Author: Melody Spier

Every writer needs to have a support system in place during the writing process. They also benefit from having constructive criticism from others. This keeps them on track and makes sure their results will grab the interests of publishers and readers. But there are downsides to joining a critique group as well.

Pros of Writer’s Critique Group

There are many positives associated with joining writer groups. Depending on your writing niche or genre, you may want to get several trusted people to critique it to help you edit the content and make adjustments. But there are many other benefits, as seen below.

• Sharing and exchanging your knowledge of writing. You learn from others and can share your knowledge to help others.
• You build a sense of community and encourage friendships to grow. While writing is a sole endeavor, it can be lonely. Joining a writer’s group helps you build connections.
• Group members can help you learn the business side of writing.
• You can get free editing and proofreading of your work in a writer’s critique group. This helps you makes needed changes before moving onto the editing process.
• You get valuable feedback from other writers on your own work. The feedback is constructive and authentic, so you know what is working and what needs to be deleted or changed. Critiquing other people’s writing helps you see where you might need to improve your own writing.
• Critique groups give you the opportunity to connect with editors or agents or illustrators if you need them.
• A critique group can provide the guidance and encouragement that makes the writing process more productive and more fun. Or you learn from more experienced members about promoting your books.
• You can get help from other members with your story when writer’s block hits you.

Cons of Writer’s Critique Groups

There are many positives for joining a writer’s critique group but there are some downsides as well including:

• They can consume a lot of your time when you could be writing instead. There are meetings to attend as well as time spent analyzing other people’s work.
• There can be some difficult personality clashes. As with any group of passionate people, personalities tend to clash. Think about how you’ll react and if you can brush off the ones who don’t meld well with you. Do you want more drama in your life?
• Most critique groups will have at least one person who is the self-appointed grammar police. They seem to focus solely on grammar and spelling. Be prepared for their input even when you’re discussing story development in your first draft.
• There will be mini power struggles over who is in charge and who decides what you’ll do in your meetings.
• The programs might be too strict, with specific exercises on specific nights and may not be helpful to you.
• In the end the choice is yours to make after you weigh the pros and cons of joining a writer’s critique group.

Even with the negative aspects of joining a writing group, the pros are hard to ignore. Join a local group or create your own group if there isn’t a local one or join an online group. Just remember every writing group is different. There is likely to be one that fits most of your needs, either locally or online.

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When you feel creative you are inspired to write. The words and ideas flow easily from your mind to your hands. But sometimes creativity stagnates. Your creativity and ideas seem to get stuck no matter what you do. You can’t force creativity so don’t push yourself too much. But there are several ways you can get back on track.

One way to restore your creativity is to write something other than what you normally would. For example, if you normally write fiction romance try writing a short sci-fi story. If you normally write business marketing materials, let your creativity free by free writing a fictional story in paranormal genre.

Letting your subconscious work freely is the way to jumpstart your creativity. Don’t force it. Creativity comes only when you open-up. Take it easy and let your mind wander to see what comes.

Challenge yourself by giving writing in a different genre you don’t know well. Try writing about an event from your life in the style of the genre, for example as a crime fiction story. This gets your mind thinking differently and opens the door to restore your creativity.

Write poetry for a day instead of your normal genre. Poetry can be a great way to enhance your creativity simply by being silly in your rhyming or from the short sentences you write in a poem. Poetry doesn’t have to make sense, but it does have to be creative.

Another way to restore your creativity is to journal. This is simply another form of writing, but it lets you sharpen your powers of observation. When you are attuned with the world around you, you see things more creatively.

Push yourself to describe places you visit in detail. Who lives there? How do they look? What are they wearing? What do they smell like? What type of food or plants, architecture, or animals do you see? Record conversations you have with people you meet. This helps to open-up your senses allowing in creative thoughts and descriptions.

Freewriting is another option to consider. Freewriting is a creative writing technique where you write without any prescribed structure, no outline, cards, notes or any other editorial oversight. You simply follow the impulses of your mind, allowing your thoughts and inspiration to flow as you write. The piece doesn’t have to have a real story. It can be random thoughts, from one to the next. It might be unusable material, but it helps to restore your creativity.

One way to do freewriting, or any writing to get the creativity flowing, is to listen to music. Classical style works best. Let your mind relax and just listen to the music. Let it inspire you to write whatever comes to mind. The first time you free write, you may end up with mostly unusable material, but it helps to reawaken your creativity.

