Writers Conference in West Virginia.
You don’t want to miss this chance to learn how to move from WRITER to PUBLISHED AUTHOR. Click on the link above to learn more.
Or go directly to the link below to sign up and save your space!
http://acornbookservices.com/Writer_to_Published_Author.html
E-reader owners share a common characteristic: as a group, they want a fun, fast read. Consequently, the length of the traditional novel is shrinking for e-books, from the print book standard of 80,000 to 120,000 words to the shorter e-book equivalent of 50,000 to 60,000.
E-reader owners often read on the fly–on the beach, on the plane, in the car, on the train, on vacation. These readers, as a group, prefer books that can be read quickly, in a day or two.
The new author who figures this out has a couple of advantages.
First, traditional print publishers are slow to offer titles in e-format. Print publishers dislike the e-publishing industry and resist aiding its development. Only best sellers in tree books get quickly converted to e-books. New authors who contract themselves to a traditional print publisher may never see their titles in e-format until their contract expires, reducing the writer’s exposure in the marketplace.
In negotiating terms with the traditional print publisher, new writers should retain e-book rights or require the return of the rights to the author if the print publisher doesn’t exercise the option to e-publish the book within a set time frame.
Second, an author can produce more material for sale in the e-book environment. In theory, a writer can produce two 50,000 word books in the same time it takes to create one 100,000 word manuscript. A smart writer will find a way to cut a longer manuscript into two connected stories, and have two stand alone books for sale simultaneously. Readers who like one book are going to buy the other. It doubles the creator’s income.
Finally, readers who own electronic devices also buy short stories. A typical 7,000 word short story can be sold via e-booksellers like Amazon.com.
I hope you have found a few helpful strategies here for your own book business.
Are you working on a novel? Is it taking forever to complete? Are you growing weary of working on it?
Take a break and write a short story with one or more of the same characters in your book. You may find it helpful in more ways than you think possible. First, it is a diversion from your novel, yet keeps the characters of the novel fresh in your mind. Second, sale of the short story assists the sales of your novel when you release it. Third, you can sell your short story for supplemental income.
West Virginia author Lauren Carr created a 7,000 word short story called “Lucky Dog.” The dog in the story, named Gnarly, is a regular character in her Mac Faraday mystery series. She intended to print the story as a promotional giveaway during book fairs. A series of fortunate events led her to e-publish the story for $.99. Since then, her short story sales have pushed her novel sales up in multiples. (Visit her web page at http://mysterylady.net/Mac_Faraday_Books.html.)
The short story, sold at a low price point, gets your work into the hands of readers unfamiliar with you. If they like your story, they will look for more works written by you. In Carr’s experience, readers who liked Gnarly, the” Lucky Dog,” bought her mystery books that featured Gnarly. The sale of the short story ended up boosting the sales of her novels.
That’s called smart marketing!
Good pep talk from Drew Keller to help you use videography to its best advantage for selling your works via social media. If you are an Independent or Self-publisher, you need to watch this:
Calling all writers who do their own marketing, selling, etcetera. Watch this video.
The following is a true story by author Brad Geagley. He admits that his story makes the envious seethe. But it is the end of his tale that has me intrigued. Brad is entering the now-level playing field of the self-published. This story is a prelude to the story yet to come. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.
Fair warning – when other writers hear my story they sometimes scream and throw themselves out their windows. It’s the tale of how I got my first writing contract, and I don’t think anyone had ever had so easy a time of it.
When I was living in New York City, where I was VP of Production for a special effects house, I purchased a loft near Washington Square. Instead of Escrow, as they have in California, a buyer and seller must instead use real estate lawyers to draw up the contracts. My realtor recommended an attorney he usually worked with, a woman by the name of Judy Levin. When I went to her offices to sign the papers I noticed that her walls were hung with posters from the New York Stage. Some of the productions I had even heard of. “Wow,” I said, “you must really love the theater!”
Judy, who was both the most laconic person I’d ever met and, perversely, the most loquacious, merely said, “Oh, those? I produced them.” It turned out that she had started her career as an entertainment lawyer, and handled the legal affairs for a variety of theatricals. When you do that in New York you also get a producing credit. But, as happens to many who work in entertainment, she got burnt out and retired from the fray to become a real estate lawyer.
Well, it just so happens that I was looking to option a book to turn it into a stage play. Judy got me the book in very short order and for a very reasonable price. Having tasted the thrill of the theater again, however remote, she then asked me, “Do you have anything else I could look at?”
Did I?!
It just so happened that I had the first hundred pages of a novel to show her, a mystery set in Ancient Egypt, which I had called generically “Ancient Egyptian Murder Mystery”. She took it and a couple of weeks later told me, “I really like it. Do you mind if I show it around?”
What do you think I answered?
Judy had brittle bones – this is not a segue, by the way – and had broken her foot. She would hobble down to the courtyard of her building in Chelsea and – as I might have mentioned – Judy could talk to anyone in that same even monotone she used with me; a stranger, a dog, the clothes dryer. A gentleman was also in the courtyard that morning, someone from her building who she had never before met. He too was ill and was staying home from work. In the course of their conversation he happened to mention his wife, Carol, who happened to work at Simon & Schuster, where she happened to be secretary to the legendary Michael Korda. Korda, for those of you who don’t know, ran the editing staff of S&S since the 1950s. “Do you mind if I give you a manuscript?” Judy asked Carol when she met her for the first time a few days.
Carol accepted the manuscript in their laundry room. “It takes a brave woman to take a manuscript in a laundry room,” Judy said to me. I could only agree.
But the good news was that two weeks later I had a contract not only to finish my novel, but also to write its sequel. The first novel, Year of the Hyenas, went on to be named one of the five best mysteries of the year by Library Journal, while the second, Day of the False King, debuted on the LA Times Best Seller List.
And all because I bought a place in New York City.
Luck like that can happen only once in a person’s life, but it is also a story that could only have happened in New York. It’s a city where you run into people you know all the time, thrust together as you are on sidewalks, in buses and subways, or by frequenting the same restaurants.
The luck began to change when Michael Korda retired, but I always knew that I had gotten to know him at the end of his extraordinary career. When I was assigned to a new editor, she frankly told me she was not “into” historical fiction and was I interested instead in the chick-lit field…?
We severed our relationship on the spot.
I’ve decided to go explore the self-publishing route this time; the new publishing industry is as unchartered as the wild west, but I’m game for anything. I guess this is where the REAL work begins.
Fay Moore: I Want To Be a Writer 