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What I learned by sending a Re-engagement Email

Bring on the confetti, the champagne, and some of those li’l smokies in the crock pot because we’re celebrating at SkipJack Publishing. Congratulations to award-winning, best-selling author, PamelaFagan Hutchins for making it to USA Today Best Sellers List! Pamela is constantly raising the bar and scaling new heights and we couldn’t be prouder of all she is accomplishing in the publishing world and all she continues to teach us.

Be on the lookout for a collaborative blog between Pamela and me when we REALLY hash out the good, the bad, and the ugly of getting to the top of a best seller list. Folks, it doesn’t happen by accident. There’s plenty of blood, sweat and tears.

You may recall a few emails back where I told you about Tammi Labreque’s book, Newsletter Ninja, as well as, her class, IndiePub Intensive. One thing Tammi recommends is sending a re-engagement email. You’ve probably gotten one of those, too. It’s the kind that generally say, “Do you still want to be on my email subscriber list?”

I’ve gotten these and really wondered what’s the point? Don’t you want to grow your list as big as it can be? Well, not necessarily. Whether your list is 500 or 5,000 or 50,000, you absolutely want to be emailing people who open your emails and engage with them.

Sending emails that don’t get opened lowers your email reputation score which means that your emails may not actually get to the people who WANT to receive and read them.

Plus, paying just to have names on a list isn’t really a great idea. The difference between having 15,000 people on your list and 20,000 people on your list could be $15 a month which comes out to $180 a year. That’s $180 that you could be spending on promoting your books to a warm audience, not sending emails into the great unknown.

I thought I could just look at the email metrics of who was opening and who wasn’t opening to determine who should be cleaned from the list. However, an important thing to consider is that your email program will not register an email as an “open” in some cases even if someone did open it. For example, in the Outlook program I use, I can read an entire email, but not actually have ever opened it.

Specifically, Pamela’s list had around 6,000+ people that appeared to not be opening in the last 6 months. And that took us to the next price point. So, I sent an email to those 6,000+ people. Almost 500 opened it (or appeared to open it). BUT, here’s the crazy thing….

Pamela loves hearing from her readers. She enjoys engaging with them and emailing back and forth. (Which is great for your email reputation.) But also great for your readers and it doesn’t hurt to get a little boost for the artist’s ego. Since I manage the list, I get a copy of those emails. Overwhelmingly, the response to ALL of Pamela’s emails is positive and warm and encouraging.

Buuuuuuuut……every once in a while….someone is having a bad day. And apparently, Pamela’s re-engagement email set some people off. Like, really off.

For this project I wrote the email and then got Pamela’s approval. I attempted to go with a lighthearted and friendly tone. But, alas, without the benefit of my sparkling personality, friendly facial expressions, and lilting tone of voice, some read the written words with sarcasm, criticism, and judgement. (I wish you could hear me saying this out loud – it’s very dramatic.)

Here’s a portion of Pamela’s re-engagement email:

“I know getting a bajillion emails can be super-overwhelming so I get it if you need to unsubscribe. I surely don’t want to keep sending you emails you don’t want.

But I also have some very faithful readers who DO want to receive updates and exclusives from me from time to time. So, I don’t want to remove you from the list if you want to be here.”

I was really surprised by the number of gracious and thoughtful answers Pamela got in response. The gist of most emails was that people loved getting Pamela’s emails and yes, they were sometimes busy, but please keep sending them. A few were honest and admitted that they just didn’t have time to get to all their emails and it would probably be best to unsubscribe. But then there were two. I’ll just let you decide what you think:

“Actually you should have had a category when unsubscribing: sent ridiculous email asking if I wanted to stay on list. If I really wanted off to begin with I know how to unsubscribe. So now I did just because I hate those emails.” 

And then there was:

“Sometimes, you’re (sic)‘very faithful readers’ have very busy lives and just can’t get to your emails in a timely manner…Just something YOU might want to consider…I was quite offended by the ‘I have very loyal readers’ comment.  I’m probably old enough to be your mother…let me give you a life lesson…be a little more careful how you address your ‘loyal readers’ because they have lives too.  NOT a fan … anymore”

Honestly, SkipJack peeps, I wasted a good seventeen seconds staring in confusion at these. Maybe it’s because I’m Texan or maybe because I’m an empath or maybe because even at my age my mother would scold me for being rude, but I just can’t imagine taking time to troll an email that’s intended to be helpful and that has the EXACT intention of doing what the “much wiser and more experienced” 2nd emailer suggested – take the readers’ busy lives into consideration.

If there were a USA Today “Best” list for writing scathing, but passive aggressive emails, I’d be a shoe in. And I did write responses to these. But, I did not send them BECAUSE the whole thing was reminiscent of Pamela’s blog, The Good in Bad Reviews, which is all about when people leave you bad book reviews (even when they admit to NOT reading the book). Check that out if you haven’t read it before, or read it again because as long as there are trolls in the world, it will always be relevant.

So, there is a life lesson for indie authors here and it’s not the lesson from “Not a Fan.” I’ll sum it up in Disney one-liners. “Let it go.” (Frozen) “Whistle while you work.” (Snow White) And “Just keep swimming.” (Finding Nemo)

Author Networking = Publishing Success

Author networking.

Besides the emotional support and critiquing support of an introvert/writer network, hobnobbing with your peers is good business. Newsletter swaps. Website and blog fodder (interviews, features, reviews, and the like). Social media shares. Introductions. Co-writing. Support for your favorite charity. And group releases. 

This week marks the release of LOVE UNDER FIRE, a group box set release featuring one of our authors, Pamela Fagan Hutchins. The goal of the set is to raise money for Pets for Vets and to make a bestseller list run for its contributing authors. The side benefit of the project has been building and strengthening author relationships, and, in turn, expanding readership and reader relationships. 

In the process of the release, Pamela’s been able to check off a few other helpful boxes.

1. Top 50 Amazon author status: the power of the release propelled her into the top 50 romantic suspense and romantic mystery authors and held her there for days.

2. New marketing tactics: the group and some of its individual members have used techniques Pamela hasn’t before. It gave her the chance to participate in their experiment and decide for herself if they work.

