Cheryl Cowtan on Writing

I have been setting Goodreads to the side as I build my author platform, and even just writing this statement strikes me right in the oxymorons. Why? Because, people join Goodreads to talk about books, share books, review books, put books on their shelves, and promote books. Now that my first adult horror novel, "Girl Desecrated",  is launched, I realize I should have been focused on this group of potential readers instead of trying to sift through Facebook and Twitter. You see, some people on Facebook like to read. Some people on Twitter like to read. But the 55 million Goodread members are an author's goldmine because everyone on the site likes to read. So, there's gold in them thar hills! How do we get it out? Obvious step #1: Create an author page and load up a book. Here is what else you can do: The Goodreads' initiative that created the most buzz for my book was a giveaway . The giveaways are for print books only, at this time. You pick your book,...

The process from novel drafting to book promotion can be a long, confusing journey of pitfalls that costs us money, causes us to doubt ourselves, and can dampen the spark that gave us the courage to start in the first place. Until a self-publishing degree is offered at our local universities, we authors have to educate ourselves on the complexities of self-publishing. There are thousands of self-taught experts writing blogs, selling books, broadcasting, and offering lessons via video to help authors navigate this learning curve. We could spend years  exploring and mining the extensive market of self-publishing information, and I have. The trouble is, when we are surrounded by a plethora of information and a multitude of people pointing us in different directions, we get bogged down with information overload and become mired in indecision. In my upcoming book, How to Solve the Top 5 Indie Author Problems, I examine the five challenges many indie authors fac...

On Saturday Feb 4th, I attended GenreCon2017 in Guelph Ontario, where, for the first time ever, I tried selling my novel at a Con. I was armed with some realistic expectations from Brandon Sanderson (Writing Excuses), Joanna Penn (The Creative Penn), and other authors I network with, so I'm actually quite pleased with how things went. I set realistic goals and as a result, succeeded at all of them, and I learned a few things about selling at conferences. #1 I can sell at a Con and keep my pride too :) I took " Girl Desecrated ", first-in-series of The Fergus She , which I published on Halloween 2016. I had a little marketing scheme going, which included pre-preparing a 3 second blurb, a 30 second blurb, and offering free tree-of-life bracelets with each sale. I also dropped my novel's price $4 from the Amazon.ca cost, and signed each copy with a quote from the novel. “Bad-girls, highlanders and vampires, in Guelph!” Now, I know I could have been more ...

We already know readers judge books by their covers. If you are still fighting this social truth, then close your eyes, take a deep breath and release your rebellion to the universe. Repeat after me, "Readers judge books by their covers". If the above is true (and it is), can we say books in specific categories or genre s have similar and distinct styles, fonts and images used in book cover design? A quick scan of Goodreads can provide a visual for us to examine, but we could never go through as many books in as short a time, or with as much brain power as a computer could. Brian Kenji Iwana and Seiichi Uchida conducted a study at the Kyushu University in Japan to determine if book genre could be guessed by cover design. What's interesting is they used a "Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict the genre of a book based on the visual clues". In case you care... Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), in particular, are multilayer n...

While loading my novel, "Girl Desecrated" onto Draft2Digital , I was faced with the opportunity to change the price of my book for different sales regions. Meaning, I can choose how much my book costs in Sweden, and how much it costs in Hong Kong, instead of just allowing an algorithm to calculate $3.99 US into every other territorial price. As a Canadian who pays more than Americans for many things, this is a great feature. The algorithm default jacks up my book's US price of $3.99 to a Canadian price of $4.99. Well, I ask, why should those North of the border pay more for an eBook that has no tangible upfront costs to produce? And I say, Draft2Digital has given me the option to control the pricing, so I am going to price my eBook the same for American and Canadian purchase, eh? (We'll continue this train of thought at Tim Hortons, first thing in the morning). Controlling pricing is also good because there are a few...

So you've written a novel, published on an internet-based retailer platform like Amazon, iBook, Kobo, and now you need to get the word out? Well Dorothy, the best thing you can do right now, is jump into the digital marketing funnel ! It's going to carry you and your novel far. Here's how. Step 1: Exposure- Let people know about your book through SEO, Ads, Word of Mouth, Groups, Posts, Tweets, Launches, Facebook Posts, signings, podcasts, interviews, a street team re-tweeting, re-posting, etc.   Step 2: Discovery- Once you get their eyes on your novel promotion, you need to get potential readers to come closer and get more information. This requires a link to click through, a sample to read, a video of you reading aloud, a landing page, a pre-order link, an author interview, and a newsletter sign-up. Step 3: Consideration- Get your potential reader to think about purchasing, offer a discount, a deal, a freebee, a promise, have ratings, testimonials, reviews, awar...

The number one rule to remember in designing e-book covers is readability. If people cannot see the images and text on the e-book cover, then they are not going purchase the novel. Readability is affected by three things: placement of elements resolution of image size of image Placement of Elements Your design is going to be made up of some or all of the following: background colour, texture or image layered symbol or other image title text series text author text description text Too many elements can make for crowded design, which is a "no, no", but if you search cover designs online, you'll find some that incorporate all of the above six items well. Why would you? Well Amazon will not allow text in the "title" section of your book posting that is not on your cover. Think about that in terms of targeting keywords potential readers may be searching. According to DigitalPublishing101's article The importance of ebook covers, an e-book...