By Fred Fields
To my mind, there are two types of writers, those
who write for their own pleasure, and those who want to be read and to sell
books.
This blog post is for the latter group.
When we were in school, our teachers had to read
whatever we wrote. God bless them. That was probably true suffering,
considering many of the essays they were forced to grade.
Nobody has to read what we write today. In fact, for
us to be successful, our readers must find us, be spurred to interest, and be
inspired to buy. That's right, they must be induced to pay for the privilege of
reading what we have written.
For us to motivate a reader's investment, we should
consider what people would like to read. What kind of fiction is selling? In
whose biography might they be interested? What would they like to learn?
More than that, we must encourage the potential
reader to believe that he or she will enjoy what we have written. This can be
difficult. A book written by Stephen King offers some idea of its quality. A
book written by Regina Farina, not so much. Nobody ever heard of Ms. Farina nor
have they read any of her output.
My suggestions for getting people to buy your books:
A.
Pick a subject or a genre of interest to a large segment of the population
B. Title
your epic with an attention grabbing-name
C. Write
with a style that is easy to enjoy with good dialog, real movement of the story, and clever, intelligent, even funny stories and observations
D. Learn
how to market your efforts to be found by the largest possible segment of the
population.
Most important of all, know the specific audience
you are targeting.
It's fine to write for your own enjoyment, but not
necessarily profitable.
No comments:
Post a Comment
The moderator of this blog reserves the right to remove inappropriate comments from this blog.