new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Robert W. Walker, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 5 of 5
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Robert W. Walker in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
I am contemplating starting an online business that would target ebook descriptions and charge a small fee to Fix 'em...left and right, up and down. There are soooooooo many ebook descriptions that are a turn off for one reason or another.
A bad book descript KILLS interest and any chance of purchase. In fact, the slighter the error in a book descript, particularly for a small press title or an Indie Author title, the less forgiving is the reader who assumes then that the book will have been poorly edited and thus a problem from page one till The End.
It is a HUGE mistake to assume that eReaders will overlook even a slight, slight error: a missing comma, a misplaced use of a semi-colon, a typo, or out of place adjective or adverb. True, yes, even for the cynical or the unconcerned and casual reader.
Picture this: Stuart is fascinated with occult and paranormal mysteries, and so Amazon links send him to your paranormal thriller entitled
Chills Galore. Stu loves the cover and title, so naturally he reads the descript wherein he finds a missuse of it's for its... He then lets it sink in and lets the one small error go, but then Stu stumbles onto another error of a misplaced modifier (the very definition of the unintended result), so he now distrusts the author's voice and credibility, the author'sability to pull off this great idea. Stuart is disappointed, but he knows there are hundreds of thousands of other paranormal mysteries in ebook format, so he iMoves On, going elsewhere, money intact, while you're left with No Sale.
So I am embarking on a company that repairs the damage. The problem for me as I see it is the fact most Indie authors do not SEE there is a problem in their descripts, so how to do exactly that? I can advertise and spread the word about my cheap and dirty service but there may be no takers. If I build it, this company, will they come? I don't know, but I do know that there is a need and a void to fill in this emerging area of the ebook descript becoming the portal, the door to beckon others to open the book itself.
A great ebook may be on the other side of that description portal, but if readers dislike your descript, if unhappy with the color and texture of your door, they will not step inside your novel to give it a chance whatsoever. No shake and bake--not even an unfair shake.
So sign up and submit your ebook descript for my laser scalpel eyes. And remember, it's a smart dog that scratches its own fleas, and an author who edits himself is a flawed character indeed. This new company of mine will have a company motto: Spit & Polish Your Portal.
Sad that a would-be reader, possible big fan, gets a look at a bad descript after having found his/her way to your book title, attracted by cover art or platform (be it Salem Witchcraft or Fly Fishing), only to be turned off by a comma or a missing one. So contact me.
[email protected]Rob Walker, Titanic 2012
If you are interested in increasing your sales of an ebook title such as a Kindle or a Smashwords title or titles, or if you are just putting one up for sale, there are some important steps you must take. This is hard-won truths via experience as I am dealing with some 44 titles on Kindle and many on Fictionwise, and one on Smashwords. First off....if you want to begin selling a kindle title or to catch attention of ebook readers for Smashwords or FictionWise, it has to be priced lower than you can imagine!
This may sound crazy but you can make more on a 2.99 book than on a 25 dollar one, so do not balk as pricing it LOW. Kindle owners believe they have a right to cheap, cheap, and cheaper ebooks; in fact, they so want free books. However, if their curiosity over a title can be piqued, they're willing to go .99 cents, 1.99 or 2.99. Getting much above this is flirting with turning your ebook into a stone as it will just sit there.
It is the way of Kindlers in particular. The entitlement has a history begun at the inception so roll with that. All my titles are 2.99 now. I had some cheaper at one time but bumped them all up by a buck as of July 1st. I am selling just over a thousand books a month from the Kindle Store.
Kindlers also go by cover art, title, and description. These may sound like simple steps, too simple (it can't be this simple, Prof. Walker), but this is me paying atteniton to those who have sold in the thousands on Kindle BEFORE ME.
The description must be flawless, not a letter out of place. Rewrite it as many times as needed, and it must excite the imagination. Fire it up; make it the most exciting story you ever wrote--the story of your story. The character name(s) need be there, the main thrust or "platform" along with the setting and some idea of the time period. The basic five W's of journalism.
Next if you intend to follow it up with a sequel, this sells more books ONLY IF the ebook readers KNOW this fact. My series titles do ten times the number of my stand-a-lones. Book length is important to kindle readers. I have a three-volume in one title, and I make that clear, and they love it. I play up the fact it is a FAT book at 160,000 words rather than the typical 80-90 thousand words. Kindlers love this as with the idea of a series.
I hang out at [email protected] and they have embraced their kindle writers on board there and in fact highlight kindle titles each month from KK authors ala the moderator, Bob.
I put up notices about the books on facebook, twitter, elswhere but I try to relay "facts" from my research or on the platform of the book to chat groups to lead into the book title, pulling back on htting folks over the head with buy my books statements.
There are also Amazon discussion boards where I drop in and do what I do on Kindle but they are not as embracing of author BSP there.
I am seeking other venues all the time. Finding review sites for kindle books and not kindle devices is hard to find. There are some e-magazines out there, and I am sure I am overlooking some possibilites.
