Using your Goodreads Giveaway for Maximum Advantage
This past Friday I wrapped up my first Goodreads Giveaway and thought I’d share some of the tips, tricks, and results I learned from doing it.
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Reading to Write
I imagine that, for most authors, the urge to write comes from reading. My earliest attempt came from having read a story and wanting to emulate it. There is something about the cognitive process that, for writers and would-be writers, makes the act of reading equate almost directly with writing.
Unfortunately, our cognitive process blithely glosses over an important fact: that writing a book is an order of magnitude harder than reading one. That single issue has broken the will of more than one would-be novelist over the years. We probably all know someone who, flush with the pleasure of having finished a really good book, has bought a new laptop, a shelf-full of Writers Digest guides, and sat down to knock out their first novel in a weekend…only to give it up before Monday morning.
But that doesn’t mean that the original impulse—to read in order to write—was unfounded. To be a good writer, you have to continue to read and, in fact, improve as a reader if you want to be successful.
A Brief Rant on Bad Reviewers
Lord knows independent authors couldn’t survive without the wonderful amateur book reviewers on sites like Amazon, Goodreads, and Librarything.com. I love my thoughtful reviewers (the 2-stars and 5-stars alike) and often thank them for their time. If I ever hit it big in e-publishing, it will be because of them.
But there’s a particular kind of reviewer that drives me crazy. Their approach or conception of what it is to rate or review a book is deeply flawed, unfair, and–frankly–unhelpful to other readers. I’ve boiled down what bothers me about this kind of reviewer in a simple statement:
Your dislike for a genre or format does not constitute a fair criticism of a work.
Give It Away! Strategies for making your ebook free
For authors going indie, it quickly becomes apparent that the best way to get the word out about your books and stories is to give some of it away for free. Although handing out novels like they are candy doesn’t have quite the same impact it did two or three years ago, it still may be the best strategy for newcomers to the digital publishing game.
Using the Kindle to Edit
When the manuscript for my novel A Reason to Live was ready to move from critique groups to professional editing, I was lucky enough to land the wonderful Alison Dasho (nee Janssen), a former editor for Bleak House Books and Tyrus Books [visit her at http://www.alisonedits.com/].
She’s in Wisconsin, I’m in Virginia; obviously, this was going to be a digital relationship. But there are a million ways to exchange documents online. How best to get my 90,000 words to you? I asked. Just send the Word document, she said, I’ll put it on my Kindle.