_______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ The Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Publisher: Randy Ingermanson ("the Snowflake guy") Motto: "A Vision for Excellence" Date: September 7, 2010 Issue: Volume 6, Number 9 Home Pages: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com http://www.Ingermanson.com Circulation: 22245 writers, each of them creating a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ "Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing" _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ What's in This Issue 1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine! 2) Organizing: To E or Not to E? 3) Creating: How To Create an E-book for Amazon 4) Marketing: The Billion-Dollar Book 5) What's New At AdvancedFictionWriting.com 6) Randy Recommends . . . 7) Steal This E-zine! 8) Reprint Rights _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine! Those of you who have joined in the past month (more than 600 of you signed up in August), welcome to my e-zine! You should be on this list only if you signed up for it on my web site. If you no longer wish to hear from me, don't be shy -- there's a link at the bottom of this e-mail that will put you out of your misery. If you need to change your e-mail address, there's a different link at the bottom to help you do that. If you missed a back issue, remember that all previous issues are archived on my web site at: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/ezine What's in this issue: The successful novelist needs good organization, good craft, and good marketing. In this issue, we'll talk about each of these in turn. This month, all three of the main articles will focus on the rising tide of e-books -- certainly the biggest story in the publishing world this year. * The traditional world of paper-publishing seems to be falling apart right now. But is it? Will e-books save us -- or destroy us? Find out what your options are in my article, "To E or Not to E?" * You've probably heard rumors about regular-Joe authors earning hundreds or thousands of dollars per week from sales of their Kindle e-books on Amazon. If you think that only a techno-weenie can create a Kindle book, then you're in for a surprise. Learn how easy it is to act as your own publisher on Amazon in my article, "How To Create an E-book for Amazon." * Sometime in the next five years, I think we may very well see a "B-book" -- a single edition of a book that earns its author a billion dollars. Want to know how that's possible -- and what kind of path the lucky author will need to walk to reach that ten-figure tidal wave? Read my article, "The Billion-Dollar Book." Are you reading my blog? Check out the massively popular "Ask A Question For My Blog" feature on my web site. Every day, I answer one question in detail from my loyal blog readers. Are you missing out? Join the fun here: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/blog _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 2) Organizing: To E or Not to E? Two days ago, I was eating a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast and reading blogs on my iPad. One of the blogs had a guest entry by an author I'd never heard of, Scott Nicholson. Within a couple of minutes, I decided he sounded interesting, so I clicked on the Amazon link for his novel, THE RED CHURCH. The book looked pretty good, and the price was right, only $2.99. It carried an endorsement by an author I know. I decided to buy it. I clicked the dropdown menu to select delivery to my iPad. Then I clicked the "Buy now with 1-Click" button. Then I opened the Kindle app on my iPad and waited a few seconds while the book downloaded. The whole operation took about four minutes from the time I began reading the blog until the time I was reading the book. Less time than it took to eat half a bowl of Cheerios. That is the great new world of publishing that we are now moving into. It's a world some authors fear. It's a world some authors welcome. Rightly so, on both counts. We're seeing massive change in the publishing world, and change is always scary. It's right for authors to feel fear. However, this kind of change is good for authors. Scott first published that novel in 2002. Eventually, it went out of print, as most books do. He got the rights to the book reverted to him and then uploaded the book to Amazon just before New Year's Day, 2010. Now the book is getting a new chance at new readers, and earning Scott 70% royalties on Amazon. That's some pretty good pocket change. It's right for authors to welcome that kind of change. Scott is using what I call the "Konrath model" of publishing his books. Joe Konrath is a major proponent of this method, which is extremely simple: * You write an original novel or get back the rights to a book you previously published. * If necessary, you pay a freelance editor to edit the book and a graphic artist to create a cover. * You format the manuscript appropriately in Microsoft Word and then upload it to Amazon, naming yourself as the publisher. * You set the price at whatever