Tag: advice

new blog post: Advice to Newly Published Indies Advice to Newly Published Indies
Writing

Advice to Newly Published Indies

Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Since I started publishing my books in 2014, I have seen some shit. I’ve watched small publishers rapidly close and force a whole genre of authors to go primarily indie, trends change, retailers suddenly change algorithms of sales metrics to screw over authors, and of course the rise and fall of various social media platforms. In that time, I’ve had what I consider to be modest success as a writer, and I thought I would share some things that I have watched newer indies do with varying levels of dread. It doesn’t feel like my place to step in and tell people these things aren’t a good idea. Then again, as my colleagues on Bluesky pointed out when I mentioned making this post, you showed up to read this, so I can only assume you want advice from someone who has been at this for 12 years.

  1. Focus on good writing and good covers– This feels like it should be self-explanatory, but in this day and age, it isn’t. The best places to spend your money as a writer are on good editing and a good cover. If you spend money on nothing else, spend it on those two things in that order. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to have friends who are more experienced writers who can give you good feedback or help you self-edit your work, and that’s fine. I do that as well, but I highly recommend spending money on a professional cover. Covers are what catch people’s eye on social media and retailer websites, so make sure it looks good and it fits the genre of your work. Look at other people in your genre with good covers and try to find out who their cover artists are, so you can commission them. DO NOT USE AI FOR EDITING, WRITING, COVERS, ETC. You will be [rightfully] black balled by other authors and readers.
  2. If you have to rely solely on art or other bells and whistles, your writing isn’t strong enough– After the Milo Winter/Age of Scorpius incident, this has been added to my list. Art is great and can definitely help sell a book online, but when you rely solely on art and show nothing of your writing, then there’s a problem. If no one seems interested in your actual writing, you may be showing parts of your book that aren’t interesting without context or you could need to work on your craft a bit. There’s no shame in going back to the drawing board, learning more, and writing a new and better book. There is shame in duping people by luring them with art and knowingly giving them meh, under-baked writing.
  3. Backlist is king– Nothing sells book one like book 2. They don’t even need to be in a series to help sell your other books. Before you get into doing major marketing or paying for promo, I highly recommend having at least three books. Otherwise, it’s a waste of money. If you don’t have a few books, what happens is that people who are interested buy that one book, and then, that’s it. With promo, the hope is they will enjoy what you marketed, and then, go buy the other books you have for sale. You want the biggest bang for your buck if you’re forking out money for marketing or promo, so hold onto that until you have a backlist. Obviously, still post and talk about your first book, send out ARCs, etc. to get more eyes on it.
  4. Special editions aren’t worth it until you have a backlist- Please see the previous bullet about backlist. There is no reason to make a special edition of your first and only book, especially at the beginning. A) you have a very small audience of readers who will want this B) no one knows who you are or why they would want to buy an expensive version of your book C) it feels like a vanity project or that you are trying to lure people in with pretty art rather than good writing. Yes, there is a market for special editions, but they are from established authors with many books or traditionally published authors who are very well known even if they have only a few books (like Madeline Miller). You are an indie with one book, and this is a colossal waste of time and money at the beginning.
  5. Swag boxes and conventions can wait– With the rise of Tiktok and Booktok, I have seen a lot of newbie indie authors try to make swag boxes or special edition boxes. Once again, you have a very small audience, no one knows who you are, and this is a waste of money that could be spent on book 2. The other thing I’ve seen is a lot of people with only one or two books tabling at conventions. If you are really into conventions, have fun, but consider the ROI. Sometimes, the table fees, hotel stays, and travel costs are very high, and if you only have one or two books to sell, there’s a good chance you won’t make back your money. Fancy book boxes and conventions can be great once you have a more established audience or a larger backlist, but early on, the ROI isn’t there for most people.
  6. Influencers aren’t your audience– Going off the swag box bit, influencers are not your audience. I think part of why people make swag boxes is because they think they can send them to people, and they’ll show them off to their social media audiences. Influencers do this for trad publishes who send lavish boxes, but unless their audience matches perfectly with your ideal reader, you are probably wasting your time and money. The best exposure I have ever had was from normal readers who REALLY liked my books and talked about them loudly on social media. Those are the people you want to court and potentially get onto your ARC team for book 2 because they are almost guaranteed to post about it if they enjoyed your book and recommend it to friends.
  7. Don’t fixate on virality– I think most authors would love it if we could tap into a large audience, but going viral doesn’t guarantee that the right readers are going to find you. There’s always the chance that your book might be under-baked, and you’re setting yourself up for several thousand 3 stars or lower reviews. Virality also doesn’t guarantee sales. Most experienced authors will tell you that even if a post blows up, you only get a handful of sales out of it, which is great but not worth chasing it. The Milo Winter situation is a good example of why going viral isn’t always the best thing. It’s also like chasing a unicorn. It makes far more sense to focus on writing another good book and then another because readers want consistency and decent quality. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
  8. Audiobooks sell– Let me start out by saying I know that audiobooks cost a lot to produce, but they are worth it. I am someone who gets audiobooks made for their books usually 6+ months after the book initially releases. It’s a good way to get new eyes on the book, almost like it’s a new release, and I get an uptick in sales. I find they are far more worth it than other marketing strategies and it makes my books accessible to a whole new audience. Some caveats: make sure you get a good narrator who knows what they’re doing and pay them well. I don’t recommend using royalty share through ACX/Audible because it requires exclusivity and you are potentially stiffing your narrator if your book doesn’t sell. I much prefer to save up and pay someone outright for the audiobook production, so I can release it on every platform I can. It’s a far better investment to save money for an audiobook over a special edition.
  9. If you make promises, deliver or people will stop trusting you– This goes for selling things and for telling people a new story is coming out and then shelving it. If you keep toying with people (accidentally or on purpose), they will stop trusting you. Lately, I’ve heard about way too many people who had to refund everyone for random ideas that didn’t pan out or people who were constantly setting preorders to rob Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. If you find you are spiraling, stop, regroup, refund people if they bought something. Being honest and taking things one thing at a time is a much better idea than panic grabbing onto whatever money you make because you fucked up. You’re just making a bigger mess for yourself down the line.
  10. If you spaghetti fling your publishing strategy, you will burn out– Note the word “strategy.” When you publish, you need to assume that you are in it for the long haul, and that means that you probably will not make a great deal of money in the beginning unless you are exceedingly lucky. That’s why I keep harping on backlist and consistency. Readers don’t expect you to pump out four books a year. They just want you to consistently publish, show them some bits to get them excited, and keep them in the loop. What I have seen a lot lately are people diving headfirst into anything that might make them money, panicking when it doesn’t work, and immediately swinging onto the next thing until they burn out having gotten nowhere. You have to be realistic with yourself and keep your day job or side hustle or whatever keeps you fed because you cannot realistically make a living wage off one or two books as an indie. Talk to more experienced authors about what they’ve done or trends they’ve noticed, set a course and a time period to do it, and follow through with it while writing more books. If you constant flit from thing to thing hoping to make money, you will end up getting no where, being stressed, and having less money than you made because you probably invested in something that didn’t pan out. Giving yourself 6-12 months to do something consistently will work far better than constantly running to the next thing.

