Writing a novel is not for the feint of heart. It is a huge undertaking that can take months or even years to complete, depending on the amount of research and detail you need to you put into your work of fiction or non-fiction. Even knowing this, it can feel like it's taking too long to complete your novel, or that you'll never finish. If you feel that way, it may benefit you to read a few tips and tricks on writing and promoting your fiction in order to speed up the process without diminishing your book's quality or value to your readers.
One of the ways you can speed up the process is by creating an outline or a breif synopsis of the plot as well as short character descriptions. This can help you get your ideas down so that you do not have to continuously stop and think, What happens next?
1. Try Editing Your Novel with a Fresh Mind and Eyes
After you have written your novel and checked for minor errors, it is normally good practice to keep your novel aside for a few weeks or even months and let your mind forget about it. This helps you to look at the novel with a fresh perspective hence you are likely to find a few more errors than you would have previously found.
2. Use Beta Readers
Being close to your novel for a long time will sometimes make it impossible to look at it from the reader’s perspective. Therefore, it is a good idea to find some people you trust so as to read the novel for you and then send you suggestions on how to improve it. They could be your writing or editing partners. Try avoiding family or friends as your beta readers. You can do this in exchange for a favor which might go a long way in motivating your beta readers.
When it comes to publishing your just finished novel, you have three choices, you can go the traditional publishing route. You can self publish, or you can YOU publish. There are pros and cons of each publishing method.
Traditional Publishing
Most writers dream of one day getting their novel accepted at a big publishing house with worldwide reach and receiving a hefty royalty advance for all their hard work. The end result is that they are going to be the next Stephen King, Anne Rice, Danielle Steele or Lee Child, and they’re never going to have to go to work again. Instead, they’re going to write novels for the rest of their lives. Fantastic! If this is your goal, I wish you the best of luck.
Probably every list you’ve ever read on how to sell more books lists the title of this article as either step 1 or step 2, and it’s a big load of youknowwhat!
You know why?
You are not the best of judge when it comes to determining how amazing your book is. In fact, what you think of your books doesn’t even matter in the long term. The only thing that matters is what your readers think of your book.
One of the things we have to do as indie authors is create our own book covers. Sure, Amazon offers ready made covers and you can change the colors and fonts and attach your own text, but to really stand out, you need a custom cover not a stock cover. Some authors choose to hire cover designers, but this can get pricey, depending on the complexity of your cover and the experience of the cover designer. In order to save money, you’ll probably want to learn how to design your own covers in GIMP.
1. Start by Downloading GIMP
GIMP is a free GNU image manipulation program similar to photoshop. It works in Windows and Linux.
2. Choose Your Photos
Unless you are a graphic artist and can create your own images from scratch, it’s best to start with some stock photos. Again, in order to control costs, we really want to choose free photos. Some places to get those stock photos for free include Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash and StockFreeImages. You do still have to watch yourself. Most of these sites include “sponsored photos”, which means pay pay pay to use. If you accidentally click on a sponsored photo, don’t worry. Just go back to the original site and keep looking.
So, you’re working on the next great novel and all of a sudden, your thoughts are as cloudy and gray as the above tree image. You’re stuck. You can’t string two words together. You can’t even get started because you can’t think of a good list of character names. Just chill out and sit back. Here are the 5 most common writer problems and solutions.
1. You Can’t Think of a Good Character Name
This is not as much of a problem as you think it is. The best case scenario is that this is a secondary character and not one of your main characters, but even if it is a main character, it’s not a huge problem.
If you are trying to increase your reach and gain more followers, the last thing you want to see are your follower numbers decreasing. Unfortunately, for numerous reasons, follower numbers can and do decrease. The most likely reason is that Twitter activated its delete account autobot. I’ve had more than 400 followers deleted off my lists over the last three months simply due to Twitter’s delete bot. There’s nothing you can do about this. The other reason is that you accidentally followed a Follow for an Unfollow Account. I’m sure you’ve seen accounts that state - #followback 100%! Well, there are also other accounts that go through and follow hundreds if not thousands of accounts at a time. Once you follow, the account owner unfollows you.
Going indie with their books is something a lot of authors are doing today. While it’s awesome that you get to keep all of the profits with an indie book, much of getting an indie book out there is the marketing. That’s true of any book. But with an indie book, you have to do a lot of it yourself or outsource some or all of the work. Outsourcing can get expensive, so let’s focus on the things you can do yourself to successfully market your indie book.
Great Teaser
Just like with anything you market, a great teaser is what gets people to pay attention to your book and hopefully consider buying it. You don’t need to stick to one teaser, either. Different teasers of various lengths can be used in different ways to successfully market a book. These can be used when sharing on social media, for the description in various marketplaces, to guest post on blogs, and more.
Writing a book and publishing a book are only the first steps to author success. This is because you could have written a great book, but this does not matter if no one knows about it. Thankfully, there are promotional tools and things you can do to help spread the word.
Social media is a great place to promote your book. You can potentially reach thousnads and even millions of people with properly timed and hashtagged tweets and posts. You can also start a blog, create promotional and informative articles and share those across your social media accounts. There are even sites where you can promote your book for free.
Additionally, there are also several Amazon books available to get you gather book promotion ideas so that you can create your own custom book promotion strategy. Great Noevel marketing books include:
, 
, 
and 
, may help keep you focused and on the productive writing path.
