Sweet Contemporary Romances Created With Heart & Humor
I’ve just created another meme to illustrate the writing life!
What fun! Why didn’t I do this so much earlier? Probably because I hadn’t a clue I could. Just like I hadn’t a clue I actually could create a video. So, I’m on a roll!
I love this image! Love it enough to want to name the little man in it. I want a similar image with a little woman character in it, so I’ll be searching for that later on.
Anyway, hope you like this one.
I am learning to make videos!
This week, I took a 5 day marketing challenge with Jim Edwards and Jeff Herring.
Wow! What a week! All my excuses for procrastinating in this area are GONE!
They were actually giving us a preview of a new marketing tool and membership site with this challenge. And I will probably sign up for the membership site as soon as I can. The recent posts here are all challenges we all had to do each day. And I copied all of the prompts in case I wanted to use them after the challenge was over. But when I join the challenge group, I will have them available every day.
I am looking forward to seeing how this will help me sell more books. It has also kickstarted my juices to write posts and make videos that will maybe help and encourage other writers to keep on keeping on with their craft. I feel rejuvenated!
Of course, it helped encourage me when my posts, memes, and video got some likes and comments! Especially when one was from Jeff Herring himself!
I have followed Jim Edwards on and off since I got online in 1993. He’s an internet marketing guru type, and maybe if I’d paid more attention to him way back, I might have been further along in knowing how to promote and market my books and websites. Lynn Terry is another “guruess” I admire and am actually a member of her private forum that teaches us how to wrap our heads around this stuff, whatever it is you’re selling, or trying to get noticed by crowds of people.
For us authors, it’s crucial if we want sales. Can’t become a best selling author without them! Not that I expect that, mind you, but we all have our dreams, don’t we?
Anyway, my video is now up on YouTube and here on this site in the Video Den. Please take a look at it! And I wouldn’t mind at all if you shared it in appropriate places!
Now that I have wrapped my brains around PowerPoint, I shall be preparing book trailers and teasers. Maybe even read a chapter and post it here, there and wherever. I’ll let you know details when I have them more finalized.
I feel like a kid with new toys now! Went and signed up for MS Office online, and I am loving it all at the moment. I do love getting new software! 
Love new gadgets too! Got a new Asus ZenPad Z10 tablet on which I have installed the office suite so I can work on my projects where and whenever. I have to upload more photos to OneDrive so I can make the videos. I haven’t made use of OneDrive as much as I probably ought to have had. I’ve uploaded boatloads of stuff to Google Drive however. But with the subscription to MS Office 365, you get 1T of storage. That’s what my laptop has, so I will be backing my laptop up to OneDrive soon!
All right, I should be writing or editing or something!
Have a great day!
Okay, first, I’m going to put out several things an author of self published fiction – or any author, actually – would consider figuring into a writing/publishing budget.
Each is important to your finished novel. They all work together to make your novel the very best it can be. But – what if your budget is practically nonexistent, like mine?
If it’s possible to purchase just one, how do you choose?
Let’s consider each one:
Poor editing will likely get you reviews from people more disturbed by your typos, misspellings, grammar, and sentence structure. Which could cause them to forget how great your story actually is. And you do want them reviewing your great story, right?
An ugly cover might see your book remaining on the virtual shelves forever with only a handful of sales.
Sure some books sell well with an ugly cover. Non-fiction particularly. The covers of Aaron Shepard’s series of how-to writing/publishing books are ugly. Butt ugly. Pink with bold black lettering. BUT – I have at least three of those books, print and ebook, because I know Aaron’s work, and I will put out for almost anything he writes about.
However, since I’m not well known . . . I really need a cover that will help sell the story.
So do you.
Now, if you’re artistic enough, or know someone who is, you can get a cover done for less. Or free. I am not artistic as far as drawing with paper and crayons go, but I can get a pretty decent one using stock photos, and free fonts. A bit of practice is in order, but it can be done to good effect.