new blog post: planning for pantsers Planning for Pantsers
Writing

Planning for Pantsers

Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I fully admit that I am a pantser by nature. I love to dive headfirst into writing and figure it out as I go… until it stops working and I hit the wall bug on a windshield style.

Over the years, I’ve tried to devise a way to balance out my discovery writer side, which I need to be enthused about writing, with my need to know where I’m going to avoid creating a colossal, unsolvable mess. I like to call this planning for pantsers, which sounds like an oxymoron, but if you’re someone who wishes they outlined but hates it immensely, some of what I mention below may be helpful to you. As with all writing advice, none of this is prescriptive. Trial and error is necessary to find your process, and what works for one book may not work for the next.

A Retrospective Outline

I have a whole blog post about this, which goes into more detail, but the basic idea is that I make an outline of what I’ve already written. I started doing this because I have a brain like a sieve and forget what I’ve already written, what threads I’ve added, details sprinkled in, etc. This caused me to reread my work-in-progress REPEATEDLY to the point that I would waste so much time rereading instead of writing that I was aggravating myself. To avoid rereading the whole thing, I would make an outline broken down by chapters which contained a bulleted list of what happens, including any important details or setting chunks, etc. that I might need to remember later. I have this as a Google Doc that I can leave open while I work on Microsoft Word (where I write my books).

This outline can be as detailed or sparse as you need, but the point of it is that you can easily recall what you already did in the book. You can always go back and add color coding or comments or whatever you need to make it more useful to you. I tend to add dates or days of the week if the timeline is important. If you are someone who goes back and forth fiddling with things, make sure to update your outline regularly to reflect that. As someone who does fiddle with things from the last chapter or so, what I do is update the outline once I’m about two chapters past it (ex. I will add chapter 6 to the outline once I’m on chapter 8) to avoid having to revise the outline regularly.

Sarra Cannon’s 3 Act Structure Outline

I love Sarra Cannon’s videos on Youtube, and I’ve taken both of her classes. She’s a really fantastic author who is eager to teach and share the resources that have helped her along the way. Her channel, Heart Breathings, has a lot of useful information for new authors and those who are further along in their careers.

