C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

See all my books at AllThatChazz.com.

07/09/2011 • 7:05 PM 0

Who disgusts me VIDEO (plus Walking Dead discussion)

Filed under: book reviews, Books, movies, ,

07/08/2011 • 7:18 PM 0

Shocked yet not surprised: Indigo halves its bookshelf space

Here’s the link to Five Rivers publisher Lorina Stephens’ excellent post on how Indigo is changing its returns policy (45 days and you’re out!) and cutting its space for books in half. So much for anybody whose name isn’t Rowling, King, Meyer and whoever the guy is who came up with Go the F**k to Sleep. This stirs up a lot of questions for people whose names are not those names. For instance, how many scented candles does anyone really need to buy in one lifetime? And how will traditional publishing cope?

For me personally, this is not a big deal because I am not in the least surprised. As I’ve been saying, this is not an if. It’s just about when. Blockbuster is battered senseless and HMVs are shrunk to nubs. I am so the opposite of an early adopter of new tech I’m nearly Amish and I don’t go near the Busted Block nor do I buy CDs anymore (though I understand some people still make them, everybody’s just picking the songs they want off iTunes.) I anticipated this boostore shift and consider it to be The Half-Measure of Doom on the Road to Bookstore Apocalypse.

Ahem. Pardon the hyperbole, but I’ve encountered a bunch of resistance from people who are convinced that my sole focus on ebooks was career suicide. No matter what I said, the doubters were sure a book had to be in a bookstore to be “real” and “worthy” and “made of paper and stuff.”

And I said, “What’s a bookstore?” Now I’m doing my “Told you so” dance and though I should be ashamed of myself, to be honest, I’m not feeling it.

But seriously, bookstores are literally farther and fewer between. As they cut down on shelf space to make room for doodads to dust, yo-yos and novelty pens, there will be no shelf for indies. You want choice, variety and a taste of the new? Go look online because you won’t find it in a bricks and mortar chain store.

But enough from me and my reactionary delusions of grandeur. Lorina says it all in detail in her usual reasonable, convincing tone, so do go read what she has to say. 

Filed under: authors, Books, ebooks, Useful writing links, , , , , , , , ,

07/07/2011 • 10:29 AM 2

Book Review Circle: Growing ideas (& an announcement about great things to come)

Salient points:

1. You won’t review the same author who reviewed you. That’s why we need a big circle. That’s one way to getting solid reviews, too.

2. This is a give-to-get situation where you will only review one or two books a year. Once it’s posted on this site, you can repost your review elsewhere.

3. Check the post below for details on the information you need to send. This helps me match you up with a genre that interests you.

4. Send said information to: expartepress@gmail.com 

Ah, and here’s another grand pronoucement:

I’ll be posting the book circle reviews on the new website (coming this fall.)

This blog will continue, but Chazz Writes is primarily a place for writers interested in indie publishing.

The new site will run concurrently, like sentences for both stealing fireworks and accidentally lighting your school on fire with those fireworks.

The new site will be a place  for readers.

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Book Reviews: A Very Decent Proposal (chazzwrites.wordpress.com)

Filed under: authors, book reviews, Books, DIY, ebooks, getting it done, web reviews, What about Chazz?, Writers, , , , , ,

07/03/2011 • 9:25 AM 0

Book recommendations & VIDEO: People, nature and killer robots are out to get you

Everything_is_going_to_kill_everybodyWhat an amazing book this is! It’s terrifying and very funny at the same time. Written by Cracked writer Robert Brockway, this book lays out everything that should terrify you to hide under your bed. Some of the stuff I write is really about scary what if scenaria. But Everything is Going to Kill Everybody isn’t so theoretical and fictional. For instance, there are autonomous killer robots in Korea right now…that can decide on their own to kill you…from two miles away…in the goddamn dark! In a few years, one-third of US ground forces will be drones and robots! (That’s ground forces! Not just the flying killer robots they have now that can kill anyone anywhere with the pilots sitting safely in a bunker n Nevada.)

(MORE TEXT AFTER THE VIDEO) 

But that’s just one Skynet scenario. There are all kinds of things that could wipe out humans everywhere: hypercanes (instead of hurricanes), manufactured mega-tornadoes on a fragile leash, energy device plots that could fry us all, asteroid strikes, Mother Nature bludgeoning you over and over, microscopic robots, huge military robots designed to eat the fresh kills for energy (no, I’m not kidding!) and biotech wonders that could wipe us out with horrible plagues. In other words, you’ve got to buy this book, because, as deep as it goes, it’s also hilarious. The writer realizes that at some point he’s going to make you may lose all bowel control, so there are lots of comedic opportunities there. This is the scariest book you’ll ever laugh at.

