Skip to content

Tag: Amazon

Supporting Indie Authors

Supporting Indie Authors

Supporting Indie Authors – do you do it? And if so, exactly how do you do it?

I am published, and one issue that comes up, time and again, concerns how people can go about supporting indie authors. In particular, friends and family far removed from the business of writing or social media or public relations or marketing or the like still want to help out.

And for the writers, who may feel strange suggesting or requesting such support, I hope this little guide can do just that. Instead of asking, perhaps they can simply point to this blog post.

The #1 Way You Can Support An Independent Author

This one’s easy. Buy their book! Which version? Any version!

However, authors might get better percentages of the take with a particular format. If that is the case, and you don’t mind which format you purchase, you can always ask your friend the writer. While we always want you to buy the book (and a sale beats out no sale), if we have our druthers and it really makes a difference, it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask.

The #2 Way To Support Independent Authors

So once you’ve bought the book, a fantastic way of supporting indie authors even more is to provide an honest review. Amazon, Smashwords, and many publisher sites provide a means of reviewing novels and other creative works. Be sure to review where you purchased the book.

Why? Because then you can be listed with verified purchase next to your name. This adds considerably more credibility to your review (and some places require it now).

The Sum and Substance of Your Review

What should you say in your review? If you loved the book, say so. If it was a decent read but not your cup of tea, say that as well, as it’s honest, fair, and remains supportive. After all, not everyone loves the same thing. If you’re not in the demographic group the work is aimed at, then no problem. You gave it the old college try and that’s just fantastic. The longer the review then, generally, the better.

Specific references to events in the book, without giving away spoilers, really help. E. g. something like: I loved the character of ___. She was believably vulnerable.

Negative Reviews

What if you hated the book? Should you lie? Absolutely not – and, I might add, don’t lie even if the author has specifically asked for positive reviews only (an unethical request, by the way). However, if the book stinks (I’ve read books that have made me want to burn people’s computers, they were so horrible, so I know exactly where you’re coming from), then you have the following options:

  1. Don’t post the review at all, and say nothing to the author.
  2. Don’t post the review at all, but mention it to the author. However be prepared for, potentially, some negative push-back, in particular if that person specifically requested just positive reviews. You can sweeten the pot by offering some other assistance (see below for other things you can do to help).
  3. Post a short review. Reviews don’t have to be novel-length! You can always write something like Interesting freshman effort from indie author ____ (the writer’s name goes in the blank). There ya go. Short, semi-sweet, and you’re off the hook. Unless the book utterly bored you, the term interesting works. If the book was absolutely the most boring thing you have ever read, then you can go with valiant or unique (so long as the work isn’t plagiarized) instead of interesting. Yes, you have just damned with faint praise. But sometimes faint praise is the only kind you can give out.

Really going negative

  1. Post a negative review. However, be prepared for your friendship to, potentially, end. Yet is that the worst thing, ever? I’m not saying to be mean. Don’t be mean and don’t take potshots at a person’s character or personality. This is about the book and not about your relationship with the person (although it can sometimes turn into that. But keep the review about the creative work only). However, if the friendship means more to you, then seriously consider options #1 or #2 instead.

Furthermore, many sites have star systems. Adding stars (even a single star) is helpful as this signals to readers that there is at least some interest in the piece.

The #3 Way to Support an Independent Author

Post and/or share the links to either the creative work or the author’s website, blog, Facebook Author page, or Amazon Author page, onto social media. This method is free and anyone can do it. This means tweets, Facebook shares, Pinterest repinning, or Tumblr reblogging.

Plus it’s clicking ‘like’ on Instagram, voting up a book trailer on YouTube or adding it to a playlist, mentioning the book in your status on LinkedIn, or sharing the details with your followers on TikTok, and more. Every time you provide these sorts of social signals to social media sites, the content goes to more people and you are supporting indie authors.

Without spending a dime, and barely lifting a finger, you can provide a great deal of help.

The #4 Way to Support Independent Authors

Be sure to follow your friends’ Amazon Author pages, and their blogs. Hit ‘like’ on their Facebook Author pages and follow them on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. There are agents who give more weight to indies with larger social media followings. You can hate the book but still follow the author.

You can also work some magic in person. Show up to any signings or discussions, even if you just drink coffee and don’t participate. Ask for the book at your local library or bookstore. Read the paper version in public (train stations are really great for that sort of thing). And you can also talk to your friends, or email them about the work.

Consider your audience, and don’t just spam your friends. However if your writer pal has written, say, a Christian-themed love story, then how about sending the link to your friend who has a son studying to be a pastor?