Now, the interior of your book is as important as a well edited copy and a good cover. Lousy interior design will also get you negative reviews from readers. Almost as likely as a poorly edited copy. Well, I know it will. I’ve seen those reviews – for print books as well as for ebooks.
A poorly done interior for an ebook might even adversely affect how ebook devices render your copy. Sure, the reader can play around with settings trying to get a better result, but why make them bother?
And, once more, you’re giving them another reason to forget to say how much they LOVED your great story!
Ebook Conversion Services
Ebook conversion mystifies many an author. There’s a learning curve to almost every method of doing it. Unless you give someone else that headache.
Outsourcing, though, can be expensive. There are some services out there that do a decent job for around $50. I’ve used one such site, and I was happy with the results. Word2Kindle.com I think it was. And, of course, you can try finding someone on Fiverr or Elance, or a similar site.
But, there are free ways to do it that don’t make your head explode, or make ebook devices cringe.
Using Draft2Digital.com is one free way. Unlike Smashwords.com, D2D let’s you create your book in both .mobi and .epub and you can use the files anywhere–you just can’t use them with their ISBN in it.
Not a big deal on Amazon. And most places offer an ISBN for free. A few charge up to $125 dollars for one. You can get your own number for that much at Bowker.com. I’ve decided to save the cost of those numbers and just go with the free ones.
You can also get software to help you DIY, some paid, some free. All with a bit of a learning curve. Calibre, Scrivener, Jutoh are just a few of them.
A book trailer isn’t necessarily a must, but it is strongly recommended. I haven’t one— Oh, no, wait, I do, but I’m not happy with it. Uggy!
Again, you can find services costing from $15 up to a couple hundred or more.
Here as well, with some practice, you can do it yourself with software you probably already own. Like PowerPoint. I’m taking some course in learning how to use this program that’s been sitting on my PC and laptop for years, and have never opened it until this week.
I’ll be converting this post into a video soon, and posting it to YouTube. I’ll let you know when it’s up.
Finally, there’s the business end of it all. The promoting and marketing of your precious baby.
Discovering what media kits are and what to do with them, social media promo and marketing, searching for sites, both free and paid, on which to post your book, such as Goodreads, and a host of other methods, both free and paid.
You can pay someone to do all this headache work for you if you have the budget for it. Chances are you don’t.
Yet there are many services that offer low cost promotion campaigns, like Fiverr and other “better” services that range right up into the thousands, like BookBaby.
If your head doesn’t explode over any of this, why, then, have at it and save yourself a bundle! My head explodes . . .!!!
Okay, last, but not least, there is your author presence on the web. Which you should already have set up. Here, too, you can find someone to do it for you, and pay nothing to thousands of dollars for that.
I do my own, because I have no budget for that, plus I want control over it. My platform of choice nowadays is WordPress.
If you elect to pay to have it done, make sure you can do the updates yourself. You don’t want your posts going up according to someone else’s schedule, nor do you want to have to keep paying to have them posted for you.
Make sure, too, that you are satisfied with the design itself. I’ve seen some authors sign up for work and the site is more than butt ugly. I can’t believe this web site developer/designer believes those sites are awesome. Aaron Shepard’s book covers are prettier!
Yes, I do my own web sites, author and otherwise. I use WordPress, and after trying out a number of themes both free and paid for, I finally elected to go with GeneratePress, which allows for many different layouts, and offered a bunch of other features I wanted. I have a few plugins I use, and there are probably others I could or should be using. I’ll get to them someday . . . 🙂
NUMBER 3!
Having spent money on almost all of the first six aspects, the most important product I bought to help me get a good looking novel, are my professionally done book layout templates from the people at BookDesignTemplates.com. They are a bit pricey, yet, not out of this world so, and definitely well worth it.
And if you hit upon a sale, then the deal is so much sweeter!
