WHAT MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL? Insecure Writers Support

But first ...
     Alex Cavanaugh and I are spotlighted in THE MYSTERY GYPSY DAILY today!
http://paper.li/gypsynovel

Karen Lamb has an excellent post today as well:
http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/what-makes-you-so-special-the-magic-to-selling-books/

Karen is much more wise than I.  But I thought I would mention a few things that might help us all.

Unless you are Alex or Hart Johnson or Talli Roland or Anne R. Allen, you -- like me -- are unknown.

What makes us so special?

 

 

We need to ask ourselves that question in thinking how to make ourselves stand out.

 

We're applying, in essence, for a job interview.  The job of entertaining a paying customer.

 

 

Why should a browsing reader pick us?

 

 

What do we have to offer that is unique in our tale?  Are we writing the same re-hash of an Alpha bad girl taking on supernatural foes with ease and lust?

 

Are we writing about a wallflower or goth girl lost in the high school crunch suddenly swept up by a GQ cover model vampire?

 

Are you 30 or over? 

 

 

How bored are you with teenage girls and their woes?  If you are, so are others.  The teens many authors are targeting are focused on social media now not novels.

 

The majority of habitual readers are past their teens usually.

 

Write about the pressures of entering the job market.  Write about the angst of having started the climb up the coporate ladder only to find loneliness your reward.

 

 

Is this all there is?

 

 

That is the question so many who read ask of their lives, of their relationships, of where they find themselves.
 

 

ADVENTURE.  LOVE.  MYSTERY.  THRILLS.  EXOTIC LOCALES
 

 

 

Those are some of the things many habitual readers seek in their books.  Provide it in a unique way, and you will be well on your way to being "hired."   :-)

 

As for pricing your ebooks:  Encourage readers to gamble on an unknown.  I suggest $1.99 to $2.99 depending on the length.

It's said that readers seeing such low prices will not respect your prose.  But they might take a gamble on it.  And respect must be earned.

How can you earn it from non-readers?

 

 

EXAMPLE:

 

 

You are in the Egypt of 1895.  Though your childhood was impoverished, you literally have the wealth of King Solomon.

 

Though you live simply, you have used your wealth to anger the Egyptian land aristocrats by buying the farms of peasants and giving it to them.

You have bought freedom for poor Egyptian young men being forced into military service. 

 

You have a death sentence on your head for breaking Oscar Wilde out of prison with your lifelong friend, Mark Twain.

 

You are hated by the Moslem followers of the Mahdi, who was murdered by your mysterious wife. 
 

 

There is simply no safe place for you in Egypt.

 

 

Yet, here you are because the wife you love with all your being is excavating in the time-lost site of Tanis. 

 

She seeks the Aegis of Sekhmet, the name of the goddess she bore so long ago the portraits of her then have crumbled into dust.

 

Into that Aegis she poured the searing parts of her mind she loathed and feared. 

 

Now, her people are in danger, and she must again become that monster of old -- the monster who may be so changed that she will no longer love you.

 

But you are Samuel Durand McCord,

 

and you will help the one you love though it cost you everything you hold dear.  Love is like that.  Anything else is self-love.

 

DEATH in the House of Life

 

 

COMING SOON.  WATCH FOR IT.