Stephen Allen Holmes Blog

Okay. Most writers know about editing their work, removing repetative words, using synonyms, not using past perfect tense, and writing in non-stilted English. Many know that, especially for epublishing, sentences and paragraphs need to be short (the art of chunking what you write) so a page doesn't look monolithic and scare readers off.

But did you know that marketing is even more important that writing? Of course, if you write jibberish, the market won't be large unless our culture allows idiocracy to fully bloom. Everyone tells you that you have to blog, tweet, facebook and enter chats to build an audience. That's all true, but did you know that you can target recent ebook buyers of works similar to yours? Big companies spend 40-50,000 a month doing exactly that for their products, but you can do it too for not very much money. Say you want to send out a thousand emails a month, that's affordable.

There are many companies that know how to avoid having their emails (and yours) not blacklisted so they go through to your targeted customers. Say you have a vampire novel on Amazon. These companies can target buyers of such books who purchased with a month or two and contact them about your book. Of course, you need a good sales pitch, better than a query letter, but the return is that often over 25 percent of your targeted market will purchase what you're selling. Check it out.

Next time, I'll talk about the concept of the hero's journey, and give more marketing techniques. Meantime, read The Writer's Journey, third edition, by Christopher Vogler. Send your questions in and I'll try to reply on this space.

Stephen Allen Holmes

Here’s my idea of what this blog should be about. Writers should not have to reinvent the marketing wheel. I want everyone to share what they know about writing and selling novels.

Even for a published writer, the question is how are you going to help people know about your book and want to buy it. In this economy, and with conglomerate ownership, publishers aren’t going to have vast advertising campaigns. If you want to sell a second novel, you’ve got to have a plan to help sell your first one. If any of you have such a plan, share it with other writers through this site.

Perhaps, you’re a good writer and want to improve. I suggest a writers’ critique group.  But, if you’re interested in some tips, email your questions.

The idea is, you ask questions and I work on providing the answers.