A Blogging Start-Up Kit

You've never Blogged, Tweeted or Facebooked but now you're ready. What to do?

First, congratulations! This is a big step, it's a lot of work, but if you're a writer, or thinking about becoming a writer, building a platform is expected and essential.

Blogging
It seems that the most popular blogging platforms are www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com. I chose to use Blogger.com rather than Wordpress.com because, while both are free to use, Blogger doesn't make one pay to take down advertisements. I know of people, though, who have a flourishing blog on Wordpress and couldn't be happier with the service.

Google Analytics. This is essential. It shows you, on a month to month basis, how the traffic on your site changes as well as what sort of traffic your site attracts.

Twitter
You have your blog set up so it's time to get a Twitter account. In my opinion, if a writer had to choose between blogging and tweeting, I'd say tweet. After I tweet a link to one of my blog posts I get a spike of traffic that represents folks visiting my site to read the article.

Twitter drives traffic to my blog and my blog gives me a way to share longer pieces of content with my readers, but if I only had a blog ... well, who would read it? My friends and family, sure, but Twitter gives me a way to reach out to people I don't know. It gives me a way to connect with people looking for the kind of content I provide. Okay, that's my plug for Twitter. :)

Before I move on, here are some links to sites that help you gauge what sort of impact your tweets are having:

- Twitter Counter: While you're there, check out Twittercounter's Twitter Profile Checker and get recommendations on what to do to attract more followers.

- Tweetreach.com: Tells you how many people your tweets have reached.

- Topsy Social Analytics: Tells you how many times your tweets were mentioned.

- Klout Score: Klout will give you a score that is based on your Score Analysis, your Network Influence, your Amplification Probability and your True Reach.

- TweetGrader: Gives you a grade out of 100

- TweetStats.com: Lots of interesting stats. For instance, looks at your tweets according to number of tweets and time of day

Facebook
You've got a blog and you're tweeting up a storm, the next step is to take out an account on Facebook. I'm going to admit that I should do more with Facebook so this section is as much for me as it is for anyone.

A little while ago I wrote an article on how to set up a Facebook page. I like fan pages because it removes the uncertainty of whether a writer intends their page for real-life friends only or whether they are inviting anyone who is interested in their work to connect with them.

Content
After you're blogged and tweeted for a bit you'll find yourself looking for new content. I've found the best source of content is other bloggers and news feeds. Below are the sources I've found most useful.

Blogs:
Joe Konrath: A Newbie's Guide to Publishing
Dean Wesley Smith
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Passive Voice Blog @PassiveVoiceBlg

News Sites:
The New Yorker
Salon

Apps:
Hootsuite
Flipboard

Misc:
Google Alerts. Interested in who is talking about you? Your book(s)? To start out with, create an altert containing your name and one for each title you have available.

This post is by no means in-depth. My goal was to give a person new to blogging and tweeting a few useful links, links that I wish I had known about when I started.

Cheers, and good blogging!

The Secret of Amanda Hocking's Success

Kristine Kathryn Rusch hits the nail on the head. In her words, Amanda Hocking has "major storytelling chops".

Critics loathe folks who can tell stories but whose prose isn’t English-major perfect. Once Hocking got her deal with St. Martins, the literary critics all downloaded a copy of her e-books then came out guns blazing, calling St. Martins stupid for buying such a seriously bad writer.

As usual, the major literary critics—the same folks who dismiss James Patterson and Nora Roberts as hacks—fail to understand what readers read for. We don’t read for beautiful language (well, some of us do some of the time.) We read to be entertained. We read to get lost in a good story. We read to forget about the plunge in the Dow and the European Debt Crisis and the war in Afghanistan and the Somali famine. We read so that we can relax after a long day of searching for a job, or trying to figure out which bill to pay, or taking care of our ill parents. We read to go somewhere else.

Hocking takes us there. So does Patterson. So does Nora Roberts. Some do it with better prose than others. But they all take us out of our lives for the time we’re inside the book.

The writers who, year after year, continue to sell books through indie publishing or traditional publishing tell great stories. Bottom line: those writers aren’t really writers. They’re storytellers.