If your friend is local, try contacting your local paper and asking if they’d do a profile on the writer. They can always say no, but sometimes reporters are hunting around for short feel-good locally-specific blurbs. It never hurts to ask.

The #5 Way You Can Start Supporting Independent Authors

Here’s where it gets to be a time investment. Help them. A lot of serious authors ask questions about all manner of things, in order to perform proper research. Can you help with that? Do you have personal experience, or are you good at Googling?

You can also act as a beta reader when you’re supporting indie authors. Beta readers read either the entire draft or a portion of it or sometimes just the first chapter or even character bios. Here’s where you can be a lot freer with criticism, as this is all private.

Is the mystery too easy to solve? The character names are confusing? Or the protagonist isn’t described clearly? The scenario is improbable? Then tell the writer. This isn’t correcting their grammar or their spelling (although it sometimes can be). Instead, this is giving them valuable feedback which will help them become better.

As always, be kind. This is your friend’s baby, after all. But if you can’t tell the difference between Susan and Suzanne in the story, then other readers probably wouldn’t be able to, either. Better that that is fixed before the book is released, than afterwords.

Final Thoughts on Supporting Indie Authors

The life of a writer can be a rather topsy-turvy one. You’re high on good reviews, and then you get one bad one and it depresses you. You write like the wind for weeks, and then you edit it and it feels like it’s garbage. Or you get writer’s block, or life gets in the way.

Sometimes the best thing you can do, as a friend, is to just listen, and be there.

12 Comments

The Weird World of Being Published

What is The Weird World of Being Published?

Published? Me?

Well, yeah, actually.

I suppose, in the back of my mind, when I was first starting to write (age four or five or thereabouts), I had an idea about becoming a published author. I also wanted to, at times, be a cowgirl, a veterinarian, an archaeologist and other things. Becoming, for real, published, makes up one weird world.

So, sit down, and let me tell you all about it.

Origins Story

No, I was not bitten by a radioactive spider.

For probably any aspiring author, the road is a long one. When I first started writing, it constituted what you would now refer to as graphic fiction. I was a child and so I would draw little figures in addition to a few words. As I got older, the words began to dominate, and I have never written, as an adult, a graphic novel.

Maybe I should one of these days. Except my visual artistic endeavors have not truly developed beyond what they were when I was in grade school. So, maybe not.

I wrote fan fiction for a while and then began to migrate over to wholly original fiction. Furthermore, I had wanted to write for NaNoWriMo back in 2012, but I did not have a decent idea that year.

I also wanted to make what I wrote wholly original fiction. In 2013, I was fortunate enough to come up with a great idea and so Untrustworthy was born.

I submitted it to a contest held by Riverdale Avenue Books and was lucky enough when they chose me as the winner in February of 2014. My thanks, of course, goes out to the wonderful people there, particularly Lori Perkins and Don Weise.

The Start of the Wild Ride of Publishing

I took a few months for things to really start clicking along. Lori was busy, other submissions came in, plus of course they had a business to run. I was in school at Quinnipiac and so, while I noticed the time passing, I was okay with it.

In November, Lori contacted me and we started to get down to the nitty gritty. This included editing the manuscript. It also included getting together a blurb about me and getting an established person in the business to review my book (a thousand thanks to Cecilia Tan!), and deciding on a cover.

I felt that the aliens in my novel would be too difficult to draw, and making up a model like them would be costly (such things are at issue if you’re a first-time author, folks) and wouldn’t necessarily evoke my vision.

Hence I instead suggested an image of broken glass. Adding to that effect were the concepts that (a) the moon, Wecabossia, would be nearly the same size as Caboss, so it would be rather large in the sky and readily observable during daylight hours, and (b) the Cabossians breathe methyl salicylate, or wintergreen oil.

Those gave the cover designer (the incomparable Scott Carpenter) some design elements and ideas to work with. I truly love the cover and how the huge moon gives a sense of foreboding as the one broken window amidst a mass of perfection is a nagging hint that something’s not quite right.

Note, by the way, that there is a newer cover, meant to evoke The Handmaid’s Tale as Untrustworthy is cut from fairly similar cloth.

Nuts and Bolts

A ton of strange things happen when you are published. For one, you need an Amazon Author page! But you can’t make one until your book is actually for sale on Amazon, in any format. Furthermore, Amazon’s many domains have different rules. You can make author pages on Amazon.com (the US), Amazon.co.uk (the UK), Amazon.fr (France), Amazon.de (Germany), and Amazon.co.jp (Japan).