I did get mine on sale. One of their newest designs, Fling for romances; which can be modified by removing the swirly heart image from the header. With that gone, you can use the template for any other style or type of book you want. I will be using the modified template for my kids’ and YA novels.
The cost for a license for one book is $59.
A license to use the template for multiple novels of YOUR making is $119.
A license to use the template for books for clients is $249.
I chose the second option. I don’t expect to be laying out book interiors for clients any time soon. Oh, and if you sign up for their newsletter, they’ll send you an offer for 10% off your order, good forever.
These templates are fully formatted not only to size, but also to margins, chapter number placement, and chapter title placement, and a table of contents. Which you may or may not want to include in a novel. If you use chapter titles, you might want to use the TOC feature in your print book, but it isn’t necessarily necessary.
It’s a must in ebooks.
Fonts are included – which are free for commercial use, so you don’t have to worry about copyright issues. Same with any images that are included.
An author page is included at the end with the spot for the author image nicely centered – where it will stay and not climb all over your page!
You get templates for all the eight industry standard book sizes, plus you get them for Word which works with 2003 and up, Adobe InDesign, and Apple Pages.
I hope you found something of worth to take away here. Best of luck to you in your publishing endeavors!
Please sign up for notifications of new posts and features so you don’t miss out. And please visit the Reading Room and check out my poems, short stories, and samples of Thomi and Joleigh-Anna!
Just created this Memes which I am going to go post on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. I think I will be doing more of these!
Procrastination is the number one time waster for most writers.
It’s why I haven’t finished Stormi’s story–which I should have, ohhhh . . . years ago.
Yep, I confess. I am a confirmed procrastinator.
And the number one cause for procrastination iiiiisssssssssssssss . . . .
The Internet.
Yup. Doesn’t matter if it’s for research, either. You can get too involved in research, and forget the book you’re doing it for.
Then there’s the old “I’ll just play this game for a few minutes . . . .” routine. Uh-huh. Three-four hours later, you still haven’t started writing anything for the day.
Facebook, the games, and casual surfing will wait until you’ve gotten your writing quota done for the day. Trust me . . . the Internet will still be there when you’re done.
But if you must be distracted, please surf over to my Reading Room and immerse yourself in free chapters of Thomi and Joleigh! Buy the books! Immerse yourself even more into their worlds!
As always, thanks for stopping by!
. . . what would you do differently with making your stories into ebooks?”
Let me start by saying, I was aware of ebooks around the late 90s, I think. Definitely by the early 20s. I was encouraged by an Irish author/self publisher to get my romances into PDF and HTML. Do it now! The time has come!
But, nope, I dragged my feet. I didn’t believe it. Ebooks? You mean, like reading books off a Star Trek tablet? Are you kidding me? And writing them that way? I need my paper and pens! No, no, no, no, no!
Okay, actually, by that time, I had a desktop PC, and I never looked back for my paper and pens. Nor most importantly, that darn typewriter! I loved my paper and pens. I hated typewriters. Hated them! My new PC made all the difference in getting those romances written. And I could print out a copy of my manuscript in a jiffy!
So, instead of jumping into learning how to get started with ebooks, I spent another year and more sending my stuff around to agents and publishers. All to no avail. I could have papered my walls with my rejections. In fact, I did.
Finally, when I received, not one but two, rejections for Thomi from the same agent, I decided it was, indeed, time to start learning more about this ebook business. I got a used copy of Adobe Acrobat 5 and figured out how to get a decent PDF created. I also sprang for an ebook creator for making HTML ebooks. Was fairly easy, and I liked that I got to create the total look of the book.
I even applied for and got my publisher’s contract with Amazon in order to sell PDFs. But before I could wrap my head around that service, they rolled out the Kindle and Kindle Publishing Direct. PDFs were abandoned while I learned next how to create a decent .mobi file.