price point you think will earn you the most. * You earn money. If your price point is between $2.99 and $9.99, then Amazon pays you 70% of the price on all sales within the US. Otherwise, Amazon pays you 35%. If you've been following Joe Konrath's blog, then you know that he's self-pubbed several books on Amazon. (Check out his blog here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com) Currently, those books are earning him a total of about $500 per day, on average. That's $3500 per week of passive revenue. Not bad for a few hours of work to format each book and then punch the button to upload it. "That's fine for Joe," most authors say, "but it won't work for me." This is true. If you believe the Konrath model won't work for you, then you will do nothing and . . . it won't work for you. Outcomes in life often depend on what you believe they'll be. But you know that, so I won't belabor the "self-fulfilling prophecy" thing. The real question is whether the Konrath model WOULD work for you if you tried it. There's only one way to answer that question for certain, and you know perfectly well what that is: Try it and see. But before you try it, you should first ask if it's plausible that it could work. After all, it'd be a shame to waste several hours of work and then earn nothing. Who is most likely to benefit from the Konrath model? That's easy. Famous authors. Authors whose name will already sell boatloads of books. In publishing jargon, "A-list authors." Of course, A-listers would sell boatloads of copies anyway, just by doing what they're doing now, which is to work with publishers who buy the rights to both the paper version and the e-books. So A-listers are going to succeed whether they e-publish or not. Should an A-lister quit his publisher and try the Konrath model? Seth Godin just announced that he's going to do precisely that. (Actually, Seth goes far beyond the Konrath model.) Seth is a marketing genius who's written a dozen best-sellers and done well. But he's got a terrific web presence and he's a little tired of waiting for the wheels of publishing to grind out his books, so he's planning to just market his ideas on his own from now on. You can read Seth's reasons for doing this on his blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/moving-on.html There are plenty of A-listers who are content to let their publishers pay for editing, graphics, marketing, and all that. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'll bet that very soon, marketing-savvy A-listers are going to start releasing their work first as e-books so they can earn higher profits. Then they'll license the rights for the p-books (paper books) to publishers. There's nothing wrong with that, either. There's another group who can also benefit right away: Mid-list authors who own the rights to their out-of-print books. The huge benefit mid-listers will have here is that an out-of-print book has already received a substantive edit, copy edit, and line edit from a team of professionals. If your book is out of print, you can typically get a Word document from your publisher with the final edited version of your manuscript for $50 to $100. If you can also buy the rights to the cover art, then you have everything you need to republish the book as an e-book. (You can't always get the rights to the art, and in some cases you may not want it.) What about unpublished writers? Can they also benefit? That depends. Yes, they can e-publish their novels and reap the rewards, just like the A-listers and the mid-listers. But they'll have to pay for it. Remember that a publisher risks a substantial amount of money upfront to publish a book. They have to pay for all of the following before the book ever hits the shelves in any store: * An advance to the author * Salaries of several editors and proofreaders * Cost of designing the cover art * Salaries of the typesetters and other technicians * Salaries of the sales, marketing, and publicity teams * Rent for the building and cost to outfit it * Cost of an initial print run The advance usually runs from a few thousand dollars up to a few tens of thousands of dollars. The other costs can add up to several more tens of thousands of dollars. The publisher risks a lot of money! That's why they earn so much of the revenue from the book. If an author e-publishes his book, then he must foot some of these costs: * The author gets no advance * The author must pay for any editing and proofreading * The author must pay for a cover design Note that A-listers and mid-listers who decide to self-publish a book FIRST as an e-book have to deal with these same costs. A-listers can afford them. Mid-listers have to weigh the benefits, exactly the way the unpublished writer does. Should you e-publish or shouldn't you? Only you can decide that. If you've got rights to an out-of-print book that was edited by a royalty-paying publisher, and if you've bought the rights to the cover art, then it seems obvious that e-publishing is a smart move. Otherwise, you need to decide whether you can tolerate getting no advance, whether you can afford to pay for a good edit and a good cover, and whether you can market your novel effectively. If you can do all of these, then it makes sense to try. If not, then it doesn't. This leaves open two major questions: * How do you get a book ready to e-publish? * How do you market an e-book effectively? We'll discuss those two questions in the craft and marketing columns of this e-zine. See below. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 3) Creating: How To Create an E-book for Amazon This article summarizes much of what you need to know to create an e-book for sale on Amazon, but it can't possibly be a complete guide. For all the detailed directions, along with all the rules and terms of service, see the official Amazon page at: http://dtp.amazon.com Creating an e-book for Amazon is easy if you have everything you need. Here are the main things you need to have before you start: * A copy of your manuscript in Microsoft Word format * A high-resolution image of the cover of your book * Microsoft Word software Here are the five steps you need to take: * Verify you have the rights to the manuscript * Verify you have the rights to the cover art * Tweak the manuscript formatting in Word * Convert the Word document to HTML * Upload the e-book to Amazon Let's tackle these steps in order: Step 1: Verify that you have the manuscript rights You must make sure that you own the rights to publish your book. If you've never sold the rights to your book, then you still own them and everything is fine. If you previously sold your book to a publisher, then they own the rights for the length of time specified in your contract. Normally this is as long as they keep the book in print, PLUS some period of time during which they have the option to put the book back in print. This means that if your book is still in print, your publisher owns the rights and you can't put the book on Amazon. Your publisher needs to do it (although you can help them.) Even if your book is out of print, you must get a letter from your publisher that states explicitly that they are reverting rights to you. This can take some time, often a year or two. These days, publishers are very chary of reverting rights to authors. Good luck! Please note that the rights to publish a book are different from the copyright. Normally, when you sell a book to a publisher, they put the copyright in your name. Yet they own the rights to publish until they revert them to you. Step 2: Verify that you have the cover art rights You must have cover art for your book in order to publish it as an e-book on Amazon or any of the other online retailers. Typically, cover art must be fairly high resolution. Amazon wants an image at 72 dots per inch and at least 500 pixels wide but no more than 1200 pixels high. A nice size to shoot for is 600 by 900 pixels. Currently, Amazon will accept only images in TIFF or JPEG format. You must own the rights to the cover art in order to use it for your e-book. If you made the cover yourself, then you own the rights. (If your art includes stock photos or other art that you didn't create yourself, you may need to pay a royalty to the photographer or artist. Be legal and pay them, for the same reason that people who read your book should be legal and pay you.) If you hired an artist to create your cover art, then you probably own the rights. Make sure your agreement with the artist says that you do. Also, make sure that you or the artist have paid the royalties for any stock photos or other art that went into your cover. If a publisher paid for the cover art, then they might agree to sell you the rights to use it if you ask. Or not. It's up to them whether they'll sell. In some cases, they may not be able to sell the rights. In other cases, you may not like the original cover and you might decide to hire an artist or do it yourself. Step 3: Tweak the formatting of the manuscript in Word This may be a lot of work or a little, depending on what shape the manuscript is in. Make a copy of your original manuscript and work only on the copy, because you may make substantial changes in order to make it look good as an e-book. You don't want to mess up the original. E-books generally don't have fixed amounts of text on each page. The text in your e-book needs to "flow" from page to page. This is because e-book readers have many different sizes of screen, and many of them let you resize the type. An e-book is not like a paper book with a fixed number of words on each page! The bottom line is that you need to make sure that the text of your e-book will look good, no matter what e-book reader is used. You don't really want to use the typeset pages from your original paper edition (if your book was previously published). Nor do you want the pages to look exactly as they appear in Microsoft Word. For the Amazon Kindle, you'll need to convert your Word document into HTML (the standard language of web pages). Don't panic! Word lets you save your document in HTML format very easily. But before you do that, you'll need to format the document so that the HTML will look good. The