Read the rest of Kristine Rusch's article here: The Business Rusch: Comparisons

When I bought My Blood Approves by Amanda Hocking -- it was the very first ebook I bought, by the way -- I couldn't put it down and finished it that day. Yes, I wanted to find out what happened at the end of the story, but it was more than that. She got me to care about her characters, about her universe.

The Key To Being Talented: Work Hard!

Dean Wesley Smith writes that talent is "only a measure of craft at a certain point in time and nothing more," and that the way you become talented is by hard work and lots of it.

From Dean's blog post:

In school I hated writing because I was so bad at it. If I had listened to all the people who told me I had no talent for writing, I would have quit four decades ago. No, make that five decades ago, because all my early report cards said I had no talent for writing.

Now, after millions and millions of words practiced, many books and stories published, I get comments all the time like, “You are a talented writer, of course you can do it.”

Or one I got the other day. “You have the talent to write fast.”

Well, when I started to get serious about fiction writing, it took me hours and hours to do one 250 word page. Then that page would be so poorly written and riddled with mistakes that it got tossed away more often than not. (Remember, I was working on a typewriter.) Yup, I was a “naturally talented” fast writer. NOT!
....
The real bottom line is that to get past this myth, you have to believe in yourself and ignore everyone else’s belief system about you. Learn from others, but ignore what they say about your “talent.” Because the moment you take that alien belief system into your own mind and believe it, either good or bad, you are doomed.

Although I am a big fan of Dean's blog, this particular blog post is a gem. If you're a writer who has ever been intimidated by the question, "Am I talented?" this is a must-read. Enjoy!

Head on over to Dean's post: Chapter 12: Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: The Myth of Talent

Photo credit: DesignSwan

US Lawsuit Tries To Take A Bite Out Of Apple

Apple Inc. has been accused of price fixing.

Hagens Berman, a consumer rights class-action law firm, today announced it has filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit claiming that Apple Inc. is guilty of illegal price fixing related to the Agency Model for pricing e-books. HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin and S&S are also named in the suit.

Read the rest here: New US Lawsuit Accuses Apple of E-Book Price Fixing

Author Altert: Investigation Into Underpayment of Ebook Royalties

In the past I've written about the growing suspicion among writers that their publishers -- even big 6 publishers -- are under-reporting their ebook royalties, in some cases by a significant margin.

Are Big Six Publishers Stealing Royalties? (April 22, 2011)
Publishers are under-reporting electronic book sales (June 1, 2011)
Writers Despair (June 30, 2011)

Here is an update on the situation. Hagens Berman, a law firm, is

... investigating claims that several large e-book publishers are under-reporting the number of e-books sold, paying authors less than their share of royalties.

E-book authors typically receive royalty statements, which report the number of e-books sold in a specified time period. The authors are paid based on these sales numbers.

According to reports, the so-called “big six” e-book publishers may be using an outdated accounting systems to track the sales of e-books. As a result, some authors have reported various accounting errors on their statements, including the under-reporting of sales of the e-books.

Read the rest of the article here.

This is what Passive Guy, a former attorney, has to say about this:

With those caveats, it appears Hagens Berman is developing a practice that’s focused on big publishing. In the majority of cases, the losses of any single author from something like ebook royalty under-reporting would not justify the cost of mounting a lawsuit to collect royalties. What PG suspects is happening is Hagens Berman is collecting information and possible plaintiffs for a class-action suit on behalf of all authors who have been harmed by ebook royalty shortfalls.

If PG is correct, this is good for authors and bad for big publishers.

What are the implications for authors besides being paid proper ebook royalties? If the agency pricing suit and a class action suit on eroyalties move forward, big publishers will be spending serious money on legal fees and, quite possibly, settlements. We’ve already heard numerous reports that advances are down and we know publishing contracts are becoming more and more onerous. Serious lawsuits accelerate, but don’t change that trend.

If, as PG believes, big publishing is in a financial death/downsizing spiral because of indie publishing, ebooks, Amazon pricing pressure, death of physical bookstores, etc., that spiral will grow tighter if it has large losses in class action suits. You’ll see some consolidation, so unwary authors may end up publishing with a different house than the one who gave them their contract. Bankruptcy is also a possibility, so unwary authors may end up having their books unpublished or poorly published and their copyrights in a legal limbo.

