L = Local is the New Buzzword!

When it comes to marketing your book, have you covered your bases in your most important area? You have the greatest impact in the area that can claim you as a local writer.

In It’s a Wonderful Life, everyone loved George Bailey, the ultimate hometown hero–but George didn’t realize it. He felt intimidated by his friends who had gone out of Bedford Falls and made names for themselves. George wasn’t inferior to them. He just thought he was.

Authors can fall into the same trap. It’s easy to get discouraged when your book doesn’t make the best-seller list or the Amazon top 100, (or even top 100,000).

In the day of the internet, it’s easy to forget the power of local.

It’s time to think like George Bailey.

Read on at Author Media.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway! You have until midnight tonight to put in your final entries.

F = The Financial Reality of Being an Author

The reality of writing is that authors don't make a lot of money. Oh sure there are the successful, rich authors but they make up only the tiniest fraction of actual published authors.

If you have dreams of selling your science fiction, fantasy or horror novel and getting filthy rich, you need to adjust your expectations. We’ve collected three testimonials from genre writers below to help aspiring writers to maintain realistic expectations.
Horror novelist Brian Keene gave a speech at Towson University’s Borderlands Boot Camp recently, laying out some frank statistics for aspiring genre novelists. Here is an excerpt:

The average advance these days, for a genre fiction novel, ranges between $2,500 and $10,000. That’s right. The novel you spent a year working on only earns you between $2,500 to $10,000 at first. When the book is published a year later, that advance will have long been spent. And you probably won’t see a royalty check until another year AFTER your book has been published (provided enough copies have sold to earn out your advance). So it will actually be two years from that advance check before you get paid again.

Read more testimonials at Media Bistro..

Enter The Eye of the Sword giveaway until the 14th!

E = Excel is Your New Best Friend, Self-Publishers

After the writing, editing, layout and publishing in general is done, the sales begin. Hopefully, that is. But let's assume that you're selling a few here and there at least. But you're a self-published author without a sales or marketing department to keep track of your sales. What do you do so that you have a track record to show to literary agents, convincing them you're a best seller in the making? Why, you make best friends with that helpful tool known as Excel!

I’ve discovered that in general, authors are not numbers people. They tend to have vague idea of sales and revenue earned. In fact, most authors probably don’t scrutinize their royalty statements like they should (with a few exceptions of course). And I get it. Authors are creative folks. Math uses the other side of the brain. But if you are digitally self-publishing, then you are your own publisher. And given that, you should be generating your own royalty statements in an excel spreadsheet. Here’s what you should track and why.

TO TRACK:

1) All Price Points – sales especially

2) All editions — including audio/shorter works

3) Copies given away for free

4) All distribution venues where editions are available

5) Percentage splits/royalty

6) Cumulative totals

Continue reading to find out why at Nelson Agency.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14!