I’ve found something fantastic, Squiders–a marketing videocast aimed specifically at indie speculative fiction writers. I cannot tell you how excellent this is. I have taken so many marketing courses, attended so many webinars, and read so many articles and books, and for the most part they seem to be aimed at nonfiction writers, which is a totally different animal. If they even address fiction, it’s more wishywashy, because there’s a formula you can use for nonfic and it will more or less work, but fiction is a weird and unpredictable animal and what works for some people won’t do anything for others.
So it’s so great to see people who have been moderately successful in not only fiction, but my own genre, talk about what they’ve tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and so forth. They also have other authors and people like Mark Coker (who runs Smashwords) on as guests. It’s been around for almost two years now, and I’m trolling the archives at the moment, watching a video here or there that seems like it will be relevant. If this sounds like something you would also be interested in, you can find it here. (Or go to YouTube and search “marketing sff” which I have found also works.)
Speaking of nonfiction, I started my nonfiction series last January and have all of a book and a half to show for my time. I’m finding it really hard to make progress, which has been a bit baffling, because I do nonfic writing all the time for my contract positions as well as here at this blog. So I’m considering an experiment–maybe I could write a series of blog posts for one of the books and then modify and expand those to into a book. How does that sound? The book series is on writing motivation as well as basic skills like outlining, so it’s not out of scope for the blog in general. If people sound generally okay with the idea, I’ll do a poll to see which subject is most interesting to you guys.
(In case people are wondering, my hope is to have all seven books done before I start publishing so I can maintain a regular publication schedule. I also have some journals and workbooks planned to go along with the series as well.)
My last pondering for the day is about Patreon. I set it up, oh, a year and a half ago? And I will admit that I’ve done a really terrible job of doing anything with it, partly because the whole platform kind of confuses me, and partly because there seemed to be very little interest from my readers as well. (You can see my Patreon page here.)
Since this obviously isn’t working for anyone, I’m thinking about revamping it, lowering the price of the reward tiers, and focusing it on a single project, so that it would be kind of a “How an Author Writes a Book” sort of thing, where patrons could watch the entire process from idea generation through to publication. I’m not sure if that’s actually interesting to people, but it seems like it would be easier to connect with than just random tidbits about a variety of projects. Thoughts, Squiders?
Anything of note with you, or that you’ve seen about the interwebs? Anything really interesting that you’ve taken notice of?