Something I realized I struggled with was balancing the plot and threads of my stories to keep the pace from being “too slow.” I still think I write more emotionally-based, slower books, which is fine, but it was something I decided to work on. I watched Sarra’s video series on plotting your novel, and in the videos, she has a workbook that you can download for free to help you parse out the major chunks of your story. This was really helpful for me because it kept me from clumping things together or spacing them too far apart. To be clear, this isn’t a formulaic structure either. This is meant to be the bones upon which your story is built, but things can be moved around, skipped, etc.

I liked this method because while I don’t 100% adhere to the guidelines, it helps me figure out on an act-by-act basis what needs to happen, where I’m going, etc. At this point, I plan an act, write the act, and once I hit about 3/4 of the way through it, I start planning the next act of the book. This has helped me to have structure and foresight without ruining the discovery aspect of my writing. Sometimes I also have chunks of story in my head, but I can’t quite figure out where they go. This outline has helped me to solidify that before I make a mess for myself. If you haven’t already guessed, I do not like making a mess for myself and will avoid it at all costs, even if it means having three different outlining methods all at once.

Using Note/Scene Cards

Remember when I mentioned having scenes in your head but not knowing where to put them? Making note cards might be a solution for you. I like using physical note cards (as opposed to using a digital whiteboard or the features on Scrivener) because I’m a visual learning and being able to physically move, crumple, or alter a card just works better for me than a digital one. That, and I can’t get as easily distracted with them as I can with anything on the internet or a digital program. I am already easily distracted, and the moment I change windows, I’m a goner.

At this point, I don’t write out a card for every scene. I only do it for the major ones, whether that’s major for a side plot, main plot, character development, etc., but I don’t do it for every single scene. The purpose of them for me is to avoid forgetting something important. Sometimes I have ideas I want to add that I don’t know where to put, so they can’t be added to the main outline, but if I have them as a scene card, they hang out in the pile. Then, when I flip through the stack every once in a while, I see it and go, “Oh! Yes, I need to figure out where this goes.” Repeat that about twenty times for everything in the latter half of the book, and sometimes I actually figure out where it needs to go or at least what it needs to come before or after. That’s really what the cards are for, the general order.

For me, these tend to be scant, like “[REDACTED] turns up dead” or “Oliver runs into his ex.” You can obviously be as detailed as you need or use the front/back of the cards for different things. What I like to do is color code the cards by act. Act 1 is yellow, Act 2 Part 1 is green, Act 2 Part 2 is blue, Act 3 is purple, and the colors are represented as a stripe on the edge of the card or as a strip of washi tape. As I write the book, I put a little check in the bottom corner of the cards to mark that I wrote the scene. The cards help keep me organized while allowing me to move things around and plan as needed.

Other Things I Do That Help Me

  • Edit as I go- I will give the caveat that I’m not editing for perfection. I’m just tidying up and beefing up the scenes I worked on the day before. Sometimes I go back and plant things that are needed to be cohesive (foreshadowing and such), so I don’t forget when I do edits weeks later.
  • Edit on an act-by-act basis-once again, tidying and reacquainting myself with what I’ve already written to maintain cohesion and make sure I haven’t forgotten any threads.
  • Have a running notepad document with random stuff I need to add or what should happen in the next scene/chapter I will be working on. If you have a brain like a sieve, leave yourself notes.
  • Work on the assumption you will not remember an idea- my brain is like a browser with a hundred tabs open, so I leave myself notes, reminders, etc. for everything. Never assume you’ll remember because you won’t.
Writing

Take Chances, Make Mistakes, Get Messy

Kara Jorgensen4 Comments

ms frizzle quote

I have found my motto for when I teach college freshmen in the fall and it comes from one of my childhood inspirations, Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus.

One of the points we’re supposed to stress to the freshman is that writing should be done in multiple drafts and not in one giant Red Bull-fueled writing binge the night before it’s due. Why? Why does it matter that they hand in drafts instead of one “complete” paper?

A) That writing binge paper is probably shitty. I mean, have you ever read something you wrote at 2 AM?

B) Freshman need to be broken of bad habits they are taught in high school, like papers that focus on form over originality of thought

C) Drafts are a place to experiment, to find what you really want to say, and work on their craft. If they were playing baseball instead of writing, would you tell them that learning to catch the night before a game was adequate?

What I want my students to understand is that drafts in my class will be place for them to experiment with their writing and evolve. Those drafts will only be graded on their completion, but they’ll still be able to get feedback that will help them. The funny thing is, I found myself stumbling into the same trap as my future students.

I was working on a tough scene in Dead Magic and found that I was staring at my Word doc instead of actually writing. I knew what I wanted to have happen in that scene, but I was scared to write it. Putting it into a Word doc seemed so permanent. What if it was bad? What if it needed major rewrites? Fixing it on my Word doc would be such a hassle.

In my head, I knew it was a draft. I know that this version of Dead Magic is going to be overhauled several times before it ever hits Amazon, yet I still found myself staring at my computer as if it could never be changed. Luckily, I’m a stationary addict and already had a notebook I had hoped to use while at work or school to jot down ideas. Putting the laptop aside, I scribbled out the scene over the course of about two hours. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t neat or even that detailed, but it was written.

