Writing a Book – Marketing And Promotion
Earlier posts in this series:
Writing a Book – Finding Time
Writing a Book – Discipline
Writing a Book – Structure
Writing a book doesn’t stop when you’ve handed in the last of your edits. Oddly, most authors think that it’s the role of the publisher to market their book, but this is fairly far from the truth. I’ve worked with two mainstream publishers and one widely-published-author-turned-publisher, and in all cases, they’re more like “air support.” It’s still your job to be the primary marketer of your book. So, here are a few thoughts that might help you get into the spirit of that.
Marketing Isn’t Bad – Bad Marketing Is Bad
What we as creators tend to think about marketing relates to the bad stuff we have experienced. For every “now how much would you pay?” that you’ve seen on TV or for every ham-handed email you receive from marketers (or worse, friends), who are trying hard to sell you something you don’t want, just accept that these aren’t the droids you’re looking for. The marketing you want is another kind entirely. Bad marketing is bad. We’re going to talk about ways that you might do some interesting things that will help.
Social Media is Your Friend
One day, I knew who Greg Pak was, and the next day, we were all kinds of chums. The difference? Greg’s presence on Google+. You see, Greg shares interesting things there, sometimes about his work as a comic book writer, and other times about things of interest. This interesting connection made me suddenly more interested in his work. Suddenly, I found myself visiting several comic book stores to find issue #1 of a new mini series he’s penned, simply because of how friendly and back-and-forth he was using social networks like Google+ and Twitter.
The same super powers are in your possession, or they can be.
On Twitter, Search is your friend. Are you writing a book about archaeology? See who’s talking about it. Looking for Buddhists? Oh, they’re there. Look for them. Start following them. Start seeing what they’re talking about. That’s the first key to using social media to market and sell your book. Learn about them first. Say it with me: learn about them first.
Talk about what they’re doing. Learn what’s interesting and find them information about that. And then, after all that, share a bit about your stuff. 12:1 their stuff to your stuff. Does this make sense?
Blog
Blogs are such great ways to promote your books, but not by talking all blah-di-blah about your book. People really don’t care much about the secret underpinnings of how fascinating your research was; they want to learn something that feels “secret” or “behind the scenes.” It’s not easy to give them this sometimes, but you’ve got to give them that, or it just will feel like you’re still promoting yourself. The best way you might look at blogging for promoting your writing is to use your blog as a place where you can grow connections between people who might eventually love your book, and/or who might eventually share that work with other people.
Shoot Video
Books are an experience, but they don’t have to stay in textual format. Shoot videos of yourself talking about what’s going to be in the book. Shoot interviews with people talking about topics that will be in your book. Do everything you can to make some interesting video happen. Put it on YouTube, but share it also on your blog, and/or on the outposts like Google+ and Facebook and Twitter. Or post the video on YouTube and your blog, and point people back to your blog via those outposts.
Guest Posts Go A Long Way
Interviews and guest posts help people find your work. If you’ve written a nonfiction book, swing by Alltop and figure out where you should post. Connect with people. Do what you can to figure out some interesting audiences. For instance, if you wrote a book about fly fishing, people who fish will probably know about the book, so where could you get a guest post or do an interview that isn’t your core audience? That’s the gold. Make sense?
Offers Actually Help
When Julien Smith and I wrote Trust Agents, we both came up with ways to make offers. I did things where I’d trade a speech for 200, 300, and then 500 books. You don’t have to do that exact offer. Maybe if you’ve written a fiction book, you could include a “secret chapter” that you make available to people who buy 3 copies, etc. Get creative and have fun with it. You could offer dinner with someone who buys 10 books to give away to friends.
You know, secretly, you could just look back on years and years of Seth Godin’s blog and see how he promoted all his books. LOTS of those methods are fun and work well. Believe me, you could have worse mentors in this one.
