Fan base is essentially your readership. It doesn’t happen overnight and you really have to go out and look to find people interested in exactly the kind of book you write. You’re guaranteed to have someone that likes your writing; it’s just a matter of finding them. A fan base, or a platform, is important to establish. It means you know who your audience is and you know who you’re writing for.

As long as you already know who you’re writing for, the next step is to find out where they are and how to reach them. This is 80% of the battle. Next, you have to give them something to talk about, something to share, and information to spread about your book. We’re talking about online hype, marketing, social networking, advertising and how to reach your fan base.

Social Networking

Social networking is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. This lumps just about every online activity into one neat little package. It really depends on your audience and reader demographic as to what social networking platforms you choose to associate with your writing. MySpace was built for a musician, Facebook was built for college kids, LinkedIN was built for the professional and so on and so forth.

Giving Away Free Copies

If you build it, they will Digg it. I know I’ve kind of spun this phrase for immediate purpose, but it still applies. Even if you’re just giving away the first couple chapters for free, you want to give your readers a taste and let them spread the news. So put up a few chapters and see how many people you can get to spread the word. The goal of giving away free copies is to build readership, build your fan base, and hopefully send your novel into a viral extravaganza. A really good piece of advice would be to ask for readers names and e-mail addresses in exchange for the free sneak peak into your novel. This ties in perfectly with our next topic which is building a readers list.

Building a Readers List

Building a list of contact information of people that are interested in your writing is extremely important. Some marketing and advertising executives would argue that it is worth more than a single sale. That’s because you already know that these particular people are interested in your writing already. You know they like the genre, they found it somehow, they wanted to read your writing, and now you have their e-mail address whenever you come out with a new book. This gives you direct access to your audience. I would say that’s worth its weight in gold, if e-mails weighed Anything.

Book Trailer Videos

Whoever thought that novels would get their own video commercials? Well, the time is now. You’ve probably seen it for popular authors such as Stephen King, but this is a great advertising and marketing strategy for every author. You don’t have to have actors, really all you need is music, some photos and a blurb about your book along with the cover picture. You’d be surprised how easy it is to hire someone to make a book trailer video, and how much traffic it will drive.

We live in an instant gratification world. That means more and more people would rather watch a video than to read and advertisement. You could argue that these are the type of people that do not read, but you’d be wrong. Besides, simplicity and ease with which to make a book trailer video and the amount of traffic it drives is not to be ignored. Video is a quick, efficient, and relatively easy process to deliver the large amount of information in a small amount of time and get the point across. Watching one video trailer for your book could convince a reader to read everything you have on the shelf. It never hurts to try.

Excerpt Space in Other Novels of Similar Genre

No matter what kind of book you publish, the reader will read your book from left to right, up to down, first to last page. This means that by the time the reader has finished the book they will be in the last 10 pages of the book.

When the book ends you find the reader flips through the last few pages just to make sure they didn’t miss anything. It’s probably even subconscious that they’re doing.

A new cost-saving, advertising and marketing, plan is to place excerpts of other books and similar genres in the backs of books. Most of the time authors will use this space to advertise their own upcoming book, past books, giveaways, or other information pertinent to their own writing. But a new trend surfacing is the selling of excerpt advertising space in the back of the popular or even obscure or novels. This is something to consider if you’re a new writer that would like to reach a specific genre.

Blogging and Micro-Blogging

Blogging and micro-blogging are very important in the spread of knowledge, both personal and professional, about your work and being a writer. If you don’t have a blog or a website you are very much behind the game in the publishing and writing world.

There’s just no excuse not to have a blog or to be on social network. You need to be constantly thinking about how to reach your audience, how to be more transparent, and how to be a common household and bookstore name.

So get your face out there, get your writing out there, and make sure you’re talking about your writing. Because if you’re not talking about your writing nobody else is.

The Importance of Writing a Series for your Established Fanbase

When you’ve gone to the trouble of building a fan base your novel you have a very important decision to make. You should have thought about this before you even wrote your novel but better late than never. The question is ‘Can I write this novel into a series?’

This is a very important question, one that can make your life as a writer easier or harder depending on your answer. The answer should always be yes, you should always be writing a series. Because as much time as it took to build up your fan base, you can want to get as much out of your fan base is humanly possible. You are you know they love the story, they love the characters, and they want to know more, so give them more and let them buy more.

It’s not just about selling more books either. If you’re writing a series, you’re saving substantial amount of time and money that would otherwise go into marketing, promoting, advertising, and building a new fan base for a new novel. Because the simple fact of the publishing world is that no two books are the same. The first novel you ever write will not be the same as your second novel, if they’re different stories, which means your readers from your first novel may not give a dang about your second novel.

To save time and money you should be trying to write a series.

What did we get out of this fan base information?

• You should be writing a series.
• You should be blogging and on every social network that you’re reader demographic is on.
• You need book trailer videos, ads in the backs of similar genre books, to the building your readership list and she tried to remain approachable as much as possible.
• If you take nothing else from this article, write a series.

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Thank you for visiting The Official Karisha Prescott Website! For more top posts, try the Featured Articles page or Writing page for more free tips. Like this article? Subscribe to my RSS feed in an RSS reader to keep up with my most recent posts.

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As always, comment, link or subscribe if you like what you read!

My friend Charmaine Clancy over at Wagging Tales has a great idea going which she got from Tossing It Out. ‘Blogging from A to Z Challenge’ (26 posts) where, you guessed it! The challenge is to blog 26 posts in the month of April from A to Z!

I think this is a GREAT idea! Thanks Charmaine Clancy!

I’m going to add links to all the blog posts for this month in this post, but you will be able to see them on the home page. Good luck to everyone taking this blog challenge! I’m sure we will all do great and I’m really looking forward to this challenge!

For my A to Z Challenge, I am going to keep everything as relevant to Writing, Publishing and Novels as possible! Wish me luck!

So to kick this Blogging Challenge Off…

A is for Advertising!

B is for Blogging and Authors!

C is for Characters!

D is for Dedication to Writing!

E is for Dangers of EDITING Your Novel!

F is for Fanbase Creation!

G is for Fiction Genres and Sub Genres!

H is for Writer’s Haven!

I is for Writers’ Inspiration!

Feel free to link your A to Z Challenge blog in the comments section!

Good Luck and Thanks for Reading!

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Thank you for visiting The Official Karisha Prescott Website! For more top posts, try the Featured Articles page or Writing page for more free tips. Like this article? Subscribe to my RSS feed in an RSS reader to keep up with my most recent posts.
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Photo Credit: mag3737

Because no one will know that you wrote a book unless you tell them.

A lot of new writers and authors think that only self-publishing authors are in charge of their own advertising. This is a common misconception. More often than not, publishing houses are leaving advertising and marketing in the hands of the authors. Unless you’re a big name, like Stephen King, you’ll be handling your marketing and advertising regardless of whether you self publish or are traditionally published.

When it comes to advertising the best way to go is online. This sounds easier than it actually is. Where print publishing and advertising has a set place in the physical world, online advertising and marketing is ever-changing real estate.

Advertising online is a complex system and strategy.

To list just a few of the advertising options:

• Google Adwords
• Blog link exchange
• Kontera Link Ads
• Social networking profiles
• Micro-blogging
• Blogging
• Author website
• and so much more

While this is just an overview of the advertising aspect of being a writer and author, you can find countless articles and books on the subject of advertising online. I will attempt to cover as much as possible on this site to help you gain some perspective on online advertising.

It’s important to point out that advertising is just as important, if not more so, than any other aspect of publishing. You could write the next New York Times bestseller and absolutely know in it in your heart, but if no one knows you wrote it then it will never achieve the success it deserves.

So don’t be scared of advertising. Be excited, be willing to learn, learn from others, take classes if you have to, and get the word out about your book.

After all, no one is going to care more about your novel than YOU.

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Thank you for visiting The Official Karisha Prescott Website! For more top posts, try the Featured Articles page or Writing page for more free tips. Like this article? Subscribe to my RSS feed in an RSS reader to keep up with my most recent posts.

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As always, comment, link or subscribe if you like what you read!

There is no such thing as ‘Ten Easy Tips to Writing a Novel’ because it’s too complex. Now, I will still say that writing a novel is easy, but it can be complex in the fact that so many easy, little pieces need to fit together.

Let’s face it, the economy is slow, the publishing industry is ‘playing it safe’ so if you are a new writer you are self-financing or self/vanity publishing your works.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We are talking about the simplicity and complexities of actually writing your novel.

Let’s take an overall look at what is required in the novel writing process.

Time: more than anything else in the world, beyond your method of writing, the genre you choose or anything else, you need time to write and time to work on promoting your work. It can be as little as twenty minutes at the end of your day to all but four hours a day (sleep critical amount).

Time is fickle. The more time you put in, the faster you could possibly have your novel ready. Each novel is different to take into account length, difficulty, plot issues, etc.

Ability: I don’t push unnecessary education. I think anyone is able to tell a story, anyone could write a novel and the basic knowledge is all you need. The basic knowledge would be a Basic English 101 class on grammar, sentence structure, etc.

I don’t recommend creative writing classes and I have elaborated about this on my blog on several occasions. I just don’t think that creativity could or SHOULD be learned. I strongly believe creative writing alters the unique creative writing voice that so many let others dampen. So, of course, it’s at every writer’s discretion.

Forming a Solid Novel Idea: Any story can fail and the same story can succeed; the real determining factor is how it is told and at what point in the story the writer is focusing on. A story that focuses on the events leading up to the destruction of an American landmark is a completely different story from that where families learn to cope with loss arising from the same situation or heartbroken volunteers working to clear away the rubble and debris. In the World of Writing, we would call this the ‘take’ or the ‘angle’ of the story.

Structure of a Novel: You need to know how the story ends. (My opinion, some would argue against my view here) Knowing how the story ends means you know what your main character’s (protagonist) ultimate goal is and can keep them on track. If your character wanders off willy-nilly at every bump and pin-drop in the night your readers may think they are on a wild goose chase and ultimately give up as well. So when we look at structure, we look at having a beginning, middle and an ultimate end or conclusion to the story, and mapping out what those main scenes are.

Momentum: Almost the same as structure, but it is more in the style of writing. Instead of long internal dialogue, you want to keep your character IN ACTION, constantly moving toward that end result. You don’t want your character to constantly be pondering the movement of leaves and grass, you want your character swinging from branches and feeling alive…alive in action.

A Crisis: Your character needs a dilemma, a crisis, a purpose. A purpose that drives your character to the ultimate end; so if the government mistakenly filters the air with poisonous ‘air packs’ (basically plot from ‘Serenity’) and only one person on the planet knows about it, that one person should be your main character and your main characters crisis should be to warn the people of the world and prevent millions of deaths. THAT is a crisis. Crises can be different on different levels of importance in different ways, but have some sort of crisis, whether world-scale or personal-world-shattering that needs ACTION.

Ultimate End: you need an end. That is how most stories go. Even if the end leaves your reader feeling angry, distain, whatever, it needs to have an end that has a feeling and the reader says ‘No more?’ and what they take from it at that point is up in the air, for the most part.

Editing: Ah, you thought you were done with that novel? Not yet. This is only the beginning. However long you spent writing your novel, think about spending the same amount of time or double that time just in editing. That is, if you are self editing. You should edit more than once, move on to the ‘Beta Readers’ part and then move back to the ‘Editing’ phase again. You should go back and forth several times.

Beta Readers: You need testers. Test readers that actually LIKE the genre you are writing and are also willing to read your story several times through out your editing process and give you quality feedback. Finding good beta readers and understanding how to interact with beta readers is very important; you shouldn’t be grilling your beta readers before they have even had a chance to sit down. You should be silent and let them say whatever comes to mind. This way, you are not swaying the ‘results’ etc.

Consider a Publisher or Consider a Self-Publishing method: I am all for the self-publishing method because I understand the value in owning full rights to my work for the rest of my life. This means no advances, but it also means I get 100% free reign on how much to price it, how it will be released, cover design, where it will be sold, if there is a book tour, etc. Self-publishing is where I am at. Does that mean I would look at a million-dollar book deal with a traditional publisher and scoff? Not a chance…but I know that the state of my writing and success as it is now, I should be completely happy with the methods of the self-publishing world.

Traditional Publishing: I could write a book on the Traditional publishing methods. Oh wait, someone already has! Hundreds of times over! My blog still covers traditional publishing topics like query letters, advances, royalties, marketing, rights, book tours, etc.

