Long Tail Writing

I am trying to get back in the habit of writing daily. I think the first source of that needs to be with having and organizing inspiration. I’ve worked hard on discovering what I can do to organize that inspiration. I dug through connections between Google Docs and Google Keep (notes) to try to divine a workable system. After becoming frustrated with that, I stumbled upon an article ( https://evernote.com/blog/how-to-organize-big-writing-projects/ ) on how to organize for a novel using Evernote. I downloaded the app on my phone and tried out a number of features. While there is still some improvements that need to be made, this should suffice for the moment. Some of my favorite features include grabbing snippets of web pages and sorting them into specific folders. I also like the style of being able to see multiple notes at one time. That way if you have several photos of something, along with some description, you will see those at the same time. What I would like improv...

Writing every day is extremely difficult because there are so many things to try and work through. As an author, you need to build the marketing along with the product. That can be great to build a wonderful synergy, but it can also lead to inhibitions on production. That’s because you need to almost do both at the same time. Writing every day and working with readers to get that writing in their hands. I am not sure how to build that balance. It would be easy to build that balance if the tasks were all set in stone. However, often times the tasks are from a regular consistency. For example, I need to work through several edits of a story, respond to review copies requested, try to work with Audible customer service, and yet… write for several hours. I can’t produce all that. I can do a little of each, but not all of it. So the best I can resolve is to prioritize and build out the parts that need to be done. The first and foremost is to cater to the review copies, then foll...

I am finishing up a book called Newsletter Ninja that talks about some of the basics behind setting up an author mailing list. Overall, I think about 80% - 90% was already understood, but it did give out a few pieces I hadn’t known. However, I am now trying to decipher another potential gain, but I don’t quite know where to go. I’ve asked the Sub Reddit group I am in about it, with not much luck so far.   The focus I am aiming for is to build a new mailing list focused around UK readers. There are three main reasons on why to focus on this market. First off, any books I produce can be read without much (or any) modification. The second reason is that this market is smaller and may have less competition than the main USA market. The final reason is that Audible has a UK site with unique codes. I get a lot of these review codes for the UK market and I’ve never been able to really give them away. I’ve given maybe a dozen away total, over all my books. I think if I can buil...

"The Muse Rewards Action" Lately I’ve been thinking of the role of the artist. What is their specific purpose? I am concentrating on a particular concept. A line I recently found is ‘the muse rewards action’. That resonates with me, because it is almost like an artist’s role is to be active in that rewarding action. An artist’s goal is to take the action, get the inspiration, and form that inspiration into a product. The world then consumes that product for a number of reasons. Perhaps for escapism or perhaps to show a vital truth that wasn’t uncovered until recently. The next question then becomes, what kind of product does the artist want to build, which is much easier. I want to build something elegant and approachable. Something that is almost a common extravagance. I want to build something like a cup of Starbucks coffee. It’s more costly than coffee at home, but is done in a way that is more delicious than what I could brew. In addition, it still has a low eno...

Progress forward is sometimes a tricky thing. You can spend a bunch of time trying to figure out an aspect of your work (such as newsletters, which is what I’ve been doing). You can have great luck in that area, but then feel like a failure in another area. I’ve let my curiosity into building newsletters overshadow my daily writing habit. I need to put this back in proper order. I’ve taken a look at my past statistics and have noticed a few things of interest. My average weekly output, since I’ve tried starting a daily writing habit nine weeks ago, has been 6k per week. The truth is I had two bigger weeks; which when removed, the average dives down to 4k per week. This is way more than I originally could do. In fact, this year is on track to be my most productive one yet. However, I want to build so much this year, and am just getting hazy about it. What do I mean by hazy? I mean that there isn’t a sustainable focus. I want want want; but I keep changing that vision by incr...

To start with, I want to say that I am extremely happy with how this has been turning out! I've had some success with BookFunnel and I am hoping that will continue. I've also been able to email out a lot of review emails, so hopefully those will produce some fantastic results. On all of this, time will tell, but I am hoping it is moving in the correct direction! BookFunnel When I last updated this, I had sent a test email to 153 users. Since that email on Friday, I’ve had 45 more subscribers join the list. That’s pretty amazing! As far as statistics go, I had a 64.7% open rate, 26.1% click rate, and a 5.9% conversion rate on the previous 153 person email. Currently, this is my high-water mark. In a previous post, that mark belonged to Noisetrade users. I am really excited by this, especially because I feel it’s going to be very cost effective to continue this effort. Currently, each subscriber gathered via this method is costing 4.8c, which is extremely cheap. Happy ...

I've done a few things, so now I am looking to describe how those things went; or are going. The ultimate goal of building any newsletter list is to have users that interact with the content. I went ahead and removed around 200 users that had never interacted with any content. I think this purging is good to do several times a year. I then tested my audiences gained from several solutions. Here are the current results. Measuring Stick (Low) - Giveaway Hops So the way I can tell if the audience is worth it or not is by comparing it against my normal gains. These are low-interest users gained from book Giveaway hops. It's nearly free to participate in these, and I get a solid stream of users. I had 34 email addresses gained in the last month. I could have pushed this harder, but had a lot going in July. Of those people, 11 opened the email. 0 clicked on the link in the form which obviously resulted in 0 conversions. So: 32% open rate, 0% click through, 0% conversions. In t...