Marketing: Every Novelist Needs an E-mail List

I will be brief. Every novelist needs an e-mail list.

Every novelist. The reason is simple.

E-mail works. That is, it works when you do it right. I’ll grant that it fails miserably when you do it wrong, just like everything else.

Over the past ten years, we authors have been bombarded with a huge laundry list of things we “should” be doing to market our books. We’re supposed to blog. And be active on Facebook. And get into Google Plus. And build a Twitter following. And get on Goodreads (carefully). And run Pinterest boards. And be on Instagram. And get involved in every fancy new wingding gizmo that comes along.

Ouch, that’s a heavy load. Those may all be fine things, but I strongly believe that e-mail is best for actually making the sale when you launch a book. Please note that qualification—when you launch a book.

A book launch is a critical part of your marketing strategy, if you’re traditionally published, because your book only has a short window of time in bookstores before the returns start. 

A book launch is merely very important for indie authors, because you only have 30 days of eligibility for the Hot New Releases lists, and the HNR lists really drive sales.

Let’s not waste time arguing theory. I’ll show you some data from a widely respected marketer—Darren Rowse, the brains behind the ProBlogger.net Website. 

Darren’s one of the best bloggers around. He’s also on various forms of social media. And he’s got an e-mail list.

A couple of years ago, Darren launched an e-book and tracked the results of his marketing efforts. Please read the results here: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2013/06/26/social-media-whats-it-good-for/

I’ll summarize:

     His affiliates accounted for 3% of his sales.

     Social media accounted for 3% of his sales. 

     His blog posts accounted for 7% of his sales.

     E-mail accounted for the remaining 87% of his sales.

Note that his social media efforts included Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Plus. But e-mail by itself was 29 times more effective than all his social media efforts combined.

Note that his e-mail was more than 12 times as effective as his blog posts—and this is Darren Rowse, the ProBlogger guy. Darren blogs for a living. 

This is not a hard call to make. E-mail rocks—for making the sale when you launch a book.

I’ll repeat one thing. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do any sort of promotion. If you do e-mail wrong, you’re not going to get good results. So do e-mail right. 

You YA writers may be grumbling that teens don’t read e-mail. That may be true, but plenty of adults are in your target audience, including me. And adults read e-mail. Your best way to sell to them is via e-mail. You might need to find another way to reach those teens.

When I teach marketing at writing conferences, I try to spend a full hour on e-mail marketing. Because it’s critically important. 

But it’s been a few years since I discussed e-mail marketing in this e-zine. Many of you haven’t been subscribing that long, so this may be new to you. Expect me to talk more about e-mail over the next few issues.

When you have a good strong e-mail list, it’s like having your own personalized version of BookBub that you can use whenever you want.

How cool is that?

We’ll continue this discussion over the next several issues of this e-zine.

Bottom line for now: Every novelist needs an e-mail list. 

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 12,000 readers. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visitwww.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Craft: Writing Deeper Characters by Randy Ingermanson

Deep characters are not deep merely because there’s something magical about them that sets them apart from other characters.

Deep characters are deep because the author chose to go deep with them. The author could have chosen to go shallow, and the result would have been shallow characters.

Any character can be a deep character. Any character can be a shallow character. 

It’s not about who your characters are, it’s about what you choose to do with them.

I’m convinced that a very powerful way to go deep with your characters is to interview them.

Set up the interview in Q and A format. Ask your character a question. Then get inside the character’s skin and answer the question—in that character’s voice.

This works for several reasons:

It Alternates Between Analysis and Creation

Asking questions gives you a chance to put on your analyst’s hat. You get to ask the hard questions about motivation and values. You can probe as much as you want into your character’s mind.

Answering those hard questions gives you a chance to put on your creative hat. You get to become the character, exactly as you would if you were writing a scene from that character’s point of view.

But in an interview, you don’t have to worry about action and description. You can focus on speech patterns, mental patterns, emotional patterns. 

And you don’t have to worry about being “interesting” to the reader, because nobody will ever read your character interview. The interview is just for you to get to know your character.

