Author: <span>Natalie</span>

Marketing vs Writing

Last month I read an article in The Telegraph about author John Locke and how he had already sold over 1 million self published ebooks.  The article starts by saying that he “publishes and promotes his own work” but I think the key word there is promotes.

When I first read the headline I thought “Wow, how did he do that?” followed very closely with a tinge of jealousy.  But reading further it becomes very clear that he was much more focussed on the marketing than anything else.  He talks about not having a big marketing budget, but in the electronic age who really needs one?  Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter, Linked In…. there are so many ways to start the ball rolling with word-of-mouth without any words actually leaving anyone’s physical mouth.

John Locke says that when he found out Amazon pays 35% on ebooks priced at 99c, he was over the moon!  He’s been in commission sales all his life and anyone in that line of work will know that 35% really is, as he says, “like a license to print money”.  He’s obviously very talented at marketing but from the reviews of his books it seems that really is his focus and the writing tends to be sub-par.

The one thing that grabbed me right away is that he has a book out now called “How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months” and at the end of the article there was mention of this as a way to “find out how he did it by buying the book”.  On his blog, his posts end with similar phrasing such as, “You know how I’m celebrating? By making my marketing system available for everyone who wants to duplicate, or exceed my achievements. I wrote it all out, step-by-step. Everything I tried that didn’t work and everything that did. I’m charging $4.99 for this information via eBook, $9.99 paperback. I hope you’ll consider it a bargain, since I spent $25,000 for information that didn’t work.”

He follows the hookline closely with, “You know when my friends finally considered me an author? When I started making serious money from book sales! And no matter how nice your friends and family are, you know in your heart they’re not going to consider you a real author until the royalties start pouring in.”

It’s very strong imagery, that you aren’t a real author until you earn royalties and that you won’t earn royalties unless you buy his book.  As a writer, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It’s the same kind of marketing as all of those adverts on the web saying things like “I lost 6 stone in a month!  Click here to find out how!” and then you get taken to a page roping you in and at the end it says “You can find out how to do it too!  It’s all in my new book priced £39.99…”.

He seems to be very much all about the profit, which can be a big motivation for people to want to be a writer and marketing is definitely a large part of becoming a known author.  But taking the focus off the writing and putting more time into marketing the work, just makes me concerned that this kind of thinking will come back to bite new authors who focus on writing first.

July 27, 2011
Writing
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Hidden Talent

I’ve never been a fan of Lady Gaga.  There are a couple of her songs that I sang along to in the car when they came on the radio, but for the most part they were all just too pop-tastic and drowned in synth that they just didn’t grab me.  I’d known for a while that she wrote the songs too and didn’t just perform them, but because of the added pop-ness the lyrics never really made much of an impression on me.

Last night though I was looking at some pianists on youtube and there was link to Lady Gaga performing a couple of her songs with just a piano.  I checked them out because I’m a sucker for piano music and wow I was really surprised at the talent she has!  The quality to her voice is fantastic and the lyrics she writes are really good, it’s such a shame she doesn’t do an “unplugged” album because I would buy that in a heartbeat going by these very few links on youtube.

It’s sad in a way that to get the celebrity she has, she had to almost hide her writing, instrumental and vocal talent.

Here is a video from before she was known as Lady Gaga, she performed live at NYU several years ago and this song is just so beautiful – the writing and the performance.

July 23, 2011
Writing
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Writers Beware

I was shown a link today for the blog of a budding writer.  She wrote about her road to publication and, to sum it up, how even though the road had been filled with rejection she ended up getting an agent and a book deal all in one day after self-publishing an ebook recently.  There were a couple of things in her story that seemed a bit strange to me – mainly the fact that the agent who contacted her then proceeded to sell her book to a publisher within a few hours and without a contract ever being signed between the agent and the writer.  I assumed she left that part out for legal reasons.

However, it turns out that my assumption was wrong.  She has just made a new post to say how the whole thing was a scam.  Not from her, but that she was scammed by someone pretending to be the agent in question.  She only found out when she called the agency to discuss some things and they let her know that they had recently been hacked and that they had no knowledge of her or her supposed contract.  I’m not going to link to her blog here because I’m not certain if she really was scammed, or if it was a publicity stunt to get more viewers to her blog with key phrases on the original post like “how I got published in one day!”.

If it really did happen then I feel for the girl, that must be a horrible thing to feel so elated and then so crushed in such a short amount of time.  But it’s a good lesson to everyone out there, to make sure that you are 100% certain of who you’re dealing with.

My writing isn’t at the query stage yet so I won’t be approaching agents for at least the next few months.  It’s a scary thing though, that there may be people who are doing these kinds of scams.

July 21, 2011
Writing
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He said, she said

All those years ago in school I remember that every story I wrote, and every piece of creative writing for school work, was written in third person.  I used to hear people talking about first person writing and think to myself “But that’s crazy!  Only one perspective?  I could never write like that!”.

Yet after leaving school, and college, I started reading a series of books that was written in first person and that series is actually what spurred me on to actually focus on a writing career.  I decided to try out this crazy first person malarkey…and haven’t looked back since!  I find it so much easier to write and realised very early on that it definitely doesn’t limit the “sides” of the story that you can convey.

So now, I’m sitting here working on a short story for a competition and feel like I’m back in school because it has to be written in third person.  They give you the first line of the story and you carry it on, to wherever you feel like taking it.  But try as I might, you can’t do anything with that first line other than write in third person.

It’s strange to me that something I used to do so often, and for so long, is now like a foreign concept and I’m finding it really difficult to write from an outside view.  I keep asking myself “Why is this?” and maybe it’s just because I haven’t done so for so long.  But I feel it’s more than that – writers choose to write in first or third person and tend to stick with one or the other throughout all of their books.  Personal preference and all that.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just like stretching a muscle you haven’t used for a while.  Or maybe I should just stop pondering these things and get back to, you know, the actual writing part!  Procrastination, oh how I missed thee.

July 11, 2011
Writing
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Tick Tock

I feel as though I’ve spent a lot of time working on this author site today.  No, I know I’ve spent a lot of time on it!  Time that I should really have been using for some writing competitions that I’d like to enter.

Too many competitions really.  Or maybe there isn’t such a thing as too many competitions.

I get a magazine called Writing Magazine (I know, it does what it says!) and they have a lot of competitions listed inside, not just their own but for all sorts of different places.  It used to be that I’d pick up a copy of any kind of writing competitions list and not find anything that was aimed at the genre I enjoy writing.  But now, it’s as though there’s a sudden boom in the fiction industry as a whole, particularly things like Dark Fantasy.  Perhaps because of vampires getting a re-vamp.  No pun intended!

Oh, I hope these competitions aren’t looking for sparkles.  Unless my MC gets herself a glue gun and some glitter, no one is going to have any.

June 10, 2011
Writing
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