It wasn’t until 2010 that I finally published my two romances to the Kindle. Had I listened to those in the know years before, I would have had all those learning years behind me so much sooner. Although, times change . . . new technology flies into our world every day. I’ve taken advantage of some of it, ignored some, and am still scared of a lot of it. I’m more open to learning, though, than I was at the start.
My advice now?
Take a risk! Try something new! It just might work for you!
Please take a reading risk, and purchase one of my romance ebooks today!
Not often. Haven’t written a poem since, well, 2001 maybe, or 02. Oh, no, wait! Wrote one this year . . . for Thomasyna. Rather an amusing verse, not probably a perfect rhyme, but hey–she threw it together in a few minutes. Being in a hurry, you understand. Maybe I’ll post it here as well, but it’s in one of the last four chapters of the book.
Wrote my first good one back in the ’70s, and it’s the one that gets a lot of attention on the two sites I have it posted. I don’t actually frequent these two writer’s site, although I pay for one of them. Just wasn’t feeling I was going anywhere with them. I’ve since returned to them, having decided to try to make a go of them.
Thing is, joining any sort of social site is a little agonizing and overwhelming to me. I have social anxieties; online rooms are just the same to me as a real room packed with people. Doesn’t matter if I know each and every person there or it’s full of strangers. The feelings are just the same no matter what. After a while, I want to run. Or, I’m frozen in the seat I’ve dropped down in, and likely won’t move out of it until my courage totally fails, or everyone else has left the building.
Makes life a little tough. Especially when, as an author, I’m supposed to be networking and getting my name out there by whatever means will work. And since these two sites have generated the most feedback for me on my poems and short stories, you’d think I’d’ve stuck with it. Maybe built a bigger reader base.
Same thing for my author websites and even the personal ones. I sit here staring at the screen, willing my fingers to work, and often they run scared. Brain shuts down . . . ideas freeze . . . and the sites are neglected. Visitors quit coming, cobwebs shroud what’s already there . . .
Big sad mess.
Anyway, I’ve decided to bring those poems out into the open and post the reviews of them here. Tell the story behind each one. I’ve found it amusing to discover the different views each reviewer takes on them. Read the poems and their corresponding reviews and see if you agree or have a different opinion!
I hope everyone is doing well on this sunny winter day. A little warmer than it has been here.
I had expected to be posting more regularly, but life tosses us more than lemons sometimes. So now I’m trying to get back into the swing of things. Nothing seems to help me more than either a great new idea for a new story, or else one for the one I’m working on–OR a new theme for my site that I absolutely love!
Nothing holds me back more than having to give up my spacious workspace and cram into a tiny sardine can! But I will conquer it . . . eventually. A mother does whatever for her kids . . .
In any case, I’m loving this new theme by MH Magazines. So hard to find an author/writer/publisher theme that works and doesn’t cost the life of my firstborn. Working with the lite version right now, but I expect to go for the paid version in the near future. All I have to do now, is figure out how I use those image boxes to the left of posts.
I’ve noted that sales of my work comes mainly from Europe and Asia. I may offer a sale on them for a couple of weeks. See if things pick up here in the home country. Really, though, it doesn’t matter where sales come from!
Getting some more feedback on Thomasyna. All good! I’ll post it later with the reviews on site. Hoping they will go onto to whatever site they got the story from and post there as well, but I do enjoy getting emails too!
I’m in a little bit of a rut with Stormi’s story, plus trying to decide how many books I want to do for this series. Do I want to do each character’s alone or do I want to chose one to be the main focus of the story, with others as subplots. I have ideas for four or five more . . . so we’ll see. I am hoping to pick up momentum on finishing Stormi by the end of next year. I’ve a couple other projects going as well, some short stories in other genre. Trying to get out more so I can build a bigger readership. Not easy when one is an unknown indie author.
