“My first marketing goal was to get five five-star reviews,” he [John Locke] writes. “That’s it. But you know what? It took me almost two months!” In the first nine months of his publishing career, he sold only a few thousand e-books. Then, in December 2010, he suddenly caught on and sold 15,000 e-books.John Locke commissioned reviews on October 13th and his book sales took off in December. I imagine it would probably take about a month for the reviews to start coming through, so those paid reviews could have been an important factor in his December success. Of course, that Christmas was coming up wouldn't have hurt.
One thing that made a difference is not mentioned in “How I Sold One Million E-Books.” That October, Mr. Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service’s best customers. “I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more,” he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford. “I’m ready to roll.”
Mr. Locke was secure enough in his talents to say that he did not care what the reviews said. “If someone doesn’t like my book,” he instructed, “they should feel free to say so.” He also asked that the reviewers make their book purchases directly from Amazon, which would then show up as an “Amazon verified purchase” and increase the review’s credibility.
In a phone interview from his office in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Locke confirmed the transaction. “I wouldn’t hesitate to buy reviews from people that were honest,” he said. Even before using GettingBookReviews.com, he experimented with buying attention through reviews. “I reached out every way I knew to people to try to get them to read my books.”
Many of the 300 reviews he bought through GettingBookReviews were highly favorable, although it’s impossible to say whether this was because the reviewers genuinely liked the books, or because of their well-developed tendency toward approval, or some combination of the two.
Mr. Locke is unwilling to say that paying for reviews made a big difference. “Reviews are the smallest piece of being successful,” he said. “But it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.”
The tale of GettingBookReviews.com, which commissioned 4,531 reviews in its brief existence, is a story of a vast but hidden corner of the Internet [...].. . . .In the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50.There were immediate complaints in online forums that the service was violating the sacred arm’s-length relationship between reviewer and author. But there were also orders, a lot of them. Before he knew it, he was taking in $28,000 a month.. . . .How little, [Todd Rutherford] wondered, could he pay freelance reviewers and still satisfy the authors? He figured on $15. He advertised on Craigslist and received 75 responses within 24 hours.Potential reviewers were told that if they felt they could not give a book a five-star review, they should say so and would still be paid half their fee, Mr. Rutherford said. As you might guess, this hardly ever happened.Amazon and other e-commerce sites have policies against paying for reviews. But Mr. Rutherford did not spend much time worrying about that. “I was just a pure capitalist,” he said. Amazon declined to comment.Mr. Rutherford’s busiest reviewer was Brittany Walters-Bearden, now 24, a freelancer who had just returned to the United States from a stint in South Africa. She had recently married a former professional wrestler, and the newlyweds had run out of money and were living in a hotel in Las Vegas when she saw the job posting.Ms. Walters-Bearden had the energy of youth and an upbeat attitude. “A lot of the books were trying to prove creationism,” she said. “I was like, I don’t know where I stand, but they make a solid case.”For a 50-word review, she said she could find “enough information on the Internet so that I didn’t need to read anything, really.” For a 300-word review, she said, “I spent about 15 minutes reading the book.” She wrote three of each every week as well as press releases. In a few months, she earned $12,500.“There were books I wished I could have gone back and actually read,” she said. “But I had to produce 70 pieces of content a week to pay my bills.”
The Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines stating that all online endorsements need to make clear when there is a financial relationship, but enforcement has been minimal and there has been a lot of confusion in the blogosphere over how this affects traditional book reviews.
If you ask a kindergartner to tell you a story, chances are you'll hear a nonsensical and fabulous tale. If you put a chocolate chip cookie on a counter and forbid the child from using a chair to reach it, chances are she'll find a few alternate routes to that cookie.You can read the rest of Aisha's article here: How we grow out of our creativity. Thanks to Passive Guy over at The Passive Voice Blog for posting a link to Aisha Sultan's article.
Children are born inherently creative. They act on it unselfconsciously when they are young, willing to dance, draw or create at a moment's notice. We all begin with enormous creative capacity, but how does our willingness to act on it diminish as we grow older?
