to write, for example. If you meet a need with your list, the growth tends to be easier. But realize if you plan content around helping meet a need, you will attract a particular type of person. This person may not be the ideal reader for your books.

Many writers have found success teaching people about writing or publishing. If this is one of your goals, understand that these are two different kinds of audiences. In a recent interview, indie writer Joanna Penn said that her fiction and nonfiction (teaching people how to write and publish) bring in about the same amount of revenue, but the crossover in audience is only about 10 percent.

Connecting with your audience can be a great thing, but keep in mind that your growth will depend on your goals. If you are planning to traditionally publish nonfiction, for example, having an email list and platform is much more necessary than if you plan to publish fiction. If you are an independent author, an email list will play a vital role in how you market your books.

Here are a few questions to ask as you clarify your goals:

What kinds of readers do you want to join your list?
What kind of books or projects are you promoting? (nonfiction, fiction, courses, etc.)
What do you want your list to accomplish for you? (book sales, readers, course sales, blog traffic, securing a book deal, etc.)
Do you hope to publish independently or with a traditional publisher?
What kind of content can you realistically put in a weekly or monthly email?
Will you have one list? Or do you have two content areas that require two lists (or segments)?
What kind of email content might help you reach your goals?

Even if you don’t have all the answers yet, I would highly recommend choosing the best provider for now and getting started. If you already have a list that is not performing or growing the way you would hope, take a step back. Answer some of the questions to clarify your goals. (For more on cultivating your audience through email, freelancer Paul Jarvis has some fantastic tips.)

What are your biggest struggles when it comes to email? What successes have you found?

Building Your Professional Author Website: WordPress vs Squarespace

via Shutterstock

Today’s guest post is from web design expert Ron Bueker (@wingmanwebworks).

When you’re ready to build your author website, there are some key decisions staring you down. The first, and the biggest, is to choose a web platform. If you’ve been researching your options, you might have heard that WordPress is the way to go. After all, it has tens of thousands of themes, plugins, and developers ready to help you create a feature-rich website that pixel-perfectly matches the one in your mind’s eye—and it’s free! How can Squarespace possibly compete with that?

Before you decide on a web platform, consider your main objective: to build a professional author website. These days, working writers can’t simply post a one-page site that looks like their twelve-year-old neighbor designed it in his basement. To be taken seriously in the publishing industry, you need a website with higher standards—one that presents you (whether you’re published or not) as a professional, dedicated writer who’s in it for the long haul. Professional author websites are well organized, well designed, and well written; they hold and disseminate the author’s unique brand.

So, with all the author websites out there, what will make your site stand out?

Here are the top features of a professional author website:

A modern, mobile-responsive design with typography, colors, and graphics that communicate your unique author brand reliably on computer screens, tablets, and phones
A clean, easy-to-navigate events page or calendar
An easy-to-use contact form
Buttons for purchasing your books
Endorsements, reviews, and/or testimonials
Social media and mailing list integration
Search fields, both site-wide and targeted
Strong behind-the-scenes technology, including spam filters, security protection, fast page loads, a content management system (CMS) that makes it easy for you to add new pages or blog posts, search engine optimization (SEO) to get your site farther up the search ranking in Google, and a backup system
A maintenance system to help you manage security updates and feature updates your site will require to remain in top working condition
Metrics to help you track visits and clicks, find patterns, and make adjustments to increase reader engagement

Okay, it’s a BIG list, but all of these features are well within the reach of both WordPress and Squarespace. Which platform you choose, however, affects your experience, time, and pocketbook. It’s worth taking a look at how each of these platforms approach ease of use, functionality, support, and affordability.

Note that this article addresses self-hosted WordPress sites, not those built via WordPress.com.

Ease of Use

WordPress. Some of the world’s most recognized brands are built on WordPress—brands like eBay, CNN, the New York Times, and Best Buy. But the size and complexity of what’s possible on the WordPress platform makes for a significant learning curve, requiring time and energy. Knowledge of some coding may be necessary to achieve all your goals.

On WordPress, you start by finding a theme that fits your vision, and all the various plugins needed to make your author site a professional one. (Plugins are tiny apps you can “plug in” to your website for additional functionality.) There are, in fact, thousands and thousands of themes and plugins to consider: some great, some average, some terrible. You will need to do your research carefully before selecting which ones to use.