It might seem silly to do some of these things. After all, you aren’t working on what you want or need to be. But it’s amazing how these simple changes in what you’re writing can cure your creative block and make writing exciting again.

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 When you are ready to publish your book, you have many options on what type you use. The same is true when it comes to marketing your book. And where you sell your book. Kindle Unlimited is one of those options.

Kindle Unlimited is the book subscription service for Amazon. KDP Select is the program authors enroll in that allows Amazon exclusive rights to sell your eBook in the Kindle store only, including offering the book in Kindle Unlimited program.

Kindle Unlimited Advantages for Authors

When you publish your book on Amazon’s KDP, Amazon makes your book available through Kindle Unlimited. This can help you get your book in front to a larger audience. This is especially helpful if you are a new author or you are a fiction author looking to build out a book series. Like most things, there are pros and cons for authors to use Kindle Unlimited.

Advantages of Kindle Unlimited

• Less competition since mainstream publishers don’t normally use Kindle Unlimited.
• You could potentially have a larger audience and earnings potential. You can have your book available to millions of readers giving you the potential to gain more reviews and build you fanbase. Kindle Unlimited is the lender’s library of the online world where voracious readers binge read books.
• You get paid per page read. Your book’s pages are based on Amazon’s system of word count. For example, a 50,000-word book might have about 250 pages according to Amazon. The pay rate averages $.0004 to $.0005 per page.
• Kindle Unlimited performs well for specific genres like romance, sci-fi and thrillers.
• You can enroll for the 90-day period only if you just want to try it out.

Disadvantages of Kindle Unlimited

• You’ll need to write and publish often for Kindle Unlimited to work for you financially. Kindle Unlimited is about the volume of material you can market to readers and keep writing to them.
• You only get paid when borrowers read you book. If they borrow a book and never read it, you won’t get paid. Amazon pays for pages read. So, if they stop reading your book, you don’t get paid for the entire book.
• You are not allowed to sell your book on other platforms while you are exclusive with Kindle Unlimited. This includes offering free copies or samples.
• Your book may be perceived as “lesser value.” The free aspect often gets the stereotypical lower quality brand.
• You only have one income source while enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. So, if for some reason Kindle Unlimited ends or readers cancel their Kindle Unlimited subscription, you’ll have to start from scratch building your readership.

Kindle Direct Publishing Select is a good choice for new authors since it gives them the opportunity to offer their book in Amazons Kindle Unlimited subscription. It’s a great way to learn about the publishing arena and about book marketing. After the 90-day period is up though, authors should consider going wide in their marketing to include FB ads, paid newsletters, give away the first book in a series and many other marketing techniques.

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You can give your customers the option to pre-order certain products or services before you are ready to launch them. Pre-orders can be used in almost every industry- hand-made products, luxury goods, books or services. Pre-orders allow you to collect money ahead of the release of your book or product.

Pre-orders can be a significant part of many authors’ and business’ new product release marketing plans. One of the advantages of using pre-orders is the different strategies you can use to boost sales. There are other reasons to use pre-orders. But there are some downsides to the strategy as well.

Benefits of Pre-order Product Options

1. Pre-order sales can give your book a boost in the chance of hitting the New York Times bestseller list or USA Today bestseller list.

2. Pre-orders are a great way to drive existing readers into new sales to a subsequent book. Link to the pre-order in your books back matter to capture readers while they are still hooked, ready to read more.

3. Running a pre-order boosts rankings and buzz about your book or product before it’s released. This begins building visibility and excitement for the product which translates into sales.

4. Guaranteed revenue, from pre-order sales, allows you to pay for creating or publishing the product.

5. Pre-order sales give you early data about the product. You can learn about how the product is received, if it needs revising, the pricing and your demographic.

6. Using a pre-order option pushes you to finish the product or book on time. You have a timeline you must meet; otherwise you will end up losing customer loyalty and revenue.

Downsides to Pre-order Product Options

1. Sometimes a pre-order campaign isn’t the right strategy for your new product or release. Some believe a pre-order is only effective for authors or businesses with a huge following or name recognition.

2. Managing customer expectations might be difficult. Long wait periods or products that never get delivered might cause disappointment and lead to loss of customer loyalty.

