Getting your books pirated can be the best thing to ever happen to you in a particular market. Like what happened to Neil Gaiman:

Great article from Tim Grahl of Booklaunch.com on how we view piracy, especially ebook piracy, in the wrong way.

It’s summed up nicely in this quote by Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media:

“The problem with writers isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.”

Read the entire thing here: Ebook Piracy = Sell More Books by Tim Grahl

Daniel Greene isn’t your average booktuber. He’s a very niche booktuber, and he’s got half-a-million subscribers.

This is what happened when he published a novel in his niche:

So you need to send out a newsletter, and you don’t know what to put in it.

Or maybe you do know, but you have no idea how to make it interesting.

Fear not, Tammi Lambreque and Lewis Jorstad have got your back with this 1,5 hour free seminar:

There’s a battle going on right now, between the pro-AI futurists and the anti-AI rights creators. Both sides got some excellent points that you can find online. I’m not going to comment on that.

I will say that I’ve been using the Midjourney Art AI and while it took quite some getting used to (and the results, as yet, can’t compare to a true illustrator – for one, a human illustrator can count the number of fingers on a hand,) there are some things that AI is really, really good at.

Like scraping lots of images and extracting the similarities from them. Which is exactly what we do when we’re doing cover research. Take a look at this:

It may not be the greatest covers in the world, but they’re definitely western covers. That’s the prompt I used “book cover, western”.

If I was writing western, assuming I knew nothing about the genre or the covers, I’d instantly know a few things: (more…)

TLDR: The increasing popularity of Kickstarter is a death-knell for traditional publishing, but great news for writers, both new and established, who’ll get access to better-paying and faster publishing options.

People, especially new(ish) writers, keep complaining that Brandon Sanderson’s kickstarter is going to hurt writers, publishers, and book-loving aliens from Mars.

I’ve seen arguments that it will make publishers less willing to pay writers, less willing to gamble on new writers, and less willing to publish non-best-selling books.

That’s great news!

Check this: the big trad publishers are dying. Have been for the past 30 years, and it accelerated as online shopping accelerated. (more…)

I’ve read a number of marketing books in my day, but very few that pack as much punch in as little space as Andrea Pearson’s Killer Content.

Killer Content is laser focused on tactics and results. You won’t find many anecdotes here (although, since this is Andrea Pearson, there will be a lot of smileys.) You won’t find heavy theory either – you’ll get a one or two sentence summary of the main points, then a link to the survey/study/rapport/other where it comes from. (more…)

Deciding whether to go with a pen name or not will depend on two factors:

1. Are you willing to promote two names?
2. Are you able to write enough books to keep two names alive over time?

Both of these assume that your ultimate goal is to make money and/or a career as a writer. If you don’t have that goal, but only want to be visible, or share your thoughts with the world, then it’s a completely different ball park, and you’ll need different considerations.

But let’s assume that you’re partial to money. (more…)

My writing friends, and random people on the writing forums where I hang out, sometimes got trouble explaining what they’re writing about. Especially when someone’s talking to them.

So do I, but I’ve got a solution.

Two words: Log lines. (more…)

I’ve written several hundred blurbs, for myself, for other authors, and for non-authors, mainly academics.

That’s right, there are blurbs in academia. They’re called abstracts, posters, or one-slide presentations, but if it works like a blurb, and functions like a blurb, it is a blurb.

That’s my view. Don’t tell it to any academics. Also, when I say “blurb,” I mean “back cover copy.” That’s the correct term. Nobody I know uses it (OK, some pundits in the self-publishing sphere do, but most of us just say “blurb”.) I’m going to say blurb. So there.

Anyhow, blurbing (which is five characters shorter than “blurb writing” and I’m a lazy bastard) is not a writing skill. It’s marketing, and while you use your keyboard for both, they’re essentially different skill sets. And no, one of them won’t leave a trail of slime on your pristine, artistic soul.

Let me explain why, and how you go about writing an effective* blurb.

(* Please note the “effective.” The key point of a blurb isn’t style, information capacity, or ego, it’s effect – unless you’re writing to stoke your own ego, in which case feel free to skip the rest of this post…)

Oh, and this is a bit longer than my usual posts. As in “about 1500% longer.” Yeah, it needs a table of contents: (more…)