3. Feed the publication engine: Pamela’s publication strategy requires her to publish something each month on Amazon (and twice a month on Kobo and Apple iBooks, when possible). LOVE UNDER FIRE counts for November. And the novella will revert to her in 2019 and can be published again, in multiple forms. She will initially publish it as four serial short stories, then combine it into a box set of short stories that equal one novella, and finally include it as a value-add-on to other box sets that include characters from the novella.

(If you want to read more about Pamela’s current six-figure strategy, you can read about it here. And for context, Pamela had been a six-figure author for years, until that eroded primarily due to Kindle Unlimited. Her revised strategy has been in place for eight months, and she is now drawing in revenue that will build to six figures again.

4. Author recommendations and reviews on BookBub. BookBub encourages authors to recommend and review each other’s work. The box set authors are exactly the type of entrepreneurial creatives that understand reciprocity and the value of shared readers and willingly do these and other cooperative activities that help them compete with the larger reach and marketing budgets of traditional publishers.

Only time will tell if they meet their USA and WSJ bestseller goals this week. But in the meantime, the author networking has been a big win.

Now, enjoy an excerpt from their #1 Amazon bestseller, LOVE UNDER FIRE, here (snag the rest plus 20 romantic suspense novels for only 99 cents for a limited time at https://books2read.com/LoveUnderFire and help a veteran get a pet!):

BUCKLE BUNNY EXCERPT, Pamela Fagan Hutchins (Copyright 2018)

Part One

Cheyenne, Wyoming
Friday afternoon

Maggie

Maggie checks her watch. She yawns, loud, and the hand covering her mouth turns it into a really bad imitation of a Native American war cry.

“That’s insensitive.” Her bassist, Brent, doesn’t look at her, doesn’t take his eyes off the rodeo action in the Frontier Park arena. He’s already dressed for their gig tonight. Snap-front plaid shirt. Tall, tall, tall in Wranglers, frayed and slit at the side hem over his scuffed boots. Brown hair short and spiky with gel, horn-rimmed glasses reminiscent of Buddy Holly.

It’s Maggie’s first time at Wyoming’s Cheyenne Frontier Days. She’s already sick of cowboys, sick of horses. Tired of big belt buckles and ten-gallon hats. She’s seen enough of them to last her a lifetime. Besides growing up in the country outside Austin, she’s dragged ass all over the US of A the entire summer, to every fair, festival, and rodeo she and the band could make between repair stops in their decrepit nine-passenger van.

That’s what you get when you play Americana. Folk. Alt-country. Whatever you want to call it. The people with a taste for it frequent the bumpkin events.

She lifts a hand to Brent, as in “talk to the hand,” as in “Maggie don’t give a flip, bucko.” The rodeo is in full swing, this being Friday, and the championship round only two days away. “I need food.”

“Go get some.”

“You have any cash?”

He scowls at her, digs in his wallet, and hands her a ten.

“And a beer.”

“Uh-uh. You still owe me from South Dakota.”

Maggie—one of only two women in the five-musician band—is broke. She’s needed every dime she’s made to keep her dream alive since she ran off to be a star at seventeen. Now, five hard years later, her agent, Larry, and the record company have sent her out on the road to promote her sophomore album, Texana, with four virtual strangers to back her. It’s make-or-break time. They’re pulling a trailer full of their equipment and luggage so there’s room in the van for the albums, T-shirts, and CDs they take turns hawking at every show.

She’s this close to congratulating her religious dad on being right that her path to the stars was a road straight to hell, just as he’d predicted. Tucking tail and hotfooting back to Giddings, Texas, where she’ll do God knows what doesn’t sound as bad as it used to.

Six months. She’ll give it six more months. Then she’s done.

Maggie socks Brent in the arm. “C’mon. I’m sober as fuck. I need some juice before the show.” She uses the term showloosely. Maggie Killian and Crew—because they need a name, any name—don’t rate the main stage as opener, much less headliner. They’re sentenced to play the Buckin’ A Saloon. Two nights. The early shows. Post-rodeo drinkers, cheap cowboys and buckle bunnies mostly, with the main crowd forking out the big-ticket price to see the Frontier Nights A-listers. Tomorrow night will be Kenny freakin’ Chesney, for Christ’s sake. Shit. Cowboys aren’t going to buy Americana albums. They’re probably not even going to tip worth a damn.

Brent shakes his head.

Lead guitarist Davo, her sometimes hookup for lack of any other contenders, says, “You promised you’d kiss the cowboy who wins the bull riding tonight, pose for a picture. We need the PR.” At least he’s decent looking. Blond. Nice green eyes. Magical fingers, long and sandpapery with calluses. He doesn’t offer Maggie any money.

“I’m gonna get my ass pinched. Again.”

“Fine.” Brent peels off another ten. “But only because that guy left a bruise.”

She snatches it from him. “Thank you.”

“That makes fifty.”

“You’ll get it tonight.”

“And so the cycle goes.” Brent turns back to the arena.

Davo pulls her to him for a kiss, slips his tongue in. It feels mechanical and slobbery, and Maggie fights the urge to wipe her mouth.

She hightails it to concession. Bull riding is next, and she has to be behind the chutes for her duties. Then, straight to the Buckin’ A. The crowd is thick, and she puts a hand on the shoulder of a burly guy who, along with his buddies, is blocking her path to the two beers she intends to buy, along with whatever food she can afford with the money left over.

“’Scuse me, fellas.” She says it in a singsong voice. It hints of her soprano and its surprising smoky rasp. It turns heads.

The men take her in. Their eyes widen. Maggie’s dressed the part for her show tonight. A cowboy’s wet dream. Daisy Duke shorts, high-heeled cowboy boots, a tight scoop-neck T-shirt with a fringed suede vest, and a concho belt that drapes her hips. Her long, nearly black hair is teased and lifted. Her hoop earrings sway. Her kohl-rimmed eyes are heavy lidded.

The waters part for her.