3. Unsteady revenue flow after the pre-order when it is the only strategy you employ in the marketing of the product. The pre-order option shouldn’t be the only marketing campaign of your product. You get a big boost in sales at the time of the pre-order then sales slack off.

It’s a good idea to not set your pre-order too far in advance. People want instant gratification and are impatient. They don’t want to have to wait months after they purchase something to receive it. One week up to three months is a good time frame.

During the pre-order period, schedule podcast interviews, do related blog posts, and advertise to raise awareness. The goal is to get high rankings so the book will be more visible during the pre-order period, which gives you momentum during your launch.

Setting up a pre-order option for your products or books is an excellent way to build buzz, create revenue and push you to finish. Before you decide to offer the option, look at the reasons why you want to do it and set up a detailed plan for making it work.

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We all want to sell more books. That’s the goal of writing and publishing, right? Many new authors think now that they’ve written and published their book sales will skyrocket. But the truth is that even if you write a high-quality book, you need more than one to improve book sales.

It makes sense that the more books you publish the more money you will make, like everything you do in business. The more books you have-at the right price- the more exposure you get in Amazon, Bookstores, Book Review Sites, and everywhere they are exposed. You’ve seen authors do this. Everyone from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series to the Mindfulness Book Series with Barrie Davenport.

Having a series whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, is key to increasing your sales. Fiction will obviously have some of the same set of characters that continue the story. Nonfiction series can be done in a variety of ways. For instance, you could target the same group of readers to solve a variety of problems for them, with a book for each problem. As an example, tackle the topic of being a single mom and write a book for each challenge they deal with. This gives you the opportunity to cross-promote the books to your target market.

Another technique for creating a series in the nonfiction arena is to solve the same problem for different groups. Think about the Chicken Soup series. This technique increases sales since readers buy the books as gifts or recommend them to others in different markets. Once someone buys one of your books in a series, they become hooked and crave more.

How To Level Up Your Sales

• Plan a series to publish more books. Most fiction authors start to see a return on their investment after the fourth or fifth book.
• Set an attainable goal for the series
• Realize that each book published will add more revenue and help sell the previous and future books in the series. It also helps you retain customers who might buy a new or different series you have.
• Amazon loves new material. Actively releasing a new book brings in consistent sales and reviews. This switches the algorithm on to help you sell more by sending your current books into the higher-traffic channels.

Of course, publishing more books won’t be easy. And it won’t happen overnight. Just keep in mind that whenever you publish a new book, you’re improving your book sales. But the more books you publish the more income you can potentially make and the more subscribers (or fans) you can add to your list.

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Learning how to deal with critiques and critics is a huge part of sharing your work. Criticism comes from many different sources including your editor, other writers, family or friends, or from your readers. It’s important to learn how to deal with critics so their words don’t keep you from doing the work you love.

If criticism gets under your skin, you need to learn how to deal with it. You will not survive as a writer if you don’t learn how to ignore, accept and rise above it. Here are seven tips for handling criticism.

1. Listen to the criticism without getting defensive or taking it to heart.

2. Remember the person is not criticizing you. They are sharing an opinion about your writing. Your writing is not who you are but only a product of your brain. Take a deep breath. Remind yourself you are valuable as a person even if someone doesn’t like your work.

3. Discuss it with other writers when you find criticism challenging to handle. Tell others in writing groups or with your writing buddy how the criticism made you feel. Get their opinion on how to handle it.

4. Don’t respond to the negative reviews. When you receive reviews and comments from readers, it’s just their opinion. They aren’t the professional reviews. Don’t expect everyone to love your writing.

5. Accept the judgments for what they are: a way to help you improve. Helpful criticism provides feedback on how you can improve your writing. You can tell if it is something you need to consider if the same type of critique keeps popping up in more than on review of the same work.

6. Realize that the critic is only one reader. Their view might be the same as others, or theirs might not. Just know that one person’s criticism is just their view. Look at it as a warning sign that some part of your writing may need to be improved.

7. Thank your critic. Take the high road, be kind and thank them for their review of your work.

Every writer will have to deal with a critic at some point in their career. Take it for how it’s meant: as helpful to improving your work, as someone who doesn’t like your style or from someone who is negative and jealous of your work. Try not to react, get advice from other writers, take care of yourself by staying positive, and find the good in the criticism.