WordPress has both a front end (what visitors see when they go to your site) and a back end (what you see when you log in as an administrator to your site). They are quite different from each other, which can feel unintuitive. You enter all of your content in the back end and, in order to see what your content actually looks like to your visitors, you need to switch to the front end, then return to the back end to make adjustments.

Maintenance on your WordPress site is ongoing, and sometimes challenging. Because WordPress software, themes, and plugins are, in most cases, developed by separate parties, software updates for each one happens when it happens. There is no coordinated effort among developers, and, consequently, every update may cause a conflict, which can make your site misbehave or fail.

Squarespace. With Squarespace, there are no pieces of software to assemble, no comparison shopping to do, nothing to install, and no maintenance required on your part. You need only go to squarespace.com, select a template, and start building.

It’s easy to give your site a branded, unified look. Squarespace templates are designed so that once you’ve decided on typography and colors, your choices are consistently applied throughout your site. You can also easily apply built-in effects to your graphics to bring them into your brand.

Squarespace’s unified front end and back end, along with its drag-and-drop approach, makes the site-building process streamlined and intuitive.

There is a learning curve. It’s not steep (no knowledge of coding required), but it requires time and attention. You will need to read through the how-to guides, watch training videos, and ask questions.

Every Squarespace template is beautiful, professional, and mobile-responsive, but there are less than fifty available. This could either be an advantage or disadvantage, depending on your level of overwhelm and on whether you feel tied to a predetermined vision of your site. You can also hire a Squarespace developer to build you a custom theme.

Functionality

WordPress. In WordPress, functionality is most often implemented via plugins. There are currently over 40,000 WordPress plugins available. While there are free plugins, paid plugins tend to be more reliable. (“Paid” also tends to get you access to customer support.) And if you need even more functionality, you can hire a WordPress developer to build it; the sky’s the limit. A word of caution, though: as the complexity of your site increases, so does the risk of software conflicts, and the amount of time you will need to sort it out.

Squarespace. All of the key features required for a professional website are already built into Squarespace, including e-commerce, slide shows, galleries, graphs, maps, and more—but here’s the catch: if the feature you want is not built in, you are out of luck. You can hire a Squarespace developer to build it for you, but even then, there are limits to what can be accomplished.

Support

WordPress. If you go looking for help with your WordPress site, you will find it everywhere. There are tens of thousands of forums, comment threads, books, videos, and articles for you to discover and peruse. However, because WordPress is open source, there is no dedicated WordPress team to handle your specific case. So, you may need to hire a developer to get through a jam from time to time.

Squarespace. While unofficial help resources are widely available, Squarespace maintains its own official support system—knowledge base, videos, and community—that is comprehensive and well organized. If you desire personal attention, there is also a dedicated Squarespace team to assist you via live chat or email.

Affordability

WordPress. The WordPress software is free, but the hosting provider you choose is not. Keeping in mind your professional author site must be secure, fast, and reliable, your hosting provider must be up to the task. There are hosting providers out there for as low as $4/month, but be careful, as the old adage applies: you get what you pay for.

A top-notch WordPress hosting provider will run you $19–$47 per month. You may also decide to purchase a premium theme and plugins to add more functionality to your site. A good theme can cost anywhere from $50 to $200. Plugins can start as low as $15. (Some developers charge a subscription fee, others sell them outright.)

If you need to hire a developer to get you through an unexpected software conflict, or to build in custom features, expect to pay $50+/hour. If you hire a developer to build something, you may need to pay a monthly fee to keep it running smoothly, about $40+/month.

Squarespace. Squarespace costs $12–$26 per month. There are no themes or plugins to buy, and no developer to pay to maintain your author site once it’s built. If you decide to hire a developer, though, expect to pay $65+/hour. If you hire a developer to build you a custom theme, you will need to pay that developer from time to time to keep your theme in top condition; the rest of the Squarespace software will continue to be maintained by Squarespace.

So, which web platform is best for building professional author sites?

The truth is both WordPress and Squarespace are brilliant and both can be used to build professional author sites. On the one hand, WordPress can deliver a seemingly endless variety of custom features, but they require time and energy to implement. On the other hand, Squarespace can “bring the easy,” but requires you to stay within its built-in feature set. The real question here, though, is not “Which web platform is best for building professional author sites?” The real question is “Who are you, what exactly do you require of your professional author site, and how do you want to spend your time?”