Promise Not To Be That Guy
I’ve put out a few books. I have a bunch more in me. I’ve also had the pleasure to meet some of the best authors in the world, as well as some of the most annoying people who somehow managed to publish a book in the world. And here’s a hint: I think we all are both at some point. I think at some point, we tend to get really excited about our books and then we want to shake everyone down who can’t run away as fast as they’d like, and we want to talk about how this book will be really useful to them, etc.
Here’s a request. Don’t be that guy. (gender unspecific, mind you) It’s okay to promote your book, but as best as you can, try to do it in that way that lets you be helpful to them. Share what you think they need. Help them. Connect with them. That’s way better than trying to sell your book, because people will come to really appreciate that you’re in it for them.
It makes a world of difference, I promise.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about making money.
Writing A Book – Structure
Earlier posts in this series:
Writing a Book – Finding Time
Writing a Book – Discipline
The trick with book writing, fiction or otherwise, is structure. Even with the best fiction, the most flowy-seeming fiction, there’s a structure. With nonfiction, there’s always a structure. The best book I ever read about this was Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting (amazon affiliate link). Don’t worry about whether you’re going to write a movie. You’re probably not (unless you are). Instead, buy this and read it. Get the hardcover, unless you are a good note taker on a Kindle. Because the notes will help more than anything else.
But, pretending that you didn’t heed my advice and didn’t buy “Story,” here’s some thoughts on structure.
Structure Defines Itself
When I write an article for Entrepreneur magazine, it’s around 500 words. That’s what they’ve given me. When I write books, I shoot for around 200-250 pages, because that’s a decent enough size to get the story told. With nonfiction, often times, the subject matter helps you define how much you need. So, if I’m writing about how a company will use human business to build their future wealth, I have to define what I mean by “human business.” I have to give “recipes” for what I mean. I have to provide case studies. I have all kinds of stuff that defines what I need to include in the story. See?
If I were writing fiction, I’d start with the frame of the story I want to tell. For instance, most fiction stories have three main acts. So maybe Act 1, the shortest act, would be defining the way the world is, and then ending it with what drastic change sets the story on its major course. Act 2 is the meat of the story and what happens to change the characters along the way. Act 3 is the resolution and the sense of what might come next. Within those three acts, I might define a series of actions or experiences that move my characters from the beginning of Act 1′s normalcy to the end of Act 1′s craziness.
Then What?
Authors tend to think that structure is something that just happens, but it’s not. Julien and I wrote trust agents with the perspective that we’d write six main chapters with one point in each chapter, and that we’d bookend that all with an intro chapter and a wrapup chapter. That didn’t “just happen.” It took months to decide on that structure, but once we had it, we couldn’t undo it. Once you have a structure, own it. Work within it. Make it yours. If you’ve decided to make the “odd” chapters in prose and the “even” chapters in verse, then do it. But stick with it.
Start Strong
No matter what, your first chapter has to be delicious. Your first page or two have to be delicious. Remember, when people pick your book up in a bookstore (those things that used to exist), they look at the cover, they look at the quotes (sometimes), and then they check out the first page or two. If you haven’t hooked them in the first few pages, they’re not bringing that baby home.
In Trust Agents, we started out with a gangster story. That was Julien’s idea. But it worked. More people mention that story than any other part of the book. You’ve got to wow people with chapter one, not warm them up. Even if you’re writing a mystery, that first chapter had better get me thinking about how I’m going to solve the mystery, or the book is going down.
Too many aspiring (and that’s why they still “aspire”) authors use the first chapter for throat clearing. It can’t work that way. Chapter one has to be the big open.
Oh, and there’s this old rule with nonfiction: tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them that, then tell them what you just told them. God I hate that rule. To me, the idea is that you’ll explain the promise of where you’re going, but don’t get all mechanical. No one wants to read a book, nonfiction or otherwise, where there are no surprises.