(If you care to order immediately, just click the image for the Amazon link. If you’d prefer to live in sad denial, I understand, but you’ll miss a lot of fascinating, scary  science  and a lot of chuckles.)

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06/23/2011 • 1:52 PM 0

VIDEO: Moso, the free Mac app for vlogging

Did I mention that this app is free, free, free?  Also, it’s free.

(There’s the power of the written word over video right there. I forgot to mention the app is free, but it was easy to add the detail of the price using this ancient keyboard thingy.)

More details: You don’t edit Moso, you just do retakes. It’s easy to upload to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, though. I’d say if there’s a social medium that’s underused for authors promoting their books, it must be YouTube. Moso will help you with that.

 Podcasts can be helpful, though access and difficulty of execution/time involved increases the variables in that argument. I don’t think Facebook is as effective for promotion as it could be. Twitter can be effective if used well (but that’s another post.)

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Filed under: authors, blogs & blogging, Books, podcasts, Publicity & Promotion, self-publishing, What about Chazz?, , , , , , ,

06/20/2011 • 10:02 PM 1

Zoe Who? I recommend you find out who! (PLUS GREAT VIDEO)

Becoming an Indie AuthorThe Little Me Update: I’m reading and  writing a lot lately. Yesterday was an incredibly productive day as I get closer to putting a (long) short story called The Dangerous Kind up on Smashwords. It’s amazing how many alterations I still want to tinker with as I go through the editing process. Still! 

Anyway, I’m also in book recommendation mode this week, so…

Have you subscribed to Zoe Winters blog yet? If you are an indie author, you definitely should. I especially like her ranty goodness on her wordpress blog. As I waited for my son to finish soccer practice I started digging into the last chapter of Zoe Winters’ book: Smart Self-Publishing: Becoming an Indie Author.

This is the single most helpful book on the business of self-publishing I’ve read. (I have the Sony e-reader version, though I think I’ll want to get the print copy, too, for easy reference and permanent residence on my bookshelf. Yes, I do that, too!)

Zoe has a no-nonsense approach to the subject which boils things down to what you need to know to succeed as an indie author. There are a lot of useful books on the subject out there, but this is delivers the bullet without preamble or extra excavation needed on the part the reader. Zoe Winters has broken the trail and mapped out the way so it’s easier for you.

I especially love how frank she is about the self-publishing strategies that didn’t work. The book is worth your time and money for the troubleshooting section alone.

And she’s good at spotting the details others might have missed. For instance, everyone agrees Goodreads can be a great place to boost awareness of self-published books. But Zoe is savvy to point out the pitfalls, too (like if the regulars get a whiff of the stink of self-promotion on you they’ll find your home, break in and beat you to death with Webster’s dictionaries.)

If you don’t love her already, she also made a series of YouTube Videos about breaking into publishing the indie way. Go to YouTube and search for the series called Zoe Who? . Enjoy. (And buy her guide.)

Here’s a sample video of Zoe Who? by Zoe Winters:

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Filed under: authors, book reviews, Books, DIY, ebooks, getting it done, self-publishing, Useful writing links, Writers

06/20/2011 • 2:10 AM 9

Book promotion for self-publishers

As a self-publisher, you probably can’t afford to splash a big ad across the back page of the New York Times (and that’s of limited use anyway.) What is useful is connecting with people. Be genuine and you can share and spread useful information that brings good karma down the line. In this video I talk about Jeff Bennington’s Reunion blog tour. I won a Kindle, but I would have promoted his novel anyway. Here’s why:

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06/16/2011 • 1:05 AM 22

6 Effective Ways to Promote Your Book

ReunionToday’s guest post is from the author of Reunion, Jeff Bennington! I forget how I ran across Jeff, though it could have been a lot of places since Jeff is a powerful experimenter in the realm of book promotion. His site is The Writing Bomb. He’s also blogged here before on CreateSpace versus Lightning Source–a very popular post, and for good reason: Jeff’s generous with what he learns. Here’s what he picked up from his book campaigns:

In the world of publishing, authors have found many ways to promote their work ranging from book signings with a 3-piece orchestra to dressing up like their characters. After publishing two novels, I’ve tried some of those crazy stunts, but from my experience, there are a few affordable and effective ways to promote your book online that won’t leave you looking like Barney the dinosaur. In fact, online marketing has been touted, and likely is, the best way for an author to promote his or her work.

However, authors have to approach marketing differently based on their genre and subject matter. And let’s be clear, when you promote your book, you can’t always expect immediate gratification and you’re not guaranteed sales. Your premise will drive readers to read a sample and the excerpt will determine your sales. And so, the quality of your writing is ultimately the best sales pitch.