Marketing and Advertising: Welcome to the world of independence. As a self-publishing/ed author, I don’t care what your day job is, you ARE the entrepreneur of the century. You are handling everything from creating an idea, writing a novel, handling editing, test readers, and now marketing and advertising! You will have to maintain blogs, twitter streams, social networking profiles, make connections, come up with color schemes and slogans, and everything else that the marketing and advertising teams would do for you in a traditional publishing house. Though, in all fairness, if you’re not Stephen King, you’re doing almost all your marketing and advertising yourself anyway. That includes setting up your own book tours.

Print: Eventually, you will have written, edited, designed, marketed, advertised, blogged and tweeted your little heart out. You are going to eventually have to decide how to deliver your precious bundle of joy to your audience. There are many options and many companies, but the two words synonymous with Self Publishing are ‘eBook’ and ‘Print on Demand’.  I cover both topics extraneously on my blog.

Rinse and Repeat: That’s right. You think you are finally done. You are exhausted, you don’t want to answer one more person ‘So, what is your novel about?’ and your brain hurts from learning marketing, advertising, editing, digital formatting, design layout, etc. in the span of what it took you to write your novel. It can be exhausting. But now that you’re done with your campaign trail it’s time to sit down, get cozy and write your next one.

Don’t worry, chances are that you were writing it while working on all the other stuff for the novel you already wrote. If you are Grade A multitasking madness, you should already be done with your second novel, working on advertising on it and be thinking about your third.

But if you don’t take one thing away from this overview, take this bit of advice:

THINK SEQUEL/ THINK SERIES.

That’s right. If you are going to put all this time, energy and heart into a book, at least have a few books lined up for the series.

Why is that so important?

* Novel idea and character creation is one of the hardest parts.

* 80% of your energy is going to be spent marketing your novel

* If you switch to a different novel you automatically lose all your marketing on just one novel. Capitalize on the marketing you have done: let it span a whole series and build momentum, a readership and hopefully a big fan base of some type.

This is essentially the entire blue print for how to write a novel from beginning to end. It looks complex if you look at all the pages, the long string of parts and roles you will play, but if you just look at doing one thing at a time, as it comes, then it is relatively simple. It’s all in time management and keeping your passion for writing alive.

So, do you think writing is still so hard? Is a Novel really so unattainable an achievement? Or are you excited to get your fingers clicking and your words on paper/screen?

Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney

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Thank you for visiting The Official Karisha Prescott Website! For more top posts, try the Featured Articles page or Writing page for more free tips. Like this article? Subscribe to my RSS feed in an RSS reader to keep up with my most recent posts.

Follow me on Twitter. Become a fan on “The Karisha Prescott Facebook page”

As always, comment, link or subscribe if you like what you read!

Photo Credit: Allen Hsu

Content is King – that is the mantra online and for good reason. Content keeps your traffic up, the interest going and keeps people looking at your ads. But today we are comparing the ‘content farms’ of the online world to the average Joe blogger.

Outsourcing is a great way to give your readers a constant flow of content. But for this example, talking about content farming, let’s pit the average Joe professional blogger to the corporate ‘The Man’ monster company in it for the numbers. We are looking at traffic, we are looking at quality and we are looking at content. Normally, you can expect your quality of content to reflect your traffic and vice versa. This is a very simple reward system.

In the online world, should you write quality content you are rewarded with traffic to your site. To explain simply without getting into the nuts and bolts of SEO, Google decides you are more relevant by throwing you in the search  and seeing how many people click on your site from there. No one nominates you besides your readers. You get ‘Dug’ and ‘Tweeted’ about and thus you start your own viral marketing for having quality on your site.

A quick overview of what a Content Farm is: a ‘catch all’ website that covers every topic possible, with low quality to medium quality writing and low amounts of actual information written to turn a quick post and a quick profit.

With some websites out there, called ‘Content Farms’, you will see a breakdown of this ‘reward’ system. The breakdown happens when places like EZine.com produce mass amounts of low quality product and floods the search engines. It makes it hard for quality to surface because the ‘surfer’ has to wade through pages of search engine results of, well, crap.

What happens? The person that ‘queried’ (searches a term) finds crap but instead of looking on page 20 of the search results, gives up and tries a different query. This is a serious problem. And there is good a good rumor on the horizon. I have heard: Though I can’t remember where: That Google, who prides itself on its secret algorithms, is taking a serious look at battling the flood of low quality articles coming from content farms.

