Just spotted this fantastic post on increasing your blog following via The Story Reading Ape. It has some great, simple suggestions to get your new blog up and running, or for revitalising one that may have dropped off a little. Take a read and follow the tips you think sound best for you 🙂 Maybe you could try the Sunday Blog Party today, I might…
One of the most common questions I am asked by fellow bloggers is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult to provide a definitive answer to:
How do I increase the traffic that I receive to my blog?
Before I begin, I think that it is important to note three crucial points:
Building a following and, consequently increasing your traffic, takes lots of time and effort. You are extremely unlikely to receive thousands, or even hundreds of views simply by pressing the publish button.
Content is key. Well-written posts will draw new people in, and encourage them to visit again. Posting page after page of inspirational quotes looks pretty, but will leave your audience bored after a while. Be yourself, make no apologies and believe in what you are creating.
I am not an expert, nor have I ever claimed to be.
Book trailers are a funny thing – I don’t suppose they really help you sell more books, like a film trailer might at the cinema, because you’re only likely to see them if you’re looking at the book already. Unless someone comes up with a good way of inserting them as a movie file at the end of your kindle book, in which case you could promote your other books quite effectively, giving someone a taster for what else you’ve written or the next book in the series.
Personally, I love trailers at the movies – I like the challenge someone faces of condensing into a few short minutes the best chunks of the story, the action, the emotion, to make us want to know more. They are cinematic versions of the ‘book blurb’ – but do you think they are more effective than an blurb?
I saw an interesting infographic the other day, which was showing the split of sales between traditional and self-publishing routes, rankings on Amazon Bestsellers Lists (the main ones were 27% Indie/Self-Publishing – 54% Small-Medium Publishers and 18% The ‘Big Five’ Publishers – if you’re interested). One of the key images the infographic contained was ‘The Top 3 Things That Sell Books’, which are the cover, the price and the blurb.
Now a book trailer wasn’t one of the things included in the Top 3 – it might not even make the top 5, who knows? This tells you, that you should focus a good portion of your effort into getting the right pricing for your book, a great cover (for people to judge your book by, obviously) and writing an enticing blurb to draw your readers in. You already have a lot to think about, don’t you, before even considering a book trailer.
I have book trailers for my main books that are available to buy, as well as a couple of ‘teaser’ trailers I did for some short ‘missing moment’ bits in the series, to help bridge the long gaps between the release of one book to another. (I’ve included a couple here, for you to see my attempts). I did them myself with a combination of stock footage, self-filmed images, and royalty-free music – they take some time and effort, but I also always loved messing around editing and making films from my own stuff anyway, so at least I’ve been able to put that to some good use.
Taking Flight – Book 1.5 (Teaser)
Outlanders – Book 3
You’ll see that I don’t have millions of YouTube hits on them – if I did, I’d probably be too busy writing my next novel, whilst sipping champagne instead of writing about writing here 😉 What I have found a book trailer useful for doing is encouraging readers (mainly bloggers) to consider a read/review of my book. If you imagine, with the increasing numbers of indie authors, all looking for reviews and features on blogs to help promote their work and try to generate readership – when you send your request, with a blurb and book cover, with a link to a trailer they can quickly and easily get a feel for your writing, different to other requests they may get. You get a few more seconds of their time – you get to give some more information on your book and make it emotive – you get soundtrack, after all.
If you can get featured on a guest blog post, including your book trailer, may well make you stand out from the other features and offers you another route to readers that you might not otherwise get. On Goodreads you have the ability to include book trailers on your Author Profile, again, if potential readers are looking at what you do – it can help you showcase a different aspect of your work, over and above the blurb and cover image.
Overall, I think if you can create a decent quality trailer for yourself, then that is the best route with book trailers – it’s ‘free’ marketing, just takes a little of your time. If you’re having to pay someone to do one for you, I’d probably look at spending my money elsewhere – on the book cover, for example, as that will have a more immediate impact on your potential readers.