She doesn’t smile for them. She saves her smiles. But she gives them a little hip roll, conscious of their stares and the whispered “Jee-zuss” in her wake. For a moment she considers stopping. Pocketing the two tens and letting these guys buy her drinks. But there’s no time. She’s getting fifty bucks for making nice with the bull rider who wins today’s round.

Ten minutes later, she’s scarfed a giant pretzel and downed her first beer. She sips at her second as she makes her way to the bucking chutes. She shows her ID to a woman at the gate. Even she reacts to Maggie. Pupils dilate. Breath draws in. Maggie’s used to it.

The woman checks her name on a list. “Do you know where you’re going?”

“Not a clue.”

The woman points, side-eying Maggie as she does. “See that big ole bear of a man by the orange gate? His name is Tucker. That’s where you wanna be, and who you wanna see.”

Maggie’s brows rise. The man is as big as the bulls. “Thanks.”

The woman lets Maggie through.

In the arena, bull riding is underway. Classic rock blares through loudspeakers just under the patter of the announcer and the miked rodeo clown. Maggie climbs up on the lowest rail and hangs on to watch, close enough to smell the bullshit, figurative and literal. A cowboy on a white bull ejects from the chute like a rocket from a launching pad. The bull spins to the right, his hind hooves punching through the sky. He reverses his turn, lurching his massive body with shocking agility. The cowboy holds on with one hand, the other swinging high in the air. His body shifts off center when the bull changes directions. He seems tall for a bull rider, this much Maggie knows. Bull riding favors the shorter bodies with more compact centers of gravity. The cowboy’s black hat flies off—he’s not wearing a helmet. The Stetson lands in the dirt. The bull crushes it as he hops twice on his front legs, nearly sending his rear hooves over his head. The cowboy can’t right his upper body, which is nearly horizontal to the ground now. The crowd gasps, ready for the cowboy to be bucked off, but he makes it until the buzzer sounds.

Eight seconds. He’s earned a score.

He rides the bull for a few more bucks, then makes a flying leap. The bull wheels, enraged at the puny human with the temerity to ride him. Three bullfighters swarm between him and the bull, the one doubling as a clown wearing white face paint. The cowboy bear-crawls away from the bull. A safety rider on an enormous horse with feathered hair at his fetlocks lopes between him, the animal, and the fighters. Meanwhile, Maggie’s eyes follow the seat of his Wranglers. It’s a really nice seat, framed by fringed chaps.

The cowboy scrambles to his feet and runs for the rails, straight at her, the cowhide chaps flapping. He snatches his mangled hat and hops up in one smooth motion. Up close, she can see he’s tall, a good head taller than the last ass-pincher Maggie’d kissed and mugged for the cameras with in Nebraska. He’s dark-headed with blue eyes that shine with good humor through the dust around them. And he has dimples. Big, juicy dimples.

Maggie hears the bull snort. It charges the cowboy one last time for good measure on its way out of the arena, clanging the rail with one horn. From his seat on the top rail, the cowboy smacks his hat on his thigh, then punches it into shape. He crams it on his head and jumps off the fence to the other side. A squealing bevy of young women call to him from outside the secure area.

He blows them a kiss.

“Nice ride, Sibley,” a man behind Maggie drawls in a Texas accent.

“Always a good one when you walk away, Joe.”

“Bet you can find a better ride over there.” The Texan—Joe?—passes Maggie and waves at the girls. “Which one you want?”

They’re interrupted by the announcer. “That’s a seventy-eight for Hank Sibley out of Sheridan, Wyoming, which puts him just out of contention for tonight. A real disappointment for a local favorite.” His voice sounds folksy. They always sound folksy.

His announcing partner answers. His voice is older, the voice of experience. “This just doesn’t look like the same Hank Sibley we saw at the National Finals Rodeo. The bull did his job, and Hank stayed on, but he’s only got one more shot to impress the judges tomorrow night if he wants to move on to Sunday’s championships.”

Maggie glances at the cowboy.

“Well, shit.” He doesn’t look that upset, though.

Joe slaps his shoulder. “Next time, buddy.”

“Sometimes you gotta lose to win.” Hank winks.

“If you say so.” Joe walks toward the young women. He stops. “You coming?”

Hank glances toward the tittering females. Then he notices Maggie. His shift in focus is immediate and total. “Well, hello there. I’m Hank.” He wipes a hand on his jeans and thrusts it toward her. “And you are?”

Joe laughs and shakes his head as he walks away.

Maggie backs off the rail. “Late for a date with the winner.”

“Ah, he’s a putz. Let me show you a good time tonight.”

She smiles at him, but not one of her real ones. The teeth-baring kind. “I’m not in the mood for an eight-second ride. You shoo, now, and hop over to one of those buckle bunnies over there.”

He runs backward beside her as she leaves. “Hey, don’t be like that.” His spur catches in the dirt, and he falls to his rear.

Maggie leans down, head tilted. “No score, cowboy.”

END OF EXCERP! Snag the rest plus 20 romantic suspense novels for only 99 cents for a limited time at https://books2read.com/LoveUnderFire and help a veteran get a pet!

Are You Confused by the BookBub Gobbledygook?

Is doesn’t take long in the indie publishing world to discover the significance of BookBub. Back in the good ole days (like 2015), securing a BookBub Feature Deal could potentially send an author with a multi-book series soaring toward 6 figures. But dreams of a life of luxury were quickly dashed when Amazon changed their elusive algorithm diminishing the impact of a BookBub-driven sales spike.

Even though yachts, personal chefs, and owning your own private island may be out of reach, BookBub still has the power to take an author from hobo status to established professional. In recent months BookBub has added to their repertoire, but they weren’t super creative in naming their partner options which can be confusing. In addition to a Feature Deal, BookBub offers Featured New Release, plus a New Release Alert, and a Preorder Alert.

Click the chart below to get a full-sized PDF of the BookBub comparison.

In addition to a Featured Deal, BookBub now offers a New Release Feature. Books still have to go through a rigorous editorial selection process and you get one chance at it, but if you get it, an email goes to U.S. BookBub subscribers who’ve signed up to receive emails for new releases in a specific category. It’s pricey for most categories, but has great potential.