following guidelines will generally give you a manuscript that will translate pretty well into HTML: * Click the icon in your toolbar to show all nonprinting characters, such as tabs and carriage returns. * Insert your cover art file as the first page of your Word document. * Edit the next page to show your title and copyright information. * If the quote marks in your manuscript are "straight quotes," change them to "curly quotes." * Change all your paragraph styles to use only single-spacing. * If you used spaces or tabs to indent paragraphs, remove them. * Change all your paragraph styles to indent paragraphs automatically. * If you used tabs to center text horizontally, remove them. * If text needs to be centered horizontally use the alignment icon from the toolbar or formatting palette. * If you added extra blank lines between paragraphs, remove them. * If you have more than two consecutive blank lines anywhere in the text, delete all but two of them. * If you turned on right-justification or full-justification anywhere in the text, change it to left-justification. * Set your fonts for all text to be Times-Roman or Times New Roman (one or the other, but not both). * Set the font sizes for all text to be 12 points or 14 points (12 for the normal text, 14 for the title and chapter numbers and any other headers) * If you have text boxes anywhere in the manuscript, copy and paste the text from them to the main text of the document and remove the text boxes. * If you have tables anywhere in the text, convert them to images, insert the images into the text, and remove the tables. * If you use automatic page numbering anywhere in the text, remove it. * If you have headers or footers anywhere in the text, remove them. * When you've done all of the above and your manuscript looks good as a Word document, save your file. If you don't know how to do any part of the above, I recommend that you check out the Smashwords web site at http://www.smashwords.com There, you'll find a number of documents that explain all the details of e-books. Get the document named "The Smashwords Style Guide." This is a long document that explains everything in a lot of detail and shows a number of pictures. (I can't include pictures in this text e-mail.) If you haven't been to the Smashwords web site yet, I highly recommend it. They have a tool that will automate the process of creating an e-book in many different formats (include the Kindle format used on Amazon). You can upload a Word document to Smashwords and their tool will do all the conversions. But the Word document you upload has to be cleaned up pretty much as I've outlined above. By the way, Smashwords has an excellent online store that can sell your e-book for you. They pay you an 85% royalty, which is excellent. They're very fair to authors. However, Amazon is the big tuna of sales channels, and if you want to maximize your sales, you should be on Amazon too (and the Barnes & Noble site at http://www.bn.com and as many other sites as you can). Step 4: Convert the Word document to HTML You can do this yourself in Word by opening your manuscript and then saving it as a web page. In my version of Word, I can save to a web page by clicking the File menu and then clicking on "Save as Web Page..." In some versions of Word, you need to click on the File menu and then click on "Save As..." A dialog box will pop up where you can choose which format to save it as. This will typically be "Web Page" or "Web Page Filtered." Since there are several editions of Word for both Macs and Windows, I can't know for sure what exactly you'll face. But you get the idea. After you've saved it, the HTML document will automatically display inside Word in pretty much the way a web browser would show it. Skim through your document to make sure it looks decent. If lines aren't centered that should be, then you'll need to go back to Step 3 and fix them. Likewise, if paragraphs aren't indented, you'll see it right away and you'll need to go back to Step 3 and fix them. You may need to go back to Step 3 several times to fix things. Each time, save your .doc file and then convert it to HTML. Eventually, you'll get it right. It will be obvious when it is. Step 5: Upload the e-book to Amazon If you've done Steps 1 through 4 above, this step is now easy. Go to http://dtp.amazon.com Follow the directions there to create an Amazon account and upload your book to create an e-book on Amazon. You can upload either the Word .doc file you created in Step 3 or the HTML file you created in Step 4. If you prefer, you can go to the Smashwords site and use their tool to create many different e-book formats, including the Kindle format that Amazon uses. But you'll still have to upload it to Amazon. Smashwords is at this link: http://www.smashwords.com Please be aware that the world of e-books is changing rapidly. Directions that work today are not guaranteed to still work tomorrow. Because of that, I've chosen to sketch things out without giving every single detail. Remember that the online stores, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords are stores. They will sell your e-book and pay you royalties. But they won't market your e-book. Marketing your e-book is up to you. That's not a bad thing -- it's a good thing. It means that no publisher is going to screw up your marketing or prevent you from doing something innovative. Please note that publishers aren't bad or stupid. However, they are often very conservative, which means they don't react well in times of high change. Also, many publishers are financially stressed right now and they're looking out first for themselves. That's why you may be able to do better for yourself right now than a publisher can do for you. It's up to you to decide that. If you choose to work without a publisher, how can you market yourself effectively? That's an issue that I've been writing about in this e-zine for nearly six years. If you read the back issues, you'll find a plethora of ideas with many details. In this month's Marketing column, just below, I sketch out some of the most promising of those ideas and I imagine what the marketing campaign would look like for the world's first "billion dollar book." Want to know how I think it could be done? Read on! _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 4) Marketing: The Billion-Dollar Book I think it's plausible that in the next five years, some author somewhere will write a book that earns him or her a billion dollars. I call that a "B-book." Who will that lucky author be? Let's not be silly. Luck will have nothing to do with it. Great writing and great marketing will have everything to do with it. If I had to hazard a guess on who will be first to publish a B-book, I'd say J.K. Rowling has the best shot. The 7-book Harry Potter series has reputedly earned her a billion dollars, so a B-book is quite possibly in her future. If not JKR, then James Patterson is my bet for the next likeliest candidate. If not him, possibly one of the other heavy hitters in the publishing world. Truth to tell, however, I wouldn't bet even money on any one of these candidates. In my view, the most likely author of that first B-book will be some unknown author who comes out of nowhere with great writing and an A+ marketing game. While I can't guess who will be the first B-book author, I am reasonably confident that the B-book itself will earn most of its revenue in electronic formats. Prediction #1: The first B-book will be an e-book. The reason is that you can't have great sales without great distribution. There are roughly a billion computers on the planet connected to the internet and all of them can read e-books in numerous formats using free software. There are roughly four billion mobile devices, and most of those will soon be able to read e-books. The sales channel for e-books is growing rapidly and has global reach. That's why the first B-book will be in e-format. What about the price of the first B-book? The higher the price, the fewer the number of copies you have to sell to earn a billion dollars, but the fewer the number of people willing to pay the price. If your royalties are $1 per book, you could earn a billion dollars by selling a billion copies. Or you could get there by earning $10 royalties per book on 100 million copies. Nobody knows the sweet spot, but my guess is that it's somewhere between those extremes. If I had to guess, I'd say that a $2 royalty on half a billion copies is the best way to get your B-book. I can't prove this. It's a hunch based on incomplete information. The reason I think this is plausible is because if you price an e-book at $2.99 on Amazon, then you earn a 70% royalty, which translates to $2.09. That means you'd need to sell about 478 million copies. (Note that Amazon charges you a small amount for delivery costs when it sells your e-book. For a typical novel, this amounts to a few cents per copy, so things aren't quite as rosy as I've painted them, but it's a close approximation.) I'd say that a large fraction of the 4 billion people who can afford a mobile device can afford a $2.99 e-book. And the vast majority of the one billion computer owners with internet access can buy that book. It's possible that the sweet spot price is $3.99 instead. At a 70% royalty, you'd only have to sell 358 million copies. Great news, eh? If you try running these numbers with typical royalties paid on hardcover, trade paper, or mass market paperback, you see right away how much harder it is to get your B-book. Most of the money charged for these formats is going to somebody who isn't you. That means the retail price has to go a lot higher or you have to sell many more copies. And delivery costs are much higher for a physical book than for an e-book. This leads immediately to my next prediction. Prediction #2: The first B-book will be self-published. Self-publishing is the best way to get the royalty rate high enough and the retail price low enough to make the B-book a reality. The fact is that most publishers aren't going to price your e-book at $2.99 or $3.99. They'll want it at $9.99 or $12.99, which is probably too high for the market. And they'll pay you only 25% royalties