It Gives You Practice Being Each Character

This is essential, because as you write each scene, you need to become the point-of-view character for the duration of that scene. You need to slip inside that character’s skin. You need to convince your reader that she is that character.

This is not easy. It’s a little easier in first-person than in third-person. And when you’re interviewing your character, you’re always answering the questions in first person. You’re speaking as that character. So this is your chance to practice. But this is not mere practice time. This is practice time that also teaches you new things about your character.

One of the hardest things to do in fiction is to develop unique voices for each character. It’s way too easy to have all your characters sound alike. The interview is an opportunity to develop all the little verbal tics for each character. You’ll learn which words they overuse. What grammatical liberties they take. How they think and how they express themselves.

It’s Not Your Fault

When you interview your character, you can let him go off on tangents and take all the wrong turns that are bound to happen as you learn who your characters are. After all, your characters are human, so they’re bound to make mistakes.

But it’s them making the mistakes, not you. So if they go off into left field, you can rein them in, delete all the dumb things they said, and start over. And it’s all their fault, not yours.

Yes, this is a psychological game you’re playing with yourself. No, there’s nothing wrong with this. Any time you can make it safe to take chances in your story development, that’s a good thing.

It’s Fun

Interviewing your character is incredibly fun. And incredibly powerful. If you’ve never tried it, you’re missing out on something amazing. 

You can do this at any point in your story development. It’s especially helpful if you’re still planning the story, or if you’ve painted your story into a corner, or if you’re worried that your character’s motivations don’t make sense.

Try it now. Pick any one of your characters. Open a document and start asking questions. Ask one, then answer it right away. Then ask another, and answer it right away. Keep doing that until you’re done. You’ll know when you’re done. Your instincts are smart about being done.

If you don’t enjoy the process, then don’t do it again.

But I bet you will. I bet if you try this once, you’ll be hooked for life.

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 10,000 readers. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visitwww.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Organization: Revisiting the 500 Club by Randy Ingermanson

In April, I wrote a column titled The 500 Club that got quite a lot of attention. Plenty of writers found it a compelling idea and began trying it out.

The basic concept was that you commit to writing 500 words on your novel every day for the rest of your life.

At first glance, that sounds like too small of a commitment to be useful. 500 words is not a lot. At that rate, it would take 200 days to write a novel of 100,000 words.

But the point is that it isn’t a lot of words. It’s doable. You could do it every day, probably in half an hour to an hour. And once you’ve done 500 words, you’ve greased your inner genius and you just might write another 500 or 1000 or even 2000 extra words. 

And that’s significant. Stephen King says in his book On Writing that he writes about 2000 words every day. Which is why he gets so many books written every year.

The 500 Club was a good idea, and I’ve been trying it over the last few months. It works very, very well at ramping up your productivity, but there are some speed bumps I’ve found along the way. Here are some of them:

Speed Bump #1: Travel Craziness

Whenever I travel, my schedule goes right out the window. I find it impossible to work on airplanes, so I’m likely to fail to write on the travel day.

Furthermore, once I get there, my schedule is usually packed from early morning until late at night. This is especially true at writing conferences, where it’s not uncommon for me to be talking with other writers from 7 AM until well after midnight. And if I have a choice between talking to writers and working, I’m going to talk to writers. Yeah, that’s a personal weakness, but it’s the way I’m made.

Since I travel about half a dozen times per year, usually for about a week at a time, I’m going to have giant holes in my writing schedule. I haven’t found any way to beat this. I’m not very disciplined.

My answer to this speed bump is to just plan for it. I plan to NOT write while traveling. I plan to get back in the groove of writing immediately after the trip.

I also have learned to limit my travel to just a few trips per year. This is one reason that I regularly turn down invitations to teach at conferences. Because I can’t do them all and still have time to write.

Speed Bump #2: The Daily Grind

Writing every day, seven days per week, 52 weeks per year, is a grind. After a while, it feels like a routine. It stops being fun.

And writing is supposed to be fun. Writing is a vacation. Writing is pleasure. Writing is a grand escape from life.

If writing stops being fun, then all is lost.

My answer to this is to plan for a weekly break. Normally, this is Sunday for me. That’s my day off from writing. Sometimes I also take Saturday off, when there’s a major project to be done out in the yard. Which is often during the summer.

A weekly break makes writing fresh and new again on Monday morning. 

Speed Bump #3: Production is More Than Just Writing

The point of the 500 Club is to keep producing more first-draft copy. First-draft copy is great, but it’s only one step in the chain to getting a book published.

I wear a lot of hats. I publish this e-zine. I have two web sites. I run the software division of a biotech company in San Diego. I own a couple of acres of massively fertile land in a state where it never stops raining and weeds never stop growing. 

And I act as publisher for my books, which means I’m in charge of hiring my editor, my proofreader, and my graphic designer. I also format my own books and do the marketing. I’ve got 2 to 3 hours per day that I can work on my novels. Period. There isn’t any more juice to be squeezed out of the lemon.

I’m a one-track mind kind of guy, so when I’m writing the first draft, the 500 Club is brilliant. It keeps me churning out copy every day, and I average thousands of words per day. But I can only do that if I’ve first planned out the novel (using my Snowflake Method, of course). And once the first draft is done, I don’t need new words—I need to edit the old ones. Severely.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of days when writing 500 words would be a bad idea. On those days, I need to be focused on other parts of the production schedule.

My answer to this is to modify the 500 Club to the 30-Minute Club. It’s the same basic idea, but instead of setting a very low quota for words, I set a very low quota for time. I’ll work 30 minutes per day on the next task on the production schedule. That might be Snowflaking, first-drafting, revision, polishing, proofreading, working with my graphic designer, formatting, or marketing. 

30 minutes per day is easy. But of course I’m undisciplined and I just can’t stop at 30 minutes, so I’m likely to go on for two or three hours. The point is to make it seem easy so I can get rolling. Then inertia keeps me rolling.

Your Homework

Now how about you? What speed bumps do you have in your writing life? And what can you do to get past those speed bumps so you can keep your writing career rolling as fast as possible?

3) Craft: Planning Your Series

In June, I talked about adopting a virtual mentor, Russell Blake. Russell is the author of a number of action/adventure novels, and he’s got a page on his web site that spells out “How to sell loads of books.”   

Plenty of people will give you marketing advice, but not all advice is good advice. What I can tell you is that since I decided to do nothing except follow Russell’s advice, my sales have skyrocketed.

The #2 item on Russell’s list is to write a series. Because readers like series. And the smart author gives her target audience what it wants.

Fortunately, I already had a series of books on my backlist, just waiting to be published. In May, I released my City of God series and then in early June (following Russell’s advice) made the first one permanently free on all the major retailers.

It’s done so well that it now makes great sense to continue that series. This was a series that my publisher abandoned mid-stream ten years ago. That was before e-books were popular. That was before permafree was a viable discoverability strategy.

So I’ve been thinking lately about how to plan out a series before you write it. I can’t recall seeing much advice on writing series, and I haven’t done much teaching on the subject myself. So this is fairly new territory for me. 

Here are some of my thoughts. I’ll probably add to these in coming months, because I’m working on a new series right now, which means I’ll be thinking intensively about how a series works:

A Series is a Mini-Brand

Many authors HATE the idea of being branded. They don’t want to be typecast for life. A brand is an unspoken contract with your target audience that “this is the kind of novel I write.”

A series gives you all the advantages of branding, but without being typecast to the end of time. 

In a series, your contract with your target audience only extends through the end of the series. Once you finish the series, you can go write a different series with a different brand. 

The best of both worlds, no?

Story Arc or No Story Arc?

Some series have a story arc and some don’t. Those that have a story arc may have a tightly wired arc or one that’s more loosely bound.

In the epic series The Lord of the Rings, the three books are just one gigantic story broken into three volumes. That’s a very tight story arc.

In the seven-book Harry Potter series, each book stands on its own as a story, with its own beginning, middle, and end. But each book also moves forward the larger story about the quest of Lord Voldemort to achieve total world domination. Every book is essential to that larger story, but you could read any one of the books in isolation and still feel like you read a complete novel. To enjoy the series, you’d need to read them in order.

In Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, she follows a string of Roman aristocrats in a sweeping historical saga over several decades, covering the lives of Gaius Marius, Cornelius Sulla, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and Mark Antony. In principle, this series could go on for hundreds of years, telling a continuous story that focuses on a sequence of characters. The story arc would be pretty thin, because it wouldn’t follow a single character, but you could pick it out. 

In the Jack Reacher series, by Lee Child, each book stands on its own, with no real need for any of the others. There’s some continuity between the various novels. But you could read the books in pretty much any order, because there’s no larger story. You could remove any of the novels and the others would still make exactly the same sense. Reacher just wanders from place to place, having adventures that aren’t related in any way.

Your series can have a story arc if you want, but you aren’t required to have one. You just need to decide up front what you want to do.

Character Growth or No Character Growth?

Most novels have a character who grows or changes in some way. 

In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits learn that they are powerful. Frodo grows so much that in the end he’s too big for Middle Earth. Sam grows from a simpleton gardener boy into a brave and moderately wise hobbit who serves as mayor. His carefree friends Pippin and Merrie also grow into bold, adventurous hobbits, able to lead their people in battle.

In The Harry Potter series, Harry, Ron, Hermione, and their friends grow into adulthood, always taking on tasks a bit beyond their range. Ultimately, they emerge as powerful young wizards and witches, able to stand up to Lord Voldemort. That’s some serious growth.

In the Jack Reacher series, Reacher doesn’t really change at all. He’s a wandering vagabond with no responsibilities at the beginning of the series, and he’s the same wandering vagabond all the way through. 

Should you have your characters grow in your series, or shouldn’t you?

If you’re writing a short series, you’ve got room for your characters to grow. As the series gets longer, there’s less and less room, especially if they’re adults. With teen characters, you’ve got more latitude to grow them, but eventually, they’re going to have to become adults and then you’re going to run out of space for growth. This is why YA series can be longer and still show characters constantly growing.

If you’re writing a really long series, (common for mystery and adventure writers), then it probably makes sense to have little or no character growth. Your lead character may age, but she doesn’t change emotionally or psychologically. 

This is something you should decide in advance. If you start your series with your characters growing in each of the first few novels, you may run out of room for them to grow, which will force you to make some changes in mid-series. Either you’ll have to add new characters (who can grow in the later books) or you’ll need to transition to stories in which your characters don’t mature any more.

Are you working on a series right now? What’s the mini-brand for this series? Do you know the overall story arc for the series (if any)? Have you made a decision on whether your characters will show growth in each novel?

I expect we’ll return to this subject in coming months, as I think harder about what makes a series tick.

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 9,000 readers. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Writing Tips - Organization, Craft, and Marketing by the Snowflake Guy

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 9,000 readers. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Organization: You Don't Know What You Don't Know

Whether you’re an indie author or you’re pursuing the traditional publishing path, you have to make some key decisions about how much help you need. 

One of those decisions is the question of whether to use a proofreader. 

This decision is a little different, depending on which road you take to publication. So let’s look at your two major options:

Traditional Publishing

If you’re submitting your work to traditional publishers, then whatever you submit needs to be as good as you can make it. That means no spelling errors. No grammatical errors. No punctuation errors.

Some writers think that a publisher ought to make allowances for a few typos, because after all, they have proofreaders, right?

Yes, they do, but it just looks lame if you submit a proposal or manuscript riddled with a zillion typos. It cuts your odds of getting accepted, and your odds were already long.

Proofreading is not your agent’s job. Your agent will probably help you polish the content of your proposal and will probably point out craft issues with your sample chapters. But it’s just not your agent’s job to proofread your work. It’s your job. 

Either you’re good at proofreading or you’re not. If you are, then do it yourself and make it perfect. If you’re not, then you should hire somebody.

What if you’re not sure? 

