News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #119…
[This is the post from last Friday. I had to redo it because of a WordPress glitch. My apologies.]
How to help your favorite authors. 1. Buy their books. Those authors get off on entertaining you or informing you. Reward them for activating those pleasure endorphins. 2. Review their books. A simple review about what you like or dislike about a book and why informs readers and the author. 3. Follow them and share. Both Amazon and Goodreads allow the first. It’s much better than a simple “like.” And most social media sites allow you to share, so do so with the blurb of the book and news about the author. 4. Recommend them. Same idea as share, but you can do this with face-to-face too, with family and friends. Even at the lunch table at work. You talk about a good movie. Talk about a good book too. 5. Offer to help. Say kind words about the East Coast author if you’re in the Midwest or West, or in a different country. Tell your local bookstore and library about the authors.
Do you do any of these? (Adapted from Penny Sansevieri’s “5 Quick Ways to Help Your Favorite Author,” Author Marketing Experts. I’ve taken the liberty to assume you have more than one favorite author.)
Freebies. The only way you’ll get one is to write an honest review for one of my books. There are 22 to choose from now. But this newsletter and the rest of the content of this blog are free. Readers and writers should check out the op-ed comments on current news, articles on writing and the writing business, book and movie reviews, author interviews, and free short stories and novellas. Don’t want to scrounge around in the archives? What can I say? You want free but want it handed to you on a silver platter? Get a life!
Pricing. All my books are reasonably priced—sale prices really, compared to traditional publishing. This is possible because by buying indie, you, the reader, eliminate all that bloated traditional publishing bureaucracy where most of what you pay goes to the publisher and not the author who writes the stories you love to read. If you haven’t tried indie, don’t miss the opportunity. In general, indie authors offer quality entertainment at reasonable prices. Sure, there are crappy books out there, from both indie and traditionally published authors, but you can afford to try an indie ebook that is usually priced for less than a meal at McDonald’s. The ebook is better for your health too. Here’s my amazon page.
More on Patterson. I’ll give the old boy credit. He keeps inventing new ways to make money in the publishing world. You’d think he was starving. I was invited to take his writing course (I’m sure there was a charge, but I don’t remember the cost—I treated the email as spam), presumably so I can be as famous as James Patterson. Or maybe he’s just looking for new co-authors to write books for him in his assembly line book factory? Whatever the reason, Patterson has taught me more about what NOT to do than what to do in my writing career. In particular, I refuse to exploit either readers or writers. I’ll leave that to traditional publishing, their agents, editors, and authors like Patterson.
Paper books v. ebooks: the eco-argument. Yeah, I know. Many people want to hold a physical book in their lap, not an e-reader. OK, I respect that. But consider this: While POD (Create Space and others) eliminates some of the damage, the sum total of all paper books kills forests in the world. E-readers are more toxic when discarded, but I’ve had my Kindle for years—e-readers contribute far less eco-waste than paper media. Considering I average one to two books read every two weeks, that would come to between 26 and 52 paper books per year. OK, I read a lot, but if every reader reads even 5 books per year, that’s a lot of paper. Books will probably go completely electronic before newspapers, another contributor to forest depletion, but please do some eco-thinking. I’ll try to provide POD availability in my catalog as budget permits, but my eco-thoughts keep one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake.
Follow-up on LinkedIn. It’s worse than I thought. Because I don’t use LI to find jobs, I was oblivious to the social media site’s unscrupulous tactics respect to job searches. As outlined in the Forbes article, “Has LinkedIn Crossed an Ethical Line,” LI not only charges job seekers $29.95 to move them up to the top of the pile, regardless of qualifications, but, of course, charges employers for posting there. Don’t waste your money. Only a small percentage of job seekers actually found their jobs from job boards. (My Indie Authors Coop is working out pretty well, by the way, as a good substitute for LI.)
Spring and summer reading. Both books in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” will have a Kindle Countdown sale April 29 through May 6. The sci-fi thrillers Muddlin’ Through and Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By will both be priced at $0.99, reduced from $2.99. And don’t forget my new sci-fi novel, Rogue Planet, at $2.99. That’s a lot of spring and summer reading for only $5.
First book in a series. If you’ve resisted jumping into the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” because the first book was too expensive, fret no more. That first Infinity edition of The Midas Bomb (I had no control over pricing) was replaced by a brand new rewritten and reedited second edition. Now every ebook in the series is $2.99. You can read the series in order or jump in anywhere. It doesn’t matter because each book can be read independently. Another reading binge you could have this spring and summer—six ebooks for $18! (Note: The Midas Bomb is available in all ebook formats for $2.99. There is also a paper version for $9.99. I’ll slowly add the rest of the series to Smashwords too, which also distributes to many ebook retailers. I don’t know about paper versions. We’ll see how TMB’s paper version does.)
In libris libertas….
