Jennifer Ellis's Blog, page 10

The First Two Months of Publishing

I am taking a short break in my marketing primer series as I have a big promotion coming up on February 17th and as a result should be able to give you more accurate details with regard to the effectiveness of the next four marketing strategies on my marketing list in two weeks.

In the meantime, my book is now two months old. I’m not sure if it has quite got its legs underneath it yet, but it has managed to teeter about the room a couple of times without taking out the coffee table.

These are...

Marketing Your Book – A Primer – Part Three

My apologies for the brief blogging hiatus. I spent the last several weeks working, watching my children’s ski competitions and finishing the final major edits to my next novel In the Shadows of the Mosquito Constellation.

Given that these blog posts were getting rather long, I am going to start focusing on three marketing techniques a week instead of six and spread this series of posts over a few more weeks.

So this week we are focusing on:

Participating in social media groups with other writer...

Marketing Your Book – A Primer – Part Two

Okay, so this week I will focus on the next six items in my long list of potential ways to market your book that I provided last week. The next six approaches on the list included:

Your blogYour platform/social media presenceYour email listTweeting/Facebooking/Google+ing about your bookReviewsBlog ToursYour Blog

Photo Credit: .aditya. via Compfight

Okay so we all know the importance of having a blog, right? And I just to be clear here, I am differentiating a blog from a more static website, o...

Marketing Your Book – A Primer – Part One

Making your book stand out in a crowd is not easy. Given that I an information sorter for my day job, I found it helpful for my own purposes to organize and analyze the marketing options available to writers. Below are the broad categories of marketing as I see them. Note that I am using the term marketing very loosely. Some of these categories are not ‘true’ marketing, but all contribute to your overall likelihood of book sales.

Don McCullough/Flickr

The quality of your book itselfYour next...

I’m a Writer (and I’m Proud)

January 1st: The time of resolutions, of living cleaner, living better, doing better, getting up at dawn to write (which will never happen), drinking less (also unlikely), and just improving my general personhood.

I don’t often make New Year’s resolutions. But on the eve of a brand new year, I do usually give some thought as to how I could do things better, how I could be happier, and how I could make the others around me happier too. In reality, I do this much of the year, but I give this cat...

After You have a Published Novel

Eight things I learned in the first two weeks of publishing

When I first started writing seriously about six years ago, I had no idea what the publishing world was like. I thought that as with many pursuits, if one had some ability and worked diligently at it for several years, that success, at least in some reasonable form, would happen.

I did learn, rather quickly, that this was not the case. That there were literally hundreds of thousands of people with the same goals with respect to their w...

Why I Write...or Girls in Science

Girls still staying away from the hard sciences

In an article entitled "Missing From Science Class", the New York Times reported this week, that despite modest gains, women are underrepresented in the fields of science and technology – particularly the more physical sciences, such as physics and computer science. In an earlier article, Eileen Pollack noted that only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in the United States are awarded to women, and only 14 percent of physics professors in the United S...

Proofreading

Nine things I learned about proofreading in the last two months

I have spent the last two months working with a copyeditor and two proofreaders on my novel A Pair of Docks. I am a fairly clean writer. I do not usually have run-on sentences, I can spell, I generally have subject-verb agreement and I know how to use most major punctuation marks (although I still struggle a bit with commas, em dashes and colons). In my day job, I often work as an editor and proofreader of technical writing. I tho...

Dialogue Tags

Don't we use said anymore?

So I was told, emphatically, by a editor that I did not vary my use of dialogue tags sufficiently - that I used "said" far too often and that I should employ a myriad of other tags (muttered, exclaimed, protested, begged etc.). I was taken aback by this as the instruction I had always received was that you should use said most, if not all, the time. Asked is also occasionally okay, as is the use of no dialogue tag (if it is clear who is speaking) and the use of actio...

Setting up a Facebook Author Page

I've been trying to decide whether to set up a Facebook Author page for my writing. I have a website, a personal Facebook account, a
LinkedIn account and a Twitter account. I also dabble in Google+, but I really
haven’t figured out how to use it yet so my apologies if I have inadvertently
not added you to my circles yet (or done anything else that is egregiously
against Google+ etiquette).

To date, I have kept most of my writing information and
updates confined to my website and Twitter account wit...