Category: Archives

Ten Things NEVER TO DO When Writing a Book

April 16, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as writing craft

10. Never Stop Reading: After a long day of reading your own work the last thing you want to do is pick up someone elseâ€™s, but do it! You will stay motivated and learn something, too.

9. Never Rely on Inspiration: The best moments in writing a book come when inspiration finds you working. Sit down, get to work, and inspiration will come calling.

8. Never Neglect Genre: Itâ€™s tempting to walk in between genres. What would be better than a science fiction, erotic, mystery right? But remember, if you want to find passionate and engaged readers, you should find the genre that you want to write and stick with it.

7. Never Get Bored: If youâ€™re bored writing your book, chances are that your readers will be bored reading it. If you find yourself becoming bored, or your main character is skating through the plot with ease, throw some roadblocks in the way. Conflict moves stories.

6. Never Rely on Pretty People: Men don’t always have to be fearless and women don’t always have to be sexy. Your readers will spend a lot of time with your characters so make sure there is something going on in their heads and their hearts. Readers love characters for their imperfections and their shortcomings just as much as their looks.

5. Never Lose the Through Line:Remember what story youâ€™re writing. Be careful of veering off the path because that’s the surest way to lose your readers.

4. Never Be Afraid to Cut: Cut close to the bone. Slice away. Make the tough choices even if it means taking out things you really love. They may be great- maybe just not great that book. Know the difference.

3. Never Throw in the Towel: Too many people have unfinished books floating around on their hard drives. The easiest thing in the world is starting a book; the hardest thing is finishing one.

2. Never Let your Characters Off Easy: Just because you love your characters doesnâ€™t mean you have to go easy on them. A reader wants to see characters struggle and sometimes fail. Give them a goal to work towards, make it hard to get, and you canâ€™t go wrong.

1. Never Beat Yourself Up: The book isnâ€™t shaping up the way you wanted it to? Someone read a chapter and didnâ€™t care for it? Feel like jumping off a cliff? Thatâ€™s fine. Those days happen. Every day that youâ€™re thinking, â€œwoe is me,â€ is another day that you could be spent finishing a chapter or polishing a plot point. You can spend your time beating yourself up, or beating your characters up. I do a lot of the former but I am trying to stop.

Happy Writing.

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My Results Using Ads and Specials by Kitty Bucholtz

April 10, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as advertising, It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, Little Miss Lovesick, promotion, self-publishing, Unexpected Superhero

Most writers are curious about what is and isn’t working for other writers when it comes to selling books. I’m grateful for what others have been willing to share, so it’s only fair to share in return. Even though my results are a bit embarrassing.

I’ve only bought ads three times. I bought an ad last year with The Wordsmith Journal Magazine (online) for Little Miss Lovesick. After one month, I had zero new sales. Ouch.

In August, while Unexpected Superhero was enrolled in the KDP Select program (meaning it was only for sale on Amazon for the first 90 days), I took advantage of the program’s free days option and made the book free for five days in a row at the end of a conference I was attending. I also bought an ad from BookBub that appeared on the first day of the promotion.

There were a whopping 17,561 free downloads during those five days! Over 10,000 copies were downloaded the first day, which I attribute primarily to the BookBub ad. During the next two weeks, I sold only 24 more copies when the book went off sale (back to $3.99). Then the sales dropped back to the 0-3 per week average that has been more common for my books so far.

A month or two ago, I dropped the price of Unexpected Superhero from $3.99 to $2.99 to see if I could see a change in sales. There might have been a slight increase. At 0-3 sales per week, it’s a bit hard to say. 🙂

My third promotion-with-paid-advertisement was last week. I dropped the price on Little Miss Lovesick and promoted it with 19 other lovely romance authors and their books last Friday. I also took out a then-free ad from eBookSoda, a newer email list like BookBub that advertises free and reduced-price books. (The ads were free, then $5, and I’m sure they’ll keep increasing in price as they grow their list. The problem with this ad is that I don’t know if it went to 100 people, 1000, or 20,000.)

I dropped the price from $2.99 to 99 cents a week before the promo with Smashwords so it would be 99 cents at the other outlets by the day of the promo. I decreased the price on Amazon two days before, and it went into effect the day before. I saw that I sold one copy on Amazon a day or two before the promotion, then two more copies total during the weekend of the promotion and ad.

That’s it – 3 sales. At the high end of “usual” for me.

Little Miss Lovesick got a new (second) cover a few months ago, but it’s barely changed the sales. Unexpected Superhero got a new (second) cover at the end of March, too early to tell if it has affected sales yet. I took out another eBookSoda ad (the free ad that went to $5 when I did it this time) for Sunday, May 4 (my third choice date, Fantasy category, same as last year’s BookBub ad). I’ll leave Superhero at its current $2.99 price and see if anything happens when it’s not on sale but advertised.

And that’s about all I know so far. My second superhero book was to be ready next week for WonderCon, and which I expected to help sales of the first book. But my husband’s motorcycle accident and injuries trumped anything and everything that used to be on my To Do list. 🙂

I’ll keep you updated so you get a well-rounded view of self-publishing and advertising. (It’s less embarrassing to write about your successes, so there are a lot more of those stories out there.) It would appear that my experience underscores what other successful writers have said about success coming after you have several books out. Unfortunately, “life” has thrown a wrench in making that happen soon, but as the Brits (used to) say, Keep Calm and Carry On.

