Jeff Haws

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3 Reasons to Join the Curiouser Author Society

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Team

Writing can be a pretty solitary pursuit. Most people are solo authors on their manuscripts. Most will bring in help at the tail end of the project; some may even solicit some advice over the course of the project. But, for the most part, the story is being pulled from some deep, dark part of your brain. Well, mine is deep and dark. Yours might be sunny and bright. Don’t let Negative Nancy here tell you how your pretty little brain should work.

But the process doesn’t have to be as solitary (and whiskey-fueled) as many make it out to be. While you may or may not get explicit help during the course of writing a story, having the support of others — knowing there are people going through the same problems you are, and that are rooting for you to succeed too — can be a great motivating factor toward getting to the finish line. One such option for that support is the Curiouser Author Society, a pay spinoff from Shayla Raquel’s Curiouser Editing site that can provide lots of editing services for your book. The Society is more of a general help site, with an e-newsletter and a (private) Facebook page where the members can interact with Shayla and each other, getting questions answered, offering advice, critiques, and bad jokes (mostly by me).

After several weeks of trying out the Society, I thought it could be worthwhile for more authors to give it a shot. Here are three reasons you might want to consider joining: [Read more…] about 3 Reasons to Join the Curiouser Author Society

Don’t Fall For These Twitter Distractions

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Twitter 2

In trawling the interwebz yesterday, I ran across a post at the Self Publishing Advice blog by a Swedish indie author named Anna Belfrage discussing whether or not Twitter can be effective as a marketing tool for self-published authors. And, while I’m certainly a novice — considering I haven’t actually published a book yet, “novice” might even be kind — at self publishing, Anna is an admitted novice at Twitter. So, while I can’t say for sure whether Twitter is necessarily effective at marketing self-published books in particular, I can say it’s been an effective tool in marketing for my past two jobs (Yes, I’m a social/content marketer by day, aspiring author by night/weekend, much like a super hero), and I’m fairly confident I can make it work for me in the author world too.

Now, to her credit, Anna does admit to her inexperience with the medium, and she does acknowledge that Twitter helped somewhat, and could probably help more as she grows her following/becomes more comfortable with using it. But you don’t see much of that unless you read to the end, and I’m afraid there’s a decent bit of not-very-good advice and implied advice earlier in the piece. I wanted to address a bit of it here: [Read more…] about Don’t Fall For These Twitter Distractions

Setting Sales Goals for Your First Novel

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Goals

As I get closer to sending my first novel, “Killing the Immortals,” sailing out into the world, I’m starting to think seriously about what I want to accomplish with it, what sorts of goals to set for myself. The Nobel Prize for Literature would be all right, I guess. There may be a step or two to get through before that, though. Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about the committee that decides those sorts of things, but my assumption is that they’ve got a high-ish bar.

So, we all may want to have incremental goals shy of a Nobel Prize that will give us something to shoot for in the meantime, until fame and fortune come to whisk us away. I think goals are important, but I also think they’re challenging to figure out when you’ve never published a novel before. You can look at all the “The average self-published book sells 250 (or whatever) copies” blog posts you want, but how does that relate to what you’re doing? So many factors are going to impact how many people buy your book and how wide a reception it gets, from its genres to its cover to the blurb you write to the following you’ve built up to how much work you put into marketing the book to whether or not your story/writing sucks. What does “average” even really mean when so many books are haphazardly thrown together with visions of hefty royalty checks, mahogany-decked libraries, and new elbow-patched jackets without considering the insane amount of work and luck it takes to become the next millionaire author? [Read more…] about Setting Sales Goals for Your First Novel

Why Cover Design is So Important

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Library

As I move closer to needing to actually sell this novel I’ve written, I have to start thinking seriously about what matters most for doing that — if, for no other reason, than to know where to direct most of the budget I’m willing to potentially waste on getting this thing out into the world of Amazon.

There are plenty of factors that go into that. I talked about three of those in another post. The top one I cited was the book’s cover. Honestly, if your book cover is terrible, I’m not sure much else matters. You can write the next Great American Novel, but if your cover is done by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but once dabbled with Photoshop a few years ago. If your cover looks like it was done in MS Paint, nobody’s ever gonna know if your book is any good. [Read more…] about Why Cover Design is So Important

Three Most Important Factors for Selling Books

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Selling

As I get closer to the editing phase of my story and this whole book thing becomes more real, I’m starting to think about some of the stuff beyond writing that goes along with putting a book into the market that will hopefully maybe possibly start selling a few copies … beyond the 50 or so my mom will buy just out of sheer excitement.

Of course, the writing matters. The story matters. But I’m not sure it matters as much as many think. I doubt you’ll hear this a lot on writing blogs, but the quality of your story isn’t going to be that big of a factor when it comes to selling books. That’s partially because “quality of your story” is really objective; what I think is a great story, you might think is trite and boring. For example, my fiancee thinks “Pulp Fiction” is boring and “The Big Lebowski” is stupid. Let’s just say we don’t see quite eye to eye on those two. Are those “quality stories”? I think most people would say they very much are, but not to her. What does that mean? Not much, other than it’s all subjective.

It’s mostly, though, because, as long as there’s some redeeming quality in your work, there’s probably a potential market out there for it. Thousands of romance and cozy-mystery stories I’d find to be laughably bad sell massive numbers of books every week. There are millions of readers out there; not everybody wants to read Cormac McCarthy or Jonathan Franzen. Not everybody wants you to challenge them. Some just want a 125-page quick read they can knock out at the beach, or before bed.

So, if not quality writing, what are the three most important factors that will go into selling your book? [Read more…] about Three Most Important Factors for Selling Books