It’s Okay to Revise
You can revise a structure if you realize that it’s not going to work for you, but be very very clear that that’s why you’re going to do it. If you say you want to build a boat, then don’t put wings on it. Make sense? But, if you start by saying you’re going to build a boat, and you go from building a fiberglass boat to a traditional wooden boat, then you’re still within the parameters of structure.
Structure is Oddly Freeing
When writing, once you have a structure in mind, it’s so very freeing. In the current book I’m writing, I know that a chapter will be around 10 written pages. Thus, as I’m writing along, I can glance at the page count, and know how far into the story I should be at any given time. If I’m near the end, but haven’t made my points, then I have to go back and edit. If I’m near the beginning and I’ve said all I have to say, I then must determine if I’m doing the story justice, or whether maybe I defined my chapter too narrowly, and thus, have written myself into a corner.
But that structure keeps me strong. The Entrepreneur magazine articles having to be around 500 words keeps me true to telling the story in the tightest way possible. Even a tweet helps you learn this kind of thing.
Make Structure Your Friend
One last point: without structure, we throw the kitchen sink into our writing. I was once writing a science fiction story that mixed angels, demons, sci fi elements, and all kinds of other ideas in a blender. It wasn’t half bad, but it wasn’t half good, either. The problem, from MY side of the writing, was that I was just throwing everything into it and making “sausage” out of the ideas. Make structure your friend, and keep “simplicity” right close by, too.
Hopefully, you’ll find that this helps your writing immensely.
10 Steps To Writing Irresistible Content That Everyone Wants To Share
This is a guest post by David Santistevan. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
You have something to say – something to offer this world that is unique, helpful, life-altering. The problem is no one is listening. It’s not that they don’t care about your blog, it’s they don’t even know it exists.
The issue isn’t what you’re saying, but how you’re saying it.
You need to make your content irresistible.
You know that nervous feeling when you finally hit the publish button?
Excitement, fear, joy, and depression all come by to pay you a visit. Some outlast their welcome.
“Will anybody like this? Will my Twitter friends RT this? Do my Facebook friends give a rip? Will this post take off on StumbleUpon and Digg and Reddit or will it get buried on the archive shelf of boring, yawn-worthy, mediocre content?”
It’s the plight of all bloggers. Our self-worth is attached to how many people like and share our content. It probably shouldn’t be, but we pour a lot into our blogs. We lay bare our soul for the world to see.
Wouldn’t you say we should do all we can to make it irresistible for people to share? Content that helps people. Content that spreads because of of the difference it makes in people’s lives.
Well, here are 10 tips for making your content irresistible:
1. Write with conviction
Don’t be boring. Don’t just spit out the facts. Write from a place of passion and honesty. Write from your soul, not just your head. Create a “wow experience for your readers…every time.
2. Write simply
Since most people scan online content, make sure you writing is simple – easy on the eyes and easy to understand. Invest enough time formatting your post.
3. Make it applicable
What do you want your readers to do? Don’t assume they will apply what you write. Give them specific instructions on how to do what you’ve written.
4. Use humor
It’s easy to drone endlessly about facts. Resist this urge. Also, don’t try and be funny if you’re not. Honestly, humor often comes from being honest. Look at your topic and describe how it makes you feel, how it makes your readers feel, and be descriptive. You may just unlock some humor you never thought you had.
5. Create unique headlines
If your headline sucks, say goodbye to anybody reading your content, except maybe your mother. She’ll probably read anything. Online readers are moving fast and if a headline doesn’t jump off the page, capture their imagination, connect with their passion, they won’t read.
6. Do your research
Thoughtful, well-learned people make the best bloggers. Are you constantly learning, constantly developing? It will show in your blogging. Know your niche, know what your readers want, develop an insatiable curiosity for deeper learning. It will show in your writing and people will love it.
7. Solve a problem
Content that spreads is content that helps. Find a problem that your readers have and solve it. This may take time, but it’s worth the investment.