I confronted this question when I participated in my first fiction writing workshop last year. The instructor gave us a series of prompts, and each time, I stared at a blank screen with unmitigated fear.
I was convinced that my fiction would be poorly disguised autobiography. And that it would be terrible. And that others would see just how terrible it was. So terrible that it wasn't worth making a fool of myself.
I envied how easily my children could slip into pretend stories, where make-believe dialogue didn't sound contrived or wooden, and plot was just a four-letter word.
. . . .We unlearn creativity, according to Josh Linkner [...]. "Instead of growing into our creativity, we grow out of it," he said.
Fear is the main culprit, he says. We are conditioned through years of schooling to strive for the "right" answer.
. . . ."People learn from an early age to get in line," he said. So, we judge others and judge ourselves when we make a mistake or - heaven forbid - fail. We talk ourselves out of creativity and hold ourselves back from big ideas.
. . . .My own children were encouraging during my creative-writing fits.
"Just try again," they would say.
So, I did. And it was never as terrible as I imagined it would be before I began.
a) What will this book do for your life, your work (or business), your lifestyle?;For fiction writers you might ask what sort of emotional impact you want your book to have on your readers. Storytellers always want to evoke emotion in their audience, but there are many different emotions. Do you want them angry about an injustice? Sad about the death of a great love? Happy that the star-crossed lovers found love at last?
b) How will this book affect your readers? What will their lives be like before and after reading it?; and
c) Imagine how your book will affect the larger world -- it will. In the earlier example, you may end up focusing solely on the Internet and protecting children, rather than all computer issues. If you can't state your vision in one sentence, it's not a workable vision.
[P]icture a dartboard. The bull's eye is your core reader. That's the person you imagine when you're writing your title, your outline, your bio and every word in-between. Write with this core audience in mind and your book will be conversational (versus self-conscious), compelling (versus boring), and accessible (versus scattered) -- and it will have a lot more impact.
Most authors want to make a profit on their books. Unfortunately, some people don’t care about books and simply want to make a profit from the authors. Here are five of the most common scams.Scam 1: The Agent's Reading Fee
To read about the other four scams read Lila's entire article here: Five Common Writer Scams — Explained!What They’re Not Telling You:
When you send your manuscript, you’ll need to include a small reading fee. And is this your first draft? It’s going to need lots of editing. She’ll recommend one of her “professional connections” to edit your novel for only a few hundred (or thousand!) dollars. The promises will keep getting bigger as your bank account gets smaller. Every week, there will be some new service absolutely crucial to preparing your manuscript for submission to the Big Six publishers. In the best-case scenario, these people might do some decent work. More likely, they will lead you on a merry chase and disappear once the check clears.
Question Toolbox:
- Is she looking to make money with you, or first take money from you?
- Does she allow you to pick your services and providers, or does she force hers upon you? For example, can you pick your own editor, or does she demand you use the recommended editor if you want to keep her as an agent?
- If she’s an in-demand agent powerhouse, how does she have time to accept online submissions from strangers?
Read more of Kris Rusch's article here: The Business Rusch: The End of the Unprofessional Writer"... [Ewan Morrison] predicts, “There will be no more professional writers in the future.”Here’s the thing: Viewed from a certain perspective, Morrison is absolutely right. A decade or two down the road, the model that we once called “professional” for writers will disappear.That model depended on writers writing on spec until they sell something. Those writers need a day job to support themselves. Those writers once they sell something then hire an employee with no legal training who negotiates their contract. Then that same employee, who usually has no literary training, vets all of the writer’s future works.For this single sale, the writers will get an interest-free loan that they do not have to pay back if their book fails to sell well. If the book does sell well, then that interest-free loan will be paid off and the writer will receive a percentage of the book’s cover price (in theory) for each copy sold. Of course, cover price might be subject to discounting (at which case the percentage paid to the writer goes down) and the definition of sold might include free copies given away in hopes of goosing remaining sales, but hey, who is counting?Wait. The answer to that is no one. Because accounting programs at most traditional publishers are so behind the times that they can’t handle e-book royalties in any sane way.. . . .Morrison is right when he calls traditional publishing a feudal economic system. What he fails to see is that it has always been one. And that the economics are simply getting more rigid as time goes on. The writers are getting less of the pie than they did before, and seem to have no way to combat that.Except through the very thing he bemoans—digital publishing. Rather than embracing the revolution, he criticizes it [...].