Still wondering whether it’s worth it – here are some further resources I’ve found on Book Trailers and how to use them effectively:
Previously, I did ‘Book Trailer Thursday’ meme on Aside from Writing, to showcase good trailers I’d come across – perhaps I will again, but if you want to check out some other examples, you can here:
Re-blogging my author friend Tony Talbot today – with a great post from him on show-not-tell in dialogue. He does some really good writing technique posts, like this, which you can find on the author blog we share at http://www.asidefromwriting.com or his own author blog: http://www.tony-talbot.co.uk/ – check him out and follow, if you’d like to see more of the same 🙂
One of the things they always tell writers to do is show and not tell. “Don’t Tell Me the Moon Is Shining; Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass” to paraphrase playwright Anton Chekov. Chekov was talking about describing the world, but here’s another way you can use that show-not-tell: to describe your characters using only their dialogue and body language.
It’s certainly one of my favourite ways of doing it. Here are some snips from my own Eight Mile Island:
Mum comes out onto the deck from the cabin behind me and weaves along it towards me. …
“Dylan?”
I ignore her for a minute, pretending not to hear my name until she says it louder. I turn from the waves and face her. “What?”
“You’ve got to come inside. You’ll be washed away.”
This caught my eye today on the BookBaby blog – a nice resource for authors on writing, publishing, marketing and much more. Anyway, if you’re thinking of revising your author bio – or even just want to check that you’re on the right track, this is a good little article to help you along the way.
Whilst I’m in the middle of typing up a storm to hit a decent word count today, I thought I’d share a couple of good posts I’ve come across from Justin McLachlan, that may be of interest to those of you who are also NaNo-ing this November, as they have some pretty good tips for writing and pitfalls to avoid.
I know I definitely fell head first into the ‘he said, she said’ one, when I wrote my first book. It’s true, you do feel sometimes like it can’t just be ‘said’; ‘said’ is boring and easy and….simple. But sighing, grunting, chortling, exclaiming and screeching your way through the dialogue of your novel can be exhausting for the reader – I know because a couple of reviewers mentioned it! These days, I find it much easier to write ‘natural’ dialogue, I suppose with some practice your style and writing patterns that you employ can moderate and change. My dialogue today often misses out ‘said’ as much as it includes it, with conversations happening around physical action (the showing not telling thing is another area I know I need to keep working at!) Now and again I will throw in an adverb or exclaimation…but nowhere near as frequently as they used to happen 🙂
The other pitfall from the list that I know I fell into, but try to steer away from these days (or catch during editing!), is overkill on adjectives and adverbs… Unless you were born a great writer (and Hemingway had something to say on that…) I think this is one of the easiest ones to fall into, when you begin writing. You may be well-educated, know lots of words and synonyms, a prolific reader…that doesn’t mean that you know how to write and describe the world of your book in a way that is engaging to someone else. I’d written a number of short stories, scenes and two full novels, before I completed and released Hope’s Daughter. I learned things from each one: how not to put all of the information that’s in your head into chapter 1; how to create a story arc; pacing…. When I released Hope’s Daughter I was able to learn more, because I started getting feedback from people about the book – there have been a number of reviews that have helped me improve and adapt my style, by pointing out things that were issues or flaws for them as a reader.
When you’re writing independently, you might be lucky enough to have some friends or writing buddies that will beta read your work…but there’s no to say, “cut this scene”, “don’t write like this”, “argh! I hate your main character!” as a conventional editor might do. In a way, you kind of have to gamble, because to get the best feedback, you have to put your work out there. Not every review will be helpful, but I know that just taking things on board, considering if you could improve what you’d done was a great benefit of publishing my book and getting feedback from readers. If people read it and like it, or love it, then great! You’re definitely doing something right…and use the other stuff people don’t get to help you refine and improve!
Ok – post over, I have to get some more writing done! But, hopefully with some new tips and some motivation, you too can shoot off today and get on with something creative 🙂 Good luck!
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“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way” ― Hemingway
During a random indie author (internet) cruise, I came across this post on David Estes’ author site. It’s a great piece on character voices, how hard it can be to get them right and also – for people to sound different. A little ‘Writing 101′ gift for any of you authors out there working on this lovely Tuesday lunchtime 🙂
One of the most common questions I am asked by fellow bloggers is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult to provide a definitive answer to:
Mel Cusick-Jones 