We always suggest that writers go onto Amazon and look at the types of books that are selling in their genre. Look at their titles, covers, descriptions…but don’t copy them. If there are no similar books to yours or they aren’t selling, you may find it difficult to sell a significant amount of books. This is an interesting article from the kdp community by an author who is already making a lot of money after only 4 months. I find it inspiring when authors share their success, I hope you enjoy it too.

http://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=187610.0

Morning everyone, I just finished reading a book on how to choose and highlight your keywords. Keywords are what will get your found among the millions of books on Amazon. Today there is an excellent ebook on Kindle for free. I’d suggest you get it.

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Publishing-With-Amazon-Kindle-ebook/dp/B00FO6WMHE

This author is very good at ranking her books and her ebook on how she does it is perfect for people new to publishing.

This is a great article by a mathematical-minded kindle author about how she thinks the Amazon algorithm works. We agree with her. So far we have only got to level 4 with our best selling book. It is great when you get a personal email form an Amazon worker asking if they can promote your book. Highly recommend you read this.

http://carabristol.com/2014/05/why-some-ebooks-sell-and-others-dont-lessons-from-rt14/

Most of the books we receive to format have numerous errors. Probably the most common one is two spaces instead of one. To find these you need to turn on your Formatting Tool (it looks like a q at the top of your word document). It will show most of your double spaces. Don’t put two spaces after a full stop…that rule changed years ago. [Read more…]

Just showing you that it is possible. We currently have 2 Best Sellers on Amazon.co.uk, one by Bill Campbell and the other by Katrina Kahler. It feels so good to see that best seller badge. Diary of an Almost Cool Girl has been Number 1 for almost one year straight and Katrina’s Diary of a Horse Mad Girl is now Number 1 in Horse books. Congratulations you two!

 

Ray Bradbury gives new authors 12 Great Tips:

• Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”

• You may love ‘em, but you can’t be ‘em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.

• Examine “quality” short stories. He suggests Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make his cut, since he finds that their stories have “no metaphor.”

• Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, he suggests a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diversity of fields, including archaeology, zoology, biology, philosophy, politics, and literature. “At the end of a thousand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”

• Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writerly ambitions? He suggests calling them up to “fire them” without delay.

• Live in the library. Don’t live in your “goddamn computers.” He may not have gone to college, but his insatiable reading habits allowed him to “graduate from the library” at age 28.

• Fall in love with movies. Preferably old ones.

• Write with joy. In his mind, “writing is not a serious business.” If a story starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that doesn’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audience.

• Don’t plan on making money. He and his wife, who “took a vow of poverty” to marry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still never got around to picking up a license).

• List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the former, and “kill” the later — also by writing about them. Do the same with your fears.

• Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He recommends “word association” to break down any creative blockages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”

• Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.”Or, failing that, you’re looking for someone to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like people say.”

http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/ray_bradbury_gives_12_pieces_of_writing_advice_to_young_authors_2001.html

Okay, here we go…BIC. What does BIC mean? Butt In Chair of course! Try to write every day. Even if you can only spend half an hour writing, developing a consistent habit of adding to your story every day, will eventually get your book written. Now it is easy to give this advice…and probably a little harder to follow it myself. So off I go, BIC! Have a great writing day!

 

Here we go again….3 out of the top 5 selling books in UK in a category with 22 081 books are by Bill and myself (Karen). Not bad!!!!