Jim Hines give you the goods on author self-promotion. You'll notice he doesn't say things about "bookmarks are the bomb" or "you must make (insert swag type here)" any of that extraneous stuff. Also, just in general, his Rules on Self-Promotion work very well even before you have a book. Just saying. Tobias (whom we're happy is out of the hospital) had a post a while back on some marketing research on the types of author promotions that work (there are at least a few dozen other posts about the subject).
Also, I think Jim's #7 could also be written as, "Don't cheap out." If you're going to make the effort on producing something, don't get cheap about it. Better not to do it at all than leave a feeling of, "Well, that was crap," in a potential customer's mind. Understand that being frugal isn't the same as being cheap. Frugal is finding the best price on good quality product; cheap is chasing the pennies down the rabbit hole (as a random example, if the paper you print on will cost you $5 more for a heavier or better quality sheet, spend the $5).
Mer Haskell has more organization than I. The post is also a good view into the rewriting business. While I have such lists, I've never written them down in such a manner. Normally I go through the story (Mer's is for a novel) with my red pen and mark exactly where I think something should happen. YMMV.
Self pimp Over at the community blog, Genre Bender, I write about Death by Thesaurus. We have a number of good blog posts there about writing, BTW.
Nathan offers up some quick (and funny) Zombie Fairy Tales (hmm, must think about that) as influence by MattW doing a Zombie Haiku inspired by Christopher Moore's Haiku post and his story The Stupidest Angel (of which I am re-listening to right as we type, how's that for synchronicity!)
And the best for last, Matt Stagg wins the rejection letter contest. What, you didn't know it was a contest? Yeah, can anybody beat Matt's rejection letter? My best was my first. It was from Ellen Datlow and started something like, "We're sorry to inform you that OMNI Online is closing..." Yeah, it was such a stinkeroo I killed the market. Still not as good as Matt's letter.
4 comments:
Holy Crap! Zombie Fairy Tales rated a link? I thought it was just a cheap way of coming up with a post. All I did was cut and paste some fairy tales and use MS Word's "Find and Replace" feature (bear=zombie, porridge=brainz).
w00t!
Urm, well, I also have red pens, post-it flags, sticky post-it note cards, and actual post-it notes marking the manuscript where stuff needs to go. The list is so I could see how much that stuff actually amounted to (and also 'cause I can't throw a post-it away and show that on-line).
Nathan, I think it was truly inspired. Sure, it may have been a toss off, but I thought it was very cool (plus, there was all the extra stuff with it, including relistening to "The Stupidest Angel" at the time).
Mer, it just seem very organized to me. I guess I have those lists in my head. I'm sure it's a little different with a novel rewrite/edit.
Thanks for the link salad Steve, you always find the best writerly linkage.
And I'll mirror Nathan here: Holy Crap! Zombie Haiku rated a link? Thanks!
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