Finally anyone interested in ebook salesmanship should follow Joe Konrath's blog and in his footsteps. Every step I have taken, Joe put me onto (or up to)save kindlekorner which I discovered. You have no idea how important it is to set the price right and get the descript down perfectly. Great. Now you know all the steps I took but of all of these steps price, descript, professional cover art, and sending the message of series or multiple volumes are the most powerful steps to take.
Rob Walker
Titanic 2012 - sneak peek opening chapters FREE for asking
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/
http://www.makeminemyster.blogspot.com/
"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than
By: Rob Walker,
on 5/28/2010
Blog:
ACME AUTHORS LINK
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
personality,
Ahab,
Robert W. Walker,
character psychology,
psychology of character building,
psychology and imagination,
character-driven tales,
creativity,
Sherlock Holmes,
Add a tag
Time for Psych 101 - Personality is important in Writing? You BET!
Q 4: How does 'personality' assist in the writing of fiction?
Answer: Personality...and this means A, B, C and all types, figure heavily in fiction and typically the author's own personality comes into play as does the readers for that matter!
A writer has to be somewhat driven and obsessive to stick with it for the duration of what is often called a "checkered" career in such a fickle business, such a roulette wheel business as publishing.
The Reader also must have the 'right stuff' to bring a book to completion--that is a personaltiy that sees a novel through. In other words: Writer endures to the end, flip-side that, reader hopefully endures to the end. I had a teacher who once asked me when I balked at War and Peace in its abridged form, "Are you going to beat that book, or are you going to let it beat you?"
In the depiction of character, personality is the culmination of conditioning, struggle against conditioning, or failure to make that struggle and accepting one's conditioning (we're all brain washed to something as it is the nature of nurture, right?). What motivates a person equals personality.
Comes of having personal goals, and every character, good, bad, ugly and in between must have goals and perhaps a super goal. Characters have run ins with themselves--memories, sensations, images. Flash backs or hallucinations, etc. These form layers in a character's personae.
A character is molded by circumstances or resists them. Either way tensions and conflict can come of a stubborn obsessive compulsive, and the most memorable characters have these traits when they set their eyes on the prize.
Ahab in Moby Dick had a wooden leg for a reason. If he was sound of leg and mind, if he still had both his legs, or if he had no legs and was confined to a wheel chair and could not act on his mad obsession over the whale, or didn't really care to be bothered, it wouldn't be quite the memorable saga it is. It'd be flatline story for sure, for sure....
Ahab would never walk the deck of a ship. Would not be motivated to do so. Would retire.
Nightmare, memory, learned experience, what's in the character's bedrock DNA is at the heart of personality and story. The best authors know how to create full-blown characters fully realized. Characters are multi-layered and complex as in life. Readers today demand far more complexity of character than complexity of storyline.
In other words a character-driven story is at least as important as a plot-driven story, and the best stories are characte fits plotline like a glove stories wherein both are equally important. If you exchanged Ahab's personality for instance for that of Sherlock Holmes, it would change the dynamic of the story as surely as chaning the plot line. Can you imagine Sherlock in Ahab's shoes...errr ahhh pegleg?
Do leave a comment; would love to hear your remarks on this area of Psych for Writers.
Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/ FREE stuff
http://www.makeminemystery.blogspot.com/
In the past when an agent exhausted his or her avenues and contacts, a manuscript was put up on a shelf or in a drawer, and I would go onto another story. I have always come back to those orphaned tales, however—tales not altogether forgotten, tales that call out to find an audience, and I’d tinker and rewrite and re-submit, sure that someone somewhere would see the value in the story that I saw right along.
When I began writing at an early age, I wrote the kinds of books I liked, those boy’s adventure tales inspired by Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, stories set during historical moments with panoramic vistas as backdrop. But once turned down for the fiftieth or sixtieth time by editors, what happens to a good book shouldn’t happen to a good book. But as rejections pile up, you move from writing what does not appear to be profitable or marketable or currently in vogue or “does not fit our current publishing program” (designed to keep you out) –a program that would keep Mark Twain out if he were alive and writing today….
So I stopped doing YA books and moved into horror as everyone at the time had a program in search of the next Stephen King…and then I moved into mystery and suspense and police procedurals when I was not discovered to be the next Stephen King (aha, no one was ever destined to be the next King). Still on my shelves, always pleading with me to get back to them, were and are these many young adult historical novels as yet unpublished and UNread. And recently, I snatched an adult historical out of the mothballs, rewrote it again for the sixtieth time, and published Children of Salem myself after getting some tough love editing done on it from good readers. That book is my top grossing Kindle title today and has sold a total of 410 copies. That’s a LOT more readers of that not commercial enough manuscript than the number who were reading it when it slept in my desk.
