I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Our topic today is what I call the “Marketing Domino Effect.” 

What’s that? When you have a series of novels, in theory each one can sell the next one in the series. In practice, that can work very well, once you’ve got 3 or more books in the series. But it’s not all smooth sailing. Some authors will have it easier than others. Read on…

Why Traditional Publishers are Wary of Series

When a series of traditionally published novels goes big, it can really go big. You can easily think of examples. The Harry Potter series. The Jack Reacher series. Sue Grafton’s “alphabet” series of mysteries. These were long series that did great. So traditional publishers love successful series. 

But there are a couple of issues that traditional publishers have to worry about, which make them wary. 

First, traditional publishers have to pay advances on novels they contract. They usually don’t want to pay advances for more than three books in a series. So even if you envision dozens of books, your proposal will probably only contain the first 3. And you won’t get the full advance on books 2 and 3 in the series until you write them. You’ll get some fraction of the advance. But even a fraction of an advance is cash the publisher has to commit far before the book starts earning money, and cash is precious, so that’s an issue for them. 

Second, you can’t predict when a series is going to be wildly successful. Most traditionally published series have tapering results. The second book usually sells fewer copies than the first. And the third book usually sells even fewer. Of course, there are exceptions, but publishers have steely-eyed accountants who don’t bank on exceptions. So they want to make sure the series is really going to fly before they commit to more than 3 books in the series.  

Despite all that, if you have a series in mind, do put that fact in your proposal. But the proposal should probably spell out only the first 3 books. You can add a sentence saying that you have ideas for more books in the series, but very few publishers are going to want to contract those until the first book or three has panned out. 

Why Indie Authors Love Series

Indie authors really love series. Let’s define what we mean here. An “indie author” is an author who acts as their own publisher. They don’t get an advance. They pay for their own editing, cover design, proofreading, and typesetting (or they do some of these themselves). Then they upload the electronic files for the book to Amazon and to the other online retailers and collect all the rewards, if there are any.

A lot of indie authors write long series of novels. 10 books or 20 or 30 in a series is not out of the question. 

So why do indie authors love series more than traditional publishers do? Because both of the issues faced by traditional publishers are reversed for indie authors. 

First, Indie authors don’t get an advance. So they don’t have to commit any money long-term. They just write the first book and hit Publish. The up-front cost for Book 1 in a series is exactly the same as the up-front cost for a standalone novel. That’s a huge advantage. 

Second, indie authors are better able to market Books 2, 3, 4, … in a series than a traditional publisher can. The reason for this will take some unpacking, and most of the rest of this blog post will do that unpacking. 

In a nutshell, indie authors are a bit more flexible than traditional publishers. As each new book in a series comes out, an indie author can easily change the back matter in the previous books to promote the new ones. They just change a few things, upload the new electronic files, and every book sold after that has the new back matter. And the back matter can be incredibly powerful in making the Marketing Domino Effect work…

Why the Back Matter Really Matters

Before we talk about back matter, we have to stipulate that Quality matters most in selling a novel. (See my article on The Success Equation to see my definition of Quality.) If a book has low Quality, selling its sequel is going to be a tough slog, no matter how smart your marketing is. 

But let’s assume each novel in your series has high Quality. Then how you do sell the reader on the next book? You sell the reader at exactly the moment when they’re most in love with your current book—right after they finish it. 

You do it by creating “back matter”—the stuff that comes immediately after The End. Back matter can have a lot of stuff, but here are the crucial Big Three marketing elements you want:

• A one-page sales pitch for the very next book in the series. 
• A one-paragraph request for a review for the current novel. 
• An “About the Author” page that invites the reader to sign up for your email newsletter.

Your back matter will typically have other elements too—Acknowledgements, Glossary, References, Book Club Questions, etc. There are no rules on what to put in, so these are all optional. 

But if you want to get the Marketing Domino Effect working for you, focus on the Big Three elements. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

Asking For the Sale

Immediately after the final page, add a one-page sales pitch for the next book in the series. Make a strong headline. I usually use, “Continue the Adventure…” for my headline, but use whatever you like for yours. Include a postage-stamp image of the cover of the next book in the series. Include a one-paragraph summary of Act 1 of the book. 

In the e-book version, you can also include a link directly to the sales page of the next book. But be careful! For each online retailer, put ONLY a link to the sales page ON THAT RETAILER for the next book. So in the Amazon edition of your book, put a link to the Amazon sales page. In the Kobo edition, link only to the Kobo sales page. The reason is that Amazon doesn’t want you putting links to Kobo or B&N or Apple in their books. And ditto for the other retailers. Putting in customized links to specific retailers is easy to do using Vellum, which is a commonly used typesetting tool that indie authors use.

Asking For a Review

After you’ve asked for the sale, ask the reader for a review. Do this with a light touch, and keep it short. I usually use the headline, “If You Enjoyed This Book” for this page. Then I have one paragraph saying that word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of advertising, and I’d appreciate it if they’d leave a review on the retailer where they bought the book. That’s all. 

Don’t make this a hard sell. You’re asking for a favor. Be polite, but do ask. Once a book has a few reviews, that provides “social proof” on the online sales page for the book. It’s way easier to sell a book with 2500 reviews than to sell a book with none. 

Remember that you are certain to get negative reviews eventually. Some will be scathing. Don’t read them. Tragically, bad reviews are like a candle, and authors are like a moth. Authors can’t help themselves. Despite my good advice, you’re going to read your bad reviews. Cry a little. Then go read the bad reviews for the book you consider the best novel ever written. I guarantee that novel has some really horrible reviews. Read them. Feel better. Then make a note to yourself to never read your bad reviews again. 

Asking For an Email Address

You would love to get your reader’s email address. That allows you to notify your reader when your next book comes out. So how do you do that? 

Write an About the Author page that comes right after the page asking for a review. The traditional headline is “About the Author,” which is a dreadful headline, but it’s very hard to do better, so just stick with it.

Then write the best, most engaging short bio you ever wrote in your life. If you know how to write funny, do so. If nobody has ever told you that your writing is funny, then it probably isn’t, so don’t try to learn it here. But do be brief and engaging. At the end of the bio, make a pitch to the reader to visit your website. The best pitch is tell your reader they can get some free goodies if they go to your website and sign up for your email list. In the e-book, you can make a clickable link that takes your reader straight to your website. In the paper edition, the best you can do is to show a printable link. On your website, have a signup form for your email newsletter. 