But don’t confuse a New Release Feature with a New Release Alert. Any author with an eligible book and an author profile can sign up for a New Release Alert. It’s FREE, but the catch is that it only goes to YOUR U.S. followers. So if you have 7 followers, 7 emails go out, but if you have 7,000 followers…it obviously has a greater potential.

And then’s there’s a Preorder Alert. The time frame on Preorder Alerts is somewhat confusing, so be sure to read BookBub’s requirements. The caveat for Preorder Alerts is that you have to have at least 1,000 U.S. BookBub Followers. This email will go to all YOUR followers and it costs 2¢ for each email. That’s a super-ecomical deal!

In addition to these offerings, BookBub also has paid ads. There’s a sea of information out there about what’s working and not working. How about you? Have you tried BookBub ads? What’s working for you?

Something else to consider is that BookBub does a ton of research and A/B tests everything. So simply glancing through your daily BookBub email could glean information about what’s working in your genre.

BookBub also sends out fantastic information in their Partner emails and has a very helpful blog. So even though riding the BookBub train may not get you to your private island, it’s still one the best resources for indie authors to make significant progress.

Check out SkipJack author, Pamela Fagan Hutchins’ recent blog on the subject HERE.

Developing POV to Develop Voice

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Recently an editor posed a question on Facebook: Do you think about and work on voice ahead of time for your novels?

It was an interesting question for me, because when I think of voice, I think of the writer’s unique style, which, IMHO, the writer develops 15% through education, 35% through innate ability, and 50% through practice, practice, practice (in fact, I believe it takes hundreds of thousands of words to discover voice, and a lifetime to pursue its perfection) . The editor, however, was referring to the voice of the characters, and I associate those with point of view. Whatever you call it, that’s what I want to talk about today: point of view and how it gives a distinct voice to characters.

Caveat: you might get a different answer from your MFA professor, but that’s OK. My purpose in writing this is to capture my process, in case it helps someone else. I don’t have an MFA, but I do have a a small library of bestselling and award-winning books, which just means I’ve killed a lot of trees (and that some readers think I know how to do this writing thing, and the readers are who I write for). If my methodology and thinking doesn’t work for you, then there’s lots of other folks you can turn to without hurting my feelings, and that’s what you should do.

The short answer to the editor’s question is that I don’t think consciously about voice ahead of time, but I do think about point of view. A lot. For each of the novels I have written, I have thought about point of view for months—and talked about it, and for most of my novels, outlined it/synopsized it/character studied it—so that when I begin to write I already know my POV character (and others) very well, and they’ve started having conversations with other characters in the book in my head. Because I know where they are from and who their parents are and who they hung out with growing up and who they idolized as a child and what educational level they obtained and how they felt about intelligence/education/self-presentation and much more, like their favorite underwear, what smells bug them, what they watch on TV, how often they shave their legs, etc. I know what they sound like. Their accents. Their mannerisms. Their pet phrases. Their hot buttons.

Possibly because of that, the voices, especially of the POV character (or characters), come out as soon as I start writing. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, because it may take a hundred thousand words or more before I get a few of them just right, and a revision (or five) to bring the rest of them in line. Sometimes I write things authentic to their POV (and how they sound) that are extraneous to the story, things I have heard them say, how they said it, to whom, and the context within which they said that was real as I faithfully wrote the book to match their story playing in my head. The writing of those things helped me establish them as a character, even if I later have to delete them.

I like to write in first person because I like to get very intimate with a character. I have also been told that I as a writer have a very distinct voice. I’m on my third multi-book first person protagonist. So it’s important that each of my first person protagonists sounds unique and true to themselves, even as each brings a piece of me with them.

To do that, I have to get deep down and dirty with the character. For instance, in my upcoming Emily series, I needed a way for Emily to say someone looked hungrily at someone else. I mentioned that to my husband because I was stuck, and vocalizing it to him aloud helped me change my paradigm from sitting silently and thinking about it. His answer was outside of the context of point of view: “hyena.” That made me think of “wolf,” which also felt completely outside of Emily’s POV. She grew up as a rodeo kid in the Panhandle of Texas, and she spent lots of time outside, and on the prairie. I sat and thought about her days as a child, and where, and what she’d seen there, and how it had impacted her until a picture formed in my mind that I knew was real. Ultimately, I went with this: “She’d looked at Jack a moment ago like a red-tailed hawk I’d once seen lock eyes on a rabbit seconds before snatching it into the sky, twenty feet from where I sat daydreaming in summer grass.” I guess what I am saying here is that, for me, Emily’s experiences impact POV choices which ultimately comes into my voice expressing her voice, whether it is in her head or verbalized.

Emily also says things like this:

“She was as shallow as a Texas river in August.”

“My research was as gappy as the hair on a mangy dog.”

“My moods were as up and down as the Dallas Cowboys.”

Emily sounds like this when she describes her mother:

“She beamed at me, reflecting a vision of what I would look like in twenty-five years, if genetics trumped will. Indecently long legs made even longer by stilettos. Better-than-medium-height, round blue eyes, and dewy, Mary Kay-slathered skin going crepey at the edges. A trim body thicker through the middle in a snug dress slightly less long than was proper for her age, and the best blonde that money could buy from the shelves of Wal-Mart. Trailer park meets the Southern church lady, that was my mother.”

From where I sit this makes her distinct from my earlier protagonists, Katie and Michele. Katie, the daughter of a north Texas Sunday School teacher and Dallas Police Chief, is more educated than Emily, but more fragile, and she cares much more about “things.” Michele, whose Caucasian mother annoys her and whose Mexican veterinarian father is her hero, is insecure about her looks and her uptight nature, and tries to control the world and the words around her. This impacts what each woman thinks, what she chooses to say and not say, what she blurts out in her weakest moments, her accent, her self-confidence, the life experiences she has to relate current events to, the length/complexity/syntax of her sentences, her word choices, and even her accent. I couldn’t tell you what exactly makes Katie sound like Katie or Michele sound like Michele, I just know that Emily sounds like Emily because I got to know her very well before I wrote her, and then stayed as true to her as I could.