So what to do with my YA historical novels calling out, yearning to be FREE…to find a readership? These titles listed in the order in which they were written are:
BattleStormer – a tale of a young Viking boy who must, when his father dies, become the navigator for the ship BattleStormer. It tells the tale of the first white men to set foot on the American continent and of a budding romance.
Animiki of the Fire Nation is a Pottowatomi Indian brave story. Young Animiki must use his head to outwit the ancient enemy of his people.
The Cannoneers is set at the time of the American Revolution and is in the tradition of Johnny Tremain, but it tells the tale of how America got its first artillery together and the man behind it.
Yukon Gold is set as the title suggest during the mad gold rush to Alaska. It is told through the eyes of a young boy.
Transcontinental is the tale of a young boy who helps build the first North American Transcontinental railroad and the obstacles he faces.
Will any of these titles do well as Kindle books? I dunno…but I do know that in the older world of publishing they were destined to be Oak Tree Publication hardcovers until shit happened. They would have been published by the San Diego publishers of YAs had the company not been run into the ground by a guy named “Lord” who bought it up for a write off? Well now with the Kindle books option, a new alternate book world/dimension has opened up, an alternate universe of publishing…and it gives me work to do that will fill my summer as I rewrite, polish, and Kindlize these titles. I also have
With all the hoopla, smoke, and mirrors going on in the publishing world over ebook pricing or what they call the sales model for ebook pricing, there’s been a lot of confusion. Confusion is in fact the natural state of most authors in relation to their publishers. Publishers routinely keep writers in the dark about many aspects of their practices and why not on how they price a book? I don’t mean to sound as bitter as I actually am but there you have it. For when it comes to such matters as cover art, for instance, or the size type on your title or name or both, and when it comes to how a book is distributed, if the publisher uses or does not use jobbers, if the publisher has cut any sweetheart deals with big box stores like Costco or Wal-Mart, and if in such cases an author earns any royalties, and if a royalty statement ever comes to an author can it be read?
The long long history of writers and their publishers has not been a gentle, kind one but rather every horror story you have ever heard at the bar about a writer and his publisher is true, true, true. In the end, typically, the writer gets it in the end—and I mean that literally. Now comes an opportunity offered by Amazon.com for authors to go “Indie” – to become their own publishing concern in partnership with Amazon acting as bookstore and distributor in one, and for the first time in history authors are getting paid what their efforts are worth.
In the meantime, while many authors have been partnering via ebooks over the hard years when it was generally believed by print publishers that ebooks were a flash in the pan and would go the way of many another fad—authors and Amazon have been in the business of ebooks. Major publishers of the NYC variety have eschewed and seldom understood this area of book sales and in fact have not supported it. Until now. Until the day it appears ebooks can and do outsell paper books on occasion—as with this past Christmas. Now suddenly, Macmillan is decrying the situation as Amazon has defined it—that no Kindle book would cost more than ten bucks, because as Macmillan CEO says, authors can earn more money if their ebooks are priced higher, and so he flies to Seattle, meets with Amazon CEO and offers up an ultimatum when Mr. Bezos says no to 15 buck ebooks for Macmillan titles. Most Macmillan authors think that they won when Amazon backed down and accepted the price increase for Macmillan books, and the general consensus among Mac authors and many others is that the giant publishing firm struck a blow for writers.
Nothing further from the truth. Amazon knows its clientele better than anyone on the planet, and they know that few people believe that an ebook priced at above the 9.99 promised price for years now is going to earn out far more monies for authors than the higher prices—which will be boycotted in huge measure by readers of ebooks. Ebook readers are not interested in titles priced high whether they are bestsellers or not. Ebook readers love FREE books, public domain books are being gobbled up at an unprecedented rate! Followed by the .99 cent book and the 1.99 cent book. Ebook readers are voracious and most have enough reading piled up for the moment to last them months. They are not in the market for Dan Brown’s latest at paper price or ebook price if it is over 9.99.
Of these facts I am sure because I have been watching this trend for years, and I have had ebooks on FictionWise for years, and I have ten Kindle titles onboard with plans to add seventeen more, and the titles that are moving, selling, are not my 7 dollar titles priced by
Do it and you have one customer. The description of my own work is the hardest thing I have to write.
Nash Black (Irene)
The second thing is to get one of these comment forms to work.
Nash Black
How much, Rob?
Donna White Glaser
www.donnawhiteglaser.com
THE ENEMY WE KNOW
Sounds like a great idea, Rob.
Morgan Mandel
http://facebook.com/foreveryoungbook
It sounds like a good idea, eh? I have been doing it for people who beg....but I have not the time unless there is some green-up in it for me. I am thinking 20 dollars - 30 for TWO descripts.
Anyone want to start the ball rolling just email me at inkwalk at SBCglobal dot net with subject line ebook descript - you only pay me when you see the results! I then give you a post office box or address.
rob
Sounds like a good idea, Rob. Count me in.
Geraldine Evans
http://www.geraldineevans.com
I am really interested in getting help from a pro.
DL Larson