Do You Use Instagram as an Author? Some Advice

Check out the inspiration and examples using the #bookgiveaway hashtag on Instagram

From Jane Friedman's blog, this excerpt, 5 Ways to Use Instagram as an Author, is from Social Media for Writers: Marketing Strategies for Building Your Audience and Selling Books (Writer’s Digest Books) by Tee Morris (@TeeMonster) and Pip Ballantine (@PhillipaJane).

Highlights include:

Insta-competitions
Competitions are a proven way to increase your number of followers on Instagram, but don’t go this route until you have at least a small following. It’s hard to make a splash if only a few people are following you... So what do you ask people to do? Keep it simple, and make sure it involves nothing dangerous or too outrageous. A picture of a participant with your book (“book selfies”), dressed up like a character, or posing with something significant related to the book (an artifact or some related item) are all good choices. Or you could go with something related to your genre that is more open to interpretation.

and Joanna Penn's at The Creative Penn's article, How to Use Instagram As An Author Plus 10 Ways to Grow Your Account Organically, offers some choice examples of how authors are successfully using instagram. From Poems, inspirations, book covers, author signing events, and quotes, there's so much inspiration!

How do you use Instagram?

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

Stuart Horwitz's Advice on Finishing Your Book In Three Drafts

Courtesy of Jane Friedman's indispensable blog for writers, this post adapted from Stuart's book of the same title, How To "Finish Your Book In Three Drafts" has some really good advice in it.

Even the idea of calling each draft a different name offers the value of having the right mindset for wherever you are in the process. He calls:

Draft 1 - Messy Draft
Draft 2 - Method Draft
Draft 3 - Polished Draft

I also thought Stuart's list of questions for your beta readers included some stunningly obvious ones that have never occurred to me to ask… but I will now!

Things like: "What scenes do you remember the best?"

and

"Which parts did you want to skip?"

and

"Where did you feel there was an emotional payoff?"

Well worth reading, whichever draft you're currently on…

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

Do Publishers Need to Offer More Value to Authors?

Jane Friedman, web editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review, and former publisher of Writer’s Digest, gave a presentation in Berlin this fall called "The Future of the Author-Publisher Relationship."

In it (and an accompanying article), she suggested that

"...given the changes happening in the industry—traditional publishers will need to be more author-focused in their operations by offering tools, community, and education to help authors be more successful, to everyone’s greater benefit. If publishers fail to do so, then authors, who have an increasing number of publishing options available to them, will depart for greener pastures. I pointed out that Amazon has a VP of author relations, and views the author like a second customer, but publishers have no such author-relations position or focus on authors as a community to be served. I recommended publishers create their own VPs of author relations and be more strategic in serving authors on a long-term, broad basis rather than on a title-by-title basis."

In this fascinating blog post, Jane explores why, from the perspective of the big six publishers (soon to be big five), that idea of offering more value to authors may not happen.  She explores the desirables that publishers offer authors (Money, Service, and Status) and reflects on how, 

"Given industry change, a start-up can reasonably challenge publishers on at least 2 if not all 3 of the desirables mentioned above."

She comments on how, as of now

"...most self-publishing authors who strike it rich are only too happy to sign with a big player and see their sales skyrocket into the millions from the hundreds of thousands. A lot more has to change in the industry to convince publishers to be more service-oriented toward their authors. But if and when it does change, will it be too late to convince authors who offers the best partnership?"

It's well worth reading!

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee