5000 words an hour – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

SFFMP 38: Writing 5,000 Words an Hour and Selling Zombies and Werewolves with Chris Fox

July 7, 2015 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

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:

If Chris’s fiction sounded interesting to you, give his first book, No Such Thing as Werewolves, a try.