Link to PG's post: Investigation into Underpayment of Ebook Royalties

Here are very informative blog posts PG wrote about this issue:
- All these royalty numbers are just so confusing for us literary types (April 16, 2011)
- Imaginary Sales Numbers on Royalty Statements – An Update (May 1, 2011)
- Publishers are Under-Reporting Ebook Sales (June 1, 2011)
- Random House Royalty Switcheroo (June 29, 2011)

Joanna Pen: How to Podcast

Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn has written two excellent articles on podcasting (see below), and who better to do so than a lady who has created over 100 podcasts. Here are her stats:

there are around 2500 downloads per month of new and old episodes. 60% of the listeners are in the US, with 15% in China and 14% in UK and the rest spread between Australia, Germany, Canada and some other countries.

Joanna's tips:

Just start, even if you don’t know what you are doing. My first interview was with 4 Ingredients author Rachael Bermingham who is HUGE in Australia, self, published and has sold millions of books now. I did it on the landline phone, I held a recorder next to it. I edited in Audacity and loaded the file to my very new and pretty ugly blog (which has since been redesigned). I didn’t know about mics, or Skype or Pamela/ecamm or hosting or anything. Things have changed and here’s how I do it now.

Fear and nerves will always be there. Just do it anyway. I am still nervous before phoning anyone. I have to force myself every time. My heart races, my mouth is dry and I go to the bathroom three times before starting. I also do public speaking and its the same thing with that. But we need to get our ‘breadcrumbs’ of content out there, so it has to be done.

I credit the podcast with the growing success of The Creative Penn because of my ability to network and offer something that many blogs don’t offer i.e. multi-media interviews. I get requests all the time and other people promote the blog because of it. All the people I interview link back to their show so the incoming links have helped my SEO ranking. I have connected with you as listeners – you have heard my voice and laugh and mannerisms and annoying tics for years now. I know some of you have bought my books for which I am very grateful. I am also personally fulfilled by being useful and I feel this is useful to people, so I love to do it. I love to get emails from people who have found the information helpful.

You can learn from everybody. Podcasting is a great way to learn about writing, publishing and book marketing. It’s also an amazing way to network. The people I have had on the podcast I have connected with and got to know more. There is a widening circle of mutual support. I also firmly believe in no snobbery – you can learn from everyone. It doesn’t matter what they have written or done, you can’t underestimate anyone’s experience. You also never know where they will end up.

Links:
The quotations in my blog post are from Joanna's article: What I Have Learned In The Last 2 Years: 100th Podcast Celebration
Joanna has written a not-to-be-missed article on podcasting, How To Create A Podcast, for anyone who has ever enterained the notion.
Joanaa's YouTube feed is here.
I can't remember where I got the link to Joanna Penn's article, but since they write so many great blog posts let me just give a plug to The Passive Voice blog and The Book Designer.

Bookcovers: When Bad Things Happen to Good Authors

Which of these covers looks more professional? Any idea which cover was supplied the publisher and which was commissioned by the author after her rights reverted?

According to Passive Guy, if you guessed that the grainy first picture was from the publisher then you'd be right. The second picture, which I think looks pretty awesome, was commissioned by the author, Grace Draven, when her rights for the book reverted to her. She has since published it for the Kindle.

PG writes:

This cover [the first one, above] is from her publisher and the fuzziness in this clip-art paste-up by somebody who just learned Photoshop is obvious in the original – click here to go to Amazon, then move your mouse to the cover to bring up Look Inside and choose the front cover view. You’ll note how the sophisticated professionals at the publisher got the cover proportions all wrong on Amazon as well.

Here is Grace’s reaction to her first cover: “Fuzzy, pixelated picture with day-glo blue outline on a font design that looked like I was advertising for Dippin Dots Ice Cream.”

The kindle version of Master of Crows looks amazing and I wish Grace Draven every success with her, much better looking, book.

