Features

Experiment: Internet flash mob for digital content known as Drummer Boy

Hypothesis: A concentrated cluster of sales can stimulate a book’s Amazon rankings and lead to more sales

First, this wasn’t a calculated, well-organized campaign. While I spent a year planning the launch for release of The Red Church in mass-market paperback, I got the flash mob idea about a week ago. The marketing was mostly limited to my Twitter account (178 followers), Myspace (10,000 friends), Facebook (1,300 friends), and the forums at Kindleboards, Mobilereads, and, to a limited extent, Amazon. The biggest megaphone was J.A. Konrath’s Newbie’s […]

A lot of the nay-sayers keep saying (ad nauseum) that writers make more money with the traditional/commercial route.  We’re apparently all ripping ourselves off and selling ourselves short by going the indie route…and that we’d be better off “trying and trying…and trying again” with traditional publishers before jumping into the icy cold water that some view self-publishing.

What some of these pro-traditional types are blind to is how a short story author and/or poet can benefit from self-publishing. Poets (published traditionally) make virtually nothing.  My first contributors fee for poetry was $10.00 and that was for 2 poems published by […]

For those of you who know who I really am, I ask–no, I IMPLORE–that you please do not leak my identity in any way, not on Twitter, not in comments, please, no mention of my name or previous handle anywhere–please. This is not a joke or a game and I am still under serious threat to lose my job. I am supporting my family and I have nothing to fall back on if I lose the job. They are watching me and scrutinizing anything new under name and former handle using Google, among other tools, to ensure I am no […]

A great post at the Tomorrow Museum about the pitfalls of crowdsourcing and how it’s not necessarily the answer to what ails publishing – namely, writers not making any money.  The gist of it is this:

The trouble I see with crowdfunding for creative projects is not that it doesn’t work, but that it couldn’t possibly work for everyone. First of all, the very act of crowdfunding requires a level of self-assuredness that does not often come naturally for artists and writers….

The least remarkable novels I read seem written as though the author knows his mother will see it

I just got back from the AWP conference – the Association of Writers and Writing Programs – in Denver.  9000 or so publishers and writers.  A lot of litmags, university presses, poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, setting up shop.  A great experience all around. I’d never actually been to a large-scale conference like this one.

50 or so panels a day.  I was on one of them – “To Publish or Self-Publish” – with Ivory Madison, CEO of Red Room, Daniel Will Harris, a book designer, and author Christopher Meeks, who put the panel together. Read his […]

When promoting your own book, the pain of promotion isn’t necessarily the amount of time it takes, but how it actually feels to be the salesman of your own work.  It’s what makes writing a query letter so hard – not just condensing a book into a few words, but trying to be an advocate without sounding like a used car salesman.  One of the problems you’ll see in self-published books is hyperbole on the back cover copy.  It’s important to realize that self-published books and traditionally published books aren’t equal in this regard.  So if a writer calls his/her […]