Amazon Author pages exist on Amazon.ca (Canada), but you can’t change them! For Amazon.it (Italy) and others, there are no Author pages. I hope Amazon makes this feature more uniform across the board.

As for what to put into your Author page, you need a good recent headshot of yourself (mine comes from four years ago; I could use a newer one) and links to things like your Twitter stream and your blog RSS, if any.

For works available in countries with non-English native tongues, you might want to have a trusted friend help you with translations (or do them yourself, if you’re able to). Trusting Google Translate is not in your best interests. Get a native speaker.

Autographing

Dealing with autographing books is interesting when someone hundreds of miles away asks you to do this. I’ll pass along this tip from New York Times bestselling author Dayton Ward: arrange it all through PayPal. For him, the best way to take care of this means to collect the cost of the book and two types of postage: one goes to his home or a post office box, and the other goes to the fan’s location.

I’ll add to this – if it’s a person you know, and you don’t mind giving out your address (or if you have a PO box I suppose your relationship with them would be moot anyway), have them have Amazon (or Barnes & Noble, wherever your book is available in dead tree format) ship the book directly to that location. Then all you need to collect is return postage.

Conceivably, someone who doesn’t want to work with PayPal could even supply a money order and slip it in the mail to your PO box.

Reviews are gold and you need them. But how do you get them? If your friends are buying your work, once they say they’ve finished, ask them to write you a review. Reviews can be short – a five-word sentence is better than nothing. There are also book bloggers. Do your research and find some that are (a) semi-available, (b) write decent, unbiased, honest, and constructive reviews, and (c) read your genre.

Oh, and bad reviews? Not fun but don’t be discouraged! For many brand-new authors, having unmitigatingly positive reviews and five stars all over the place feels, well, kind of suspect. But a bad review, here and there, and a single star or no stars will help you. Because readers will see the reviews as being far more authentic.

Takeaways for Being Published

It’s all rather satisfying but also a tad freaky. Every now and then, I just want to run around screaming – I’m a published author!

‘Cause I am, you know.

5 Comments

How to Create a Writer Website: Writer SEO

No one will know about your awesome writer website if you don’t start to pay attention to writer SEO.

And without all the connections on your website you could be making, guess what happens? You miss will out on sales. And you may also miss out on places where you can appear and promote your book. Or libraries where you can have your book.

Note: this is an overview and not the details of any form of SEO, even writer SEO. That would take up a few hundred blog posts at least.

Why Does Writer SEO Matter?

Have you ever wondered how and why the results you get in a search are in the order they’re in? Yes, some of this has to do with paid advertising. But budgets are not infinite. Or, at least, they aren’t for most of us.

But SEO is, in a way, a form of free advertising. Optimizing for search means your post gets placed further up on search results. And that’s good. But is it good enough?

Page 1 or Die

Writer SEO - Sweet Brown saying, ain't nobody got time for that, illustrating the concept of writer SEO
Preach, Sweet Brown.

We live in a hurry-up, impatient, “ain’t nobody got time for that” world. And a good 90% or more of us never bother with the second page of search results!

So, while positive changes in position are nothing to sneeze at, they do not truly matter unless you’re on page 1 of results.

If that seems unfair, odd, and maybe even a reason why the human race is doomed, well, I’m with ya on that.

Yet our preferences do not matter.

Ads Are Outta Control!

But… there’s one problem with writer SEO or really any kind of SEO. We’re all gunning for page 1. And that means that the competition is fierce.

There’s you, me, and large corporations with insanely big budgets. There are people who’ve been doing SEO since before it had a name (or at least it feels that way).  So, how do you compete?

I Got an Itch for a Niche

Exxon is enormous! Their annual ad budget may very well be more than everything I have ever made in my life. And probably ever will.

But they’re not competing in the writing space. Even if their CEO decided to write a book, they would not be my competition. And they might not even really be my competition if their CEO decides to try their hand at writing something in the exact same genre as me.

Is James Patterson my competition? Well, not exactly. Yes, we are both writers. But that’s where the comparison stops. Now, Patterson does write science fiction. But are we really in direct competition? For one thing, a lot of his sci fi stuff is aimed at teens. Mine … is not.

So, maybe I don’t have to worry about him, or at least not too much. Same with JK Rowling and Stephen King, particularly as they don’t really write in my genre.

I’ve Got a Niche to Scratch

Amazon is great about having separate categories which match a ton of niches. Consider horror. Even if vampires, werewolves, wendigos, mummies, and serial killers were all in the same novel or film, so what? They all still have their own sub-niches (if you will) within horror.

Science fiction has a number of well-known niches:

  • Space opera – this is like Star Trek. My novel The Enigman Cave fits this niche, as it’s also following people on a spaceship.
  • Dystopian – this is like Ready Player One. My novels Mettle and Untrustworthy both fit this niche, even though they’re set in different places.
  • Science fiction noir – this is like Blade Runner or I, Robot, where cops and science fiction mix. My Obolonk and Time Addicts trilogies both fit. This is not a large genre and Amazon does not have it as a filter. But the good news is that there might not be a lot of competition…
  • Time travel – this is like the old TV show, The Time Tunnel. Time Addicts fits this niche.
  • Historical science fiction – now, this one’s tricky.

Issues with Historical Science Fiction

Science fiction isn’t normally set too far in the past. Even Stranger Things just goes back to the 1980s.

Without getting into Steampunk, one of the only examples I can think of are the films Time After Time (where HG Wells himself has to chase Jack the Ripper in the modern era) and Somewhere in Time (1970s playwright Richard Collier goes to the turn of the 20th century via hypnosis and falls in love with actress Elise McKenna).

In both stories, someone in the present is writing about the past. It makes sense that it would be a vehicle for a time travel story.

My Real Hub of the Universe trilogy fits this niche of a niche, which is so small that Amazon doesn’t list it as a genre (although at least GoodReads does!). And looking it up often means you find science fiction books written earlier in history, such as The Island of Dr. Moreau.

As a result, when you put that kind of work onto Amazon or the like, your tags and keywords had better be pitch-perfect and utterly on point.

Your Writer Website and Your Niche(s)

I’m not the only author who writes in more than one niche. In fact, many authors who do so will use a pen name or even several pen names.

So, for someone like me, writer SEO means looking at competition in all of these niches. And it means looking at the keywords which the more successful posts (the ones at the top of search, which don’t necessarily belong to bestselling authors) are using.

Keyword Research for Writer SEO

People who do SEO for a living are researching keywords pretty much all the time. It’s a fancy way of trying to determine what people are looking for. If you can give it to them, then you want them to be able to find you. The closer what’s on your website matches their search, the higher up (usually) your content will be in search engine results.

Google’s mission is to match seeker and website owner as closely as possible. Because if a person has a good experience with Google, they’re more likely to use Google than, say, Bing. As a result, Google can charge more for its advertising (and yes, unfortunately, paid ads are dominating the first page of search results. So page 2 can get some love after all—but never settle for anything lower).

Synonyms and Intent

To use an example a different form of art, consider film. Or cinema. AKA movies. Or pictures. AKA Hollywood or Bollywood or the Oscars or BAFTA awards, etc.

What is the difference in intent between these two searches:

  • movie for kids not Disney
  • classic cinema for children

Now, they both pull up lists of movies for the younger set. But the first is more likely to pull up articles about The Land Before Time, whereas the latter might pull up blog posts about The Red Balloon. Between the two searches, the first is more likely to pull up animation, too.

Now consider your books. I’ll use the Time Addicts trilogy as an example.

  • time travel with robots
  • science fiction noir in the far future

Both searches would fit this trilogy. The first gets a lot more hits. But the latter pulls up much more closely-related stuff. And if I change the first one to time travel with aliens (which would also fit Time Addicts), it gets me TV programs about ancient aliens.

What’s a better set of keyword phrases (kwps) to target? Probably some mix of these:

  • science fiction noir
  • sci fi noir
  • science fiction set in the far future
  • time travel noir (although currently there are two kinds of returns on this search which are coming up a lot)

Writer SEO, Searches, and Your Buyer Persona

Who’s your ideal reader? Your ideal customer? You have got to market directly to them. And you will need to write your blog and pages, etc. with that person in mind. If your ideal reader didn’t finish high school, then a term like movies is more likely to work than cinema. And if your ideal reader is female, you may want to toss in terms like feminism or strong female character.

If your ideal reader is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, then you will need to use terms which will apply—but I would caution you to be careful here. Terms evolve quickly. What was acceptable in 1999 is not necessarily going to fly in 2023. And for God’s sake, don’t try to reclaim a slur unless you would be a subject of said slur.

Writer SEO: Takeaways

Like I said above, this barely scratches the surface. Try tools like Keywordtool.io, answerthepublic.com, and MarketMuse (or Surfer SEO, Ubersuggest, or AhRefs) for more advanced ways to better target your ideal reader.

Want More of Writer Website Development?

If my post on website speed resonates with you, then be sure to check out my other articles about how to create a writer website.

Writer Website Development

Next article


Get your author website going the smart way and use SEO! #amwriting

Leave a Comment