Why Writers Should Educate Themselves

When I started this blog almost three years ago, I had turned over a new leaf. I had gone from being an egomaniac to realising I knew nothing. Zip. Zilch. Don’t pretend you haven’t been there, that because you can read, because you’ve been writing since you were six, because you can text your mate, or got a great response to that post on Facebook, you believed that writing a fantastic story would be easy. It was all about talent, you didn’t need to build on your skills, you knew what worked.

Yep, I was a dumbass, you probably weren’t as bad a me, but pretty close. Then I sent my stories out into the world and I got slapped by rejection after rejection, some rejections even threw a cocktail in my face and that hurt! Then one rejection came with some advice, and a little part of me said, “Well, try it out, it’s better than sitting here getting a red face. Better to waste your money on something useful rather than cups of tea (or coffee for you caffeine addicts).” I hired an editor, I took writing courses at my local writers’ centre, actually searched out feedback (Rather than letters  with various versions of ‘no thanks’) from writers and I learnt that my writing sucked. Big time. I was so embarrassed at what I had sent out I could have powered a small city for a month on my shame alone. I worked hard to improve and hone my craft, and that work paid off when I landed a mentorship with one of Australia’s biggest fantasy writers.

In the video below I was interviewed by a local internet entrepreneur, Bernie, on the e-book revolution, why it’s important to educate yourself, and why you need to pay for good quality information if you actually want to get ahead.

In this video we discuss:

• How I’d realised that talent wasn’t enough to write a good story.
•  Why I sought out experts rather than ‘free’ advice on the internet. While free information was great, it wasn’t particularly detailed or step-by-step, no one was helping me step back from my own manuscript and point out what I couldn’t see in my own work. I needed people who had more experience than me, and those people, the people that would really make a difference to my writing, wanted to be paid for their time. Experts hold back the valuable part of their knowledge (Usually the ‘how do you do it’ or ‘how do you apply it to you’ part) because they know its valuable, I could search as much as I wanted on the net but I would only get an idea of what I needed, not how to do it.
• How I really resisted paying for help at the start; I didn’t have the money for goodness sake! Then I compared how far I had gotten in six months doing my own ‘research’ in comparison to eight weeks taking a social media marketing course and realised paying for information got me better quality, and I got to where I wanted to be faster. No one else was going to invest in me and my books if I didn’t invest in myself. 

Do I still invest in courses even though I am now asked to give my own? Of course, I don’t know everything. New crazes and ideas and strategies come out every day, and I try to share as much of what I absorb as I can here on the blog in the hopes that you will find it interesting enough to learn more, from me or someone else. I now know that I will always need an editor to look over my books, that there will always be someone I can learn from who knows more than me. 

I can say without a doubt that the only reason I have come so far in my writing career is because I've constantly educated myself these past three years. Every year I have a budget to spend on learning new things. Frankly, it was the best investment in myself I ever made.

What was the best investment you ever made in your writing career? Leave a comments below and see what other writers believe it is important to learn.

It’s Time To Live Life! How To Increase Your Productivity & Keep your Writing, Marketing & Life On Track.

Typically, my memory is atrocious. No really. A family member will ask me to help with some exceptionally mundane task and my memory seems to hit the snooze alarm, like I have a black hole in my head that stops me from linking into the real world. This quirk turned into a bit of a self-hate/productivity nightmare during my first two months of this year as a ‘full-time writer’. Well, I was going to be a full time writer for as long as my digital piggy bank kept turning those slowly dwindling numbers into money. Then I would have to reconsider my strategy, but until then I was going to give my writing the best chance it could get!

Or so I tried.

I would work all day on marketing and hate myself for not getting to my writing. Or spend all day writing and kick myself that I did nothing significant to move my ebook further into the conscious mind of teens everywhere. This was how it was for the first month and it did nothing but lower my morale. It was clear that I had to get my goals out of my head, on paper and chunked it into manageable tasks rather than to-do lists. Otherwise I was going to end up with a zero bank balance and an erratic pile of achievements that didn’t build on each other, they just dressed in spandex and looked impressive.

Tony Robbins calls it Chunking, I call it Bagging Idea Vomit. Everything is bigger in our head, filled with a million tasks, but once we start grouping it together it’s manageable.