A word to the wise is in order. If you don’t yet have a website, think about simplicity now. You want a website address that will be easy for your readers to type for the next fifty years. Once you’ve created a website, it’s not good to later change your domain name because you’ll lose “domain authority” which takes years to build up. If you host your website on one of those free sites that let you make a website easily, make sure that you get your own domain with your name in it. You want the links in your books to work pretty much forever, and the way to guarantee that is to buy a domain that you will own for the rest of your life. Get this right at the beginning of your career, and your life will go better. 

A Sneak Preview

At the very end of your book, you have the option to add one last powerful tool—a free sample chapter of your next book. This is like the one-page sales pitch you included earlier, but it can go on for 10 or 20 pages. In an e-book, extra pages cost you almost nothing. In a print edition, they’ll cost you a little, so don’t go overboard. 

This can be great at getting the fence-sitters to buy the next book, but it’s not actually as valuable as it sounds. If your reader really loved your book, then they’d have already bought the next book as soon as they saw your one-page sales pitch earlier. Of course, you can’t include this sample chapter until the next book is published, so it’s much more common for an indie author to do this than for a traditionally publisher. Publishers will do it for big-shot authors, but most of us aren’t big-shots. 

This option makes the most sense in one special case—when the current book is the last book in the series. Then you’re probably trying to pitch a book in another series, if you have one, and that is a harder sell. So if you have two series, at the end of each, it makes sense to show a sneak preview of the first chapter of the first book in the other series. Or a sneak preview of a standalone book, if that’s all you’ve got. 

Advertising a Series

Once you have a series of novels with high Quality, advertising them becomes a lot more cost-effective. You only have to advertise Book 1 in each series and then you rely on the Marketing Domino Effect to sell all the others. Indie authors have several good options for advertising—Facebook ads, BookBub deals, other deal sites such as FreeBooksy, BookBub pay-per-click ads, and Amazon ads. Ads can be expensive. The ads will sometimes cost you more than your profit on Book 1. 

But if Book 1 sells Book 2, and Book 2 sells Book 3, and right on down the line of the Marketing Domino Effect, then you can afford to take a loss on Book 1. Authors who have 30 books in their series can pay a LOT for advertising Book 1—as long as the Quality of each book is high. Then you get good “read-through” on the series.

Warning, warning, warning! Paid ads are something only indie authors should do. Don’t pay for advertising if you’re traditionally published. You can’t make the numbers work. Your publisher might be able to, but you can’t. You can ask them nicely, and it’s possible they’ll say yes. 

Back Matter For a Traditionally Published Novel

Frankly, it’s a bit harder to do the back matter well for traditionally published novels. The problem is that when Book 1 is published, Book 2 doesn’t exist. So you can’t sell it yet. If you want to ask for the sale of Book 2 in Book 1, you’re going to have to ask the publisher to change the typesetting of the book after Book 2 comes out. If you’re very lucky, they might even do it. But don’t count on it. However, in a traditionally published book, you can still ask for a review and you can still have an About the Author page that points readers to your website, where you hope to get their email address. 

For indie authors, the moment Book 2 is published, they can revise the back matter for Book 1 and upload it again. And likewise, when Book 3 is published, they can revise the back matter for Book 2. This is one crucial advantage indie authors have over traditionally published authors. 

Homework:

• Are you an indie author with a series of novels already published? Is your back matter working for you? If not, you now know what to do, and it should only take a few hours to make it happen. 
• Are you a traditionally published author with a series of books underway? Tell your editor what back matter you’d like to come immediately after the end of your story. You can’t ask for a sales pitch for the next novel, because it doesn’t exist yet. But you can ask for a review and write a nice About the Author page. 
• Are you undecided whether to write standalone novels or a series? Think about the advantages of writing a series. The Marketing Domino Effect is a pretty strong point in favor of writing a series.
• Are you an indie author with a series of 3 or more books that already have good back matter? Then think about running paid ads on Book 1. 

The post The Marketing Domino Effect appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. Our topic today is a practical 4-step method novelists can use whenever they feel overwhelmed by life.

Being Overwhelmed is Normal

An author’s life is crazy busy. Many authors have a day job. Or they work as a caregiver. Or they volunteer for an organization. Or they have a chronic health issue. Or. Or. Or. And maybe all of the above. On top of this, they want to write a novel, which is a massive task at the best of times. 

So it’s normal to feel overwhelmed once in a while. How are you supposed to create a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when you’ve got all this daily life stuff crushing your soul?

I don’t have an easy answer. I feel overwhelmed sometimes, just like everybody else. But I do have an exercise I work through when I feel especially overwhelmed. I learned it from some internet marketing guru many years ago, but I can’t remember which one, so I can’t give them credit. So this is not my solution, but it’s the one I turn to when I feel paralyzed by the overwhelm. 

I use this exercise several times per year. I set it up as a template in the Scrivener file where I’ve done all my daily planning for the last 13 years. Here it is, direct and unfiltered, an exact cut-and-paste from my Work Journal:

Overwhelm Exercise

Step 1: Write down everything that’s causing you to feel overwhelmed. Keep going until it’s all out on paper. 

Step 2: Mark ONLY those things you could reasonably get done today. Make it doable. 

Step 3: Mark ONLY those things you could reasonably get done this week. Make it doable. 

Step 4: Give yourself permission to do everything else later. 

Some Comments on the Overwhelm Exercise

Yes, that’s the whole thing. Just 4 steps. But they work. You can mark the tasks however you like. I highlight the Today tasks Green, the This Week tasks Yellow, and the Later tasks Orange. 

Some people say you should write your Overwhelm Exercise out by hand on actual paper, because writing on paper activates parts of your brain that don’t get activated by typing. I don’t do that. I just make a copy of the template as a new entry in my Work Journal and then type in my answers. But if you prefer handwriting on paper, go to it. The point is to break out a few small, doable pieces that you can do TODAY. And a medium-sized bunch of other doable pieces that you can do THIS WEEK.