If you intend to regularly set aside time to maintain your site (in addition to feeding your site), WordPress is the right choice for you. If you require custom features for your professional author site, WordPress is a strong choice. If you require a custom theme for your professional author site, both Squarespace and WordPress will serve you well. And finally, if web development is not your thing, and you do not require custom features, then Squarespace is the better way to go.

Regardless of which platform you choose, you’re not in this alone. There are companies, consultants, designers—all sorts of people who can help. Talk to your friends and other working writers about their experiences. Ultimately, the author site you build will reflect your unique artistry, and it will allow the world to see what you’ve been working on all these years.

How to Use Guest Blogging to Promote Your Book

by GotCredit | via Flickr

Today’s post is from online marketing expert Beth Hayden (@BethJHayden).

When you create a guest post, you write an article specifically for a site that is not your own. Over the past few years, guest blogging has become a powerful (and free) tool in many authors’ book promotion toolboxes.

Jane features a lot of high-quality guest posts on her site—check out these articles to see some recent examples. Jane’s guest bloggers get exposure to her passionate audience of motivated authors, and Jane gets high-quality content for her website that she doesn’t have to create herself. It’s a win/win situation for all parties involved.

This post discusses the benefits of guest blogging, and how to write top-notch guest posts for sites with a passionate, dedicated audience. We’ll also talk about the controversial side of guest blogging, why some authors shun it as a book promotion tactic, and why you shouldn’t turn your nose up at this powerful technique.

The Advantages of Guest Blogging for Authors

The benefits of guest blogging for building your platform and promoting your books can be enormous. Guest blogging can:

Enhance your reputation as an authority in your field. If you’re trying to get found online and establish yourself as an expert in your field, guest blogging is a great way to do it. When your prospective audience members see you on popular sites—and posting useful and entertaining content—it’s easy for them to view you as a reliable specialist in your niche.

Introduce you to targeted, passionate communities. As an author, your main job is to get your message out to the right people—the folks who are most likely to be interested in what you’re saying and ready to buy your book. When you publish a guest post on a popular site, a group of highly engaged community members will read your piece—and that can lead to significant increases in your subscriber numbers and sales.

Increase your sales numbers more directly, because a purchase is only one click away in a guest post. When you are featured in regular media outlets, a prospective book buyer often has to write down your name, then remember to go online, search for your information, and purchase your book. With a guest post, your book page on Amazon is only one click away—your prospective reader can purchase your book quickly and efficiently.

Help you stand out with influencers and popular bloggers by giving them something of value. Instead of begging influential bloggers for reviews, consider reaching out to them with guest post ideas. By offering popular bloggers a guest post, you’re giving them something valuable (high-quality content) instead of asking for a favor (asking them to review your book). You’re considerably more likely to get a positive response than if you’re just requesting their attention and time. Guest posting also helps you build long-term relationships with influencers, too—which can be helpful for future promotions!

Be a great list-building technique. If you need to build your list (and let’s face it—all authors do), guest blogging could be your new best friend. It’s a great tool for attracting new subscribers. Traditional publishers love to see authors who already have an established platform, and one of the major things they look at is the size of your mailing list. If a traditional book deal is what you want, using strategic guest blogging to build your list is a good idea.

Give your book launch a boost. Although guest blogging can be useful anytime, planning a guest posting campaign—also known as a virtual book tour—can help boost your sales during a book launch.

The Guest Blogging Process

Here are the steps you should take to find guest blogging opportunities and write effective guest posts:

1. Find and research potential targets

Look for popular blogs that take guest posts and have a dedicated, passionate audience.

It’s fine to target a blog outside your exact niche, as long as the blog has an audience similar to yours. For instance, it’s okay to target a personal finance blog if your audience hangs out there—even if you’re not promoting a personal finance book.

As you’re looking for sites to write for, try to estimate how much traffic a particular blog gets. Look at the average number of social shares and comments their posts receive—the higher the numbers, the more popular the site is. Focus on sites that have ten or more comments per article, or a high number of social shares on each post.

That said, remember that size isn’t everything. You’re looking for blogs that have a decent-sized audience, who have built trust with their community members. Use your best judgment and don’t rule out all smaller sites, especially if you’re just getting starting with guest blogging.

Next up, examine the site’s previous guest posts, and make sure guest bloggers are allowed to link to their Amazon book pages (or to their own blogs) in their bylines. If the site doesn’t allow you to include a strong call to action—to buy your book or download a free incentive on your site—you should remove that blog from your list of potential targets.

Remember, you are guest blogging for the link and the exposure, so if you can’t link back to your book or your site, writing a guest post for that site will likely be a waste of your time.