In a nutshell, for me, it is all about preparation, and letting the characters develop over time before I attempt them, then remaining true to who they are and their own histories as their scribe. Also, it’s about writing it absolutely as fast as I can so I stay in “voice” and “POV.” I really stink it up if I put it down and come back later multiple times, unless I have reached a stuck state where I accept the inevitability of a MAJOR rewrite (which is fine if it needs it). Even then, I just have to become the character and live in her world until the story ends, for that second (or third or fourth or fifth) time.

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like those in her What Doesn’t Kill You world, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes and trail rides with her hunky husband, giant horses, and pack of rescue dogs, donkeys, and goats. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

Did you know you may be charged delivery fees on your Kindle sales?

Authors whose non-Kindle Unlimited books fall into the 70% royalty range are charged a delivery charge based on a MOBI’s size for sales of Kindle books on Amazon. The charge is 15¢ per megabyte (MB). The actual cover of the book is not included in calculating the size for purposes of the delivery fee.

Because of the impact of this charge, we recently had a strategy change. In the past, we used beautiful cover images at the beginning of excerpts at the back of our author’s books. The charge was significant enough that we removed them entirely.

Interestingly, MOBIs are larger than EPUBs because they contain data for multiple Kindle configurations.  The delivery charge is not based on the actual file size.  For example, if the book is 6 MB, you are not charged 90¢. The formula appears to be divided by 6.  So a 6 MB book divided by 6 is 1 MB.  This size book would have a delivery charge of 15¢.  So our goal was to make the books under 6 MB so that the actual Amazon converted size is less than 1 MB.  The smaller the better, when it came to saving our royalties. And our deletions worked.

Useful info to know…

~ Bobbye, SkipJack Publishing Assistant

Bobbye Marrs is a supermom extraordinaire with currently 5 jobs, 4 teenagers, 2 dogs, and a husband crazy enough to be a pastor.  When she’s not working or Bobbyelearning some new hobby like the HAM radio, she is trying to be a romantic mystery writer.  Look for her book, I Am My Beloved’s to debut this spring.  In the meantime, she started a t-shirt business to support her writing habit at www.greetingsfrommarrs.com.

Rev Up Your Book Release With Coordinated Social Media Promotion

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The first time I heard of Thunderclap, I cringed. Sounded like a social disease to me, not social media promotion. But I overcame my initial reaction and checked it out. I am super glad I did.

Thunderclap is a service that amplifies a message crafted by you with the power of the “crowd.” Think about it: often your friends, family, and contacts want to help you, but they either don’t know what to say and when (and how to include the right link and image), or they try and do it clumsily in a way that doesn’t help. You’re still grateful, but you’d like to make it easier for them and better for you.

Enter Thunderclap.

You craft a message complete with an image and a link, and you recruit your social media contacts to join you in the message, or “Thunderclap.” Then, on the day and time or your choosing, all of the messages are released at one time. It creates a heck of a buzz and the possibility of “trending.”

Let’s take a look at my Thunderclap experience for the release of my seventh novel, Hell to Pay.

First, I read the information on the site advising me on how to craft a message and how to promote it. Next, I reviewed their privacy policy, to be sure I wasn’t putting my contacts at risk. I was satisfied and you can read it in its entirety, HERE.

Then I chose my plan. I used Lightning. You’ll want to follow the Pricing link on Thunderclap and carefully consider your options.

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After I had my message drafted,  I contacted every person I wanted to recruit for my Thunderclap individually through social media. Here’s an example of one of those messages:
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Yes, it’s time consuming, but don’t people deserve your individual attention when you’re asking for a favor? And I would humbly suggest that you should have “relationship credits” in the bank before you ask, meaning you already help them more than they help you.

I also posted requests on Facebook and Twitter, but they were less successful than my individual messages. I sent out hundreds of the messages, and was limited by Facebook to doing them in batches because when you hit copy/paste, they automatically get suspicious of spam. So be it. I’m glad they try to control it.

I had a really successful response from my crowd in support of my message.

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357 people signed on, with a combined “social reach” (friend list) of 472,533 on the various social media Thunderclap works with:  Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

Their messages posted all at once, and I took the time to click like and comment (as did my awesome husband) on all of them I could find. When I did, I encountered a number of messages like these:

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Check out the comments: not only did I get exposure of the message I wanted at the time I wanted with the right link and image, but strangers acted upon the message. And they were people my own posts would not have reached. The Thunderclap’s were further shared by friends of friends, again, people I could not have reached myself reaching their people. I also found that my own contacts acted upon the messages, but based on the posts of my friends, not mine. Because people ignore me when I toot my own horn. They hate it when writers shout BUY MY BOOK (or some form thereof). Your friends give the post you wrote visibility and credibility.

The end result? And one I communicated with my Thunderclap supporters through an “update”:

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This was an extremely well spent $45, and I’m already prepping for my Thunderclap for the release of my eighth novel, Fighting for Anna. Have any of you Thunderclapped?

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like those in her What Doesn’t Kill You world, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes and trail rides with her hunky husband, giant horses, and pack of rescue dogs, donkeys, and goats. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

 

Taking a closer look at Ken Oder: What works in indie fiction?

oldwounds ebook

Congratulations to author Ken Oder on the release of his second novel, Old Wounds to the Heart. Not only is it his second novel, but it is the second in his series of Whippoorwill Hollow books.

When you take a closer look, it’s clear that Ken’s doing a lot of things right as an indie novelist. Things we can all learn from.

1. Ken is writing a series of books that sit side-by-side on the virtual shelf. He published his first in 2014 and his second in 2015. His third is slated for 2016.

2. His first novel, The Closing, won an IndieFab finalist award and broke the top 100 on Kindle.

3. Ken has worked hard to garner reviews, with 96 reviews and a 4.7-rating on The Closing and already 15 reviews and a 4.9-rating for Old Wounds.

4. Ken has parlayed his excellent reviews and awards into a BookBub promotion. Around it, he clustered promos with Books Butterfly, Kindle Nation Daily, BookSends, Bargain Booksy and OHFB.