In that case, I’d strongly suggest you hire somebody.

The reason is because you don’t know what you don’t know. And you can’t see what you can’t see. 

You might think that the phrase you want is “one in the same,” when it’s actually “one and the same.” You might think the word you want is spelled “discrete” when the word you mean is actually spelled “discreet.” You might know that the possessive of “it” is “its” but even so, your fingers might type “it’s”—and once you’ve done that, your eyes may skim right past it because it looks so right.

And spell check won’t catch any of these errors.

Indie Publishing

If you’re an indie author, this becomes doubly true, because now you’re the publisher. A traditional publisher would hire at least one proofreader, probably more, to review your manuscript after typesetting. They would also send it to you for review. 

When you’re the publisher, it’s your job to make sure the proofreading gets done. 

I know many indie authors who say this isn’t necessary. They use beta readers. Or they do all the proofreading themselves.

It’s a rare beta reader who’s qualified to do a professional level of proofreading. It’s a fairly rare author who’s qualified.

I’m very good at spelling and I’m fairly good at grammar and punctuation. So it’s a real temptation for me to do this myself.

But I don’t, for a couple of reasons. 

First, I’m a perfectionist. I want my books to be as good as possible. Even one typo is unacceptable to me. 

Second, my eyes just aren’t good enough anymore. The retina in my right eye has a small bubble under it, which means that everything that eye sees is slightly out of focus. My left eye is fine, but my brain has to put together the very different images from my two eyes and make sense of it. And sometimes, it just doesn’t see what’s there. This is very frustrating, but it’s my reality.

I’ve been working on a new indie book on the Snowflake method, which I’ll be releasing soon. I edited it as well as I could. 

Then I hired an experienced freelance editor to give me a high-level revision letter. She gave me several suggestions that were “obvious,” but which I had somehow missed. 

Then I worked the manuscript over another couple of times. Then I proofread it one last time, until it was absolutely perfect in my eyes. 

Then I hired an experienced proofreader, who caught an embarrassing number of mistakes.

You don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t see what you can’t see.

I know an indie author who uses beta readers to do his proofreading. When he released one of his books, I bought it on launch day and read it right away. Good thing I did. 

Midway into the book, I discovered one of those embarrassing spelling errors that you hope never to make in public. 

I emailed the author right away and he fixed it. But it could have caused a bit of backlash from his readers.

I know other authors, both traditional and indie, who believe they are much better at proofreading than they actually are. But even my eyes, fallible as they are, can see problems in their work. And if I can see lots of problems, then there are probably many more.

I’ll say it again, because it’s worth repeating. 

Ewe donut no watt ewe donut no. Yew cant sea wot yew cant sea.

The above paragraph passes spell check. But every word is a typo.

My opinion is that hiring a proofreader is just a standard cost of doing business as a writer.
 

Craft: You Are What You Read?

Years ago I was talking to a fellow novelist whom I’d just met and I asked him what his Top Five favorite novels were.

This is a question I ask writers a lot. I’m always looking for great books, and one place to find them is on the Top Five list of another writer. 

This guy’s answer just about knocked me over. He said, “I don’t read fiction.”

I couldn’t believe it. I asked him if he meant he didn’t read much fiction. 

No, he didn’t read any. He was a nonfiction kind of a guy.

He wrote fiction, but he didn’t read it.

That was years ago, and I haven’t seen anything from him recently.

To put it bluntly, I don’t see that as a recipe for success. If you’re a novelist, you need to be reading fiction.

There’s a saying that “you are what you read,” and I think this is partially true.

If you read great fiction, you’ll absorb some of it, and you’ll become a better writer. You’ll learn what’s possible to do in writing, and it can’t help but expand you as a writer.

But I think it goes beyond that. I recommend reading widely, even if it isn’t great fiction. Because the fact is that you are MORE than what you read. What you read is fuel for your mind—it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

Novelists need to be reading fiction. A lot of fiction. Not just the bestsellers. Obscure stuff. Good fiction. Great fiction. Horrible fiction (not too much of this—if you do manuscript reviews at a writing conference, you’ll see more than you need).