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Do you know why your audience is buying? This is the first thing you need to understand before you begin marketing to them. You need to know your customers like and what motivates them to buy. That means you need to know as much as possible about your ideal audience, who will become repeat buyers.

Getting to Know Your Audience

You want to dig deep to learn why they need your product, why they want to learn something you are teaching or do they just like it. Did they buy it because it’s on sale or they had a coupon? Digging deeper into your customer profile helps you answer these questions.

Building an audience profile helps you understand why they are buying. It includes more than the demographics like location, age, interests, and gender. It includes a lot more. Your target audience profile can include:

• The baseline demographics like their age, gender, and income as well as education level completed and geographic information.
• What shared challenges they face. This answers why they are looking for your product.
• Their goals. Is it to be healthier? Do they want a product that lets them do it themselves or one that inspires them?
• How do they communicate? Are they active on social media or do they prefer email, text message or phone?
• How do they make decisions? Are they more impulse buyers because something is on sale or some other reason? Do they do a lot of research before buying?
• What triggers them to buy from you or others?
• What time of year do they buy big-ticket items? How often do they buy books or digital products?
• What things do your customers do or feel before buying? What are they willing to spend? Do they like a discount?

Look at data from your current and past sales. Analytics on your site, platforms that help you determine attribution and existing customer data help you see where, why, and how often do they buy? This info gives you an idea of what motivates them to purchase at a specific time or within a price point range. You can also use these audience or customer profiles to help you segment your audience based on past behaviors.

Purchase Intent

Demographic information doesn’t always tell you the whole story though. This is where you need to learn to understand their purchase intent. This refers to the mindset of your audience related to purchasing.

Purchase intent takes demographics into account, as well as, content consumption, their behaviors, the devices they use to purchase, and the channels they buy from. This gives you a better picture of the path your potential customer takes to purchase. That way you can target them in a way that moves them to each next logical step in your funnel towards buying.

Knowing the reasons behind your customers purchases helps in how you market to them. Dig into your analytics, look at recent purchases of competitors and talk to potential customers on social media on what motivates them to purchase something.

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As writers, we often worry about things that aren’t really warranted. This keeps us from never starting or continuing with our writing. Some writers worry about their craft and the writing process. Others worry about the business side of writing. This constant worry hinders you into moving forward. Here are five things you should let go of as a writer.

1. Idea stealing is one of the biggest concerns many new writers have, especially when they talk about it on social medial platforms or in the self-publishing arena. Let’s face it, ideas are a dime a dozen but when it comes down to it, it’s the value of the writing that sets you apart.

Stay on the safe side, if you’re worried about idea stealing, by being careful who and where you share your work with. There are legal steps you can take if they don’t comply. Remember no two stories will ever be the same because we all have different views and experiences.

2. It might be difficult to ignore negative talk from critics and others. It’s going to happen. No matter how good your work is, there will always be some who don’t like it. You might get criticism from well-meaning friends, family, or fellow writers. You’ll get advice on your work, your titles, the cover, and every area of your work.

Don’t waste your time worrying what everyone else thinks, though. The ones you want to please are yourself and your ideal readers or fans. You do have to learn to accept criticism. Some will be good, and some will be bad. Just use the good, to make your work better and shrug off unhelpful bad reviews and criticisms.

3. When you worry about your book not hitting the bestseller list, you’re forgetting the reason for initially writing your book. Sure, it’s a privilege to be on this list, but most authors won’t ever be on it. Even if you do hit the list, it doesn’t necessarily get you much. Your book, if it’s well written, will get you authority and credibility in your niche without the bestseller list label.

4. Making the first draft or first book perfect is a big worry that causes many writers to not finish. This hurdle trips up writers when they think their work won’t be good enough or the first draft must be perfect even before it goes to the editor. It won’t be perfect; that’s the beauty of the first draft and editing.

So just write and forget about making it perfect. That means you don’t edit the beginning, middle, or the end of the book before you’ve finished writing it. It means stop waiting on others to validate your writing.

5. Many writers worry their work isn’t totally original. You’ve probably heard the saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun”. It’s almost impossible to invent a new idea. The storytelling techniques, the themes, character types and other elements of storytelling have been covered in some form over the many decades of publishing. However, you can make the way you tell your story unique. Put your own spin on the idea with your writing style, your expression, and the types of characters you use.