But that would be the case were I traditionally published. Been there, done that, actually. And was screwed royally by the publisher. Facts are, an author has to bring readers in on his/her own power, and get word out about their books on their own budget and time. All the promises of book signings, bookstores getting the books on display, and ads going out never happened. Royalties didn’t cover the expenses, so I made the decision right then to never go that route again. So, I formed my own publishing entity as was recommended, and I haven’t looked back.
All the hardships of getting published and noticed could make a writer quit–if money was the only reason for writing. For me, it’s also the joy of creating the world and characters; writing something fun, or serious and worthwhile, or simple and silly. Really, I guess it’s mostly for the joy of it.
So, dear readers, I’m going to sign off for now and get to it! See you next time! Enjoy your visit here. Download the free chapters of the books while you’re here!
Just a line to mention that Ride ‘Em Tough and Thanks to Eustace are doing fairly well as freebies at iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Nook and Kobo. Ride ‘Em Tough is doing a bit better than Eustace, and I suspect the cover may have something to do with it. I am considering creating a new cover as soon as I find a better image for it.
Over at Amazon, each book as been bought once. It’s priced at .99 there as you can only offer your book for free through the Kindle Select program and requires you to offer the book exclusively through Amazon. Not doing that, folks. My stuff is now offered in fifteen online stores in Europe. And downloads and sales are coming from that area. Why should I give that up?
Yup . . . got work at my promo and marketing skills. They’re just above nil right now . . .
Hello Readers!
I’ve been meaning to post more often, but Life likes to take a hand in diverting my good intentions. I’m finding that with my hubby retired and my sons off on their own pursuits, I actually have less time at my laptop. Can’t send anyone out to run errands for me. Hubby devotes his time out in his workshop, creating works of art in wood. He specializes in end grain cutting and chopping boards. Which some people have bought just to decorate their kitchens with. Too pretty to use, they say!
In any case, all the running around has generally fallen to me. You’d think I could maybe get a word written later on, but my oldest son is working on a couple of fantasy novels and wants my opinion and advice. Not to mention the call to catch up on the seasons of NCIS slow things up. Well, I also love to head over to YouTube for some hilarity with Carol Burnett and friends.
In trying to get myself back into a better working schedule–writing schedule–although a schedule for all I do would be a laudable goal as well, I’m revamping my list of things to do. First, I have to do something to organize my tiny office space. I know, I should be grateful I even have a space. Really, this ought to be a bedroom for someone, but my boys seem to be able to sleep anywhere, and prefer the living room floor–so . . . Plus they know, as the only female in the house, besides the dog, I need a space to myself. Maybe someday we’ll add on to this little shoe box to we all have a bit of privacy when we need it.
Someday, when the world has discovered that the novels of Neenah Davis-Wilson are worth spending time with and buy everything I write as soon as it’s out. Or, as soon as they realize the novels are already out . . . You know . . . been out for years, and however did they miss them!
I have everything crammed into this little space, including all the stuff I’ve got for sale on eBay or plan to sell on eBay. I’d rather be writing, but usually am running the roads for whatever errand, so posting stuff to eBay is a slow boat to China as well.
Posting to blogs is pretty much last.
Got a lot of changes to make to get it all running smoothly.
One of the things I’m decided I’m going to add here is a gallery of pictures from our vacations in Rhode Island where my stories take place. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that sooner. I’ll be going again in a couple of weeks, so will have new stuff to post. I may have lost all my pictures from the last time we went, so I’m hoping to get some more sunset photos to replace the ones lost.
I figure you can get an idea of what some of the places are like and make the story feel even more real. Of course, the island that Thomi, Joleigh-Anna and others live on isn’t real, although there are plenty of islands out by there where people do reside for the summer, if not year around.
The suggestion that I write some back story or side story for the books has been suggested to me. Since I’m working on three writing projects at once already, adding a new one will likely not happen for a while. But, I’ll keep it in mind for a future time.
I have some other thoughts, but I’ll stop here for now. Have to eat and run roads again . . .!
Have a great weekend and such until we meet again!