Ksenia Anske's Blog, page 21

5 marketing victories I won and learned from

Illustration by Cécile Dormeau

By your request! From eating forbidden apples to riding airborne sharks! While thoroughly naked! Here comes the companion post to the post on five marketing sins I committed and learned from. This time about five marketing victories. So, take off your pants, hold on to the fins (or the tail, or the sides, or the many rows of teeth), and let's take a wild ride into the vast marketing sky the color of nipple-pink.

Despite all my marketing mistakes, I have intuit...

5 marketing sins I committed and learned from

Illustration by Marie Bretin

Let's get naked here, shall we? I will bare my soul (and my bum) and tell you about the horrible marketing sins I committed, and you will gloat and snicker and hopefully learn on my mistakes ("Don't eat that apple, Ksenia!" you'll scream. And I'll say, "TOO LATE," eat half and force the other half down your throat.)

So. Marketing. Marketing is like breathing when you self-publish. Without marketing you won't sell, and without selling you won't thrive. And withou...

Writing through painful memories without becoming too distressed

Illustration by Natalie Foss

Antonina Mareglia wrote: "A blog post about how to write through painful memories without becoming too distressed would be very useful for me. People who meet me say I should write about my life, my childhood, but I struggle...I get too upset and then always worry I'm not remembering anything honestly or clearly. Your insight would be appreciated."

Dear Antonina, here is how I have dealt with this need to be absolutely correct, absolutely exact, and so on (still...

13 secrets of great dialogue

Illustration by James Joyce

Most of these are borrowed from Dialogue by Robert McKee (which I highly recommend and which I'm rereading at the moment). And some come from regurgitated stuff in my head—things I'd picked up from various sources over the years. You can argue that there is no such thing as perfect dialogue, but I'd argue back that as much as dialogue can be fluid and nebulous, it must have a form. It can fluctuate within that form, but without form it bogs down the narrative wi...

An editing example: bad vs. good

Illustration by Billy Nunez

On the heels of the previous post on editing lessons, Howard Oberg asked me to provide "some examples of bad vs. good." In Howard's own words: "As a noob writer sometimes I don't even know crap writing if it hit me in the face." I asked Howard if he'd like to serve as a lab rabbit in this exercise. He agreed: "A chance to be humiliated before the masses. Sure, why not." We sealed the deal with coffee, and below you will find the opening to Howard's short story C...

Lessons learned while editing

Illustration by Chia-Chi Yu

I'm editing the manuscript of my last client right now, as editing proved to me very painful because I'm such a perfectionist. I've been told I'm very good at editing, as good as a pro (which made my jaw drop, because I'm a total rookie), and I made money. I could continue making money editing, but it's not what I want to do. I want to write books and publish books and make money selling books, so I have deleted the editing page from my site, and I have only one...

The value of a book giveaway

Illustration by Kirstie Edmunds

What if I told you that the number of books you give away isn't enough? And I mean actual paperbacks, not ebooks. What if I told you that if you're cringing about the idea of parting with hundreds of your books for free, "You know nothing, John Snow?" What if I said 1,000 might be the number to come close to yield what you desire—albeit only the beginnings of it—which is, the road out of obscurity?

Yeah, I know. I had my hair move on my head too after I recen...

10 tools that help me sell more books

As you have probably noticed, I have switched my blog commenting system from native Squarespace to Disqus. And you have also probably noticed that if you hang out on my site for a while, a popup will tell you not to kill me for a popup but instead to subscribe to my fabulous newsletter. This is all part of what I told you I'd do: focus on selling my books. You see, this May 15th it's been 5 years since I started writing full-time, and though I soared at first (there was lots of interest in m...

4 tricks to motivate yourself TO FINISH THAT NOVEL

Illustration by Phoebe Summers

I'm struggling with finishing Draft 5 of TUBE. I've been writing it for over a year now, and new stories are crowding it out of my mind, but every day I get up and I know I have to finish it. It's an important story—for me and for you—and so it's important I do a good job. But man, how do I love procrastinating on it, and how hard it is to get myself in gear! Once I start, I forget my fears, and it's easy. Starting is the hard part. So I came up with four way...

The 5-layer manuscript revising process

Illustration by Michael Nÿkamp

This is nothing new, actually, just an approach I'll try with the final draft of TUBE to make it as good as I possibly can before sending it off to Sarah for editing. Lots of writers do it. So I'm jumping on the wagon to join them. The idea is simple: instead of going through the manuscript draft by draft like I did before, revising everything as I go, this time, after Draft 5 is done, I will read it 5 more times, from beginning to end, each time focusing on...