Promoting Your Shorter Fiction

SellingFictionWe’ve talked about why you might want to add short fiction to your author’s bag of tricks. Your next challenge: promoting short fiction in today’s slightly wobbly and ever-shifting marketplace. While Smashwords’ Mark Coker says that the highest selling novels on his site come in at about 100K, other industry professionals are all over the map about book length. On one hand, they point to recent successes like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (775 pages), but then they blame our culturally reduced attention spans for the desire for shorter books. Continue reading “Promoting Your Shorter Fiction”

LynneQuisition: iAuthor

Interviews by Lynne CantwellAuthors are always looking for new ways to find new readers, and one website that aims to help is iAuthor. Founder Adam Kolczynski has agreed to take a seat in the comfy chair and answer a few questions about the site.

For starters, Adam, how would you describe iAuthor? Continue reading “LynneQuisition: iAuthor”

Promo Site Spotlight: BookSends

booksends_logoJason Letts is a writer who has been publishing for over four years now. He also happens to be the man behind the book promotion site BookSends. Jason is joining us today to talk about BookSends. Let’s give Jason a hearty IU welcome.

How long has the BookSends been in operation?
We started BookSends in early 2013 when it became clear that Facebook was no longer a sustainable place for maintaining an audience that could be reached on a regular basis. A lot has changed since we started, including the proliferation of similar sites and services, all of which have struggled to develop an audience since many of the usual channels have become expensive or ineffective. So what’s kept us going is authors who’ve had good experiences advertising with us who keep coming back and back. Continue reading “Promo Site Spotlight: BookSends”

The Real Question is – Who’s Going to Pay?

dollar signsI attended elementary school in the seventies. As a kid, I knew what hippies were and one of our teachers even explained communes to us too, or more specifically, her opinion on the breakdown of communes. The teacher told us that the ideology behind communes – everyone contributing and helping each other – was a unique concept but ultimately the system would always break down. According to her, problems always arose and the lifestyle built on humility and benevolence would fall apart. They didn’t all fall apart though. One of the more famous is Farm Community Commune in Tennessee. It’s sometimes referred to as the Mundo sister’s commune. It’s still active, but they had to make changes too.

Those old hippies were paying it forward, just like many of us do today. Fortunately, in our ever-interesting world of self-publishing we don’t have to live in a communal setting. Many of the authors who have excelled and managed to connect with thousands of readers have indeed paid it forward though, and they’ve passed along their time and knowledge to others. Their motivation varies. For some it’s because they were helped themselves and want to pay back, and for others their mandate is to help professionalize our industry and raise the quality of presentation and content higher and higher. Both are noble intentions and I like to think I do my little bit to help achieve both aims. As authors we’ll ultimately gain followers and perhaps readers by adhering to this philosophy. We’re not the only ones paying it forward though. Continue reading “The Real Question is – Who’s Going to Pay?”