The best promotion for me has come from the following:

#1 Goodreads.com: Goodreads “giveaways” are an incredible tool to publicize your book. I recently posted Reunion in a giveaway and had 787 bites in 5 days, beating out bestsellers that have been on the list for months.

HINT: Don’t post more than one book to give away and do it in one-week spurts. You’ll have to trust me on this.

I also like what my ad on Goodreads is doing. The thing with Goodreads is not how many clicks or sales you get, but how many folks “add” your book to their “to be read” list. When they do that, they are more or less planning on buying your book when they get to it, and they will, because most readers on Goodreads are avid readers and love talking about what they read, so they will also rate and review your book, which is another benefit of that site.

Another secret here is that if you spend X amount of dollars on an ad, you will likely get a lot more “adds” than clicks, which is good because it is a pay-per-click system. But if folks add your book without clicking on the ad then you have effectively extended the life of your ad immeasurably.

#2 Blog: If you don’t have a blog or you’re afraid of starting one or you think it’s too much

Jeff_Bennington

Jeff Bennington

work, then plan on writing your book solely for your mother to enjoy because blogging is only the beginning of what it takes to market your book…and it’s the easiest. It’ll only get harder and more expensive from there.

#3 Kindlenation.com: This is a very good site but you’ll have to plan months in advance to run an ad. It will definitely make your money back and more because they have a lot of readers who buy what they advertise. Programs run from $119 to $349. Kindle Nation reaches from 7,500 to 15,000+ opt-in readers. I paid $99 for an ad that ran in mid May and sold over 200 copies that day. So if you make $2 or $3 a book and spend $119…do the math.

#4 Twitter, Facebook, email lists: These are the most obvious and basic starting points. I’ll put it this way, I got all four of my book blurbs through Twitter connections, two of which are bestselling authors. If you can get that elsewhere, go for it. Basically, you have to tell your social marketing pals about your book.

And, this is important, you have to share their work too.

If you blast your friends and followers with your personal spam, they will retweet and share less and less the more you do it. Share what they are doing and chat with them and you’ll notice a marked difference in how receptive they are to spreading the word about your book. I’ve experimented with this and I can tell you without a shadow of doubt that cross promotion helps.

Strict self-promotion hurts.

However, I have found that tweeting short blurbs, such as “A Riveting and Incredibly Powerful Story of Pain and Triumph!” grabs reader’s attention more than, “Check out my new book, REUNION”. Try both methods and see which works better. Be sure to include a “tiny url” to allow room for your #tags.

HINT: Use the twitter share button on the right side of your Amazon sales page. It has the shortest “tiny url” I’ve seen yet.

#5 Ereadernewstoday.com: I’m on the schedule, so I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that Ereadernewstoday.com is a good site to advertise on. This program is $25 a day. Emails will reach about 10,000 book readers through opted-in email blasts.

#6 Blog Tour: Plan for a lot of work. It can be nearly free, but will be the most time consuming. However, if your book sucks, I think a blog tour can backfire. I’m just sayin’.

If you go this route, you better get your book professionally edited and proofed and have a great cover and good formatting because that’s what book bloggers and reviewers expect.

Basically, when it comes to promoting your book. You better make sure it is a damn good book or you’ll have a 7-digit Amazon ranking within a month. I know. I’ve seen it. But don’t get overwhelmed. I’m a newer author and I’m not breaking any records, but I believe these six methods of promotion will help you tremendously, especially if you are in the process of building your platform as I am.

Thanks for reading. What methods have you used to promote your book? How did it turn out? Let me know.

Jeff Bennington, author of REUNION & other thrillers

CLICK THE COVER TO BUY REUNION NOW:

Reunion

And here are more of Jeff’s links:

The Rumblin’ 

Killing the Giants

The Writing Bomb 

www.jeffbennington.com

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06/12/2011 • 3:58 AM 3

Life & book marketing update shouted from a speeding car

Happy Sunday. Things are moving somewhat quickly as I start making transitions to writing full-time. I have a marketing plan: It’s important to be prolific. I believe in being available across as many e-platforms as possible (and zero DRM). Having just one ebook up won’t cut it. Being prolific allows cross-promotion (e.g. You like this? Then you might like to buy that, too!)

Over the coming months I’ll be offering individual short stories (at 0.99 each), a collection of short stories ($1.99 or 2.99, haven’t decided yet), a novella ($1.99) and another collection of short stories with a quirky hook I can market effectively ($2.99). At some point I’ll package the aforementioned individual stories—there are six—in another book (conveniently priced at $2.99 probably.)

There are several full-length novels that are written and need revision before they’re ready to be swallowed by the masses, but most of them are for next year.

A few things about the slingshot launches:

1. I’m doing a soft launch until I have a bunch of ebooks available. Then I’ll be carpet bombing (more details to come in another post on what that means.)

