Janice Hardy

Creating Our Author Business Plan: Book by Book Marketing

August 20, 2015 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

The marketing section of our author business plan is unique in that we need to think about our overall marketing strategy as well as the specific marketing activities we’re going to use for each individual book we produce.

Last month I talked about developing our overall marketing plan, and this month I’m going to suggest ways we can create a successful plan for marketing each individual book.

Please join me at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University for my regular monthly guest post!

P.S. Every summer I try to travel around and guest post a bit, but now that the summer is drawing to a close, I only have one more guest post (for the fantastic Jami Gold), and then it’ll be back to business as usual here on the blog 🙂

Janice Hardy Fiction University

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Internal Dialogue is now available from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or Apple iBooks.. (You might also want to check out Grammar for Fiction Writers or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

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Creating an Author Business Plan: Our Competitive Analysis

June 18, 2015 by • Marcy's Books, Uncategorized, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 0 Comment

Image Credit: Glenn Pebley

Image Credit: Glenn Pebley

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

We’re down to the final pieces of our author business plan. (If you missed the previous sections, you can start back at the beginning with setting our goals, choosing our stories, identifying our audience, running our business, and crafting our product plan.)

Today we’re tackling the competitive analysis.

Traditionally, the competitive analysis section in a business plan has been about learning as much as you can about the people or businesses that directly compete with you and figuring out a way to steal their customers.

I don’t know about you, but that view of a competitive analysis makes me shudder. I don’t want to hurt other authors. In fact, I believe that we can achieve more when we work together. When one author is successful, it brings new readers into the reader pool who might like our books as well.

Besides, books aren’t like cars or plumbers. You can own a whole bookshelf (or e-reader!) full of books.

Because of those factors, I like to look at this as a cooperative analysis. Some of the elements in a cooperative analysis will focus on how we can stand out and what we can learn from other authors, but we’re also looking for authors we might be able to partner with.

If you’d like to read the rest of this post, please join me for my regular monthly guest spot at Fiction University where I’ll be giving tips on how to write the competitive analysis section of our author business plan.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

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Creating an Author Business Plan: Our Product Plan

May 26, 2015 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , • 3 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

We’ve now reached a milestone in writing our author business plan. Last month, we finished our author business plan summary and our Business Operation section. In other words, we’re officially into the body of our author business plan where we need to start laying out practical steps to reach our goals. (If you missed the earlier posts, it’s important to start from the beginning because we’ve already talked about setting our goals, choosing our stories, and identifying our audience.)

Everything we’ve written down in our author business plan prior to this point will remain fairly stable. In the upcoming sections, we’ll need to be much more flexible, adjusting as we go. What we write down is our starting point.

In the coming posts, I’ll be talking about our competitive analysis section, our marketing plan section, and our professional development section, but before we can do that, we need to complete our Product Plan.

Please join me at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University for the rest of this post on Creating An Author Business Plan: Our Product Plan.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

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Creating an Author Business Plan: How Will the Business Run?

April 16, 2015 by • Writing • Tags: , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@Marcy Kennedy)

In our ongoing quest to write up an author business plan that will guide us in the years to come, we’ve already talked about setting our goals, choosing our stories, and identifying our audience. I think of that as the fun stuff because it feels like it’s closely related to the actual writing of our books.

But now we need to dive into the business part of our Author Business Plan Summary. You knew it was coming eventually, right? Writing this part of our author business plan might not seem as exciting or creative, but it’s essential. We can’t have long-term success unless we’re smart about our money and the operation of our business.

As independent authors, most of us start out on a shoestring. Some of us even start out with no string at all. It doesn’t matter whether you have $10,000 to invest in your business when you start or nothing—you still need to write this part of your author business plan. I promise to make it as painless as possible.

Join me for my regular monthly guest post at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University where I talk about Creating an Author Business Plan: How Will the Business Run?

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

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Creating an Author Business Plan: Identifying Your Audience

March 19, 2015 by • Uncategorized • Tags: , , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Welcome back to the third installment in my series on writing your author business plan. We’re working on our Author Business Plan Summary, and we’ve already covered setting our goals and choosing our stories. If you haven’t read those posts yet, I recommend you go back and start from the beginning.

Our next logical step is to identify our audience.

Please join me for my regular monthly guest post at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University where I look at how to narrow down the core audience for our books.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

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Creating An Author Business Plan: Choosing Your Stories

February 19, 2015 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Last month we started writing our Author Business Plan Summary by setting our author goals. Now that we’ve laid the foundation through deciding on our goals, it’s time to take the next step and decide on what type of books we plan to publish.

This can be one of the most difficult things for an author to do. I hope you’ll come by and share your experiences with this part of the process, how you chose what type of books to write, or the struggles you’re facing in doing so.