He finds himself faced with a hell of a dilemma—one that most traditionally published writers face. Should they get a day job in which someone else now pays for their time? Should they keep writing and hope that things will improve? Or should they learn how to run a small business and actually control their finances—and their careers—for the first time in their lives?
. . . .The true professional writers will publish indie. You have to be professional to survive in a market that requires business savvy as well as creativity.
. . . .Yes, Morrison is right. The past sixty years of publishing have become an era that is no more.
And that’s a very, very, very good thing.
After 100-plus novels through the system, I had decided to pretty much move on. I would finish the last few contracts I had and just fade away, write some short fiction, go play some poker.Read the rest of Dean's article here: Dean Wesley Smith: The Self-Publishing Bestseller on ‘How I Did It’
Then my wife Kristine walked into my writing office on a fine day in May 2010, laughing. She told me about a $12 payment she had just received from Amazon for two short stories.
The previous fall I had tested the new electronic book world of Amazon with a couple of her short stories and a couple of mine. And then promptly forgot about them.
As Kris stood in my office door laughing about the $12, not in a bad way, but in an astounded way that those two stories had made 12 bucks in one month, I understood finally the new world we had just entered for writers.
For the first time, writers had an option other than traditional publishers, a viable option to reach readers directly, a viable option to make a living with their fiction.
Recently on #MyWANA we had a link-spammer who would not stop spamming #MyWANA. I tweeted nicely and asked her to stop. So did at least a dozen other people. When nice didn’t work, we tried not-nice and tweeted “WHY ARE YOU SPAMMING #MyWANA? STOP!” I even blogged, then blogged AGAIN to make the mission and rules of #MyWANA clear and to gently discourage her behavior."RULE #3 Each of Us Gets One Turn—We only need one identity on Twitter…really."
Still, she kept posting links…and more links…and, yes, even MORE links.
We finally blocked and reported her so much that Twitter shut down her account. What did she do? She opened a new one (or unlocked the reported account) and started link-spamming #MyWANA AGAIN, no matter how many times we told her that #MyWANA was for community.
Why didn’t she listen? Likely because she’d set up automation. Because she wasn’t present, she couldn’t see the fierce hatred we all had for her. Every time we saw her name, we saw red.
When I awoke yesterday to an entire column of tweets from this woman on #MyWANA, I took the fight to Facebook. This got her attention. She apologized and said she was only trying to help writers, that she had a good intentions, and I believe her but:
Good intentions + horrible manners = ticked off followers
Jumping back into your story:"Silence your inner critic: It's not doing you any good." Truer words were never written! Another great article by Elizabeth Craig: Jump Back Into Your Story.
Consider limited Re-reading: The worst part is losing the story thread. I’ll usually read the last couple of pages and just forge ahead. If I poke around too long in past pages, I start getting my editor hat on. For me, that kills the creative process. But every writer is different. And this is harder to do if you’re way behind.
Timer: I’ll write as quickly as I can for 10 minutes. I won’t worry about if it’s something that’s going to need to be cut later. The important thing is making process on the story…mentally, that’s important. The next day, the writing will be more focused.
Lists: At the very least, sit down and make a list for options for your next scene, options for your character’s development, options for the next big conflict. Get your mind back into the story again.
Silence your inner critic: It’s not doing us any good.
Don’t try to catch up: It’s not fun to meet your daily goal and then write more than that to satisfy your catch-up goal. If I’m not close to a deadline (and right now I’m not), then I’m going to forget about those 8 or 9 pages I’m behind on. Each day is an opportunity to meet that day’s goal.
The important thing is to pick up your story again. It might be that the only way of doing that means taking a small notebook on the go to jot down story notes. I’m doing that today when I take my kids to their dentist appointment. Just figure out a way to fit it in.