2. I will be launching another website in addition to this one. Chazz Writes is all about writing craft and publishing and I intend to continue. However, I have broader plans for the new website that will expand my mandate and goals. I’ll be talking about a lot of different things on the new site.

3. And I do mean talking. I’ll be incorporating video and podcasts. Fancy plans with pants to match. More on that closer to the new website launch.

4. I want to do  a hard launch of the first novel in my line, but I’m not sure if I can pull it together for Christmas. There are more than the usual variables. For instance, I need to get permissions to use the names of a major Hollywood star and a major porn star. (Yes, I’m familiar with the rules of fair use—and both characters as they appear in the novel are adored by the hero. However, this isn’t a fair use issue. It’s a Smashwords rule issue.)

5. I’m not in the least interested this year in printing books with which to assail bookstores. It’s a lot of work for less reward. It’s an exciting venture I do not, at present, have time to pursue. (And yes, I’ve looked at the numbers.)

6. However, I will need printed Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) for promotional purposes when the hard launch takes off. I’ll be using CreateSpace to print a few sample copies since there is no punishing fee for each revision. For bigger print runs, once the formatting is solidified, I’ll switch to Lightning Source.

If you’re wondering how I’ll get it all done, sometimes I wonder, too. Then I remember that I’m severely underemployed. (Except for the soul-crushing poverty, it’s a fantastic advantage and a real time saver.)

There’s more to the book marketing and promotion plan and I’ll share it with you as soon as I can. In the meantime, back to my editing suite in the batcave beneath the bunker under the Chuck E. Cheese.

Thanks to my buddies Jeff Bennington, author of Reunion, and author Rebecca Senese (look her up, she’s a fountain of short stories), for clarifying my strategy on the issues in #6. Both these lovely people have guest blogged here. You’ll remember Rebecca did a great job summarizing the workings of Smashwords and Jeff compared CreateSpace with Lightning Source. (If you don’t remember their posts, search this site in the search box top right. Sorry! I’d link it for you but I’m in a huge hurry just this minute. I bet you can guess why when you see this tiny portion of my to-do list.)

Jeff tells me he will do me the honour of another guest blog soon. I think the discussion will be about book promotion and what he found effective for his massive push for Reunion. 

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Filed under: authors, blogs & blogging, Books, DIY, e-reader, ebooks, getting it done, Publicity & Promotion, publishing, What about Chazz?, Writers, , , , , , , , , ,

06/06/2011 • 1:05 AM 2

DRM: The Digital Rights Management Scam

At the Writers Union of Canada conference, an author stood to ask a panel the question:

Should authors fight to keep Digital Rights Management?

DRM:  is a term for access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to limit the use of digital content and devices.

Someone from the panel replied that, yes. Authors need DRM to keep the pirates at bay.

I disagree. DRM has two major disadvantages. It keeps customers from enjoying your writing on whatever devices they choose so savvy readers won’t read your book if you’ve slapped the locks on it.

But the panel missed the most important problem with DRM on books: It doesn’t work. If you’ve got a work out there, it’s already cracked. It’s already distributed to pirates. However, it’s not all doom. Pirates were never going to buy your book, anyway. They’re pirates and it’s the pirate life for them.

If you want to protect your work from illegal copying, don’t bother with DRM. Make your book cheap, so cheap it’s not worth a pirate’s time to even think about cracking DRM.

Self-publishers putting out ebooks are 

in the impulse buy, couch change business. 

Pirate 1: Let’s disrespect the author’s work and steal his book! (Editor’s note: Because pirates these days talk like that and rarely say Ar! That’s cliche.)

Pirate 2: It’s like $2.99, dude. Why bother? Why risk a virus to download it from a pirate site?

Pirate 1: But we could read it for free, matey. (Editor’s note: Yes, they say matey. A lot.)

Pirate 2: Look, I’m okay with being a hosebag about enjoying somebody’s work for free, but I’m not going to waste my time. Just one-click it and own it.

Pirate 1: But free’s always better. If I like it, I’ll blog about it and publicize the book. (Editor’s note: I expected more swashbucklin’ talk, too.)

Pirate 2: And if you hate it, you’ll blog longer about it, right? You’ll complain and troll about something you got for free. Pathetic. Listen, order the pizza and we’ll look in your couch for change. You’ll find enough coins under the cushions to buy that book and still tip the pizza delivery guy.

(Editor’s note: This concludes Pirate Unlikely Verbalization of Argument in Conversation Form Theater for today.) 

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Filed under: Books, DIY, ebooks, self-publishing, Writers, writing tips, , ,

Bestseller with over 1,000 reviews!
Winner of the North Street Book Prize, Reader's Favorite, the
Literary Titan Award, the Hollywood Book Festival, and the
New York Book Festival.

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