And keep writing! 🙂

Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her novels, Little Miss Lovesick and Unexpected Superhero, and the free short story “Superhero in Disguise,” are now available at most online retail sites. Superhero in the Making will be released this summer.

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OCCRWA’s April Class: Social Media for the Confused and Terrified, with Elena Dillon

April 1, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as OCCRWA Online Class

On April 14th we’ll kick off an online class taught by our own Elena, Dillon, and she’s with us here today to talk about the class. Take it away, Elena:

So, Iâ€™m a little bit of an information junkie. I love technology. I love gadgets and I love learning new things. When Social Media came about I knew Iâ€™d found a new love–all the stuff Iâ€™m enamored with in one place.

When a new Social Media platform launches I want to check it out. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram. My kids are horrified. â€œMom, thatâ€™s not for you. Thatâ€™s for young people.â€ Hmmm. Not so much. Really the only new one I havenâ€™t started using is SnapChat. I value my sleep and I know my children will be sending me SnapChats all night if I get an account there.

Besides I really donâ€™t have time for any more, I have books to write!

This April Iâ€™ll be teaching a class for Orange County RWA called â€œSocial Media for the Confused and Terrifiedâ€. If you couldnâ€™t tell by the title itâ€™s for anyone who is a beginner at Social Media, anyone who has been putting it off because they donâ€™t want to go to the trouble of figuring it out, and anyone who isnâ€™t tech savvy.

The class is geared for Romance Writers but anyone can use it. I have tons of resources, videos and podcasts to learn from step by step. I will be teaching as much as I can about as many platforms as I can fit in. The class is going to be more of a workshop format. None of this “sit back and just absorb the information”! Weâ€™re going to be doing. Weâ€™re going to be helping each other and building our audience.

Donâ€™t be overwhelmed. Donâ€™t be scared. If you need to learn how to manage your Social Media marketing and platforms, this is the class for you.

We will be using each platform but weâ€™ll be doing it together. So sign up. No excuses. Iâ€™m going to make it easy. And weâ€™re going to have fun doing it.

Thanks, Elena. Sign up, everyone! No excuses, it’s easy, just go here.

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Why I buy Organic milk

March 24, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives

I buy organic milk. There. I’ve said it. And it’s true.

But I do not buy organic milk because it’s organic.

I do not buy organic milk because of its lack of pesticides.

Nor do I buy it because it’s fashionable and others will admire me for my thoughtful and responsible choices.

In addition, I do not purchase it because I know that my milk choice will, in some small way, Save The World.

In fact, let me say this right up front: there is only one thing I really am interested in with anything ingestible: Does it taste good? Well, actually, the question really is ‘do I like it,’ because “goodness” is clearly self-defined.

And in terms of self-definition, I have little taste memory, so my assessments use the scientific A/B method on everythingâ€”that is I taste things back-to-back to try to determine which I like better, or indeed, if I can tell any difference at all.

I also need to confess that I am a tea drinker and have both milk and sugar in my tea.

Thus I must have milk available every day, and it has to last. It is inexpressibly sad to see a kelp bed of white curdled milk streamers appear at the top of your mug as you milk-up first thing.

And I like fat milk, a creamy taste. I call it Boy Milk, i.e. whole milk, Vs Girl Milk, which is skim (as I child I thought was called ‘skinned milk.’ Really not too far off).

I was initially intrigued by organic milk by the remarkable sell-by dateâ€”often a month away. Given the issues around the allowed sell-by date (in New York City, the allowed date migrated to 5 days later, so milk that used to last for a week past the sell by date expired in two days, totally messing up my arithmetic) this swath of time was seductive. I was seduced.

Then an odd thing happened. I found the organic milk not only lasted longer, but tasted better, sweeter, creamier, I could have 2% and it tasted as good to me as regular whole milk (yes, I verified this in an A/B taste test).

There’s a fair bit of information out there as to the whys and wherefores, but the most compelling explanation for me was in Scientific American. The article’s focus is on the long shelf life of organic milk. It notes that organic milk processing is different from regular milk, as it is heated to a higher temperature (UHT), which kills more bacteria and enables it to last longer and hence travel further. There are fewer organic farms and the product ships longer distances. The high temperatures slightly caramelize the trace sugar in the milk, giving it a sweeter taste. Yum.

I have not found non-organic UHT milk, and do not care for the taste of Parmalat, so I’m just paying the price.

And happy to.

Do you have things you do or buy for all the “wrong” reasons?

Isabel Swift

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The Princess and the Magic Shamrock by Jina Bacarr

March 11, 2014 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as book, bookshop, Confessions of a Podcast Goddess, job, king, magic, poem, prince, princess, romance, shamrock, St. Patrick's Day, tiara, video, Vimeo, work

St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner…

So how could I not put up a Princess video with a magic shamrock theme?

Here is the latest in my “Princess Chronicles” — video romance poems about being a princess. My princesses know a tiara doesn’t a princess make…and in this story, we meet a princess who’s not looking for a prince but a job!!

The Princess and the Magic Shamrock from Jina Bacarr on Vimeo.