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Showing posts from December, 2013

Bitchfest! I missed #PitchMAS

Oh sorrow! Oh my! Oh me! I just discovered PitchMAS ten days too late. And I'm going to post about it, so you and I never miss it again. PitchMAS seems to be a query-fest that occurs between December 15th and 16th during which authors can submit a 35-word pitch through email to the twitter pitch geniuses. On December 19th, the top 75 pitches will be posted on this blog   http://pitchmas.blogspot.ca/  and agents and publishers will weed through and make comments or request manuscript pages. On December 20th, everyone and anyone can tweet their 140 character pitches with the hashtag #PitchMAS. The line-up of  ready and willing publishers and agents just waiting to find that perfect twitter pitch is pretty impressive, not to mention all of the authors and other industry folk following for fun. (Check out the list here  http://pitchmas.blogspot.ca/2013/11/epic-announcement-pitchmas-2013.html ). So, it's over. How can it help us now? Easy. Read through the list of pitches

Small Press Compared to Big Publisher and why I need "to Agent, to Agent, to get a fat Contract"

I wasn't going to go with an agent for my novel and here are the reasons why: Agents generally take 15%  Publishers list their submission guidelines on their web pages, and I can follow those Query letter example s abound, and I can apply those Lawyers share free publishing contracts with do and don't list s, and I can read those Kindle offers online publishing , and I can learn from their format suggestions DuoTrope and Submission Grinder offer access to calls for submissions, and I can track mine I have three family members who are active in the book industry, and I can ask them And I did all that. And I submitted my novel, "The Precious Quest" to three of the biggest fantasy publishers who accept submissions from authors.  A year and a half later, and three rejections later, I have run out of big publishers who accept high fantasy and who accept from unagented authors. Still confident, I felt I could get my 90,000 word, high fantasy that took

How's Your Online Marketing? Test, Improve, Retest.

As authors, we do all we can to promote ourselves online. You've heard the list: tweet, blog, post, publish, advertise, trailerize, subsidize... whatever. It's all true, but you could spend hours and days and weeks and years without really nailing serious traffic and gaining exposure. So how do you make sure your efforts are gaining a balanced and appropriate outcome, when compared to all the hours you've put in? Get graded on your marketing efforts at  http://marketing.grader.com . Type in your Web address and you'll be off and running as the application checks: programming keywords and tags positioning links linking to your site ability to follow easily (twitter, facebook, etc) saturation of key search words mobile marketing and more Test yourself, then follow the instructions for improvement and retest. Watch your score go up.