I’ve found that this works very well to shut down the pulsing red Panic Button in the back of my brain. Here’s why I think it works:

Step 1 gives you permission to name all the stuff stressing you out. Once it’s out of your head and onto the page, you feel cleaner. You know you’ve been heard, even if it’s only by paper or by a computer. At the very least, you no longer have to remember all the stuff zinging in at you from all directions. And this usually takes less than 15 minutes. Time very well spent. 

Step 2 gives you focus, and focus is the first thing you lose when you feel overwhelmed. This step gives you permission to NOT try to do everything today. It gives you the right to delay things that can be delayed.

Step 3 gives you a roadmap for the next week’s worth of focused days. That’s gold. You still may have a lot of work. But you can do it without that horrible sense of panic in your gut that you’re leaving a lot of things undone. Of course you’re leaving things undone. But they’re not forgotten. They’re just less urgent or less important than the things you’re doing. 

Step 4 gives all those delayed tasks the recognition that they deserve. Yes, they need to get done eventually. Just not today. And not this week. They’re for later. 

The Last Time I Tried This

As I said above, I work through this Overwhelm Exercise a few times per year. The last time I did it was in September. I’m sure you don’t care what was on my list, so I’ll just talk in general terms about how it worked out. 

My Overwhelm List had 18 items on it. Of these:

• 10 were marked Today. 
• 2 were marked This Week. 
• 6 were marked Later. 

And how did that work out? I had a very productive day (it was a Saturday) and a very focused week that followed. But I was a bit over-ambitious in marking the Today items. Here are the results of what actually got done:

• Of the 10 that were on my Today list, I did 6 that day and 2 later on, but there are still 2 I haven’t done yet. Apparently, they weren’t as urgent as I thought. 
• Of the 2 that were marked on the This Week list, I did both that week, along with another very large task that was not on the list, because it seemed too huge to even imagine doing. 
• Of the 6 that were marked for Later, I have gotten 4 of them done, 1 is in progress, and 1 is still not done. 

To me, the important thing was that the Overwhelm Exercise bumped me up out of a rut of massive anxiety into a safe place where I could do something productive. And in the weeks since I did the Overwhelm Exercise, I’ve also cut 13,000 words from the current draft of the novel I’m working on, and polished about 80,000 words that survived the cut. 

And that’s the point of it all. Once you tame that horrible feeling of being overwhelmed, you can carve out some time from your crazy busy life for your writing. 

Now it’s your turn…

Homework:

• Do you ever feel overwhelmed? If so, save the Overwhelm Exercise template in a safe place, so you can find it in a hurry when you need it. 
• Do you feel overwhelmed today? If so, give yourself 15 minutes right now to try the Overwhelm Exercise and see if it can lower your anxiety level enough to make some forward progress. You don’t have to do it perfectly. It’s enough to make forward progress. 

The post The Overwhelm Exercise appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Our topic today is the much-maligned Flashback. Some people will tell you to never put a Flashback in your novel. Is that true, not true, or something else? Let’s start by clarifying what a Flashback is.

What is a Flashback?

A Flashback is a scene set sometime in the past, relative to your storyline.  

Let’s be clear that a Flashback is a scene. It’s not exposition on what happened in the past. It’s a scene, shown to the reader as if it were happening right now. You use the same standard techniques for showing that you use for any other scene. For a review of those techniques, see my recent blog post, What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Means. 

So a Flashback looks exactly like any other scene in your novel. But it’s special, because it’s set at a time before your novel begins. Therefore, a Flashback is never the first scene in your novel. Your story is humming along, moving forward in time, and then suddenly you inject a scene that zips the reader backward in time. When the Flashback is over, you zip forward in time to where your story was just before you showed the Flashback. 

What’s the point of that? It’s simple. A Flashback is a powerful way of showing the reader a particularly important chunk of Backstory. 

What is Backstory?

Backstory is the whole history of your characters and your storyworld before the beginning of your novel. The Backstory of your novel would have a gigantic word-count, if you told it all. It’s everything that ever happened. Your novel has far more Backstory than you could possibly put into your novel. You have to pick and choose the most important Backstory and leave the rest out.

Why is Backstory important? Because your characters carry all sorts of mental and emotional and physical baggage into the story. They have limitations, and some of those limitations are a result of things that were done to them in the past (or things they did to themselves or others). Those limitations may be holding them back in the current storyline they’re in, which is your novel. When that’s the case, your reader needs to know some of the Backstory.

When is Backstory Allowed?

Most fiction teachers will warn you to keep Backstory to a minimum. There is a “rule” I’ve often heard that you shouldn’t show or tell any Backstory in the first 50 pages of your novel. That’s a rule you can ignore. You can put the Backstory wherever you need it. 

Here are some general principles that will serve you well when deciding how and when to use Backstory:

• Introduce your Backstory as late as possible—only bring it in when the reader absolutely needs to know the information about the past. 
• Give the reader the minimum amount of Backstory possible. 
• Consider Showing your Backstory (rather than Telling it) by putting the Backstory into a scene. And the way you Show it is by using a Flashback.

Backstory is a problem when it detracts from the Frontstory. Your reader bought your novel to experience the Frontstory.Your reader didn’t buy your novel to learn about what happened before the Frontstory even started. 

Some novels never need a single Flashback. That’s because, in some novels, the past doesn’t have that much of an effect on the present. 

But in some novels, the Frontstory is fundamentally based on what happened in the Backstory. Then you may need to show a lot of Backstory. Which means you may need a lot of Flashbacks. Let’s look at an example of a novel where Flashbacks are crucial. 

Flashbacks in The Man From St. Petersburg

One of my favorite novels is The Man From St. Petersburg, by Ken Follett. The story is set in the spring and summer of 1914. Germany is preparing to declare war on France. England will be pulled into this conflict, but it knows it will lose. The English government thinks it can win if it can get Russia to agree to join Britain and France, forcing the Germans to fight on two fronts. 

The Czar agrees to send his nephew, Prince Orlov, to negotiate. But the Czar insists that the English negotiator must be a man he trusts, Lord Walden. Walden speaks Russian and is married to Lydia, a Russian noblewoman from St. Petersburg. Lydia is Prince Orlov’s aunt, and she and Lord Walden are quite fond of young Orlov. Lord Walden and Lydia have one daughter, Charlotte, who is 18 years old. A Russian anarchist, Feliks Kschessinsky, has got wind of the negotiations and has come to London to kill Prince Orlov to prevent his country from being sucked into a pointless and stupid war.