on the wholesale price, which is too low. If you want an aggressively priced e-book and a high royalty rate, you'll almost certainly need to publish it yourself. Of course it may be that all of the above is just my wishful fantasy, but if you're with me so far, let's ask how you're going to market a few hundred million copies of a self-published e-book. You can't do that alone. You need what Seth Godin calls a "tribe." In the context of book publishing, your tribe is your set of committed fans. They're the people you lead. You don't have the marketing oomph to reach hundreds of millions of people on your own. You do have the marketing oomph to reach thousands or tens of thousands of people. If you can energize them so that they love what you've got and if they're willing to spread the word, then they can reach those hundreds of millions. Want proof on that? I don't have absolute proof, but I have three words that ought to be persuasive if you were awake two years ago: Barack Obama 2008. President Obama raised an estimated $656 million in individual contributions for his presidential campaign. He raised that by tapping into the social networks. In a word, he built a powerful tribe of committed followers. Now it's true that Obama didn't hit quite a billion dollars, but he came close and he had an end-point for his marketing campaign. Presidential campaigns end with the election. Books stay on the market as long as they're selling. Let me sketch out how I foresee the first B-book will happen. I'll probably be wrong on some details, but the general picture is plausible: * First write a great book. There is no substitute for excellent writing. I define that to be, "Writing which provides a Powerful Emotional Experience." Style is less important here than raw emotive force. See any current best-seller list for proof of that. * Self-publish the book as an e-book and put it up for sale on all the usual sales channels: Amazon, B&N, etc. * While you're at it, create your own online store where you can sell your e-book in all the common formats: text, PDF, RTF, Mobi, ePub, etc. Don't count on this bringing in a billion bucks on its own, but you can't beat the royalty rate, and there's just no reason not to do this. * Post a large fraction of your book on your web site. I'd recommend at least half the book. Enough so that your readers can really get hooked on the story. Include links to your sales channels, along with incentives to buy. (Access to online "Director's Cut" material would make a nice incentive. Don't be offended, but a date with you would probably make a bad incentive.) * Early on, you might jump-start sales with a special low price. Publishers can do "free Kindle" campaigns that seed the market with early fans by setting the price of the e-book to zero for a short time. (Don't try that with a paper book!) You probably can't do this if you self-publish your book, but you can set the price to $.99, which is almost free. * Focus your marketing efforts on your tribe. Who is most likely to love your story? Build your web presence to appeal to them. * Communicate to your tribe. Treat them as special, because they are. These are the people most like you. These are the folks who read your blog and subscribe to your e-mail list. * Enable your tribe to communicate to you. They can do that through comments on your blog and by sending you personal e-mails. You can and should automate part of this by using online surveys -- this will let you go broad. But don't forget to go deep too -- your tribe deserves personal responses from you. These are your people. Do right by them. * Empower your tribe to communicate to each other. Your tribe is excited about your great writing. Naturally, they want to talk to like-minded people. Make that easy by giving them an online place to gather and talk -- a forum is ideal for this. Join them when you can, but give them the space to be leaders. A large tribe needs many sub-chiefs. Foster those leaders. If you can, give them the ability to add content to your fan site. * Encourage your tribe to communicate to the world. Give them buttons on your web site to Twitter or Facebook about you to their circles of influence. Collectively, your tribe knows a lot more people than you do. Your tribe can sell your book better than you can. * Team up with similar authors who have similar tribes. Your fans will love these authors and their fans will love you. If I can switch metaphors here, remember that "the bigger the hive, the bigger the buzz." * That's it. Don't do things that sap your energy or drain your money or monopolize your time. You are finite. That's OK. You may be saying, "But what about book-signings? Speaking engagements? Giving away free copies in drawings on your blogs? Library visits? Yada yada screama?" What about them? Those may move a few copies or a few dozen or a few hundred. They may be fine things to do once in a while for your tribe. They aren't going to make a B-book for you. Think about it. How many book-signings would you have to do to sell a hundred million copies? You will never book-sign