Tips For Writing Well

Looking back at my blogs and tweets over the last couple of days, I realize I've been focused on the subject of good writing. Here are a few tips I've come across:

Blogging Tips from Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger:

1. Make your opinion known
2. Link like crazy
3. Write less
4. 250 Words is enough
5. Make Headlines snappy
6. Write with passion
7. Include Bullet point lists
8. Edit your post
9. Make your posts easy to scan
10. Be consistent with your style
11. Litter the post with keywords

1. Make your opinion known
People like blogs, they like blogs because they are written by people and not corporations. People want to know what people think, crazy as it sounds they want to know what you think. Tell them exactly what you think using the least amount of words possible.

2. Link like crazy.
Support your post with links to other web pages that are contextual to your post.

3. Write Less
Give the maximum amount of information with the least amount of words. Time is finite and people are infinitely busy. Blast your knowledge into the reader at the speed of sound.

4. 250 is enough
A long post is easier to forget and harder to get into. A short post is the opposite.

5. Make Headlines snappy
Contain your whole argument in your headline. Check out National newspapers to see how they do it.

6. Include bullet point lists
We all love lists, it structures the info in an easily digestible format.

7. Make your posts easy to scan
Every few paragraphs insert a sub heading. Make sentences and headlines short and to the point.

8. Be consistent with your style
People like to know what to expect, once you have settled on a style for your audience stick to it.

9. Litter the post with Keywords.
Think about what keywords people would use to search for your post and include them in the body text and headers. make sure the keyword placement is natural and does not seem out of place.

10. Edit your post
Good writing is in the editing. Before you hit the submit button, re-read your post and cut out the stuff that you don’t need.

Read the rest of the article here: Ten Tips for writing a blog post


General Writing Tips

1. Have something to say and say it.
2. Use the active voice.
3. Avoid overusing adverbs and adjectives. Eliminate unnecessary qualifiers such as very, a little, mostly, etc. If removing a word from a sentence doesn't change the meaning of the sentence, then lose the word.
4. Edit ruthlessly. In On Writing Stephen King says that, as a rule of thumb, your second draft should be 10% shorter than the first. (3) and (4) are really the same point, only said different ways.
5. The most important tip of all: Have fun! Don't get so hung up on the rules of good writing that you can't type a darn thing. That's happened to me a few times!

Read more here: 11 Smart Tips for Brilliant Writing

Cheers!

iPad Apps for Writers

I felt it was time for another post about iPad apps. Or, in this case, a post about posts about iPad apps!

1) Debbie Ohi, iPadGirl, has written the most compressive listing of iPad apps for writers I've seen. She breaks her post into sections such as, Writing & Project Management Apps I Use The Most Right Now, and Notetaking Apps For Writers Who Prefer Writing By Hand, to name only two of the seven categories she discusses. She talk about 30+ apps. Well worth the read. Apps discussed: SimpleNote, iAWriter, Notebooks, Pages, Evernote, Appigo's To Do, Elements, Manuscript for iPad, to name only a few.

 Read Debbie's post here: iPad Apps For Writers

2) Although only two iPad Apps are compared, iA Writer and PlainText, I think I would be hard pressed to come up with a better comparison and analysis. As a result of reading this blog post I installed PlainText. It's a great little app and, hey, it's free!

Read Alex Layne's post here: iPad Writing Apps: PlainText vs. Writer

Alex's conclusion?

Honestly, I think both apps are great. PlainText has better organization and Dropbox integration, but Writer has a more focused environment and better typography.

 

Writer Offered Six-Figure Deal After Self-Publishing

I'm a big fan of Dean Wesley Smith's excellent series, Killing The Sacred Cows of Publishing, in which he sets out certain widely held beliefs that many people, especially writers, have but that happen to be false.

One of myths that I've heard over and over again is that only writers who are already traditionally published can make money self-publishing. Another is that if an author self-publishes then no traditional publisher would even think of publishing them. Well, here is one instance where both are shown to be false.

The London Evening Standard reports that:

A struggling writer landed a book deal with a major publisher after putting her novel online for 96p a copy and promoting it by using social networking.

Louise Voss, 42, shot to the top of the Kindle charts after publishing the book in digital form herself after being rejected by literary agents.

It attracted the attention of publishers HarperFiction, which offered her a six-figure, four-book deal.

As a result, her ebook Catch Your Death will also be printed and stocked in bookshops in the traditional way.

Read the rest of the article here: Writer puts novel on Kindle for 96p and wins a six-figure deal