8. Be generous with other’s content
Nobody likes a talking head that ignores everyone else. If you want your content to spread, live it by sharing other’s content. Networking and connecting with other bloggers is so important to your blog’s success.
9. Be kind
If people like you, they’ll be more inclined to share your content. Respond to comments when you can, participate in Twitter conversation, respond to facebook comments. Always be kind. This will increase your likeability.
10. Connect with influencers
The more you connect with influencers, the greater chance your blog has to getting noticed. Comment on their blogs with insightful thoughts. Link to their posts (they will notice). Share their content with passion. Reach out to them and thank them for their expertise.
I believe it’s a worthwhile endeavor for all bloggers to apply these 10 points. It’s not enough to simply write. We need to write in such a way that people actually read, apply, and their lives change because of it.
How do you make your content irresistible?
About the Author: David Santistevan is a musician, pastor, and blogger. You can read his blog here.
Original Post: 10 Steps To Writing Irresistible Content That Everyone Wants To Share
Why Writing Every Day Isn’t Enough
This post is by Michelle of Wicked Whimsy.
One of the most common pieces of advice given to aspiring writers and, by extension, bloggers is to write every day. The idea of a daily writing practice is thrown around as though it’s a cure-all for any malady.
Don’t get me wrong, I try to write every day, but the advice as it’s given is missing an important component. And it can be downright harmful in its closely related form: “Write every day—it doesn’t matter what you write, so long as you’re writing”.
The problem
Recently, I had a stint of a week or two where I was writing almost constantly, and all of it was for the viewing of others: blog posts for my blog, guest posts for other blogs, client work.
When things slowed down a bit, I took a week long breather since I had a backlog of blog posts‚ I was still writing daily at 750words.com and my private journal, but that was it.
And, to my surprise, when I sat down to write again, I found it nigh impossible. The words simply refused to come. I couldn’t figure it out—I had found it so easy to write only a week before!
The new version: write for others every day
There’s a big difference between writing something that you know will be private, and writing something that others will see. I propose that if bloggers want to keep the ideas coming, keep writing, and most importantly, keep improving their writing, then writing every day isn’t enough.
Instead, you should be making it a point to write for others every day. Why?
There are two main reasons:
- You hold your writing to a higher standard. If something is private, you have no pressing motivation to keep improving it aside from your own drive. Sometimes that’s enough, but sometimes it’s not. If you know that your writing will be in front of hundreds or thousands of people (or even just the one paying client), you definitely want to make sure it’s up to scratch.
- It keeps you in a quality writing mindset. Writing for yourself is often an entirely different experience than writing for others. It gives you a moment to pause and reflect on your day, tease out thoughts you might not have known you had, and record your experiences. These are all totally fabulous things in their own right, and doing these on a regular basis might (eventually) make you a better writer. But they’re not the same thing that you need to be taking into consideration when you’re writing for other people. When writing for others, you need to think about headlines, subheadings, ease of reading, and how well you convey your message. If you’re not actively practicing writing for others and maintaining the mindset that comes with it, then chances are your improvement will be nonexistent or marginal.
It could also be argued that writing for others makes you more creative, but several other talented bloggers have recently addressed that idea here on ProBlogger, so I’ll just point you towards those posts for that debate.
You don’t have to write an entire, polished post every day. Depending on your schedule, that might not even be possible. But do try do something like writing a post draft or editing another post, just to keep you in the groove of writing for others. You could even make commenting a part of this practice—as has been proven in several ProBlogger posts, commenting is a vital part of growing your blog and your brand. A well-crafted comment makes both you and the blog you left the comment on look better.
Do I think a daily writing practice is vital? Definitely. I also think that bloggers are in the business of writing for other people—so that’s where our focus should be. I still write for myself every day, but now I know better than to fail to put the focus on writing for others every day.