(I delayed publishing this post for almost a week trying to figure out where I heard this rumor online and I can’t validate it. Please take it at face value. I have no actual proof that Google is working on this algorithm other than ‘I think they are, I heard they are…I think’ and I’m sorry for that.)

This presents a problem but I don’t know how serious. If you are running a medium or small sized content farm, chances are that you outsource a large portion of your post writing. If you are a small enough company/operation, then you probably make sure to pay for quality. (I hope.) And if that is the case you don’t have a lot to worry about. If, however, you are posting zero-information-high-external-link content, you may want to watch out for this rumor I’ve been hearing.

Does this mean abandon your little content farm immediately? I couldn’t, in good conscious, tell you to do that if it is making you money. It’s up to you and even I wouldn’t abandon something turning a profit until the last minute. You may as well just ride out the content farming wave as long as you can if you have a substantial amount invested and are seeing good returns.

Do I think this is a good time for the average Joe to get into content farming or to start outsourcing articles and posts to compete with the big boys? No. I don’t. Simply, You may be building slowly, but you have a few advantages over the ‘big boys’ that will have you rising to the top.

• You have a personality and it is embedded in your posts (We call this Branding)
• Your posts, while slow to write and accumulate, are ( I assume) of the highest quality because you care about pride and respect, etc.
• You are building a person-to-person loyalty slowly out of your readers. I’m sorry but have you ever heard someone say, ‘I can’t wait until So-and-So who writes for eHow.com puts another interesting link ridden article out about randomness!’ It just doesn’t happen.

So if you are thinking about getting into content farming, STOP! Stop thinking that outsourcing articles for fifty cents a pop will save your blog and increase your readership. If anything, you are going to drive away the fan base you have because the quality will plummet.  If you are going to outsource, be sure to paying for the quality, well constructed articles that will have your site/blog rising to the top of the internet ‘slush piles’ of these content farms. That’s right, I’m not knocking outsourcing. I’m saying :

• Take your time in finding writers that match your style and interests
• Don’t Encourage Sweatshops in India and around the world by paying .50 per post
• Keep your quality at the same level or higher
• Don’t rely on outsourcing – Your readers will begin to tell or worse: will forget your ‘writing style’ in the flood of ghost writers posing as you.

Will Google attempt and/or succeed at weeding out and penalizing content farms? Only time will tell but with the research and funding that Google throws at its main money maker, Search Engine Results and the adjacent ads, I am sure they will fix this monkey-wrench-in-the-machine.

After all, the real threat to Google are Subscription Services offering high quality content in return for filtering out the slush piles. They are coming…content by subscription because…people are tired of spam, landing websites that are 100% ads and articles dancing around an idea but not offering any information or solutions.

Our Lesson? Quality is going to be winning out over Quantity very soon. Stop counting your pages and start counting your loyal traffic numbers because the numbers will lay in loyalty and that will get you skyrocketed to that exlusive Top 10 spot in Google Results soon enough.

Of course, the majority of this post was opinion. I heard a rumor, can’t remember where I heard it but want to know what people think. Do you think Google is working on an algorithm to combat content farms that are clogging up the search results? Do you think it helps or hurts Google that so many content farms are pumping out as much as 4,000 articles/posts a day? Will this affect you in any way? Are subscription services for quality content the wave of the future?

Thanks for reading and as always, please comment, subscribe or just send me an email to tell me what you think!

M.A.C. Black and Blue Smokey Eyeshadow in Super Macro on Green Eye

Photo Credit: DreamGlow

It can be  hard for a writer to balance writing, editing, marketing, advertising and still maintain a relationship with the readers. The relationship with the readers is the enjoyable part, as is the writing, but the stuff in between can seem endless and frustrating.

I am happy to say I am having a lot of fun with the launch of my book coming up. The launch is late but for the best. Some great changes, some added features and …well, you’ll see!

So far we are looking at:

• The Book Website
• New Graphics
• New Videos

Bonus reader-interactive features that will be unveiled shortly!

What do you think of as the foundation of YOUR book launch?

By far, the book launch and marketing/advertising aspects are the most difficult. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun!

Be sure to keep an active interest in your book.

From beginning to end!

Past Mistakes ~ Sample Chapters by Karisha Prescott