Jackie Dana I’ve been up to a lot lately, and sadly, blogging hasn’t been as high on my list as I’d like.
The important thing is that I’ve been writing a lot. Between my professional copywriting gigs and my novels, I generate a lot of extra vowels each day. I’ve also submitted two different short stories to contests, and I hope to do a few more of those in the next few months.
Authors without readers are like house plants without water. While at first they are filled with life and promise, if they go unnoticed long enough, they will wither and fade away.
So it’s important that excellent books get the attention they deserve. Independent authors, who cannot rely on the marketing departments of traditionally-published authors, depend heavily on their readers to help promote their work and grow their careers. A key component of reader promotion comes in the form of book reviews, which play a huge part in selling books and bringing in new readers.
With that in mind, I recently finished two books that I enjoyed very much, and as a challenge, I decided to try reviewing them together. The books are The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree by S. A. Hunt and Brother, Frankenstein by Michael Bunker.
Imagine that words and phrases in the English language could be bought. A company could purchase words and become the only entity who could ever use them.
It would fill our language with landmines, forcing writers to navigate through a whole new kind of stylebook. If we used a forbidden word, we could be sued by the word’s owner. One day our use of words like “iced tea” or “notebook” might be completely fine; the next day, if we tried to use that turn of phrase, we could get our websites shut down.
Sounds like crazy science fiction, doesn’t it?
It’s not.
The US Trademark Office is allowing companies to trademark phrases in common and widespread use, such as the term “fire cider,” just because a company wants to have exclusive rights to using a phrase for a product.
Read moreYou won’t believe what the US Trademark Office is doing
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I started my first novel as a senior in high school.
It began as a short story about two characters in a fantasy world, and as I recall was inspired by the 1980s Robin Hood television show. Before I began my novel, I had completed a beast of a project, a 20-page short story. It was for one of my classes, and until that point had been the longest thing I had ever written. After that challenge, I would have been scandalized if someone told me I could write an entire novel.
So I wasn’t writing a novel that day. I just had an image, a scene in my head that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Novels are a collection of ideas and images and characters and philosophies and stories, all twisted up in a blender until all the bits come together into a coherent series of words that we recognize as a book.
These words then get wrapped up in their cover like a Christmas present, with shiny and colorful paper that includes the title and author.
Some books have fantastic covers, others… not so much.
Writing your novel or nonfiction book is only the beginning. If you want people to buy your book, you need to develop an author platform as part of your marketing efforts and to build a relationship with your readers.
Speaking to the Indie Publishing Austin meetup, Tom Corson-Knowles (the bestselling self-published author of 20+ books including The Kindle Publishing Bible series, founder of TCK Publishing, and host of The Publishing Profits Podcast), offered up excellent tips on how authors can build an online presence and an audience for their books.
As he defined it, the author platform is the combination of methods, tools, and resources that an author uses to connect to readers and build an audience.