Michelle Nickolaisen is a rainbow-haired writer, blogger, and all-around creative maven making her way in Austin, TX. She writes at Wicked Whimsy about saturating life with constructive creativity, among other topics.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
Solid Web Content Writing Tips
Even when you’ve been writing web content for a while it’s always a good idea to take a step back and read an article or two that will 
help you refresh the techniques that make for effective web copy. Even if you come to working on the Internet from another discipline like journalism or even business writing, there are a few things that are exclusive to Web content you need to keep in mind.
Attention Span
First of all you need to take into account studies have shown our collective attention span has become shorter over the years so that means that people in general can only process smaller bits of information. I’ve also read that the information age has made the whole attention span issue worse by constantly distracting you and giving you all kinds of choices as to where you want to point your concentration.
So that means in the context of Web content that you want to write in shorter paragraphs and sentences. You should aim to have a concise and brief text as well that usually aims for half the words you would have used in the print medium. However, there are some rules that apply to Web content that are crossovers from the print way of doing things in general and journalism specifically.
Simple Word
For example when you are writing web content the simple word is the one you should always choose over the more elaborate model. Usually you will find that the simple word is the one that has a clear and concise meaning. You should also use the inverted pyramid style as another left over from the print journalism years because it allows readers to get to the information that’s most important quickly because you’re placing it at the top of the article.
There are several other factors that you need to take into account to make sure that you are holding reader’s attention and another one beyond style is credibility. It’s never a good idea when you are writing web content of any kind to make elaborate claims that you cannot back up. Wherever possible it’s even a good idea to include a URL or an actual link to the origin of the information.
You also need to supply your readers the information that you want them to have in bit sized chunks so that they find it useful. It’s an important consideration to keep in mind that people who are reading Web content on the Internet often suffer from overload of information. You want to be aware of the fact they often only scan articles or large portions of text so you can use bullet points and even bolding to direct their attention to where you want them to go.
While writing web content isn’t that much different than journalism in many different respects, it’s important for anyone who wants to make a career of this to be able to write in a conversational style so that the reader feels like they being made privy to information and not talked down to.
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How to Suck at Writing, and then Write for the Biggest Blogs in the World
This is a guest post by Danny Wong. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
Writing hasn’t always been a skill of mine. I rarely ever read when I was younger, and still had my father read me books for years after I had learned how to read for myself.
So how did I go from a forced writer (I only wrote things when I had to for school and never for recreation) to an influential blogger?
I started writing for our business blog just because we needed content creators. I was new to this whole Social Media thing, and I could hardly write coherent content, nevertheless quality content. I dreaded it.
We quickly killed my future contributions to the blog because I wasn’t enjoying it, the content wasn’t incredibly beneficial or engaging, and instead I focused more efforts on things I could do to really impact the business.
So I turned to learning how to manage Public Relations because I thought, “If I can’t inbound any visitors to the site and business blog by writing quality content, then let me go out and get traffic from other people’s sites and blogs.”
So I spent a lot of time schmoozing bloggers and writers and then I closed a feature article with a writer on a site called Examiner.com. I thought it was the neatest thing to have such a high traffic site featuring me since it had millions of unique visitors a month. After reading and reveling in the feature article, I saw a Call-To-Action saying, “Write for us” and I thought, “Hm. This seems like an interesting opportunity to build brand awareness through links in my byline and increase my personal brand by just being a (sort of) professional writer.”
The CTA called to me and I answered. Using a referral from the writer that featured me, I ended up becoming the Boston Startup Examiner, and then things just snowballed from there. I starting reading blogs like DailyBlogTips, reading more content on Examiner and other news-oriented blogs, and then starting doing guest posts any blogs that would take my work!
Then I just kept stumbling upon opportunities, and quickly built relationships with lots of editors through my formal PR work and then reached out to them with a guest post ready for their review.
Finally, I started publishing on some of the biggest sites in their niche, like SearchEngineJournal and a local NY Times blog, and then I started publishing on some of the biggest blogs in the world like TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb.