When you read other people’s fiction, you learn things that you couldn’t learn any other way. Because when it comes to the craft of writing, you don’t know what you don’t know. The only way to learn what you don’t know is by reading other people’s work.

For starters, you should read widely in your category. You need to know the rules of your genre—which ones are ironclad and which ones can be bent.

But that’s not enough. 

Read widely outside your genre. Read outside your demographic. Read outside your worldview.

Read romance fiction. Most novels have a romance thread in them, no matter what their category. If you can improve that thread, your story will improve.

Read suspense fiction. Most novels have some element of fear in them. Learn how to do that better and your novel will be better.

Read fantasy. Even if you, personally, would never want to read a vampire or werewolf story, it’s quite possible that one of your characters would. If you understand that character better, then you’ll do a better job writing that character.

Read mysteries. Even if you hate mysteries. Most novels have an element of mystery to them—some secret that needs to be uncovered. If you know how to unwrap that secret, one layer at a time, then your story can only get better.

Read a spy novel. One of your characters is reading a spy novel right now. Do you know what he likes about it?

Read a historical novel. The better you understand history, the better you understand the present.

Read science fiction. You might learn a bit of science, if it’s a hard science fiction novel. But for sure, you’ll expand your universe a bit. Never hurts.

Read YA fiction. It’ll give you insights into your younger characters. It might give you some insights into a few young adults in your life.

Read women’s fiction. If you’re a guy, you’ll understand women better, which is good all by itself. If you’re a guy writing fiction, you’ll understand your readers better, because the odds are that the majority of your readers are women.

Read fiction that features characters with wildly different beliefs than yours. I understand hyper-capitalists better after reading Ayn Rand. I understand Jews better after reading Chaim Potok. I understand Wiccans better after reading S.M. Stirling’s apocalyptic series that begins with Dies the Fire. I understand Muslims better after reading Khaled Hosseini’s book The Kite Runner. I understand fundamentalists better after reading the first book in the Left Behind series. 

The better you understand your characters, the better your novel will be. 

Read bad fiction. Yes, really. If you find a particularly bad piece of writing, read it all the way to the end. Figure out why it’s so awful. Resolve never to do the things that the author is doing.

I confess that I have a favorite bad novel, written by a high-school kid who graduated a couple of years behind me. This thing is fearsomely, wonderfully, amazingly awful. It’s bad on every possible level.

No, I won’t tell you the title. Find your own dreck. I’m keeping mine a secret. My family knows which book I’m talking about, and they’ve all read it. We sometimes quote particularly horrible lines at the dinner table.

There are a billion ways to write great fiction, but only about a dozen ways to write truly horrible fiction. Good writing starts by learning to avoid  that dirty dozen of Desperately Horrible Writing Follies.

If you’ve read some really awful fiction, I guarantee it’ll improve your writing. But there’s such a thing as too much of a bad thing, so stop when you’re had enough. A little goes a long way.

Read a little bad fiction and a ton of good fiction.

Reading fiction is the foundation of writing fiction. Make your foundation broad and strong.
 

Marketing: Every Writer Needs a Mastermind

The more I see of how successful authors work, the more I think that it’s imperative to be part of a community of writers. 

You might think that once you get published, all the other authors out there are your competition, and you ought to do your best to avoid giving them one speck of help.

But that’s not what seems to work. Over and over, I see successful authors banding together into small and large groups to help each other figure things out.

Small groups of five to ten people are often called Mastermind groups, but in my opinion, even a large community of a few hundred can function as a Mastermind, if it’s run well.

You can think of it as “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” if you want to. That’s kind of a self-centered approach to life, and I think it misses the point. It’s fun to help others. It’s fun to hang out with similar people. And it’s way cool that doing good leads to doing well.

Based on what I’ve seen, I’d say that you’re much more likely to do well in marketing your work if you spend some time and effort helping other authors. 

