How to make a living with your writing

How to make a living with your writing

by | Dec 23, 2018 | book marketing

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

 

Where does it come from?

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.

Where can I get some?

There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.

Your Author Funnel

Your Author Funnel

by | Feb 15, 2017 | author website, book marketing

I wrote recently about author funnels on Creativindie but the point was this: you can’t try to give everything to everybody. You have to focus on the 95%.

Who is going to visit your blog? Either people who know you, your name, your book’s name – or people who don’t.

People who already know you and your books probably don’t need to visit your website much: when they finish a book you’ve include a call to action and links to go buy the next one, or sign up for a free book from your website. (If that’s the case, you have a special landing page where they can sign up for their free book, not just the homepage).

And it’s important to get those people onto your list.

But it’s more important to think about the people who found you by accident – because they were searching for stuff related to your genre, and because you were smart and wrote a lot of great content with keywords relating to your genre – they stumbled upon you’re site.

And now you’ve got, maybe, 3 seconds to catch their attention.

How do you do it? With fancy colors and images and moving gifs and flashing lights?

NO.

One Facebook or Twitter, when they are scrolling through a bunch of stuff, pictures help your posts stand out. But they are already on your website. You don’t need to catch their eye, you need to hook their brain. Probably with an interesting headline or subtitle.

All your posts should extremely clickable with captivating titles, but you also need your subtitle/tagline (under your blog header or logo) who you are and what exactly you do.

And then you want them to do something.

But don’t give them a ton of choices – too many choices will paralyze them.

Give them  one choice.

The choice will probably be, “Read Something For Free.”

You could offer a free book, but if they don’t know you yet, they aren’t going to want it – at least not badly enough to give you their email.

So instead you should try and get them to read an excerpt. “Read the first chapter free!” and immediately following, add social proof with a few reviews, or “over 100 5 star reviews” or “over 10,000 sold” or “winner of X prize.”

Give them a reason to start reading.

Back it up with social proof.

At the bottom of your excerpt you have “get this book for free on Amazon” (for your permafree book – if you don’t have one, you can link to your book).

At the end of that book, you have another offer – something even better – to try and get them on your email list.

Why do you need an email list?

So you can let them know when you have a new book out, ask them to buy it and review it, and hopefully share it with others. But if you only have one book, after they’ve bought it and read it, having them on your email list is worthless… unless you plan to write more books soon. It’s still a good idea, but it can be expensive once you get a few thousand people on your list to keep it up, unless you’re earning some money back.

So you need more content.

My point

Don’t give them everything. Don’t worry about everybody. Make the thing you want them to do the easiest thing to find; remove obstacles (price, confusing site, email optin). If you ask for their email too earlier they’ll leave. You need to make them want your book before they’ll trade their money or their privacy to read it.

You can do that with excerpts, or a brilliant description, or a beautiful book cover, or lots of quality reviews. Attract them with the right content, grab them with a good offer, get them on your list – OR sell the book hard and get them to click over to Amazon and buy.

What to write about on your author website to get more traffic

What to write about on your author website to get more traffic

by | Jun 17, 2015 | author website, book marketing

Congrats! You have a site! Hopefully you kept it clean and simple, and didn’t add a bunch of ugly graphics, awards, bells and whistles, or an ugly header/logo. The good news is this: content matters most. The majority of authors who have become well known in self-publishing circles, “celebrity bloggers”, are using WordPress’ default theme or a free blogger theme or something else rudimentary and poorly designed.

But they had a lot of good stuff to say, so people followed them and shared them. Most authors, even if they manage to set up an author website, have no idea what to blog about – so they don’t. Or they post banal, trivial updates about their life.

You’re going to do better, right?

Firstly, you need a bunch of content so Google recognizes that you exist. I recommend starting out with 100 posts. That seems like a lot, but it isn’t.

Choose five main keywords. Focus on “longtail” keywords (phrases, rather than words).

For this site, for example, they might be:

  • WordPress author website
  • Book sales page
  • Author Platform
  • Book Marketing Tips
  • Setting up WordPress

For Urban Epics, it might be:

  • paranormal romance
  • indie published books
  • urbane fantasy
  • free kindle books

Those keywords might be too competitive, so I could focus on longer ones by combining them, like “free paranormal romance kindle reads” or “indie published urbane fantasy book”.

Then use a title generator: here are some.

http://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker

http://tweakyourbiz.com/tools/title-generator/

http://backlinkgenerator.net/titlegenerator/

Type in one keyword at a time, and make a list of 100 article titles. You can tweak them a bit if they sound strange, or use them to think of better ones. Don’t overthink these: you need a “body” of content up on your site quickly, so Google knows what you’re all about. I would suggest writing 5 of these a day. Shoot for around 500 words each (that’s just 2500 words – it should take you a couple hours or less). They need good titles and some writing, and shouldn’t be total crap: write them for humans. But don’t overanalyze either – it’s very possible you won’t get many readers. But you need the content so that Google starts to trust you. You can spend more time rehashing good topics later. From then on, after you get your first 100 posts, you can just write something every week or two.

What to write about next

  • Keep a lookout also for trending issues you can jump on
  • Review books, movies and TV shows in your genre
  • Offer free book reviews to other indie authors in your genre (it’ll make you popular and bring you a lot of traffic, quickly).
  • Round up posts like “The 10 best new paranormal urban fantasy books I read this year” (or do a monthly roundup; search Amazon for bestselling books in your genre and post a monthly list of top sellers.”
  • You can also blog about your life, your moods, but don’t whine or complain, or show off or preach. Just try to be authentic, but also share things of interest that are related to your genre.

Improving your sales rank

It takes time for Google to know you and trust you. Probably a year or two. But you can grow your traffic faster by:

  • Getting people to link to you; by having great resources or doing lots of guest posts.

Jamie Gold, for example, put up this page of ‘writing beat’ worksheets in excel that I keep coming back to when I need help plotting.

  • Repurpose content: make videos, powerpoints, image quotes – when you post a blog post, also make extra content for Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, Pinterest and Youtube.
  • Write stuff that people will want to share (using the title generators will help a lot with that)
What the Hell is this site?

What the Hell is this site?

by | Feb 15, 2015 | author website, book marketing, Updates

This is a demo site I set up to show writers the best way to set up an author website with WordPress – where to put everything, how to organize the content, and how to showcase your books so people actually want to read them. This site not only has posts about how to sell your books online, get people to sign up to your email list, which themes and plugins to use, and present yourself professionally, but also demonstrates everything by being a live virtual site.