Archive for 2015

Elyria 5th-grade teacher Dawn Neely Randall finally spoke out over fears of reprisal against the 20 hours of tests designed for Ohio public school students.

From her Facebook post:

Well, I did it. I addressed our school board. I had packets for each member as well as our superintendent and walked them through sample PARCC passages that had no clear articulation through the grades and shared with them information straight from the website that proved that the maturity matrix of many passages were well beyond the students’ grade levels.

Randall encouraged the school board to stand up to Columbus and for Elyria students. The Lorain County Chronicle featured her story here.

Last week, we talked about how marketing begins with your target audience.

While my experience is largely with non-fiction, one of my favorite comments came from athenap about marketing fiction:

With fiction, you’re offering an experience. An entertainment experience, to be exact. So you have to create a question in your target audience’s mind. “What would happen if an entire world’s survival hinged on one short, hairy-footed guy who liked to throw jewelry into a volcano?” or “Hey, what’s that space princess doing in prison, who’s looking for these lost droids, and where did that small moon come from?”

I would never have thought about it this way, but this is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve seen about writing fiction. If you know your question and who it might intrigue, you know your target audience and have a leg up on how to generate interest and market your book.

Along these lines, I thought today I’d talk about five resources I found useful to help connect you and your book with your audience.

Chris Christie said on Monday: You know it’s much more important what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official. And that’s what we do. But I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the […]

Last week, skywriter published an excellent piece recommending indy publishers consider both CreateSpace and IngramSpark. It’s a great read and the follow-up discussion was also extremely valuable.

In a poll at the end, skywriter asked about the hardest part of self-publishing and two themes emerged: writing the book and marketing the book.

We’ll be getting to the marketing aspect, it’s the hardest part for me as well. First though, I wanted to talk about a realization that helped me get past a few of my writing hurdles.

This realization was that writing and design are not two separate things. They influence each other. You want the layout to complement the text and the text to work with the design. You want something aesthetically beautiful, whatever beautiful means for the work that you’re creating.

Once thinking about the writing became thinking about the design, the writing became much easier – it was just another aspect of the design.

Layout and typesetting are other critical components. This is why I’d highly recommend using a professional layout program. Or, as I’m going to recommend, LaTeX.

I am a former news reporter. These days I work as a book shepherd, editing and designing print and digital books for authors. Doing so keeps me mostly out of trouble and able to pay some of the bills some of the time.

Akadjian asked me if I’d guest host this week and talk about strategies for publishing and choosing between IngramSpark and Amazon CreateSpace.