I belong to several small and medium size groups of writers on Facebook. Last month when I was trying to get my novel TRANSGRESSION permafree on Amazon, I ran into several glitches. I posted some questions on a couple of these groups and got help within minutes. 

One of my small Facebook groups has been terrific in helping me evaluate cover designs. I’m not great at understanding what makes a good cover, but I can post several concepts that my graphic designer gives me and get feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and which direction to go next. This is huge for me.

Of course, in turn, I give a lot of techie advice on formatting and marketing to my Facebook groups. I have expertise in those areas.

In marketing, 1 + 1 = 10. So if you help a friend, and they help you, then you both wind up massively ahead.

If you’re trying to market your work and you’re not making much progress, then the very first thing I’d recommend is to join forces with other writers similar to you.

There’s power in numbers. There’s wisdom in a group. 

And yes, you need to be wary of those annoying people who think that tearing down others is the quickest way up the ladder. You also have to be wary of the people who believe they know more than they actually do.

But I’d say the benefits of a group far outweigh the hazards. Successful authors hang out with other successful authors. Success breeds success. It just does.

The key thing is to find authors similar to you. Similar in category. Similar in outlook. Similar in level of success. They can’t all be identical to you, but general similarity with a bit of diversity seems to be the best.

Theresa Stillwagon Shares her Journey to Publication

Today Theresa shares her journey to publication and why she writes contemporary romances. Be sure to leave a comment for a chance to win one of her ebooks. Take it away, Theresa!

I don't remember a time when I wasn't writing.

My first attempt at writing a book was a historical, and I wrote it long-hand. I was in my mid-teens. I don't think I wrote more than the first chapter.

My second attempt was in the mid 1980s. That one was a romantic suspense I planned on sending to Harlequin. The best thing I could say about that one is I finished it. Every mistake a new author could do, I did.

The next few years were a learning experience for me. One thing I learned was that if I did a plot outline for a book, I would be too bored with it to actually write it. I also learned to show, not tell, to write believable dialogue, to start the book in an interesting place, to know the characters inside and out, but one thing I wished I knew then that I know now is -- not to be afraid to show your work to someone else.

For years I wrote alone, no one even knew I was a writer. It was as if I was ashamed of it. I wrote for ten or so years, finishing three or four books and starting twice as many without 'the end', before I finally trusted my writing enough to let others read it. I was nervous, yes, but I didn't need to be. I still call those first critique partners my on-line friends. Almost every one of them is now a published writer, and I'm proud of that.

A second thing I wish I knew then was to ignore the bad comments of others. People have been telling me my whole life I'll never amount to anything. It wasn't until I decided to stop listening to those negative people that I found out I could.

What would be my advice to a new writer?

Don't be afraid to put your work out there. I started writing almost thirty years ago, and I've only been published since 2008. If I'd listened to my own heart, my own mind, I might have been published years earlier.

You have to believe in your dreams.


Tell us more about your work and your favorite genre.

I love history, yet I could never write an historical.

I love romantic suspense, but I have a hard time keeping track of the suspense part of the story.

And, as for paranormal, fantasy, or steampunk genres, I'm way too lazy to build a proper set of rules and customs to make the story believable.

So why do I write contemporary romance?

I think writing in the same period as you live frees you to add a bit of suspense, or a ghost, or a mystery, without having to worry too much about research.

Basically I write contemporary romance because I'm a lazy researcher. As I'm writing and I come to a spot where I need to research something, I stop what I'm doing and Google the problem. When I have the facts straight on the subject, I go back to writing. In the book I'm writing now, I needed to know the process on how a woman became a Catholic sister. I stopped writing and Googled the town she lived in and found the Sisters of St. Joseph, and I found all the answers I needed. I needed to be sure she could walk away from it. (And, yes, she can.)

For an older book, A Betrayal of Friendship, I stopped writing and researched the state of Alaska and flying. I found out more than I needed to know about the state, but I also found out something interesting about me. I really would like to learn how to fly. (Maybe someday, I'll do just that.)

One bad thing about writing this way is I'm easily distracted. I really need to force myself to write. In those times, I disconnect from the internet and just write.