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Marketing 101: Creating a Strategy — Guest: Jennifer Fusco

Dart board target with text: Marketing Strategies to Find Target Audiences

Whether we want to push our publishers to live up to their marketing promises, hire a marketing team, or do all of our promotion on our own, the best way to make sure things work out the way we want is to be informed. To help educate us, Jennifer Fusco, author and marketing expert, gives a rundown on the basic marketing strategies.

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March 26, 2015

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How to Punch Up a Blurb or Query — Guest: Julie Glover

Fist punching into water with text: Punch Up Your Blurb!

No matter how we publish, we have to come up with a great book description. Queries and blurbs have always been my weak point, so I asked my editors at each stage of the editing process for help. Julie Glover’s here today with tips for how to go from good to great.

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March 5, 2015

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The Perils of a “Dead” Genre

Black and white image of dead tree with text: What Should We Do with a Dead Genre?

It’s been almost a week since my release of Unintended Guardian, and I’ve been getting lots of questions about how I made my decisions for what to do with my books. Let’s start at the beginning: How did I decide on my publishing path? For that, we have to go back to when I first started on my writing career path.

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March 3, 2015

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Story Engineering

Master the 6 Core Competencies of Successful Writing — and learn about story structure too

February 18, 2015

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Should Our Protagonist Be in the First Scene?

A face hidden by a hoodie with text: When Should Readers Meet the Protagonist?

Most stories open with the protagonist on page one, but every once in a while, our story seems to work best if we start with another character. If we understand why the protagonist usually works best as the point-of-view character for the first page, we might be able to remake those exceptions into stronger openings.

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February 17, 2015

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How to Get Our Thoughts onto the Page

Illustration of a brain with text: Sharing Our Ideas with Readers

Probably no one can claim to be an expert at making sure the cool character in our head makes it onto the page. We can only guess at how readers will interpret what we tell them. Advice can help us share our brain with our readers as much as possible, but the process will never—ever—be completely clean.

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January 29, 2015

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Balancing Conflict in Romance Stories

Surfboarder balancing on a wave with text: Balancing Conflict in Romance

One of my commenters asked a great question last week that gets to the heart of the balancing game we have to play when writing romance. The characters have to be perfect enough for each other to make a believable couple, but there also has to be enough conflict between them to sustain a story.

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January 22, 2015

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Wrapping Up the Year: What Didn’t Work?

Arrow crashing down with text: What Didn't Work for Us?

I want us all to have an even better year in 2015, so we might need to work on our weaknesses or identify what didn’t work for us this past year. What decisions, processes, or priorities held us back? The better we understand ourselves, the more likely we are to know how to succeed in the future.

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December 30, 2014

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Are Multimedia Books a “Game Changer”?

Green light in a tunnel with text: Is Multimedia the Future of Books?

In any profession, we have to stay on top of industry changes, and publishing is no different. Recent stories have stated multimedia ebooks are the future of fiction, so it’s in our best interest to learn whether storytelling will evolve into multimedia ebooks as the primary medium.

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December 4, 2014

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