When you find a blog you’d like to write for, look for that blog’s guest post guidelines. If the site regularly features guest posts, they will probably have guidelines for writers in a “Write for This Site” or “Write for Me” section of the blog. These guidelines will often spell out exactly what kinds of posts they accept, where to submit topics or posts, and how to increase your chances of submission success.

2. Come up with a few topic ideas (or sample headlines)

Your next step is to come up with a few post ideas. Think of three to five topics you could write about for each blog on your target list.

Make sure the topics are a good fit for the site, and study the content on the blog carefully before you brainstorm ideas.

In your research, find out what previous posts have been popular on the site. Look for past posts with lots of social shares and comments, and consider pitching posts on similar topics.

Don’t pitch the exact same ideas as previous posts, though—especially if the topic has been covered extensively. Find fresh angles on old topics, or answer questions people asked in the comments section.

3. Make your pitch

Email the blogger or use the blog’s contact form to send your three to five proposed blog post topics. Follow the writer’s guidelines during this step, and make sure to submit your ideas using the method they’ve requested.

Tailor your pitch to that specific blog, and always include your topic suggestions—if you don’t, it’s likely your guest post request will go straight into the trash.

Spend time on your pitches, just as you would if you were writing to a journalist or media outlet. Don’t send mass template emails to hundreds of bloggers—craft each email personally, and add details and ideas that are specific to that blog.

4. Write a top-quality post

When your blog post idea gets accepted, craft a top-quality post. Don’t reuse content from your existing blog, and don’t cut corners. The post should be longform (1000+ words) unless otherwise specified by your host.

At the bottom of your post, write your author byline. The byline should be short (eighty words or less) and include a strong call to action. It’s preferable to link directly to your Amazon book page, as long as it makes sense with your blog post topic.

If you don’t want to send people to Amazon (or your book hasn’t been published yet), include a link to a simple landing page on your site where the reader can sign up for a free incentive and join your mailing list.

5. Answer post comments and help promote the piece

When your post is published, answer comments from readers, and help promote the piece by sharing the link on social media and sending it to your email list.

6. Follow up and keep going

If the post does well and brings in lots of book sales or subscribers, follow up and ask for another guest posting opportunity with that blogger. Develop ongoing relationships with high-traffic blogs and become a regular contributor, if possible.

The Biggest Concern About Guest Blogging

At this point, you might be thinking, “Why should I write for free on these sites? Shouldn’t I spend my time working on my ‘real’ writing, instead of writing all these articles and not getting paid?”

I get it. It’s frustrating.

However, as we’ve already discussed, the potential benefits of doing strategic guest posting on popular sites are huge. When you’re selective about where you post, and smart about how you gather leads from your posts, guest posting can often be more effective than any other book promotion tactic out there—and that includes major media attention!

Bottom line: Guest posting works. I look at it this way: I’m okay writing some pieces for free in exchange for higher search engine rankings, hundreds of subscribers, and tons of book sales. The benefits (as we talked about above) make guest blogging the right decision for me.

You have to decide what works for you, and whether you want to include guest blogging in your book promotion strategy—but for me, it’s a no-brainer. Guest blogging is an excellent way to get more subscribers, build your platform and get more book sales. When done strategically, regular guest posting can be your most powerful book promotion tool. So pick some sites, start brainstorming your post ideas, and get ready to go on an exciting ride.

For more on finding the perfect guest blogging targets, check out How Authors Can Find the Best Places to Publish Guest Posts.

How to Become a Ghostwriter

by hobvias sudoneighm | via Flickr

Today’s guest post is from ghostwriter and author Roz Morris (@Roz_Morris).

Could you become a ghostwriter?

Before I ever published anything with my own byline, I’d already sold 4 million books as a ghostwriter.

Book ghostwriting is much more widespread than you’d suspect. Many writers—even well-known names—also use their skills for hire. Sometimes they’re credited. Sometimes they’re completely incognito.

Why do they do it? Well, money—obviously. Established ghostwriters get paid at a rate that’s fair for the time they spend. That’s pretty remarkable at a time when book advances are dwindling and authors are struggling to earn a decent living from book sales. Journalists, too, are finding that ghostwriting is a good career move. While magazines and online publications cut their staff to the bone, the book trade needs reliable wordsmiths who can quickly produce manuscripts to a brief, or interview a notable person to write their life story. But the ghostwriting world is broader and deeper than memoirs and celebrities. The deeper you dig, the more opportunities you find.