Now watch the video below, or here onYouTube, about how I have managed to increase my productivity, and do more, in less time.

In this video I discuss:

• How I’ve always been anal, in that I must finish a task before I move on to the next. The problem with this is you leave all your other tasks alone for weeks at a time to finish one thing, when most tasks need to be done consistently to have an impact. I had to reprogram my brain to let go so I could move all my important tasks forward together rather than sacrificing all the others for one.
• Basically, thoughts become bigger and more insurmountable the longer they stay in your head. All of the sudden your thoughts become King Kong, raging through your brain and bruising the frontal lobe, giving you one hell of a head ache. Don’t let your tasks and goals run over each other like panicked lemmings, write them down. And I don’t mean create another list. To-do-lists still overwhelm, you need to get out of prose writing altogether, put all your major goals and tasks in a Mindmap. Have three or four main areas of focus off your ultimate goal. Then, off the main branches have bubbles stating the things you need to do to bring those focus areas into being.

Copyright: Nicoguaro

• Now you have an exact idea of what you are focused on and what you need to achieve your goals. Now you need to block out the time. Pull out Excel and do a little keyboard dance, block out a maximum of 2 hours per task. Most of my tasks are in hour blocks. It’s better to do things like social media in half hour chunks more than once a week, for example I do Twitter, Facebook and Forums each twice a week.  Make sure you leave some spare hours in there in case you get tied up one day and need somewhere else to put the task. Life happens, don’t fight it!
• Try to follow your plan! Don’t beat yourself up if you run over time, don’t try to make it up. You’re just increasing that stress and dropping your morale like a lopsided scale. Move the task to a spare hour or focus on it the next week. Even if you don’t cover everything, you will be covering more ground, creating more art, and moving all your elements forward at once, not paying rent (in stress-credits) for all the tasks you dumped in the storage shed.
• It does work! I'm blogging more often for you guys right?

Do you find it hard to juggle Life, Writing and Marketing? Or do you have weekly goals? What ways do you try to balance the load? Please do share your thoughts in the comments below.

Ten Shades of Author Collaboration - Why Writers Shouldn't Compete

Why is it that every time I talk to writers ‘new’ to the digital world I end up feeling like I’ve volunteered to be a crash-test dummy for a dozen cars? I’ve just come back from the Adelaide Writers’ Festival with a bit of a bee in my bonnet. Even after all the studies, the blog posts, the infographs and pie graphs, authors and publishers are still under the impression that only the few elite will ever be writers and apparently the whole population of worldwide readers will only read the books of their one perfect author. That god awful vibe still exists, insisting we (authors) are all in competition with each other, and if we even get out readers to look sideways at another author’s book, we will lose their hard won attention, forever!

“Let’s face it, not everyone can be a writer, there’s not enough room,” was the mantra I heard again and again. I’m surprised I didn’t see more writers wandering around the festival looking like escaped kidnapping victims with hoods duct-taped over their heads. Setting aside the fact that I’ve been asked to swallow a steaming pile of BS, let’s break this down a little. There a millions of readers across the globe, it is ridiculous to assume they will only read one book or one author in their life time (40+ reading years). Let’s assume only half or a quarter of the millions were voracious readers, where reading (and I know a lot of you feel me here) is a way of life and once you’ve made it through all those Harry Potter novels you need more pumpkin juice. I can name a dozen favourite authors off the top of my head, none of which are producing books fast enough, collectively, to fill more than two-three months of my allocated reading time. So what do I do for the other nine months (Or eight if you subtract a month’s worth of social media)? Making floral arrangements? Completing my ninja training? No! I’m sampling the wears of new authors, who may not have as much ‘talent’ as my favourites but are competent, and entertaining and still worth my reading time. They may not be the elite writing-del-a-creame, on the NY Times bestsellers, but they write books in genres I like to read.

While readers in the past were restricted to by the cost of printed books, with digital books people are finding reading more affordable. Surveys as far back as 2010 were already noting that 40% of people using e-readers are reading more books now than they did when they were reading print books and that number has only increased. In America surveys suggest that 31% of the population own tablets and 26% own e-readers. In Germany almost 1 million e-readers were sold in 2012.