The novel depends on a crucial bit of Backstory. Feliks is the biological father of Lydia’s daughter Charlotte. Nobody in the story knows this at the beginning of the novel. The reader and Feliks and Lydia discover it slowly, beginning with a series of Flashbacks that show Feliks and Lidia as they were in 1895. They meet by accident in a bookstore. They have a torrid affair. Feliks is captured by the Czar’s secret police. Lydia is married off to a young English nobleman, Lord Walden. 

This Backstory puts a massive twist into the Frontstory. The initial goal of Feliks is to kill Prince Orlov. It’s a straightforward political assassination, and Feliks seems like a one-dimensional terrorist. Orlov is staying at Lord Walden’s house. Midway into the story, Feliks tries to shoot Orlov and fails, because he’s distracted by Lydia’s scream. He now realizes that his old lover is the wife of the Englishman negotiating the deal with Orlov. Soon after this, he learns he has a daughter. 

From this point on, Feliks has two Values: 

• Nothing is more important than saving Mother Russia from a senseless war. 
• Nothing is more important than protecting his daughter. 

Those Values are in conflict. And that’s what makes this a novel worth reading several times.

The Mechanics of Writing a Flashback

Let’s talk about mechanics. A Flashback interrupts the linear flow of time. How do you get into the Flashback and how do you get back out?

It’s really very simple. Typically, you need a transition at each end, a little bit of narrative glue to connect the present-day life to the Flashback. 

In The Man From St. Petersburg, Feliks has just failed in his first attempt to kill Prince Orlov, because he was distracted by Lydia’s scream. Then Lord Walden wounds him with a sword, and he loses his gun and runs away. When he gets back to his cheap apartment, he can finally rest. 

There’s a transitional sentence that ends with: “…and at last, Feliks allowed himself to remember:”

Then there’s a long series of Flashback scenes with Feliks and Lydia in 1895. The series begins with Feliks meeting Lydia and ends with Feliks learning that Lydia has been married off. 

This is followed by a transitional sentence that says: “He learned no more for nineteen years.” And then the story resumes with a new scene at Lord Walden’s house. 

That’s how you do a Flashback. Write a short transition in. Write the Flashback as a scene. Write a short transition out. Done.

Homework:

• In your current novel, how important is Backstory to your Frontstory. A little? A lot? Somewhere in between? There’s no wrong answer. It depends on your story.
• Is all the Backstory you tell essential to the Frontstory? If you told less, would the reader still understand your storyline? 
• How much of your Backstory needs to be shown in Flashback scenes? Does each Flashback have a transition in and a transition out? 

The post Do Flashbacks Belong in a Novel? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Our topic today is Discoverability—what it is, what has worked in the past, and what works now. This is an article about strategic thinking, not about tactics. I want to teach you how to think about Discoverability. We’ll save the details for another day. 

What is Discoverability?

“Discoverability” is the ability of people in your Target Audience to find your book, even if they never heard of you. 

Why is it important for them to find you? Because you have limited time to find them. You could go out in the street and accost perfect strangers and tell them about your novel. But that’s very labor-intensive—it costs you a lot of time and energy and mortification—and it will have very little effect. A small fraction of people you meet might be in your Target Audience. But they’ll still be angry at you for invading their personal space. And so will the vast majority of people who aren’t in your Target Audience. So it’s really hard for you to go out and find your Target Audience.

Instead, you want to create a way for people in your Target Audience to find you. This requires you to spend a bit of time, energy, and possibly money up front. But after that, you want people in your Target Audience to do all of the work to find you. Sounds like magic? It is, kind of. But when you find an engine to drive Discoverability, it works fantastically well. 

Discoverability is the Effect, Not the Cause

Please note that Discoverability is an adjective, not a verb. It describes a feature that your book has, not an action you can take. A book doesn’t have a “Discoverability knob” that you can turn up to 11. 

If you want your book to be more Discoverable, there is a verb that describes the actions you can take to make it so. That verb is the least-popular word in the vocabulary of any writer. The verb is “Marketing.”

If you cringed when you read the word “Marketing,” that means you’re normal. It means you’re human. It means you have a soul. So congratulations on that. But if you want your book to be more Discoverable, you’ll need to find a way to get past that cringe. 

That Time I Admitted I Hated Marketing

True story: I remember a time early in my writing career. I had a few books out, but they weren’t doing well. I was discouraged. Then I ran into an agent friend of mine at a writer’s conference. She asked how my marketing efforts were going. And I exploded. “I hate marketing! I hate book-signings! Everything I do fails! I don’t ever want to market my books again!” 

My agent friend shushed me and said, “Be careful what you say. The walls have ears. You don’t want the publishers to know you don’t like marketing, or maybe they won’t buy your books anymore.”

She was right, and I was wrong. Hating marketing is not the answer. Soon after that, I found a course on marketing that really clicked for me. I spent a long weekend inhaling the course. And I learned the general principles of how to make myself and my books more Discoverable. I made a short list of ideas I could actually do. Within a few weeks, I started putting them into practice. 

When I ran into the same agent at the next conference, she said, “Randy, have you gone crazy? What are you thinking? I’ve seen what you’re doing, and it’s way too much effort. Anyway, it won’t work. I’ve never heard of anyone doing things like that. You’re going to burn yourself out.”

But this time she was wrong. I’d found a way to do Marketing in a way that worked for me. The proof was in her own comments—she had seen what I was doing. I didn’t have to tell her. She found it herself. Just like thousands of other people. And I didn’t hate marketing anymore. When you’re doing something you like, you don’t burn out. 

She was correct that she had never heard of the methods I was using. They were new. I didn’t invent them. I copied them from people who had already figured it all out. Those methods worked for a long time, but they work much less well now. Which brings me to the next point…

Most Marketing Methods Eventually Go Obsolete 

The general principles of marketing always work. They never go out of fashion. But those principles have to be put into practice using tools and methods that are available right now. And most of those tools and methods eventually go obsolete. Let’s talk about some of those methods that don’t work nearly as well as they used to.

Search Engine Optimization. This was a big one for more than decade after Google became a thing. The idea was simple. You created a website, filled it with interesting articles, and used the methods Google suggested for making your articles Discoverable. These methods became known as Search Engine Optimization. SEO for short. And it worked for a long time. SEO is how I got famous. SEO has brought over 7 million people to my article on the Snowflake Method. But SEO works a lot less well now, for a lot of reasons. 

