I attended a webinar today that purported to give the Six Secrets of Author Success. I won't name names here. I signed up for it to see if it was a scam, actually. And actually, it wasn't, although the presenter did try to sell us a reasonably priced continuing education program.
I gleaned some really good tips. The main one: I need to totally redesign all of my books and titles and marketing in Amazon and start all over again.
I'm not kidding. I've been doing it all wrong if I want to sell books. Case in point:
This cover stinks and no one would want to buy this book based on it. It says nothing about the content. I used it because it was free. I'd be better off to go take a picture of my back deck.
Of course, this webinar was geared toward genre fiction, niche genre fiction even--really niche. Romance for vampire cowboys, that kind of thing. Medieval suspense erotica. But there's nothing to say that a more literary writer couldn't make it work.
Beyond repackaging all my books (6 novels out there now), the other main advice was to find a lane and stay in it. Do series. Create expectations, then fulfill. They will know what they are buying. If you want to write something else, use a different name (I already have one to use, thankfully).
That said, this article from Christianity Today poses some fascinating questions about fiction writing and the evangelical world, and I would love to talk about it with someone: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/october/reading-evangelicals-bestselling-christian-fiction-novels.html
I generally grown at the concept of "evangelical fiction" and rarely read it, but he takes a different approach--not whether it's good or not, but what it means and does to people.
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