My thoughts on marketing were kicked off this week not by the social media data engineering post I shared yesterday, but Dave Freer’s thoughts on the publishing industry and the impact the pandemic is having on it. Once upon a time there were no book chains, and publishers had to sell to directly to… Read More Paradigm Marketing Shift: Make a Connection
The little engine could, and did. This big bookstore seems to be running out of steam and sliding backwards down the slope and toward a crash. I spent several hours in the store I’ll call BN for brevity, yesterday. And the heck of it is, we hadn’t planned to go to the bookstore in the… Read More The Big Bookstore that Can’t
Good morning readers. It’s a bright winter morning here, just above freezing and getting warmer, which means the snow is going away. I may enjoy photographing snowflakes, but I don’t want the snow to linger for long! I’ve been a busy lady, so I have two articles up for you all, one my regular column… Read More Psychology, Marketing, and Guesting
I have the honor and privilege to work with a large community of writers, some of whom I also claim as friends, and it’s past time that I shared a handful of their latest releases (or, in one case, it’s been a while, but the sequel is coming out real soon now, I hear *looks… Read More New Books! Hot Books! Getcher Books Here!
I woke up this morning with a start. I hadn’t written my weekly Mad Genius post. So I hopped out of bed, grabbed my tablet, and went back to bed. There, I propped myself on my pillow and wrote for a bit less than an hour. Sheer decadence, if you think about it. The First… Read More Writing Life
Selling Art I know there are not a lot of us who are working at art and writing. I probably wouldn’t have gotten into it, the art is sort of my sanity valve when school gets intense, except… I kept getting asked to sell pieces, print, coffee mugs (looks hard at a certain person). So… Read More Selling Art Merchandise
A friend (actually, more than one, come to think of it) pointed me at a ranty post made by another writer this last week. I looked at it, shook my head, and went back to homework. But it stayed with me. Not the first part of the rant, which was… well, it didn’t make sense,… Read More Playing with the Big Boys
Hear, O fellow authors, and consider this. Writing is not a competition. There is not a scarcity of readers, and although there has been for lo, these many years an artificial scarcity of of reading material, that drought is coming to an end with the Age of Indie. So why do we hear fearsome cries… Read More Winning, Losing, and playing the Game
Hat tip to Everitt for the title. I’m writing this after a conversation about blogging, and promoting one’s work, and how to set up a blog to do that. In my opinion, it is a good, low-impact way to market yourself, whether you are an author, artist, or something else altogether. There are a few… Read More The Care and Feeding of a Blog
I have been asked several times in the last week alone about indie publishing. Before I talk about what I’m doing, and why, let me point out that I am relatively new to this. Vulcan’s Kittens is the first novel I have published, and that came out in 2013. I have been writing and studying… Read More Why I do what I do
Crossposted from Amazing Stories: A recent conversation about self and independent publishing led to me voicing my thoughts on what to do once the book is released. This will also hold true even for the traditionally published, as the publishers provide them with less and less support. We must be able to be businessmen, not… Read More The Dreaded M-Word
But on a different topic. I read Kristin Kathryn Rusch’s blog regularly, and today it really caught my attention. She takes on why self-publish? and handles that topic masterfully, based on her wide experience. I am still a newbie to this, but she sums up why I’ve chosen the arguably more difficult path. I am… Read More Another Reason