5. Ken has priced his novels at the optimal price point for profitability, for indies: $2.99.

6. Ken didn’t publish until he was ready to invest in excellent editing and a great cover, on top of deferring publication until he received multiple objective opinions that his novels were “ready.”

7. Ken continues to work on his craft, attending conferences, workshops, and retreats to learn and get feedback from other writers.

So, again, congratulations to Ken, on both his success and his most recent novel. We’ll be following his progress eagerly.

Eric

Cleaning UP During Your Bookbub Promotion, Part 2: Be Poised for Success

Last week I started telling you about my most recent Bookbub experiences and whether Bookbub pays for itself. You can read that post HERE. Today, I’m talking about “off the page” ways to monetize when you run a free or discount Bookbub promotion. More next week!

Now, here’s the part where I start explaining new things you can use, some of which are “off the page” from the information above, and none of which I’ve related on the blog before.

  • Be sure you have the print and audiobooks available for the e-book you promote. If I hadn’t had an audio book version of Saving Grace, I would have sold 271 less books on my Bookbub day.
  • Make your e-book available everywhere. I get super traction on sites other than Kindle during a Bookbub. Ken Oder, author of The Closing, had just added his books to Google Play and had no sales there— ever—until his Bookbub promotion, and now he is gaining traction there every day. It raises my rankings across all sales sites and has a lasting impact. Not to mention Bookbub prefers e-books that are widely distributed, as it resonates with a larger number of readers.
  • Funnel your readers from your promoted e-book exactly where you want them to go.
    • Want reviews? Put a link at the end of your promoted e-book to the exact online page on which to leave a review. Make it mistake-proof and one-click easy. This will mean you have to create multiple versions of your e-book, one for each sales platform, but it’s worth it. Saving Grace has 2100 reviews on Amazon. Before its first free promo with Bookbub in June 2014, it had 200.
  • Want engagement? Link to your website and e-mail from your engaging bio. I hear from readers who don’t like to leave sales platform reviews, but who pour their heart and soul into an e-mail or a comment on my website’s fiction page.
  • Want newsletter and/or blog subscribers? Put the link(s) to sign-up at the end of the e-book, and offer something extra in return for subscription, something cool and exclusive. I’ve had 100 subscribers in the ten days since Bookbub. While that’s not earth-shattering, neither is it insignificant, and ultimately your e-mail subscribers are your independence from the vagaries of the sales platforms. For perspective, my entire list is 6,000 and took eight years to build: 100 readers added to my list in ten days is thus a staggering rate of growth. Here’s how some of this actually looks in my e-book:Screen Shot 2016-01-18 at 11.19.45 AM

Truly, these days Bookbub is the king-maker. But it’s not just about how many e-books readers download or buy during your promotion. It’s about how you handle these readers to convert them into lifelong fans.

And it’s also about how you convert that into bonus money, which we’ll talk about, next week.

Any tips on strategies that have worked for you are welcomed in the comments below.

Good luck!

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like those in her What Doesn’t Kill You world, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes and trail rides with her hunky husband, giant horses, and pack of rescue dogs, donkeys, and goats. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

Print on Demand Strategy: Where Does Nook Press Print Platform Fit In?

Screen Shot 2016-08-08 at 10.59.57 PMFor the last few years, I’ve been recommending that the easiest print option with the best benefit for authors is Amazon’s CreateSpace (“CS”).

Beginner: CreateSpace

The reason? They have had the best wholesale price for authors to buy their books, they charge no fees other than the cost of books, they have the best margin on Amazon (the largest sales platform), and they offer expanded distribution to other sites online. Also, they handle online customer returns by reducing your sales by one instead of by charging a higher amount than your original royalty for the return (this is big: Ingram charges you the cost of printing for the return in addition to  your royalty). They don’t, however, offer volume purchase discounts to the author.

Theoretically, their expanded distribution allows authors to sell at brick and mortar bookstores and libraries. Realistically though, bookstores look down on print on demand and really hate Amazon/CreateSpace. Worse, they don’t favor non-returnable books (which is what CreateSpace books are). It’s basically impossible to do anything other than consignment with bookstores, and very hard to book events at chain stores, if CreateSpace is your sole source of print books. The bookstores and libraries prefer Ingram (or Baker & Taylor, but usually Ingram).

Advanced: Ingram, too

But for authors wanting to get fancy—and to have a better chance at direct orders from bookstores and libraries and at getting the green light for events in chain bookstores—I recommend that in addition to CreateSpace, they also use either Ingram Spark (self published) or Lightning Source (small publisher), both owned by Ingram. The upside? You can make your books returnable, and they won’t be coming from an Amazon company. The downside? You’ll have to generate an Ingram-specific cover file, the Ingram programs are much harder to use, and they charge you coming and going. Fees to setup. Fees to make changes. Fees to be in their catalog. Annual fees. Your margins are small on books sold (I’ll do a comparison below). And much more expensive per book cost to authors unless you buy, literally, 500 or more per title.

There are other ways to do print books, like short run printing or other online services, but for 99.9% of us, the above two choices have been the best ones. You can read more about them in my book, What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too? if you’re dying of curiosity.

Unknown: Nook Press Print Platform?

Recently (June 28, 2016), Nook Press/Barnes & Noble announced a new Nook Press Print Platform (“NPPP”).

Per their press release: “Through the new print platform, eligible NOOK Press authors have the opportunity to sell their print books at Barnes & Noble stores across the country on a local, regional or national level, and online at BN.com. Authors can also qualify** for the opportunity to participate at in-store events including booksignings and discussions, where they will be able to sell their print books and meet fans.”

Eligible NOOK Press authors are defined as “those print book authors whose eBook sales [of a single title] have reached 1,000 units in the past year.” The in-store promotion is for “those print book authors whose eBook sales [of a single title] have reached 500 units in the past year.”

To try for bookstore access eligible authors must then submit their print books “for review by Barnes & Noble’s Small Press Department and one of the company’s corporate category buyers”. To participate at in-store events authors need a “review from a Barnes & Noble store manager.” But how many copies might the chain order? How long will they keep those precious books in inventory? Where will they be displayed? What about returns of unsold copies? So far there are lots of unanswered questions. It’s not a slam-dunk. (Quoted from http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/post/interesting-twist-bn-sell-self-published-books/)

First, let’s take a look at royalties. Assuming a 302-page book  (I’m using my Hell to Pay as the exemplar), here’s how much money you’d make for selling your book on B&N online.

