Defending First-Person POV
By: Ginger | Posted on January 3, 2020
Many authors are so used to writing from one particular point of view (POV) that they never give any consideration to switching things up. But while there is something to be said for writing in the style you’re most comfortable in, limiting yourself means limiting your ability to tell your story in the most effective way possible – so it’s worth understanding the merits of alternative styles. For example, if you always write stories in third-person POV, then you may not be aware of some of the benefits to writing in first-person. Describing things through your character’s eyes can be an incredibly powerful narrative technique. The more time I’ve spent editing and reviewing other author’s books, the more I’ve come to differentiate the storytelling aspect of a novel, and the writing part of it. The story is what grabs people – hooks them into the lives and fortunes of your… Read More >
5 New Year’s Resolutions for Writers
By: Ginger | Posted on December 27, 2019
Sticking to a plan is essential when you’re an author, especially if it’s not your full time job and you’re finding you need to juggle writing with all sorts of other things in your life. So start 2020 off right by prioritizing what it is that makes you a successful writer, and resolving to actually do those things regularly and consistently! The end of the year is, to most of us, a time of reflection. We see what aspects of our year went well, and which went badly, and a lot of us write a list of ‘new year’s resolutions’ to follow to give the upcoming year a better outcome. For me, 2019 saw a dip in my overall book sales, but a more consistent outcome to the books I published. I had a good period of book sales which was directly attributed to a process I stuck to –… Read More >
Give Your Audience What They Want
By: Ginger | Posted on December 20, 2019
Santa may only bring gifts once a year, but as an author, your job is delivering what your readers want all year round. That’s why it’s important to understand your market and your genre, and meet the expectations of your audience. That doesn’t mean selling out or having to change your actual story, just making sure you’re telling it in the most effective way. And to help make our point, we have a few popular examples of where this has gone wrong, and when it’s been done right. Readers expect something from you – so, successful writers don’t disappoint. The other day, I half-watched The Mandalorian, on Disney+, since my wife was watching it while tidying up. To her annoyance, I kept predicting what would happen next – even down to the specific lines of dialogue – and eventually she switched it off and snapped: “Well, you might make fun… Read More >
5 Tips for Social Media that Sells Books
By: Ginger | Posted on December 13, 2019
The most successful authors I know have one thing in common, they not only spend time on social media, but they do it right. For some, social media comes easy but for others, it’s a grind. There are ways to make it easier, though, and even if you just do a little it’ll be better than doing nothing at all. But you can’t just spam them with links to buy your latest book, there’s more to it than that… There’s a lot of money in social media… apparently. But a lot of authors I speak to don’t seem to be seeing any of it, or don’t know how to leverage their social media platforms to generate engagement and sales. One common refrain is: “I don’t really know what to post” and for that reason, they don’t post anything. Other authors spend time and effort posting links to their books and… Read More >
How to Use Time in Your Stories
By: Ginger | Posted on December 6, 2019
You’ve likely heard someone discussing whether a book had a good or bad flow often enough that you understand how important the concept is to get right – but there are many factors that contribute to it. Stilted writing, repetitive ideas, even word choice can all break the flow of your story, as can grander things like pacing. You want your reader to be able to move easily through your story, be drawn in, follow along, and ultimately arrive satisfied at the end. So while it may seem risky, even counter-intuitive, to write a story that doesn’t flow through time in that same straightforward, linear fashion, when done right it can be a fabulous technique to add to your author toolbox. Books and movies are full of examples of non-linear timelines used to enhance their story, and today we’re going to explain the whys and hows so that you can… Read More >
Are You Getting Your Categories Right?
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on November 29, 2019
Which category your book is listed under can have a massive influence on how well your book sells, so it’s worth making sure you get it right. Understanding how Amazon organizes their virtual bookstore – and more importantly what factors they use to determine what goes where – can help increase your sales by making sure more of the right customers are seeing your book. Before I write any author blogs, I’m always struck with a dilemma: Is what I’m going to write about too obvious? Does everybody know about it? Normally, if I take the plunge and write the blog anyway, it all becomes worthwhile when I receive an email from a reader saying: “Thank you! I never knew that before.” I face a similar dilemma with this blog post – which addresses the topic of categories. Categories are the silo your self-published book falls into in Amazon’s systems… Read More >
The Paperback Problem – Print or Not?
By: Ginger | Posted on November 22, 2019
For some authors, they’re first and foremost. For others, it’s an afterthought. Today, we ask where physical, paperback or hardback copies of your books fit into your self-publishing strategy. Ginger uses images of one of his own books as an example, but if you’d like to share pictures of your own physical books – plus any tips or tricks you have for printing them – we’d love you to hear from you in the comments section below. “There’s nothing like a real book,” one of my old college buddies recently told me. “The feel of it in your hands. The smell of the paper. You’ll never catch me reading anything on a Kindle.” We’d studied English literature together – so far from sounding erudite and cultured, I argued that his position was kind of arrogant. In refusing to read eBooks, my oh-so-cultured friend cut himself off from 37% of fiction… Read More >
10 Software Essentials for Authors
By: Hidden Gems | Posted on November 15, 2019
With the rise of self-publishing, there’s a growing differentiation between people who just publish – and the truly successful authors who produce books that are indistinguishable in quality from those of the top 5 publishers. One of the ways in which they achieve this is by using the same tools as publishers do; or often, even better versions of them. Here are some software essentials as recommended by our community of Hidden Gems authors – which could empower you to add additional speed, precision and polish to your published works. Vellum It’s a cliche that writers tend to favor Apple products, but in the case of this highly-touted formatting software, the fact that it’s only available on MacOS suggests there’s some validity to that. Vellum is designed to streamline the entire process of formatting books – including inserting links and pretty flourishes, assembling box sets and store links, and even… Read More >
Stretching Your Ad Budget (Part 3) – Increasing Visibility
By: Ginger | Posted on November 8, 2019
In the first two parts of this series, we discussed a couple of different strategies you might want to use your marketing dollars for, but at the end of the day the goal of any author comes down to one of two things (and often both). Selling more books, and getting more readers. In either case, increasing the visibility of your book is key – you run ads on your books so that more people see them, you increase your readership so more people know about you and talk about you, which also leads to more sales and more readers. Running ads to sell books or grow your subscriber base are great ways to do this, but there is another way you can make readers more aware of your book – by weaving its presence directly into the digital algorithms of Amazon itself. Each of the parts of this series… Read More >
Make Amazon’s Sales Rank Work for You
By: Ginger | Posted on November 1, 2019
If you’re an author that ignores the Amazon Best Seller Rank (ABSR or Sales Rank) because you think it just exists to stroke the ego of successful authors or because you don’t think you have enough sales to ever get to the top, then it may be time to reconsider and start paying attention to it. Because even though only the #1 spot bestows a bestseller label to your book, just getting in the top 100 can be massively beneficial to your sales. Think of it as free promotion targeting all the readers that search for new books by browsing the top lists (which a great many do). The best part is that there isn’t just one bestseller, or one top list, but many of them – one for each genre and many sub-categories within those genres – which means that you don’t need thousands (or even hundreds) of sales… Read More >
