Hello Friends!
Happy 2022!
I really appreciate you signing up for this newsletter! It’s so helpful to have people I’m talking to as I get more serious about marketing. First I will share updates on my creative career and then I will share some great resources that you may enjoy.
As you know from the title of this email and the tagline, I’ve been “slowing down to speed up.” That means that I have relieved myself of the pressure to accomplish in certain areas. So the main area of slowing down for me was my creative work — the marketing and writing. In spite of this, I’ve had several fun accomplishments!
Marketing Update
First – My biggest marketing accomplishment this month is that I made a landing page for my newsletter — that is the sign-up page — and I posted it all over my social media! This resulted in SIX people signing up. Oh yes, SIX! So if you are one of them, you are extremely special and I’d like to get a hello from you!
Second – My second marketing-related accomplishment is that I collected a bunch of content for this newsletter and I’m sending it out tonight — yikes!
Novella Update
Title – Once Upon a Vampire Snob
Outline – After writing tons of messy notes where I struggle to blend the plot structure of Pride and Prejudice with scenes and jokes in my head and modern fantasy elements, I have found an excellent outline that works for me. Ergo, an outline that facilitates filling in the draft.
Drafting – My estimation is that I’m 12% of the way through the first draft — and I like what I have.
What’s the novella about?
It’s about a paranormal dating service, but the plot includes action, deceit, and romance.
The protagonist is a powerful wolf shifter and her job is to keep humans safe while they use the paranormal dating services. She’s prejudiced against vampires, but then one of them falls in love with her. The plot is influenced by popular tropes from indie shifter romances and my protagonist reminds me a lot of Sailormoon because she’s determined to support and rescue people while they pursue love. While writing out the plot and filling it in, I relied heavily on the plot structure of Pride and Prejudice.
This is the first “real” novel that I’m writing, so I am taking advice from Brandon Sanderson and his friends. Borrowing a plot structure from another book or movie is something they highly recommend for new writers.
Marketing
This episode of the Book Marketing Tips and Author Success podcast provided a bunch of practical advice for book marketing. My quick and dirty summary: don’t be cheap in editing. Learn about keywords (I think this is called advertising analytics), be easy to find (present on social, author website), update your book covers, and publish your book in multiple formats — even new authors ought to publish in both digital and hard copy.
I’ve also heard that indie authors are making gains in communities like BookFunnel and BookBub.
If you’d like to know what makes me love marketing so much, listen to this lecture by Seth Godin.
Other Recommendations
This fantastic interview between Ali Abdaal and Oliver Burkeman — the guy who wrote the satirical Guardian column “This Column will Change Your Life” — about the book he’s writing and how important it is to “accept your finiteness.”
This cheesy-but-entertaining lecture where Brandon Sanderson explains in nerdy gamer terms that “doing the hard part is the only way to get good at doing the hard part.”
Bye bye!
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