Permafree books. This became huge not long after Amazon created its Kindle Direct Publishing tool and other retailers followed suit. Authors posted their e-books directly on Amazon and the other retailers. Amazon didn’t let you set the price free, but they would price-match a free book if it was free on B&N or on Kobo or on Apple Books. Readers loved free books. So authors with a series would make the first book in the series permanently free, put a link to the second book at the end of the first, and sell tons of copies of all the other books in their series. I moved over 170,000 copies of a permafree novel, which led to great sales of the other books in my series. But permafree doesn’t work so well anymore, because readers eventually decided that “free” is highly correlated with “low-quality.”

BookBub. This was a great tool, when e-books were new and exciting. BookBub.com is a site where authors can buy a listing for their book at a greatly reduced price. BookBub sends readers a customized daily email with great deals on books in exactly the categories each reader is interested in. Readers love a bargain, and BookBub is pretty good about vetting books. So a BookBub daily deal is usually a good quality book, and it’s cheap. I once moved 25,000 free copies of one of my novels in a single day on Amazon. And I reaped the rewards for months. But the prices have gone up for authors to list a book on BookBub, and it’s very hard now to even get your book accepted on BookBub. If you can, it’s still worth it. But authors can’t depend on this anymore, because there’s so much competition.

TikTok. Five years ago, marketing gurus started talking about how amazing the Discoverability engine was on TikTok. The app was no longer just a place to show off your teenage dance moves. It became a powerful video-blogging tool where a person with good content could quickly find an audience. Because TikTok’s algorithm found the audience for you. I created a TikTok account and began making videos. My first 6 videos each got 500 to 800 views. My 7^th video had 211,000 views over a long weekend. Within a few months, I had almost 10,000 followers. I stopped making videos when my day job got more demanding. For several years, TikTok was a fantastic place to build an audience. But TikTok creators have been complaining for the past year or so that the platform has become much less useful. The algorithm is not reliable anymore. And TikTok users know that the FYP feed has gotten clogged with ads and AI slop. 

Some Current Marketing Engines to Boost Discoverability

So what marketing methods work for authors? There are several.

SEO still works, sorta kinda, if you have an older site with “authority.” My site at AdvancedFictionWriting.com has been around for 20 years, so it has a bit of authority, and it still gets about 10,000 page views per month. SEO is a major factor in that. But the site used to get 100,000 page views per month. Traffic is way down, because the internet changed. 

BookBub still works pretty well, if you can afford the price, and if your book gets chosen. It’s just really hard to get chosen. And I hear that the “halo effect” of a BookBub deal doesn’t last nearly as long as it used to. (I had a BookBub deal in August of 2014 that prompted a wave of good sales that lasted about 3 months.)

Facebook ads work, or so I’m told. About 10 years ago, Mark Dawson made a very big splash with his course Ads for Authors. Many professional novelists bought this course (I did), and many people put it to good use (I never had the time). David Gaughran runs an excellent newsletter on marketing books, and he often talks about Facebook ads. I’ve never met David, but I’ve followed his newsletter for years, and I highly recommend him. If you’re interested in running “pay-per-click” ads on Facebook, Amazon, and BookBub, he’s your go-to resource. He’s also very knowledgeable about running email newsletters, which are a powerful marketing tool, even though they’re not focused on Discoverability. 

Substack appears to work. I’ve only recently completed my transition into the Substack system, so I can’t give you any numbers from my personal experience. But Substack is a place where serious content is prized by readers, and Substack makes it easy to add a paid tier. (I haven’t created a paid tier yet, but I will, once I figure out what “extra stuff” I can create for you, my Loyal Fans, that will go beyond the free content I give out.) Substack also has some nice Discoverability tools built in—an internal social media feed called “Notes,” and a recommendation engine for creators to recommend other creators. I recommend the Substack publication named “Write, Build, Scale”, which is published by Sinem Gunel, Philip Hofmacher, and Jari Roomer. They teach how to use Substack effectively, and I like their content enough that I joined their paid tier. 

Is This The Right Time In Your Career to Boost Discoverability?

Let’s be clear that there is a right time and a wrong time for boosting your Discoverability. I talk about this in one of my cornerstone articles, The Success Equation, which explains what drives author success. If you are just starting your writing career, you should focus on getting your Quality up to snuff. After that, work on your Production. When your Production is ticking along nicely, you can work on your Discoverability.

Of course, it’s never too early to start learning about Discoverability. Knowing what drives Discoverability will help you in mapping out your career. But there’s a difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it. There’s no point in working on your Discoverability until you have at least one book available for your Target Audience to discover.

Homework:

• Read my article, The Success Equation, if you haven’t already. 
• Where are you on the highway to Success? Do you know your Target Audience? Is your Quality where it needs to be? How’s your Discoverability? 
• Pick your next step. It’s different for different writers. 

The post Boosting Your Discoverability appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. Our topic today is a Public Service Announcement on how to spot the scammers who are currently trying to sell you bogus services . . .

Scammers, Scammers Everywhere

Every week, I get several emails from scammers. Most of them are written by AI but I suppose some might be human-written. It always feels good to hear from them, because they all love one of my novels and say wonderful things about both me and my fiction. We all like getting compliments. But these emails are all scams. 

Early on, I replied back to one of these scammers, just to see where his scam was going. After a couple of exchanges, he got to the point. He wanted to have me on some sort of a Zoom call with “thousands of historical fiction fans, hungry for thought-provoking” blah, blah, blah. And there was just a small $85 administrative fee to get things rolling.

I replied back pretending to misunderstand him—as if he were offering me $85 to be on his Zoom call. I said that my time was valuable and I couldn’t appear on his call for less than $250, my usual hourly fee. (I made this up. I am a much cheaper date than that, but I wanted to pull his chain.)

Then we had a number of back-and-forth emails where he kept asking how I would pay the $85, and I kept telling him I’d be fine with him sending the $250 by PayPal or Zelle. At a certain point, I told him I had raised my rates to $500. Eventually, he got tired of this and quit emailing me. 