Most novice writers, as well as many experienced writers fall into the trap of worrying. They all worry over their skill, the publication process, or about making their book perfect. They worry about critics or becoming a bestseller. But if they put everything into perspective and realize that none of these things matter So, stop worrying and just write.

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“I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not then wonderful. Then you write for who you love, whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.” – Ernest Hemingway

Writers are known to be perfectionists. We strive to make every scene, every word and piece of grammar perfect. But we should be striving for good as perfectionism keeps us from completing. So how good is “good enough” when it comes to writing?

While you should always be honing your craft, you don’t necessarily need to beat yourself up with perfectionism. There are ways and tools that can help you create good pieces.

Good writing is good enough when it evokes emotion. It’s good enough when it connects things. Good writing is good enough when it tells a story the reader relates to. This is how you know you writing is good enough.

Good writing is free of misspellings, doesn’t have a lot of grammar issues and it flows well, meaning it’s not choppy and doesn’t jump around. Good writing gets the point across without rambling. Good writing tells the story in a cohesive, logical way.

Writers are notorious for judging themselves against other writers. These other writers have better vocabularies or have slicker prose. They seem to be the best of the group. It makes others believe they have to have a formal education and be perfect in their writing.

So how do you break away from the perfectionism?

• Shift your mindset to one that believes that good enough is okay.
• Learn to stop. Don’t overanalyze your work.
• Become comfortable with imperfection. You will make mistakes. It’s okay to miss some of them.
• Stop comparing yourself to other writers. Set your own bar and reach for it. Try to do better than your last written piece each time.
• Strive for your best, not perfectionism.

Fill your story with emotions, describe your characters with details, let your creativity run free and then let the writing be good enough to let the piece be finished.

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When you’re blogging, it’s important to make your plans in advance for the content that will appear on your blog. This needs to be based on the season as well as the products and services that you plan to promote or launch. Just like a retail store is planning fall sales in the summer, you should be planning in advance for each season too.

Survey Your Audience – Just that because you’ve studied your audience once doesn’t mean you shouldn’t survey them occasionally to ensure you’re still delivering to them the information that they need and want. Try a quarterly survey so that you can find out what’s on their mind, and get a deeper insight into their problems.

Research Your Niche – Keeping up to date on the niche you’ve aligned yourself with is imperative if you want to stay ahead of the curve. Read industry news and study regular news for clues to the state of your niche. Look ahead for killer technologies that might turn your niche on its head.

Check Out the Competition – You should always be aware of what your competition is doing… not to copy them, but to stay one step ahead on whichever way you want to compete with them. For example if you offer higher quality, test their merchandise to ensure that your quality is better.

Know What’s Coming – Not all businesses are seasonal, but all of your audience is. They think of things in terms of certain seasons depending on where they are in their life. For example, if they have school-age children they are thinking differently during back to school time than summertime. Plus, if you have a product or service launch or other event coming up, you should be planning it in the quarter before the event.

Know Your Realistic Schedule – If you have a regular job, or children at home, or other responsibilities that will get into the way of your blogging duties, be honest about that as you create a schedule for yourself. If you have a lot to do, set a realistic blogging schedule around these other responsibilities.

Brainstorm Topics – Once you have some of this other information set up, it’s important to take some time to brainstorm topics based on the information you’ve gathered above, plus the events you know that are coming. At this point nothing is wrong; just write it down.

Organize Your Topics – Take the brainstormed topics and categorize them for your blog. Throw out anything that doesn’t fit. Then organize them and match them with the seasons, events and products that you want to promote.

Create a Publication Calendar – Add everything to a publication calendar. If you use WordPress, there are numerous plugins that you can use to help create editorial and publication calendars. Here you enter the information so that during the times you’ve set aside for writing and producing content, you can get right to work.

Set Aside the Time to Create – Now that you have everything ready for you, each time you have the time to work you can get the information from the publication calendar and get going. You can also look ahead easily so you can know whether some of the content needs to be outsourced.

Planning in advance will actually end up saving time and ensuring your success. Working off the cuff will rarely work when it comes to building a successful blog. What will work is planning, knowing what is coming up, knowing what products you want to promote, and relating the seasons and current events to your blog posts.

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