your way to a B-book. There isn't any magic bean you can eat that will make you a B-book author. You need outstanding writing and a marketing campaign that you can automate as much as possible, so it doesn't require ten times as much work to get ten times the results. You need strong, loyal fans who brag about your great writing to their friends. Very few authors will ever write a B-book. It's a lot easier (but still Xtremely difficult) to write an M-book -- earning a million dollars. It's vastly easier to write a K-book -- one that earns a thousand dollars. Most authors will fall somewhere on that spectrum. Now here's the good news. No matter where you fall on the range, from B-book to M-book to K-book, the principles above can help you market your work more effectively. That's good news for all of us. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 5) What's New At AdvancedFictionWriting.com My new book, WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, has been selling well since it began shipping last November and is one of the most popular fiction writing books on Amazon. You can find out all about WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES here: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/info/wffd If you've already bought the book and like it, I'd be delighted if you wrote an Amazon review. Thanks to those of you who already have! I appreciate you! I've also been gratified at the response to my latest software product, "Snowflake Pro," which makes it fast, easy, and fun to work through the steps of my well-known Snowflake method for designing a novel. You can find out more about Snowflake Pro at: http://www.SnowflakeProSoftware.com Currently, my co-author John Olson and I are preparing our back list of novels for publication as e-books. John and I are also creating some powerful online tools to make it easy for us to market our work effectively and easily. In due time, we'll make those tools available to other authors. More info on that when the opportune moment arrives. I teach at roughly 4 to 6 writing conferences per year, depending on my schedule. My schedule for this year is now all filled in but I'm already in discussion with organizers for next year. In September, I'll be taking mentoring appointments at the American Christian Fiction Writers conference. Details here: http://www.acfw.com/conference On October 16, I'll be teaching an all-day series of lectures for the Northwest Houston Romance Writers. Details here: http://www.nwhrwa.com/conference.htm On October 23, I'll be teaching an all-day series of lectures for the Heart of Denver Romance Writers. Details here: http://www.hodrw.com/news-events/october-all-day-mini-conference/ If you'd like me to teach at your conference, email me to find out how outrageously expensive I am. If you'd just like to hear me teach, I have a number of recordings and e-books that are outrageously cheap. Details here: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/info _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 6) Randy Recommends . . . I don't take paid ads for this e-zine. I do, however, recommend people I like. I'm a huge fan of Margie Lawson's courses, both the ones she teaches in person and the ones she sells on her web site at http://www.MargieLawson.com Margie is a psychologist who applies what she knows about human psychology to writing fiction. I believe her material is brilliant. Check her out on her web site! I've also become a fan of Thomas Umstattd's terrific uncommon-sense thoughts on internet marketing. You can read Thomas's blog at: http://www.AuthorTechTips.com Thomas is especially skilled at helping authors create an inexpensive but powerful web site using WordPress blogs. I am a huge fan of this approach, since it gives the most bang for the buck in an author site. Find out more about this at: http://www.UmstattdMedia.com _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 7) Steal This E-zine! This E-zine is free, and I personally guarantee it's worth at least 4608 times the price. I invite you to "steal" it, but only if you do it nicely . . . Distasteful legal babble: This E-zine is copyright Randall Ingermanson, 2010. Extremely tasteful postscript: I encourage you to email this E-zine to any writer friends of yours who might benefit from it. I only ask that you email the whole thing, not bits and pieces. Otherwise, you'll be getting desperate calls at midnight from your friends asking where they can get their own free subscription. At the moment, there is one place to subscribe: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 8) Reprint Rights Permission is granted to use any of the articles in this e-zine in your own e-zine or web site, as long as you include the following 2-paragraph blurb with it: Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 22,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com. Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Randy Ingermanson Publisher, Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/ezine _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________