Since then, I’ve got many more scam emails. The offers usually take one of several forms:

• The scammer wants to have me on a Zoom call with those “hungry” readers. 
• The scammer wants to help me promote my book by redoing my Amazon Author Central page, my Amazon keywords, and/or my Goodreads page. 
• The scammer doesn’t say what they want, but they use the typical language that other scammers use, so it’s clear they are going to want something eventually.

I now simply ignore these. I am on an email list with hundreds of professional novelists, and lately, part of the conversation has been the many scammers they’ve been dealing with. They have noted two other scams that I haven’t come across:

• The scammer says they are an editor at a very well-known publishing company. 
• The scammer says they are an agent at a big-shot literary agency. 

In both cases, the scam is that they’ll say your book isn’t quite ready, but they have this friend who does book doctoring and can get your book up to snuff. Or they have this friend who does book publicity and can help you promote your previously published books and earn much more money on them.

So how do you sniff out a scam? I’ll show you the red flags that instantly raise my hackles and make me suspect a scam. And I’ll show you the smoking guns that prove you’re dealing with a scammer. Neither the red flags nor the smoking guns will always be there, so you should always be cautious. When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 

Red Flags: Probable Scam Ahead

Scammers are lazy, and most of them seem to be using AI to generate their emails. And they all seem to be using the same AI tool, because there are certain phrases that I see over and over in scammy emails. Here are a few of them:

“What caught my attention about __________”. I see this phrase or phrases like it often in scam emails. The sentence goes on to say something very specific about my novel. This makes it sound like they must have read my novel, because the compliments can get very specific. 

“What I found especially interesting is __________”. Then they add in yet more detail about my novel. They really lay it on thick. You’d think my novel was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the way they go on about it. 

“… an interesting reader conversation…” This sentence fragment is designed to make me think that the scammer is part of lots of reader conversations, and knows people who are simply dying to have reader conversations about my book. 

“… curated Goodreads readers…” This makes it sound like the scammer has a Goodreads group that they’re connected to. 

“Amazon visibility strategy” The scammer offers to make the book more “visible” on Amazon by doing things that most professional authors already know how to do and have already done. If you don’t know how to do these things, you can use your favorite search engine to learn how to do them yourself at no cost. Or you could pay a “visibility expert” to do it for you, but they won’t do as good of a job as you will, because you know your book and they don’t. 

There are many other similar phrases. The common denominator is that they tell you how great your book is, and then they offer a service. They don’t tell you how much it costs. Not yet. That will come after you reply. And once you reply, they’ll probably sell your email address to other scammers. 

Smoking Guns: When You Can Prove It’s a Scam

You can know for sure that a scammer is fake when they impersonate a real editor at a real publisher, or a real agent at a real literary agency. 

The reason is that they have to give you an email address to reply to. But real editors and real agents have email addresses you can check on their websites. And the scammer can’t receive email at those real email addresses. So they have to find a way to look like the real thing while still receiving email from you at a phony address.

The scammers use a few tricks that you can easily spot.

The first trick is to use an email address that is very similar to a real address, but it has a small typo. If the real editor is named Joe Schmoe and works for a real publisher named (for example) BigPublisher, then the real editor’s real email address would typically be joe.schmoe@bigpublisher.com. The scammer changes the lower-case “l” in bigpublisher.com into a “1” and uses the scam address joe.schmoe@bigpub1isher.com. In some fonts, these look almost identical, and you’d be hard-pressed to notice. 

The second trick is to “spoof” a real email address by putting it in the header of the email as the “sender” email. But then the “reply-to” email address is something different. (The “sender” email address is the one that the email claims to be sent from. This is easy to fake. The “reply-to” email address is the one that you will actually send to when you click Reply. These are usually the same address, but not always.) You might not notice after you click the Reply button that the email you’re sending is now going to joe.schmoe.bigpublisher@gmail.com. Which is owned by the scammer. 

The third trick is for the scammer to simply to use a Gmail or AOL email address and hope nobody notices. But real editors always work with an official email address provided by their publisher. And so do real agents. 

So here’s the smoking gun test to catch these kind of scammers. If you receive an email claiming to be from a real editor or real agent, click the Reply button and look to see what email address your reply would go to if you were to actually send it. (You won’t send it. If this is a scammer, you’ll delete this reply after you see the address of the alleged editor or agent.) Now use your favorite search engine to find out what real email addresses look like for the publisher or agency in question.

As an example, a friend of mine was recently contacted by someone claiming to be an agent at the very well-known literary agency, Curtis Brown. I looked at the Curtis Brown website and saw a Security Notice at the bottom saying that its agents were being impersonated via email. The notice said that all real Curtis Brown agents use email addresses ending in @cbltd.com. This was the smoking gun, because the emails my friend was receiving didn’t match this ending. My friend then used the Curtis Brown website to contact the real agent, who confirmed that she had never tried to contact him.

Note that this kind of smoking gun will not work when the scammer is merely claiming to have a Zoom community of “engaged readers” or is offering an “Amazon visibility” service. Lots of legitimate people use Gmail accounts. In that case, you’ll need some other way to detect their scamminess. People who run real reader communities should not be charging authors a fee. People who offer to help you with promoting your book or making it more visible are probably offering you services you can do better yourself. 

Case History of a Scam, With Receipts

My friend Stan Williams is the author of The Moral Premise, a well-known book used by authors and screenwriters. I reviewed it in my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine in November of 2011, after meeting Stan at a conference. 

Stan emailed me recently about an “agent” he’d been talking to. Something seemed scammy, and he wanted my thoughts. I told him my opinion, and pretty quickly he found the smoking gun and proved that the person he’d been talking to was impersonating a real agent. 

You can read Stan’s whole account of it on his blog: https://moralpremise.blogspot.com in the post dated October 7, 2026. He identifies 12 red flags along the way. 

One bright side of this episode was that I learned Stan had a recent novel, Sabriya’s Hope, that looks interesting. I’m pretty sure I’m in the target audience for this book, so I’m going to read it. 

Homework:

• Watch out for red flags.
• Be on the alert for smoking guns.

The post Stop and Smell the Scammers appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Our topic today is how to inject conflict into your scenes using “adversarial dialogue.” I’ll define what I mean by that a bit further down. But first let’s talk about conflict…

Conflict is the Heart of Fiction

I’ve been in critique groups for more than 35 years. I remember one meeting when a new guy came to the group, bringing a scene to be critiqued. There was nothing grammatically wrong with his scene. No spelling errors, grammar problems, or failed punctuation. But nothing was happening in the story. This is my best recollection of our discussion of his scene:

I started out by saying, “You write pretty well. But there’s a problem with this scene. You don’t have any conflict.”