E-book authors are in a unique position where we have a sector of the market that’s at least 50% voracious readers, ready to snap up a good recommendation from an author that they just read and loved. So why wouldn’t you, as an author, collaborate with other authors whose work you enjoyed, and send them your readers? Think of this as a marketing exercise: if a reader is done with your books (yes, all of them), how do you continue to build their trust in you? By giving them good recommendations, and in the process, another author is building the trust with their readers by sending them to you. It’s a simple concept. No two authors follow the same marketing strategy, which means that every author will have reached different people. No two sets of fandom are the same.

At the risk of sounding cheesy, we need to share the love, not horde the treasure. Because let’s face it, everyone dies, and hording treasure never to use it, is stupid. Better to make connections and friends and promote an abundance economy (Channelling Seth Godin’s Icarus Deception here). As the ever wise J.A. Konrath says:

“One hand should always be reaching up for your next goal. The other should be reaching down to help others get where you’re at. We’re all in the same boat. Start passing out oars.”

So what are authors doing to promote not only their own work, but the work of their collaborators? One of the best examples I’ve come across is the hugely successful Ten Shades of Sexy, a perma-free ebook which features sex scenes from ten different novels and authors. The premise is simple; ten authors got together to produce a compilation book that brought a reader nothing but the ‘good parts’ of their sexy romance novels. They knew their audience well, and took advantage of the knowledge that romance readers loved to bookmark ‘the good parts’ of their favourite novels and gave them just what they wanted. The brilliance of this project is twofold; you have ten authors promoting the same book to their networks of different readers. By supporting each other’s work they are building their own fan bases. Secondly, the book is comprised of novel samples, so the ultimate aim is to use this free book to urge readers to purchase the full novels.

At first glance looking at the Goodreads reviews you would think the exercise had failed with an average star rating of 2.98. But if you delve into the reviews you find that the reviewers have given it 3 stars because the ‘novel’ doesn’t stand as its own book (remember, this was not its purpose – to read like a rounded anthology). The reviews then go on to admit that at least every reader put one or more of the novels sampled on their to-read list. That was the aim, to gain more readers and sell more books; Ten Shade’s Of Sexy did what it was supposed to do. I will admit I read it, and love it for a different reason. I got to read the racy parts without having to go through what I saw as the tiresome parts of a romance! But that’s my genre preference. It’s worth noting that this book is still in the top 100 free Amazon Kindle downloads after almost 8 months (#64 at time of publication).

While this is a great example, this may not be the ideal way for authors to collaborate in other genres. I have blogged about this before but consider going out right now and reading other indie authors in your genre. If you like what you read, and feel your readers would enjoy it too, approach the author about collaborating! Put the synopsis for their novel at the back of yours and have them do the same for you. Then every reader who finishes your novel, full to the brim with praise for your prose, sees the ad and because they liked your book so much they take your recommendation and purchase the other novel. It’s a win-win situation for both authors. You can be very clinical about your choice of collaborator if you wish, asking them about the size of their fan base and the number of downloads they have, making sure they are similar to your own. You could also wear a Dracula mask and shout boo at them through their living room window, but hey, if you want to scare off collaborators it’s your choice. You can even join the affiliate programs of Amazon, Smashwords and Kobo and get paid a percentage for every collaborator novel you sell through the back of the book (how I would do it).

So let’s collaborate with each other, spread the love and ignore the treasure hoarders. 

Use the comments section below to describe your novel (no links to where the novel is sold please, this isn’t a free promotion bid) post your email, and find collaborators. 

Please be gentle with each other, for a potential collaborator may not mesh and that’s ok, it’s about finding a good fit and not everyone will fit, first in best dressed is not the aim of the game. Just remember, it is better to live in a community then take part in an imaginary competition that only exists in the minds of the ‘elite’.

Speaking of collaboration, this is the next phase I want to implement in my own novel The Grand Adventures of Madeline Cain, a YA comedy set in Facebook, just released in December. If you are an YA indie author who writes humorously or for a chick-lit (think Meg Cabot) YA audience please feel free to drop me an email ebookrevolution (at) yahoo (dot) com. Let’s swap books and go from there. The Chick-lit/humour element is important! Straight genres that don’t include these elements (paranormals/fantasies/sci-fis etc) probably won’t fit. I like these novels, but they’re not my target audience. Don’t forget to put ‘author collaboration’ in the subject heading so it doesn’t get spammed!