CS expanded distribution royalty: 74 cents at $12.99 price (If you sell your book directly on Amazon, you make $3.34)

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Ingram royalty: $1.14 at $12.99 price (with 50% wholesale discount, and not considering all the fees)

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NPPP royalty: $2.66 cents on $12.99 price

 

Screen Shot 2016-08-09 at 7.48.46 AM$2.66 is a lot better than 74 cents through CS or $1.14 through Ingram (and that $1.14 doesn’t address set up, change, and annual fees on Ingram).

Other upsides: No fees. You can generate hardbacks with and without book jackets, unlike on CS. You make a hefty amount more per B&N sale than through CS or Ingram. (Note you make almost $1 less per book than a CS sale on Amazon though; what’s up with that??)

Downsides: More work. No expanded distribution so doesn’t replace Ingram for libraries and non-B&N bookstores. Eligibility requirements and unanswered questions re events/in-store sales. You pay for returns by online customers, and we don’t know if that is a refund of royalties or more (B&Ns share, return shipping, etc.) at this point. No volume discounts. You need a new ISBN if your print book is for sale anywhere else (CS and Ingram let you use the same one), so it dilutes your Nielsen sales numbers. And if you don’t want your paperback published by Nook Press, you have to pay for an additional ISBN in your name or the name of your publishing company.

It remains to be seen how big the benefit will be from NPPP, if any, for events. B&Ns operate like nation states. Those that wanted to do events with indie authors already were. Those that didn’t won’t be required to now.

But don’t kid yourself about distribution/in-store sales: it’s the 0.001 percent of indie authors that will make it onto the B&N brick and mortar bookshelves. And those authors and their books were probably already there, and they’re 99.9999% in the back of the store buried in the shelves—this application process through their Small Press Department is not new, and the common folk can’t afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes for traditional publishers to get placement for their books in the front of the store. The only part that is new is that B&N does the printing instead of Ingram.

For example, I’ve had my books on B&N shelves since 2013, and have had direct order events since that time as well. A store manager on a rainy night in 2013 walked us through the store and explained the cost of each section (new releases, best sellers, etc.) and offered to put my novels in staff picks, as that was the only thing that didn’t have to be negotiated and paid for through corporate. We actually tried to negotiate front of the store placement with a now defunct chain, and we couldn’t afford it. Back of the store = few sales = expensive returns.

And I cannot imagine a scenario where B&N won’t require the author to fund returns, like they do when they order your books through Ingram. Returns = your royalty PLUS what the store paid for the book. And, if you don’t have it pulped, return shipping. We’ll see how this plays out with B&N as the distributor and “buyer”.

I am going to experiment with NPPP for the higher margin for B&N online print sales, because that’s how I roll, even though my online print sales are only a drop in my royalty bucket. I am an “eligible author” but don’t plan to apply for distribution and events at this point but may in the future. However, I can’t drop my CS or Ingram strategy, as B&N doesn’t replace what I use either of them for, at least for now. I”ll keep you posted on how it goes.

I am pumped to hear your thoughts in the comments below; what am I missing? Am I wrong? What are you going to do?

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like those in her What Doesn’t Kill You world, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes and trail rides with her hunky husband, giant horses, and pack of rescue dogs, donkeys, and goats. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

Tips for Faster First Drafts and Better Plots

When the reality of the need to be more than a one-trick pony sinks in for an author, the pressure mounts. How can you write fast enough (and well enough at the same time) to make a living at it? Maybe you’re trying to fit writing in around a day job/life. Maybe you’ve given up the day job and are terrified you’ll starve. Most authors (the vast, vast majority) find that their income doesn’t become substantial until they publish four to six complementary books, if ever.

If you’re like me, your first book took you five years to write. If you’ve gotten to your second, it was a little faster, but not much. And even if you’re on to your third, you can’t believe it’s not getting any easier. Plots don’t formulate themselves, and characters don’t break the third dimension without blood, sweat, and a lot of tears.

Writers more successful than you, a la Steven King, advise you to write 1200 un-outlined words a day. But that’s not getting you where you want to go. It’s not resulting in tight, suspenseful, and numerous books with your name on the spine. So how do you get from where you are now—glassy-eyed, numb-brained, and drooling—to “the end,” over and over, with less work, and less time invested in a better product, each time?

  1. Brainstorm with a story partner.

I can daydream like nobody’s business. Sometimes I even feel like I emerge from these fugue states with ideas. But as soon as I try to commit them to words, they fizzle. It takes an enormous amount of my time and energy to generate half-baked schemes and even longer to wrestle them into something.

But if instead I sit down with a brainstorming/story partner and talk it out, their ideas spark mine, and vice versa. One of us sees the gaping holes and we redirect the plot line. Another of us throws out a bad idea which generates a good one. We both feel it when a story takes off in the right direction. We goad and prod and cajole each other on and cover far more ground, more effectively, than we do alone. We talk about current events and we talk about history and we talk about pop culture and art and music and sports and love, and anything that will stimulate a good story.

Some writers take this to a whole ‘nother level with brainstorming groups. The more the merrier, if you can keep people focused on forward progress instead of analytical discussions or grandstanding, at least. It all comes down to working with people with whom you mesh and who you trust. Whether that’s one or ten.

Or none.

If this idea doesn’t work for you, don’t do it. It just works fabulously for me. It’s my fast-plotting ace in the hole.

2. Write an “outline.”

Do I really outline my books in I.A.1.a.i. format????? Hell-to-the-no. But do I “outline”? If by outline you mean do I make a list or bullet points and start writing down ideas in roughly sequential order to comprise rough scenes and rough chapters and rough acts leading up—roughly—to a rough ending, then yes, I outline. And it helps tremendously. As long as I don’t make it so formal and regimented that it stifles me. It’s a free flow. Diarrhea of the hands. Ideas before order. Output over exactitude.