He gave me a blank look and said, “A novel has to have conflict?”

I said, “That’s practically the definition of a novel. Fiction is characters in conflict.”

He said, “Oh.”

Notice what happened here. He thought fiction was one thing. I thought it was something else. That meant our goals in the meeting were at cross-purposes. I didn’t come there to grade a piece of writing for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. And he didn’t come to be graded on conflict.

So we had a dialogue that’s stuck with me. There’s a lesson here. The key to interesting dialogue is that it needs to be “adversarial”…

What is Adversarial Dialogue?

When I talk about “adversarial dialogue,” I mean dialogue in which two or more characters are at cross-purposes. They each come into the scene with a different goal. And that automatically creates conflict.

You don’t need violence to create conflict. You don’t need shouting. You only need multiple characters who each want a different thing, with neither willing to budge. If the stakes in the scene are high, your scene will be interesting, and your reader will be hooked. 

If the stakes are low, or if there’s no conflict at all, your scene will be boring. 

So how do you fix dialogue that’s not adversarial? That’s easy. Let’s look at an example, and I’ll pull this from my recent experience buying a car. (Our family car died unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago, so we spent last week shopping for a replacement. It’s a story with a happy ending, but there was conflict along the way, because I watched a few billion TikTok videos first on how to shop for a car.) 

Example 1: Nonadversarial Dialogue

In this example, I’ll show you how not to buy a car. The dialogue will be nonadversarial, and the scene will be extremely boring. 

Salesman: Hi, how are you today?

Buyer: I’m great, how are you? 

Salesman: Fantastic. Are you looking to buy a car?

Buyer: Yes, but I don’t know what model I want. 

Salesman: What kind of monthly payments were you thinking of?

Buyer: I was hoping not more than $900 a month. That’s the most I can afford. 

Salesman: You’re in luck. Take a look at this car right over here. 

Buyer: (Looks at sticker and gasps.) Wow, that’s a lot of money! 

Salesman: Not to worry. We can get you a great deal on financing, if you need it. 

Buyer: That would be wonderful. Can I take it for a test drive?

Salesman: Hop right in and let’s give it a whirl. 

15 minutes later…

Buyer: Wow, I love this car! But I don’t see how I can afford it. 

Salesman: Leave that to me. Let’s just go in my office and I’ll work some numbers for you. 

Buyer: OK. 

30 minutes later…

Salesman: You’re in luck. I fought with my manager and got you a $3000 discount that includes a $2500 rebate from the manufacturer. Then I argued the bank down and got you an amazing rate on financing. I added in a really incredible maintenance package to extend your warranty out to 10 years, and our own special Invincible Finish paint protection package. The bank let me stretch out the loan a tiny little bit, and we got your monthly payments down to only $897.67 per month. That’s within your budget, right?

Buyer: Yes.

Salesman: Then you just bought yourself a new car. Sign right here.

* * *

Let’s mercifully draw the curtain on this exceptionally boring scene. There’s no conflict here, because this salesman and this buyer have almost exactly the same goal. The buyer wants to buy the best car he can at a price he can afford, and the salesman wants to sell a car at the maximum amount the buyer can afford. These goals are so well aligned, there’s only one possible outcome. 

And it’s a yawner of a scene. If you have a scene like this in your novel, you need to fix it. Here’s how…

Example 2: Adversarial Dialogue

In this example, I’ll show you a better way to buy a car, and coincidentally, a better way to write the scene. The dialogue will be adversarial, because now the two characters have misaligned goals. The salesman still wants to sell a car at the maximum amount the buyer can afford, but now the buyer wants to buy a car at the minimum amount the dealer can afford. This does not mean that either the salesman or the buyer is a bad person. They are simply players in the game called capitalism, each playing the role that the game requires them to play. 

Salesman: Hi, how are you today?

Buyer: I’m really interested in your model Z. I saw it on your website and it looks like a solid car. Here’s the stock number for the exact vehicle I want to look at.

Salesman: (Looking at stock number.) That’s a terrific car, but it’s in the cheapest trim line. The Limited edition is way better, and I bet you can afford it. What kind of monthly payments were you thinking of?

Buyer: I don’t know if I’ll be making payments. I might pay cash and I might finance it. We’ll talk about money later. All I care about right now is that I want to drive this exact car. 

Salesman: Help me help you. Can you afford $1100 per month? 

Buyer: I’m not going to talk about money until I decide if I even like this car. Have you got the keys?

Salesman: Hop right in and let’s give it a whirl. 

15 minutes later…

Buyer: This car is perfectly acceptable. 

Salesman: Great! Let’s just go in my office and I’ll work some numbers for you. 

Buyer: Thanks, but I’m not ready to talk numbers yet. I haven’t even decided if I’m going to be buying from you. I’m planning to also test drive a Toyota Model X and a Chevy Model Y today, so I need to be going now.

Salesman: Those cars are OK, but that model of Toyota has had some problems with the…

Buyer: Thanks for your time. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to talk money.

Salesman: I can get you a $3000 discount. Also, we’ve got really great financing. Just come into my office and we can talk. 

Buyer: (Walking away). I’ll be in touch.

Salesman: Let’s go talk to my manager. I think I can get you $3500 off, but this deal is only good for today. 

Buyer: Have a nice day.

* * *

There’s no punching or shouting in this scene, but the conflict is real, because the buyer and salesman have wildly different goals. The salesman’s goal is to get the buyer into an office where he can create a deal favorable to himself. The buyer’s goal is ONLY to test drive one particular model and then walk away. 

The buyer does not intend to buy any car today. After he test drives a few different brands and models, he’ll make a decision on one of them. That may take a few days. Then he’ll take another day or two to research prices online for his chosen make and model and trim line, looking at sellers within 500 miles of his home. He’ll identify a few specific cars with specific stock numbers at specific dealers. 

In a later scene, the buyer will negotiate with the dealers who have the cars he wants. He does not intend to negotiate in person. Nor will he negotiate over the phone. He plans to negotiate the deal ONLY by text messages. The buyer knows he’s an amateur going up against a pro. Negotiating by text will help to level the playing field. A little. If he can, he’ll pit the dealers against each other to get the best selling price. But he might not have this option. 