Step one: Write your stuff in a low-stakes place. Just get it out and try to keep going without too many stops.

Step two: Type it up and edit as you go.

For me, step two is par for the course. I’m not just going to slap up my shitty draft into the Word doc I was so paranoid about ruining. As I type up the new material, I add the detail that was missing in my handwritten draft and clean up any oddities. The low-stakes writing gets you out of the rut and can easily be translated into high-stakes writing. One of the unexpected perks was that I ended up writing more by hand and the word count grew even higher when I added detail while transcribing it.

If you’re getting performance anxiety working on your draft, try a change switching your medium. Writing in a designated notebook instead of Word may help take the edge of your perfectionism and help you get past your “writer’s block.”

Writing

5 Tips for Beating Writers Block

Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Sorry for not blogging sooner, but I have been under the weather for the past week.  Today’s post will be about the dreaded writers block.

Writers block can be one of the most crippling experiences for a writer, and after experiencing a bout of this recently myself, I thought I would post a few tips that may help to get through it.

  1. Ask, “Would your characters actually do this?”  Sometimes being stuck is caused by something as simple as trying to force a scene. Step back for a minute and think about how the scene can be reworked. Is your character doing something out of character? This can be the bane of a plotter’s existence because they have their outline and want to stick to it, but at times, a character can be whispering to you that they don’t want to or wouldn’t do what you are intending them to do.
  2. Free write.  Is another story knocking at your brain but you’re 2/3 into another one and don’t want to give up on it or throw yourself into a new project? Take a few minutes to let the scene out. Save the file in a separate folder of scraps or future projects and let it go. You can always revisit it when you’re finished with your current project, but for now, it’s out of your brain and on paper for later.
  3. Make an outline. Sometimes you need to see it on paper to get going. It’s often a case of where have I come from and where am I going? Draw out what you have thus far and then where you know you have to go. Typically, I use a blank sheet of printer paper and a brightly colored pen to stimulate ideas and remove constraints (no idea why it works but it seems to). Don’t put the future points too close together, leave space to fill-in with ideas. What do your characters need to do and how do we get them there?
  4. Look for visual inspiration. You have ideas, you know what you need to do, but the spark just isn’t there. Try going onto sites like Pinterest or Tumblr and looking for pictures that have to do with your story. If it’s set in the Victorian era, look up historical photos or vintage clothing. Is there a celebrity who looks like your characters? Look them up. Throughout the writing process, I create a Pinterest board of inspiration and look to it when I’m feeling stuck or meh about my writing.
  5. Read. One of the best pieces of writing advice I have ever gotten is to read. Reading will not only stimulate ideas, but it will be a refresher for craft. How does the author get to the climax? How are the characters built with depth and how do we find out about them? Read authors who inspire you and see how they did it. Learn from the masters, and let their words power yours.

Hopefully this helps you in your writing. The block is often caused by stress or fatigue and not laziness on the author’s part, but when you feel stuck, try some of the tips mentioned above and see if they help get you through. If nothing else, go for a walk and clear your head.

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Writing

7 Tips for Editing Your Manuscript

Kara Jorgensen9 Comments

editing

I have a love-hate relationship with editing.

Being the type of person who is appalled and embarrassed to have others discover mistakes in my work, I use editing as a way to polish my work before I show it off to anyone.  I have one alpha reader who reads most of my work while it is in progress because she is the most familiar with my characters and can often judge if I have a scene or reaction makes sense, and of course she sees my work in its unedited glory.  She is also my best friend and a fellow writer, who isn’t afraid to say, “Uh, what were you thinking?”  No one else should see it that way.  To me, an unedited work is like being in your underwear.  You don’t necessarily want everyone to see you in that state. Continue reading “7 Tips for Editing Your Manuscript” →

Writing

Finishing Book Two and What I Learned Along the Way

Kara Jorgensen5 Comments

wg manuscriptIt’s done.  The Winter Garden is done.

Well, the story is finished.  While I was stuck on the third to last chapter (yes, I had finished the epilogue and part of the pen-ultimate chapter before I started that one), I decided to edit the first twenty-seven chapters.  Now, the editing is done as well and The Winter Garden (Ingenious Mechanical Devices #2) is off to my beta readers! Until they get back to me with their feedback, I will be taking a little hiatus from Emmeline, Immanuel, and Adam.  Every time I finish a novel, it’s a bit depressing.  I’m done with the characters (for now), the plot is finished, the bad guys have been dealt with, and now, I need to step back.  In my next post, I will discuss editing in more detail, but for now, I would like to impart what I have learned after publishing my first book and finishing my second. Continue reading “Finishing Book Two and What I Learned Along the Way” →