The Island
Simple and yet suggestive.
This is something I’d like to write.
But don’t hold your breath – and feel free to write your own story!
Best-seller author Elle Casey on the basics.
Enjoy!
Some things to consider if you want to make a living writing books.
I keep stealing stuff from Chuck Wendig’s blog, but this one’s another that’s too good to let it go – idie publishing as a business choice, and as an outlet for adventure fiction.
“Why I Went DIY,” By Thomas Pluck
Good, fun piece by Karina Cooper on what comes after you’ve delivered your book.
You’ve Submitted Your Book: Now What? By Karina Cooper
The return of Pinterest for Writers
I already did a post on Pinterest, and how it can be useful to writers.
Heck, I did two posts about Pinterest!
Well, there’s more.
My Italian-language non fiction ebook, Avventurieri sul Crocevia del Mondo, my pulp-history overview of adventurers in Central Asia between the wars, is doing fine on Amazon – good sales, excellent reviews, nice Top 100 position.
But.
But I get lots of requests for graphical contents – maps, photographs of the characters whose stories I’m telling.
It figures.
Now, putting graphical contents in a Kindle book is not that easy – and maybe not even worth the time and the effort, considering that older, cheaper readers (like the one I use) are not that good at displaying images.
Can you really appreciate a map of Central Asia on a 6″ b/w screen?
Old grainy pictures?
Very large, garish paintings?
Also, a graphically-intensive ebook can be huge – and Amazon charges you some extra cents for big files.
And finally, there’s the lengthy (and expensive!) matter of the rights to the images.
And yet, it’s the sort of content that would make my ebook more appealing to the paying public.
So, I did a Pinboard on Pinterest – pinning the maps, and the photos of the historical characters.
As hi-quality as possible, with Italian captions, in the proper order – so that as you read my ebook, you can browse the pinboard and meet the characters.
Not only this free extra web-content allows my readers to finally get a good look at those faces, at their leisure, on the bright, colored display of their device of choice.
It could also work for the undecided – now they can look at the pictures, and decide whether they’d like to purchase the book or not.
And it can be updated.
With the next update of my text, I’ll place a link and a short note at the very beginning of my ebook – and at that point, it should all be nice and fine.
I’ll certainly adopt the same strategy for my next non-fiction book – which, after all, is about Dinosaurs!
You’ve got to have pictures in a dino book!
Related articles
- The ultimate Pinterest guide for writers and media organizations (curationgalore.wordpress.com)
- Taping Pinterest’s Social Features To The Fullest For Business Promotion (urbantimes.co)
The time spent logging in on Facebook (or Tweeting, or posting on your blog), to tell the world “Today I wrote 3000 words”, would be best spent writing another 1000.
Nobody gives a damn about how many words you churn out by the hour, but those that will never read you anyway.
Author/Publisher – profiling your works
Great post about what comes after the writing is done.
Once you have crafted your brand new novel you have to think about how to profile it for the market. That means you have to connect one or more (hopefully more) than a genre or category to your work in order to make it available for “spider” programs of search engines. The same applies for host sites like Amazon.
A bit of research is what you need to get this little piece of work done. You know your novel, don’t you? Yes, it’s something new and fresh and smart and so on… but let’s face the truth, it cannot be anything unprecedented in the world’s history. What you have to do is to choose a number of keywords to establish a profile for your novel.
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