In a yet later scene, the buyer will negotiate financing, again using only text messages. Now he’ll pit the dealer against his credit union (or against a cash deal, if he’s lucky enough to have cash). 

In each of these scenes, the buyer will be at cross-purposes with the salesmen. They will try their best to get him to come in to the dealership and “talk.” The buyer will try his best to get a written term sheet in a text message. The buyer wants to have a hard offer before he goes to the dealer in person, at which point he will sign papers and take his car. There is no guarantee on who will win this tussle. A lot depends on what the market is like for the particular model the buyer wants. Uncertainty is part of life. And uncertainty is what keeps fiction interesting. 

Homework:

• Take a look at the dialogue in the most recent scene you wrote. For each of the speakers, write down what their specific goal is in this scene.
• Are there conflicting goals in this scene? 
• Can you put those goals more at cross-purposes to each other? (Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. It’s always worth asking.)

The post The Art of Adversarial Dialogue appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Our topic today is author branding. There is no need to spend a lot of angst on this. Branding yourself as an author is simple, once you know the answers to two questions… 

Who Is Your Target Audience?

The first question to ask yourself is: Who is your Target Audience? 

Let’s define our terms first. Your Target Audience is the set of all people in the world who would love your book, if only they knew it existed. This is usually much less than 1% of the world population. It’s often much less than the population of the country you live in. And that’s OK. I live in the US, which has a population of almost 350 million. 1% of that is 3.5 million. 

And that’s plenty. My Target Audience for this blog is the set of people who want to write a novel. These are very special people. I’ve always estimated that only about one person in a thousand is really serious about learning to write a novel. That is more than a third of a million people in the US. And many more outside the US.

If you work with a traditional publisher, they’ll often send you a questionnaire about your Target Audience, asking “demographic” questions like “What is the age of your ideal reader? What is their sex? What is their annual income?” I take a jaundiced eye toward these questions. They’re relevant for a few kinds of fiction and useless for most. 

I prefer “psychographic” questions such as “What does your ideal reader secretly dream of doing, if they had the time, energy, and money? Who would your ideal reader want to have dinner with, if they could choose 5 guests from any period of time?” These questions tell you how your ideal reader’s brain works. 

Once you know who your Target Audience is, there’s only one other question to ask…

What Would Delight Your Target Audience?

You have only one job as a writer—to delight people in your Target Audience. If you do that, you’ve won the game of fiction writing. If you don’t do that, you need to rethink and retry. There’s no shame in missing the mark. Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We all have to keep improving. But once you start hitting close to the mark, your life changes. Amazingly. 

So what experience can you give your ideal reader that would delight them? Only you can answer that question. And you’ll probably be getting better and better answers to that question for your whole writing life. Finding good answers to that question is the secret to branding. It’s the whole secret. There isn’t anything else.

Constructing Your Branding Promise

When you’ve figured out what your Target Audience wants and you’ve settled on an experience you can give them, it’s time to make a Branding Promise. Let me give you a couple of examples. 

I’ll use my own work as an example, so I don’t have to guess. I respect and admire many authors, but I don’t know exactly what thought processes they went through to figure out their Target Audience or their Branding Promise. Whereas I do know mine. 

For my Advanced Fiction Writing website and (forthcoming) Substack, my Target Audience is “Everyone who dreams of writing a novel someday and successfully publishing it.” There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US who are in this Target Audience. But there are hundreds of millions of people in the US are aren’t. 

My Branding Promise for Advanced Fiction Writing is this: “I will teach you to write an excellent novel.” This appeals to people in my Target Audience, and it drives away people who aren’t. If people who aren’t in my Target Audience accidentally come to my website, I want to let them know right away that this is not the place for them. But if they are in my Target Audience, I want them to stay. 

For my fiction, my Target Audience is “Everyone who would take a vacation in ancient Jerusalem.” This is not a huge Target Audience, but I’m in it. I’d go on that vacation. I’d love every minute of it. The closest I’ve come to this impossible vacation is the four times I’ve worked on archaeological digs in Jerusalem.

My Branding Promise for readers of my fiction is this: “I will take you on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” I’m well aware that not everyone wants to go on my adventure. That’s fine. Other authors can take them on other adventures. But for those who want to go to ancient Jerusalem, my aspiration is to be the best person on the planet who could take them there. (A high bar, yes, and I hope someday to reach it. You jump higher when you try for something difficult.) 

Constructing Your Branding Promise

Once you know your Branding Promise, it tells you how to market yourself, forever. Everything you do marketing-wise—your website, your email newsletter, your blog, your Substack, your TikTok, your Instagram, your FaceBook, your whatever—should make your Branding Promise crystal clear. 

You can make your Branding Promise explicit or implicit. Neither way is always right or always wrong. The only important thing is that you must know what it is. That will guide your art, your layout, your presentation, your message, your everything. 

Your Branding Promise gives you a clear yardstick to measure your work. Look at the results of your fiction every year or so. Are you keeping your Branding Promise? If not, what went wrong? Did you lose focus? That happens to everyone occasionally. The solution is to get your eye back on the ball. 

Talking to Agents and Editors

Once you understand your Branding Promise, it becomes super easy to talk to agents and editors. When they ask, “What do you write?”, you just tell them your Branding Promise. “I teach people how to write excellent fiction.” “I write novels that take people on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” 

99 times out of 100, when an agent or editor hears your Branding Promise, they’ll say, “Sorry, that’s not for me.” That’s fine. You’re trying to separate the sheep from the goats, and you just found another goat. If they don’t like your Branding Promise, they’ll never like your book, so don’t bore them by talking about it. Talk about the weather or sports or food or something else equally unbook.

But 1 time in 100, the agent or editor will stare at you with thunderstruck eyes. After ten seconds of golden silence, they’ll say, “Where have you been all my life?” And now you have a potential business partner for whatever you’re writing. And not just a business partner. A true believer. Wouldn’t that be incredible, if your agent or your editor was a true believer in your work?

Homework:

• Who is your Target Audience? 
• What delightful experience could you give your Target Audience?
• What is your Branding Promise? 
• What actions could you take to make your Branding Promise clear on all your marketing platforms? 

The post Your Branding Promise appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.