Now, I have a blogger account with the world’s #1 blog, HuffingtonPost, and I have a pretty strong portfolio of writings published in an even stronger set of blogs, which gives me leverage when trying to publish articles on other sites when I can say, “My name is Danny Wong and I have contributed writings to NY Times (blog), HuffingtonPost, ReadWriteWeb, TheNextWeb and Examiner.”
Just to break down how I went from sucking at writing to writing for some of the world’s biggest blogs:
1. I had a relationship with a writer at a media outlet that had open invitations for writers to join, and spent way too many hours crafting my application writings as well as my first few posts.
2. I was reading more blogs and books, and spent more time writing blog posts that I would never publish just for the sake of practicing writing.
3. I started publishing anywhere and everywhere that would talk to a small-time writer like me, especially one that had some interesting thoughts and experience in startups and entrepreneurship.
4. Some of the bigger blogs I read had published guest posts on their site, so I contacted the first person I knew who was a writer (a relationship I built through my PR work) and asked how I might become a contributor. Sometimes, I was directed to the editor who would then request I submit a post to them directly, or I would have already had contact with an editor who was anxious to see how I could contribute to their business.
5. The bigger sites bit. Admittedly, I did spend several hours writing my first post for each outlet, but it was well worth the time investment because I started the relationship off on the right foot, and then became a semi-frequent contributor.
6. I name-dropped all the different media outlets I had contributed to when pitching myself to publish with a new media outlet, so things just snowballed as I built up my credibility. As I became more credible after publishing posts with more and more influential blogs, the bigger blogs started to pay attention to me and were more than happy to take my contributions.
It took quite a bit of hard work, networking and determination to build up my writing skills and my writing portfolio so now I can proudly say I am a blogger with the #1 blog in the world and write for several of the biggest blogs out there.
What tactics did you use to publish with big blogs and sites?
About the author: Danny Wong is a writer at HuffingtonPost (you can see his column here), the #1 blog in the world, and the co-founder of co-created dress shirts startup, Blank Label.
Original Post: How to Suck at Writing, and then Write for the Biggest Blogs in the World
Want to Improve Your Writing Skills In The Next 10 Minutes?
As most of you guys know, I own another blog called DailyWritingTips.com. A couple of months ago I was talking with my editor there (Maeve Maddox, the person with the deepest English knowledge I have ever met), and we started discussing how an average person can improve her writing skills without spending too much time at it.
We figured that the best way is probably to learn and avoid the most common English mistakes. Things like exchanging less with fewer, misspelling its as it’s, or placing commas where they are not supposed to be.
Long story short, we decided to write a book with a compilation of the 100 most common writing mistakes of the English language (Maeve actually wrote it, and I helped with the formating and production). The title is: “100 Writing Mistakes to Avoid: A practical guide to 100 common mistakes of spelling, usage, grammar, and punctuation.”
The book was launched a couple of weeks ago, in digital format (i.e., PDF), and the feedback has been great. We are offering a full money-back guarantee, and out of hundreds of copies sold only one person asked for the refund so far. On top of that a university in the United States contacted us, stating that they might be interested in adding the book as a recommendation for the English students.
How much does it cost? Right now we are offering a 50% discount to promote the launch, so you can get your copy for .99 instead of .99, which is the normal price. I believe any person would benefit from this book, and bloggers even more, so check out the sales page to get more details or order it.
As I said, only the digital version is available at this point, which means you’ll be able to download the book in PDF format right after completing the order.
Original Post: Want to Improve Your Writing Skills In The Next 10 Minutes?
How To Make Money Writing and Reviewing Blog Posts
There are so many different methods to make cash on the internet that it can almost get overwhelming. I am about to confuse you even more. If you’ve a weblog you are about to discover one more revenue stream. This involves reviewing blogs posts on other people’s blogs as well as obtaining compensated to refer [...]
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