Growing Your Mailing List with Instafreebie

December 21, 2016December 1, 2017 / kimberleycooperblog / 7 Comments

Welcome to the Cow Pasture, Guest Contributor, Kimberley Cooper – Kimberley Cooper Blog

Firstly, thanks to Sheila for giving me the chance to chat with the folks that visit her blog. Nice to meet you all. I’m based in the UK, so please excuse any spellings and expressions that you might not be familiar with.

Ok, so this isn’t a ‘how to’ as much as a ‘what happened and can anyone else benefit?’

Probably like most of us who like to write, but even more, would like to get a little money in for our efforts, sales have been so-so. Enough that the tax man wants to know but not enough to make an appreciable dent in the monthly bills.

So now, with two novels in the bag, a novella, and two short story collections, it seemed like a good time to take a month off writing and concentrate on promotion. Because hey, writing is one side of the coin, but letting people know that you’ve written something that they may (or may not) be interested in, is the other.

I’m an avid user of Facebook. I keep my private page and my writing page pretty separate, and that works well. In late October on my private page, up pops details of Instafreebie. And me, being always keen on a bargain noticed one word. FREE. So I had to click, didn’t I? But being hopeful and untrusting in equal measure I also had to see for myself that there didn’t appear to be a catch (I haven’t found one.)

You can set up a package that doesn’t cost you anything. I tried this for a few days, and it means you can give away copies of one of your books (you decide how many copies or when to end the giveaway). Originally that was my intention – give away a few copies and hope people liked what they read and then bought some of my other stuff from Amazon. But after a couple of days when I’d given away close to a hundred copies, it occurred to me I was missing a trick. This option doesn’t allow you to collect the email addresses of the people downloading your book. And if those people didn’t head over to Amazon, I’d lost them forever.
So I went to the next level of Instafreebie. Currently, $20 a month allows me to link Mailchimp to my Instafreebie account, and between them, I get to record who is downloading my book. And then I can email them directly with what else I can offer. And write off the cost against tax.
There was another piece of advice I picked up on growing your mailing list, from Facebook – offer more. Don’t just offer the minimum you can get away with, but more. So I sent a ‘welcome’ email to everyone who joined my mailing list via Instafreebie/Mailchimp and offered a free copy of my quirky dark fantasy novella Adventures of a Girl Death Demon. And readers contacted me in droves. I had some great back and forth conversations via email with some, and YES, more sales started appearing on my KDP dashboard and Createspace account.
So that’s a result for me. As is the hundreds of people on my mailing list that I wouldn’t have had, that I can email when I have new content to offer. And setting up an account with Instafreebie gave me a chance to join their closed Facebook group which coordinates promotion of books so that you benefit from a much wider audience, potentially.

So, am I pleased to have done it? Oh yes. The first promotion that I took part in has finished, but I’m still seeing new subscribers joining my mailing list at almost 50 a day. And I’ve joined another promotion which is more long-term, so I hope that will steadily raise my numbers further.

I haven’t got any connection with Instafreebie or Mailchimp; this is just the experience of how it’s been for me. Yours may well be different. But it might be worth a go … whatever you decide, good luck, and here are links that you might find useful.

www.instafreebie.com

www.mailchimp.com

If you enjoyed Kimberley’s post, let her know, and as always, I’d love to hear from you. Talk to me. Tell me your story and look for me on Facebook at SheilaMGood, Pinterest, Bloglovin, Twitter@sheilamgood, Contently, and Instagram. You can follow my reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

3 Electric Ways TV can Defibrillate your Writer’s Block

December 16, 2016December 1, 2017 / kalanleitch / 2 Comments

CPC Guest Contributor, K. Alan.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with television. I dreamed of the day that I could watch my choice of any TV show, at any time I wished. Now, that day has arrived, and I have discovered that it is a classic Chinese Curse: something for which I should never have wished. The temptation to watch the fiction on that electricity-powered device too often distracts me from the fiction I should be writing.

More recently, however, I have managed to use television, film and Internet video to motivate my writing on those days when nothing will flow. Perhaps as an exercise in proving my mother wrong, here are three strategies for using electronic video to shock your Muse back into pumping creativity.

