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Livewire Publishing |
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Livewire Publishing |
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| Newsletter ... |
April/May 2001 |
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Feature Article - Marketing your novel If you’re submitting you work to a publisher for the first time, this can be a daunting experience. All writers know the percentage of acceptance for publication is small. Despite this, you must submit your work if you have the aspiration of becoming a published author. Every serious writer, at some stage of their writing career, will have been given the advice to “write what you know” and “write from the heart”. This is good advice, but I’d like to add “write with your marketing self on full alert”. By this I mean - you need take a marketing approach to your writing right from the time the first idea for a story enters your thoughts. This is because there’s so much competition to get work read by an Editor, and you need to make your work stand out. There has to be something unique about your story that makes the Editor take notice … and that’s “marketing”. During the creative process (formulating and writing your story/novel), you should constantly ask yourself the question – “Does my product (book/story) have something that will make it stand out in the crowd?” Only you can decide if it has and what that something is. |
I
strongly believe the characters carry a book along the road to success. The
mention of the word “character” immediately brings up other elements and
techniques that have to be innovative if your work is to be taken seriously.
Everything your characters say, think and do gives you an opportunity to
showcase your writing talent in such a way that it has that “something
extra” that will make it sell. But it gets down to how you sell these
characters in your synopsis or marketing proposal.
No doubt, when you finish your story or novel, you’ll love it and have great faith in its quality and possibilities. It’s normal to feel that way. That’s part of being a “writer”. The trick is to make the Editor feel the same way about it … and that’s “marketing”. So, can you see how writing and marketing your project are intertwined? To a certain extent you have to become two separate entities. The creative self produces the novel or story. The marketing self has to be hard-nosed and practical to run the business side of things. And the business side of things is getting work accepted for publication By allowing the marketing self to intervene a little in the creative process, means your project could have a better chance of success. |
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