In Part One of this blog series I explained how I made my DIY book trailer on a shoestring $19 budget and how you can design and build your own epic book trailer. Today in Part Two I'm going to tell you how to use your awesome book trailer to effectively market your self-published book, even if you don't have...
If you're a self-published author, like me, marketing your book while staying on budget is a huge issue. Very few authors have thousands of dollars to spend on their launch and instead have to make every penny count. A book trailer-or, should I say, a GOOD book trailer, can be an incredibly powerful tool that pays dividends both before and...
Marketing your Book: What Genre are you Writing, Who is Reading it and What do they Expect? Part 5 - Literary Fiction
Next time you're in the theater watching the latest superhero movie, wait until you reach the pivotal fight scene-the big show down. The one with the highest stakes. The fight that the whole movie has built up to-and then glance around at your fellow movie-goers. Chances are, they're all looking at their phones.
World building is my favorite part of fantasy, both in reading it and writing it. This can be a bit of a drag when reading because so many authors seem to gloss over this critical aspect of the genre and it ends up leaving glaringly large plot holes, inconsistencies, and nonsensical events that I just can't get over. For me,...
The Hero's Journey is a tried-and-true storytelling structure that came to be after a man named Joseph Cambell spent a great deal of time analyzing the stories of ancient mythology-or, beloved stories that had stood the test of time. He found twelve key stages which fit within a standard 3-act storytelling structure when, if followed and executed...
In this five-part series, I'm breaking down the different genres from the perspective of a debut novelist: How to recognize what genre you're writing, what the readers of those genres expect, and how to reach them. Today is Part 4 - Horror.
Today I'm going to talk about a phenomena that has come to be known as Mansplaining. What is Mansplaining? According to writers Lily Rothman and Rebecca Solnit, Mansplaining is "explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman" and is characterized by "overconfidence and...
In this five-part series, I analyse the most popular genres from the perspective of a debut novelist. I answer questions like "How can I identify my genre?" "Who is my target demographic?" "What will my readers expect from me?" and "How can I reach them?"
In this series I continue my survey of the most popular genres from the perspective of a debut novelist. Today is Part Two: Thrillers, Mysteries and Crime.
