Journal blank books, writing prompts, etc. are not in our usual repertoire but sometimes fate hands you a good thing you don’t expect. Sheila Allee’s “All are Free to Write” is one of those. It is a vast improvement over the typical products in the “low-content” genre, and might even be considered a collection of very short stories. Its 52 stories are set up as a prompt for writing something once a week for a year, but unlike most such products, the prompts are not one-line quotes from famous people or motivational meme sentences. Instead, each section is carefully crafted to provide a vignette from the author’s experience and by the end of the year you will know her as well as you anyone but your real lifelong friends (and probably better than many of those, because we don’t share all our secrets, do we?) The book is still useful even if you are not into journaling, because you can certainly use the thought for the week to prompt you on something you are involved with. For instance, the first piece of giving yourself permission to do something other than the daily routine spurred a business blog post on the need for companies to make investments in “sharpening the saw” if they wanted to stay competitive in a fast-moving world.
Category Archives: Writing and publishing
3 Weird Marketing Secrets of Successful Authors on Amazon
This is a very useful reference for Amazon authors. While the secrets are not particularly weird (or, for that matter, particularly secret), you don’t often find them all nicely bundled into one place, and Shaun Hibbs isn’t pushing any products.
It can be applied to revitalize the track record of an existing book or to help the launch of a new book;perhaps the most profound observation is to consider writing the online book description first and then making the book fulfill that commitment, thereby keeping its focus on what the reader wanted to get out of it instead of diving down into irrelevant rabbit-holes.
The book provides a fairly thorough description of how to go about setting a book up for success on the Amazon platform, with step-by-step instructions for key activities such as identifying current on-line search trends and hints when going through the Amazon publishing steps. Those instructions, where they apply to automated tasks, are in some cases better than those offered by the makers of the tools.
If you learn nothing else, the fact that Amazon only offers you about 40% of their actual categories, and the explanation of how to get at the rest which may be better sellers for your particular book, are worth the price of admission.
Shaun is not flogging any product, and some of the tools he points out are free, but I will say that KDP Rocket (which I do own) is an indispensable way of doing in minutes the tasks described here that would otherwise take many hours to accomplish yourself.