Most of the time I write a list of one to forty. That’s how many chapters I expect my 100,000-word book to have. Roughly. I draw lines to separate my list of numbers at the point in forty chapters that I expect my opening to give way to act one, act two, act three, act three extension, and ending. Then I scribble in a beginning, a point of no return, a total protagonist meltdown in the beginning of act three, the climax, and the ending. Next I start filling in the plot/character/subplot progression with rising tension in each scene, and within in each scene, making sure I beat my protagonist down mercilessly at every opportunity and all leading up to each of the big turning points that I marked originally.

Usually, it’s all falling apart for me by this point. I can’t help myself and I either a) go off on a tangent and write too much and realize I’m drafting the story in my outline or b) get on Facebook and waste three hours and wonder why my outline isn’t writing itself. Whichever I do, I also discover about this time that my story sucks and it’s boring and I hate it and I can’t write it and there’s no way to get from point A to B.

But I keep going. Or not. If not, I go back to my brainstorming/story partner and beg for help. Mostly I keep going until I realize that I have no idea how to write a story when I don’t even know the characters in it. And that’s a sign.

3. Bullet-point your characters.

So I do some character study. Nothing excessive. Bullet points. Sentence fragments. Lists. As fast as I can, I close my eyes and let the character speak to me about who she is, and I go ahead and and make a record of it. Because this is where all this stuff belongs. In her character study. Not in my book. And if I know these things about her, I can write her in the story because she’ll be real, and not just some placeholder stick figure that I’m using mercilessly and in a most demeaning way because I can’t be bothered to do the work of figuring her out.

If I write without this “knowing,” my story will fall apart because I can’t plot if I don’t know how people will act and react, or how they know each other, or where they were Saturday night when somebody bludgeoned our vic with a frozen pork tenderloin. I’m good, but I’m not that good.

4. Start a synopsis.

By this time I’m itching to write and my fragments start growing verbs, and my bullet points are fully diagrammable sentences with correct punctuation. Half the time, I’ll give in to the madness and write a first chapter. Sometimes (the other half of the time), I hold firm and decide to test my plot one more time in the form of an in-voice synopsis. This does two things for me. Well, three, if you’re counting. First, it gets me in voice. Duh. Second, it tests my plot and the story arc for my main characters. Third, it gives me something to revise that later I will use to develop my story blurb from. Or, you may find it’s part of the package you use when you pitch your book to agents or publishers.

Synopses are never wasted and never a waste of time. But I confess I do not always do them. I just write better books faster when I do.

5. Begin.

So I’ve been brainstorming my book, dreaming about it, outlining it, character studying it, and synopsizing it. How long does this process take? Days. Weeks. Months. Years. I’ve found that the longer I “live” with a story before I write it, the faster the writing process will be. I write better books if I have stories in different phases of their life cycles going on all at once. I’m processing copyedit on one while I am first-drafting another, while I am having periodic brainstorming sessions on new ideas for a third.

When the time comes that I allow myself to take the bit in my teeth and WRITE, I don’t worry about the first sentence. I’ll revise that later. I just get going and write. It’s like diving off a high dive. Don’t overthink it. Just bend your knees and push off your toes and get ready to fly. Your take off may not be graceful, but you’ll end up where you’re headed anyway.

6. Write until you get to “the end.”

But, when I begin, when I write “once upon a time” or something like it, I write until I get to the end. I mean it. I write without editing the previous day’s work until I get to the end.

It’s hard and it’s horrible. I make a zillion notes about things to go back and change in earlier parts of the book as my subplot falls apart and my killer obviously is Betty Lou instead of Ralph and my protagonist quits her job and dumps her boyfriend, and I hadn’t seen any of that coming. But I don’t turn back and revise. I just keep making notes and writing the book it’s morphing into.

Does that sound like Hell to you? It’s pretty close. It’s also effective. I don’t waste my time editing work I’ve learned I will probably completely change or cut once I figure out what my story is. And I won’t know what my story is until I get the whole thing out.

Go ahead, revise your first chapter for two or three years if that works for you. I’m here to tell you how to plot and write books faster, but you can do it however you want. Imagine adorable winky emoji here.

7. Revise once.

After I get to the end, I give myself a break of a week or two or however long I need. Then, when I revise, I do it with the same rigor as when I wrote the book draft. ONE TIME. This means I pull all those notes together that I made in the first draft and I deal with them as I come to them. I go through a One Pass Revision checklist that is the same and yet different for each book, scene by scene. (For more on this, read this post). I don’t leave a scene until I think it is as good as I can make it at this point, and fully good enough to send off for developmental edit. Then I move on to the next. As I make changes, this necessitates changes down the line (or in earlier scenes). I make notes. When I get to those later scenes, I make those changes. When I get to the end, I can revise the earlier parts.

But here’s something important: often those notes themselves change. If I go back and make a series of cascading changes before I finish my one pass revision, I might make all of them for nothing. So instead I keep moving forward, and only make the changes when I come to them. It cuts down on so much wasted effort.

When I’m done, I hand the book off to advance readers, I consider their suggestions, make changes if I think I should, and then ship the book off to a developmental editor.

8. Repeat.

And then I do it again. For a new book. I’ve started doing my outline for the next book while my book is at developmental edit. Then, after I’ve made any changes I need to and while it’s in copyedit (later), I draft the next book.

See how that works? Because it does. It really does, for me.

***

Truth time: Did I achieve this on my first novel? NO. Not on my first, second, third, or fourth. But I got closer each time, and by my fifth, I did. And I have done it ever since.

Why?

Because I want to be prolific. To make money as a writer. To write mysteries with tights plots, but quickly, and efficiently.

And I want it to get easier. Which it hasn’t. Just faster. That’s good enough for me for now, though.

For tips like these and many more, check out my classes on the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE).

Your tips for plotting great books, and doing it efficiently and somewhat quickly are gratefully appreciated in the comments below.

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like those in her What Doesn’t Kill You world, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes and trail rides with her hunky husband, giant horses, and pack of rescue dogs, donkeys, and goats. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).