Tag: writing

SFFMP 120: Writing Stories That Keep Readers Coming Back for More

Group Discussion, Podcast

This week, Jeff, Jo, and Lindsay talked about the craft side of things and how to write stories that are compelling and that will make readers want to keep plunking down money for more of your books. We argued that books that aren’t written to market and don’t hit on popular tropes may need to be better crafted to succeed, but that if you’re able to gain a readership, those readers may be more loyal in the end and follow you from project to project, as opposed to readers who are just looking for X type of stories and don’t care who wrote them.

Here are a few more details on what we covered:

  • Pretty prose vs compelling stories.
  • Creating characters that people care about and want to follow from book to book.
  • What makes a sympathetic and relatable character?
  • The importance of believable characters and why it’s good to avoid a “Mary Sue” (or “Marty Stu”).
  • Remembering that your protagonists should change and grow (or cause others to change and grow) over the course of a book and also a series.
  • The importance of a mix of internal and external conflict and the idea of “the human heart in conflict with itself” being at the core of good fiction.
  • Avoiding throwing in random battles with bad guys or other obstacles that could seem contrived because they have little to do with the plot.

 

| Open Player in New Window

Click to download the mp3.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast via RSS.

Like us on Facebook.

, , , ,

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

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.

 

| Open Player in New Window

Click to download the mp3.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast via RSS.

, , , , , , , ,

SFFMP 29: Increasing Writing Speed and Publishing More Books

Group Discussion, Podcast

For today’s show, we talked about how we’ve learned to write more efficiently and get more books out there. After all, a lot of the marketing stuff we discuss on this show becomes more effective when you have numerous books, and maybe even numerous series, out there. It’s also easier to keep the momentum going if you have new adventures coming out every few months.

Here’s some of what we covered:

  • How each of us approaches plotting and whether we outline or pants
  • Whether we write down the “beats” for individual scenes before starting on them
  • Lots of tips that we’ve all learned for hitting our daily word count goals and staying on task
  • Tips from the book 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You love.
  • How over-editing can slow you down (and may not be that useful in the end)
  • How a series can make everything easier, since you’ve already established the characters and done the world building.
  • Dealing with being daunted by a story idea
  • Finding motivation to write every day and staying motivated for the long run
  • How to get readers to try a new series, especially if you jump genres
  • Ways of storing or backing up your work in the cloud and writing from anywhere

 

 

| Open Player in New Window

Click to download the mp3.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast via RSS.

, , , ,