Down the Rabbit Hole

Happy Tuesday everyone!  Another Tip Tuesday for you all!  Today I want to talk about how to find your niche. Finding your niche feels almost as Pidgeon-holing (is that a word??) as an ideal reader. Kind of another way to fit yourself into a little, confining box that feels claustrophobic.  But I'm here to tell you it is anything but confining and boxy. Finding my niche has actually been super freeing and amazing for me. I started my journey of narrowing my niche down at the beginning of 2019 when I took Katie Phillip's Five Day Author Challenge. For a whole day we focused on finding that one genre we could write our whole lives and never grow tired of it. "That's not possible! I would get bored of writing in the same genre my whole life!" you shout. I thought that too at first.  This is the girl who's debut is a YA sci-fi superhero book, who's written steampunk, high fantasy and even tried my hand at gold old alien sci-fi (none of them published, besides ...

Happy Tuesday!  We're officially three days into Nanowrimo, so I thought I'd share a few tips (specifically for the pantsers out there). This is my sixth Nanowrimo and I've won them all, so I thought maybe I have some wisdom to share? Honestly, I'm not sure how I've won six Nanowrimos other than out of shear force of will. The thought of not getting to 50,000 words at the end of the month after committing to it kills me, so I always push through even when it's hard.  But let's start with this first: If you don't know, there are three types of writers. Pantsers, plantsers and plotters. Pantsers are those of us who write by the seat of our pants. We jump in and just let the story happen without really planning or plotting anything out. The story takes us where it wants. Plotters are the opposite. They plan out everything before they write a single word of their WIP. Some plotters are meticulous and others have loose plans and worldbuilding notes and all th...

Happy Tuesday!  Last week I talked about how to find your ideal reader. This week I want to talk about how to use what you learned to reach your ideal reader. Full disclosure, this is something I'm still learning and figuring out. I haven't implemented all of these, but I'm hoping in the next few months I'll slowly get grasp on this topic. This will be a smaller post then because I'm still learning about how to implement these things and use what I've learned about my ideal reader to reach them.   The whole reason you get to know and find your ideal reader is so you can use what you've learned to get your books in front of them. These are the readers that would absolutely love your books! But first, you need to figure out how to show them your books.  The first thing you can use your drabble or whatever you used to get to know your ideal reader is to find out where they hang out on social media. A fifteen through seventeen year old would frequent a different...

 Happy Tuesday!  Let's talk about one of the most confusing and controversial aspects of marketing/publishing: Ideal readers! There's tons of posts about how to find your ideal readers, but not many on how to use what you've learned about your ideal reader for marketing. I mean, the whole point in knowing who your ideal reader is, is learning how to get your books in front of them and how to make your social media presence appealing to them. That will be my post next week. How to use what you've learned about your ideal reader to market your book and get it out there in front of your ideal reader.  For now though, let's talk about how to even find your ideal reader. Just gonna be honest here, a lot of what I'm about to tell you I picked up from Jenni Sauer's live on ideal readers and branding. If you're interested in a more in depth perspective on both of those things and a whole lot of awesome and creative ways to figure out your brand and ideal reader,...

 Happy Tuesday everyone!  Welcome to my first Tip Tuesday where I share writing and publishing tips! Recently, I’ve felt the need to want to share more about writing and indie publishing for fellow writers. I’ve published quite a few books, so I'd say I've learned a thing or two about publishing... But I also will say, that I still have a lot to learn!  Any sort of publishing is a learning process. You never stop learning new things and getting better at that process the more books you publish. So, I hope that these Tuesday tips can be helpful to you as I share what I’ve learned, what I’m still learning and what I continue to learn as I write and publish.  I've realized lately that I have a lot of thoughts and things to share about self-publishing... some of it is going to sound a little discouraging or jaded, but I want you to know that none of it is meant to scare you or stop you from following your dreams to becoming an author. Everything I share is meant to help ...