Defibrillate by novelizing: Whether we admit it or not, nearly everyone remembers moments when we were tickled, traumatized or terrified by something we watched in a film. Find that video, by searching online or breaking out your old-school DVDs, and watch some of the scenes that move you two or three times. By providing narrative to describe those scenes, and working the screenplay’sdialogue into it, you may find that you are describing emotions and settings in ways that can be adapted into your own work.
Of course, there is no shame in novelization, even professionally: in fact, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers is entirely committed to this work. For us, though, adapting a scene or two into narrative form is meant to more quickly and more simply “grease the wheels” of your own original fiction.
Defibrillate by franchising: A novel franchise is an original story based on characters and situations invented elsewhere. In fact, fanfiction.net features a range of storytelling (some of which is surprisingly good) usually written under a Creative Commons License that prohibits selling the work. Some of your work might even end up there—somewhere in my own files are original Star Trek and Columbo novels—but our purpose today is, again, simply to help with Writers’ Block.
Franchising can help inspire you! By writing an original scene or two featuring your favorite film or series, you are removing some of the cognitive load associated with characterization, setting, and even planning in general. All that’s left is the writing, and the momentum of that writing might open doorways into your own work. Write a scene as though it was missing from your show. Who knows? Maybe it was!
How would Frasier interact with your characters?

Defibrillate a ‘throwaway chapter’ using crossover: Recently, I submitted my NaNoWriMo project, Death Imitates Art, to the Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition. This put me under a tight deadline: so tight, in fact, that I knew one day I just didn’t have time to be stuck on a chapter. When my protagonist, Eloise, was conflicted about her mother’s mental illness, I asked myself a simple question: “How would Doctor Frasier Crane explain it to her?”

Within an hour or two, I had completed a chapter featuring Kelsey Grammer’s famed character interacting with mine and explaining how the illness affected Mara. I knew I could never use this chapter—it would be grossly illegal—but the dialogue that it generated in the other characters became some of the most important signposts of my premise. More importantly, once Frasier was gone, I just kept writing.

Of course, your mother was right, as mothers usually are: too much television, or video… or Internet… is damaging not just to our eyes, but to our creativity. If you can tell the difference, though—if you can see that fine line—then the border between inspiration and obsession might be just the place that cures your Writer’s Block.

Unashamed, then, I thank goodness for my TV.

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Write Who You Know

December 6, 2016November 25, 2016 / wendyunsworth / 2 Comments

Welcome to the Cow Pasture Guest Contributor, Wendy Unsworth – Wendy Unsworth, Books & more

Image source Pixabay

The accepted advice to writers is very often, write what you know and when I first heard it I thought it made a lot of sense. It still does make sense, sort of…
Bookshelves are peppered with court-room dramas penned by ex-lawyers, police procedural by cops and war stories by ex-military personnel. I can see how that works. Budding writers with this kind of background have a flying start, they know things that us ordinary mortals don’t know. They can write a very convincing and authoritative line on criminal profiling or surface-to-air missiles.

But what about the rest of us? I, for example, have been lucky to travel a lot and live in very different parts of the world. I’ve had a few different jobs, raised a family. But I haven’t been into outer space and I’ve never professionally (or otherwise – I hasten to add) dissected a human being. So does that preclude me from Sci-Fi and stories that require an insider’s description of a mortuary?

No, it doesn’t, but it does mean that if I want to write a credible story about a geeky young scientist who seems like a total fruitcake but whose genius is going to save the world from a mega-quake, I’m going to have a harder job than if I had just retired from on a dazzling career in seismology. I would need to do my research extremely thoroughly. No problem. Writers do that all the time. Writers create worlds and whether it is a contemporary concrete jungle or a kingdom, so far away that nobody has heard of it (yet), ravaged by marauding dragons, they have to get it right.

So, if knowing your fictional world, with its landscape and its skill-set is not necessarily a pre-requisite but, we accept, can also be achieved by careful research and understanding, is there anything else that a writer must vitally know?
The answer for me is yes. I need to know my characters, inside out, upside down, backward and forwards. I need to know what they would do if…

With time and perseverance, I can gather the knowledge I need to create the landscape of my story. I can read other books, I can google it, I can watch YouTube and I can ask people in the know. But if I really want my story to come alive I must get to know the characters who walk there, as only I can. These are my people, I don’t want to introduce them to the world if they are still strangers to me. And knowing them, I need to be true to them every time, no matter how much their refusal to go down into the deep, dark cellar while the wind howls and the lightning flashes, messes with the plot. I need to be absolutely sure that their actions and reactions are theirs and not mine and I need to respect that.
Know who you write. This is my mantra. When an author truly knows his or her characters they leap out of the page and stalk the reader right through to The End. They are memorable. They make us, the reader, think, question, admire, loathe.

And that’s what all writers want. (readers too!)

If you enjoyed Wendy’s post, let her know, at wendyunsworth.com, and as always, I’d love to hear from you. Talk to me. Tell me your story and look for me on Facebook at SheilaMGood, Pinterest, Bloglovin, Twitter@sheilamgood, Contently, and Instagram. You can follow my reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.