SFFMP 38: Writing 5,000 Words an Hour and Selling Zombies and Werewolves with Chris Fox
On today’s show, we chatted with Chris Fox about marketing zombies, werewolves, and vampires, and also about how he writes incredibly quickly. He holds down a 60-hour-a-week day job as an app developer and doesn’t have a lot of time to devote to fiction, so he’s learned to be productive, logging 5,000 words in an hour. He’s even written about it in a book designed to help other authors: 5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter.
Here are some of the highlights from the interview:
- Using the start-up mentality for indie publishing
- Investing in your product (including scouring DeviantArt for hours to find just the right artists!)
- How audiobook sales (from Audible) can help Kindle sales on Amazon
- Is it helpful to use popular tropes, such as werewolves, zombies, and vampires? Or do readers have expectations that can be hard to meet if you’re doing something slightly different?
- What advertising Chris has done and what’s been effective
- Why it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend much time and money on marketing when you only have one or two books out
- Utilizing a mailing list to make promoting future books easier
- How Chris is writing so darned many words in an hour
- Addressing the argument that writing faster means writing poorly
- Using voice recognition software effectively as a fiction writer
If you’re looking for more information on marketing, you might want to visit Chris’s site and check out some of the articles he’s written for writers:
- Marketing Principles: Part 1- The Fundamentals
- Marketing Principles: Part 2- Passive Marketing
- Marketing Principles: Part 3- Paid Advertising
- How Gamification Will Dramatically Increase Your Word Count
If Chris’s fiction sounded interesting to you, give his first book, No Such Thing as Werewolves, a try.
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Cool to see you on SFF Marketing Podcast, Chris! 🙂 It’s hands-down my favorite podcast.
Voice recognition software will probably not work for me, because I have LOTS of invented technology, and usually write at my day job during down times (I work in IT, too). But all the other tips in 5K/h are definitely making it into my long-term productivity strategy. Thanks for sharing them!
Thanks for stopping by, Veronica! I had a heck of a time getting it to do my fantasy character names and made up places when I tried it years ago, though in theory, you can train it to remember those terms. It’s probably gotten better over the years.