Happy Samhain to all of you out there. The celebration of the Pagan/Wiccan New Year. May the Blessings of The Goddess fall upon you in the coming year!
I am hoping she blesses me with many book sales! Check out The Legend of the Swamp Witch at Amazon.com and buy one!
Social media
According to most associated with the Indie publishing industry, social media is supposed to be the way to sell books. I am not much of a techy and have only recently been using Facebook to promote my work. I am told Twitter is the way to go, but not familiar with that system at all. I want to sell my books, but I don’t have hours and hours to devote to tweeting and retweeting. I have found sites where I can hire people to do this for me, but that costs money, which I have little to spare on my disability income. It is a vicious circle. Has anyone found a good system yet? I am going to start blocking a few hours each day to devote to social media marketing to see if this helps. It takes away from my writing time, but if I am not selling, why bother writing? Vicious, vicious circle!
content and sex
Outline or not to Outline
Outlining has been a big question in my mind. I did not outline my first Manuscript, The Legend of the Swamp Witch, but had the story in my head for so long that seat of the pants writing seamed to work for me and I had the first draft finished in 60 days. Unfortunately, my writing coach, when he read it, referred to it as a mind dump. When I sat down to begin my new project, which I hope will be a three book series, I thought perhaps I should give outlining a try. I sat down and outlined the complete first book, did character studies of all my major characters, then began writing. I got about 250 pages in, when someone hacked into my machine and deleted my entire file! I was devastated, but realized it gave me the opportunity to fix some mistakes and make some additions. I went back to my outline and made some notes. Then I did some more reading and spoke with my writing coach who recommended I read Randy Ingermanson’s book about the Snowflake method of outlining. I found it very intriguing. It is sort of organized seat of the pants writing. Start with one sentence that describes your book, then a five sentence paragraph, expanding on that sentence, then a two paragraph page expanding on the paragraph. Then you write a synopsis. You just keep building on your basic sentence, developing story and characters. I am trying it for this book.
Lori Beasley Bradley 