Click here to read my post on “Creating an Author Business Plan: Choosing Your Stories” at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

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Creating An Author Business Plan: Setting Your Goals

January 29, 2015 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

In my last post, I announced that I was going to start a series helping busy authors write their author business plans. I’m excited to be back now, facing 2015, and diving in.

The first section of your author business plan is your Author Business Plan Summary. Because it actually contains a lot of different information, I’m not going to cover it all today. That would be overwhelming and make this post much too long. Remember that this is about breaking it down into manageable, unintimidating pieces. One small bit that you can do each day.

Eventually, your summary will include your goals, the types of books you plan to publish, your target number of releases per year, your audience, what outside help you plan to hire, the form and method of distribution for your books, and how you’ll deal with income. You’ll likely end up giving a paragraph to each.

Today we’re going to focus on your author goals. If you look back at my opening post “Three Questions to Ask Yourself Before Writing an Author Business Plan,” you’ll remember that we’re focusing on what I called the “career writer” and we’re looking at this from the perspective of someone who wants to independently publish (or hybrid publish). A career writer is someone who views their writing as either a full-time or part-time job or wants it to be one. They want (and need) their writing to make a profit.

If you’d like to read the rest of this post, head over to Fiction University for my monthly guest post–Creating an Author Business Plan: Setting Your Goals.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers, is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Mastering Showing and Telling in Your Fiction.)

Both books are available in print and ebook forms.

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How Authors Can Work Together to Achieve Success

November 20, 2014 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

The perception of self-publishing is that you’re working alone. And you are, but it doesn’t have to be that way all the time. In fact, I believe the future of successful self-publishing is in working together as allies with other authors rather than viewing them as your competition.

Before I dive into some of the ways I see authors successfully teaming up, though, it’s important to cover the harmful and/or dishonest ways that authors sometimes work together. I want to be very clear that these aren’t things we should be doing.

For the rest of this post, please join me at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. I’ll cover both the ways we shouldn’t work together as authors and the ways we should.

Upcoming Attractions: Tomorrow I’ll also be visiting Writer’s in the Storm to talk about the best hashtags for authors. This is the second to last post on Twitter I’ll be doing. (I have one more guest post at Kristen Lamb’s blog that I’ll be sharing with you.) From that point on, I’ll be returning to writing craft posts for the foreseeable future. Also, keep an eye out closer to the end of the year. I’ll be asking you what your biggest writing struggles are so that in 2015 I can focus on the topics that you need help with the most!

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers, is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Mastering Showing and Telling in Your Fiction.)

Both books are available in print and ebook forms.

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Choosing the Right Social Media Site for You and Your Readers

October 16, 2014 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

When it comes to how to spread the word about your book, you’ll hear widely divergent opinions. Don’t bother with promotion. Promote in every possible way. Do real life events—forget about social media. Don’t bother with real life events—stick to blogging and social media. Buy ads. Don’t buy ads.

The one thing everyone can agree on is that indie writers need a way to let potential readers know their books exist. We don’t have access to a publisher’s ready-made audience. My experience (backed up by discussions I’ve had with other authors who’ve used the same methods) is that social media does help build your audience.

Thanks to social media, I’ve grown my blog and newsletter, moved my books into the top ranks of their respective lists when they released, and have grown my business to the point where I work full-time as a writer, editor, and writing instructor. I wasn’t able to achieve those things by networking in real life. My reach was too small.

But social media can also be a giant waste of time. The key to social media is to choose the right site for you and then learn how to use that site in a time-effective way that builds relationships. Spam never works.

The first step to using social media effectively is to figure out what site is best for you and for meeting up with your potential readers. So today I want to give you a quick overview of some of the major social media sites, how they’re different, and who they’re best for.

To read the rest of this post, head over to Janice Hardy’s Fiction University!

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers, is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Mastering Showing and Telling in Your Fiction.)

Both books are available in print and ebook forms.

I’d love to have you sign up to receive my posts by email. All you need to do is enter your email address below and hit the “Follow” botton.

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How to Save Money on Editing Your Book

September 18, 2014 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Self-publishing your work means all the profits are yours, but it also means all the costs are yours. The two universally accepted areas where you shouldn’t skimp on quality are your cover and editing.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep your costs to a minimum when it comes to editing without sacrificing quality. Today, in my guest post at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University, I’m going give you tips that can help you save money no matter what level or levels of editing you need.

Click here to read the rest of How to Save Money on Editing Your Book.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers, is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Mastering Showing and Telling in Your Fiction.)

Both books are available in print and ebook forms.

I’d love to have you sign up to receive my posts by email. All you need to do is enter your email address below and hit the “Follow” botton.

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