Even fiction publishers use ghostwriters. Funnily enough, people are surprised to hear this. But if you’re a fiction writer, you already know you didn’t learn your craft overnight. Neither can many of the people whose names go on novels.

There are other advantages besides money. Ghostwritten books are quicker to research than your own work. The client is your walking, talking source. You get to work with others instead of totally solo—although that can have mixed blessings and sometimes you have to be a diplomat. Quite frequently, in fact. You’ll earn every cent.

Ghostwriting can make a refreshing breather. My own books are literary, and take a lot of slow-burn development. But when I ghost, I can step into someone else’s shoes and life, shape their stories, adopt their voice, and write for their audience. And I can finish in a matter of months—instead of years.

Who hires ghostwriters?

Publishers might look for ghostwriters to help an author they’d like to publish. You might spruce up an existing manuscript or write the book from scratch. Ghostwriters are also needed by literary and entertainment agents. A client might have a book idea and need to get a writer on board to sell it to a publisher. Writing book proposals is a significant part of the ghostwriter’s work.

What qualities does a ghostwriter need?

Ghostwriting is not for beginners. But if you have solid writing craft skills, you’re on.

You also need a cast-iron deadline ethic. Somebody will be waiting for your manuscript or proposal document, with their eye on the clock and the money they’re shelling out. Often a book has to be written in a screaming hurry. I once ghostwrote four novels in one year while dodging around illness in the family and a separate and unexpected funeral.

Did I mention you’d earn every cent?

You need to be good at interviewing and earning the trust of the subject. That’s lovely if you get on well with them. You have to be willing to respect their work, their achievements and their goals. But sometimes you have to use ingenious wiles to get enough good book material.

You need business survival instincts. If you’re a freelancer, you’ll already have some of this, but ghostwriting involves big projects and it’s easy to let them spiral out of control. You have to learn when to work on spec and when to charge, what your time is worth, and how to manage the demands and give your best while guarding your energy.

And you need to abandon your identity. You’re a medium, channeling the book the client would write. And at the end you hand it over and slip away—with your haul of secrets and your lips sealed.

How do you find ghostwriting gigs?

If you’re already active in the writing and publishing community, then you can start by letting your publishing contacts know about your interest and availability as a ghostwriter. Similarly, for writers who are active within a very specific sphere of professional expertise, one of the first things you should do is spread the word throughout your professional network.

Alternatively, you can also try participating in online marketplaces such as Guru and Reedsy. Self-publishing service companies and literary consultancies also frequently hire and use ghostwriters.

Interested in pursuing the life of a ghostwriter? Roz has put her experience into a course that starts on May 23. Early-bird registrants get a significant discount. Find out more.

Join Me to Discuss the Rise of the Writer-Entrepreneur

Next week, I’m participating in the Book to Course Virtual Summit, a free event hosted by Teachable.

The summit gathers 25 world-class entrepreneurs, New York Times bestselling authors, CEOs and influencers to give you behind-the-scenes access and insight into how they run their business and how you can build your own with an online course.

The summit is 100% online, with eight straight days of live online training workshops and panels—once you register for free, you get access to all of them. Here’s the rundown on some of the featured workshops:

May 11: How to Create Your Own Profitable Online Course as a Writer, Author or Blogger featuring Ankur Nagpal
May 11: How to Crack the Bestseller List as a First-Time Author with Neil Pasricha
May 12: How to Transform Your Book into an Online Course with Mariah Coz
May 13: Hack Your Social Marketing: Double Your Traffic & Your Free Time with Laura Roeder of Edgar
May 14: How to Go From Zero to Self-Published Book in 90 Days with Regina Anaejionu
May 15: The Five Most Powerful Ways to Monetize Your Book with Tucker Max
May 16: How to Partner with Influencers to Promote Your Online Course with Navid Moazzez
May 16: How to Self-Publish & Launch Your Book with Pat Flynn & Nathan Barry
May 17: The Rise of the Writer-Entrepreneur, my panel discussion with James Altucher, Mark Dawson and Andrew Warner, with opportunity for Q&A.

These authors, writers and entrepreneurs are going to pull back the curtains on how they’re growing their writing businesses. 

After you sign up, you’ll receive a couple of gifts from Teachable—they’re sponsoring the entire event—as well as a workbook to take to your first session. Hope to see you there! Click here to register.