It’s happening around the world. Authors, published or as-yet-not, are discovering the powerful experience of producing content for the Kindle reader. For many this is a mysterious process without a well-lit path.

On June 5th and 7th in Tiburon, through the Belvedere-Tiburon Recreation Department, we will shine some blazing lights on the important details that take you from a manuscript, a pile of blog posts, or an idea for a book all the way to seeing your content available in the Amazon search engine. Everyone has a chance to talk about their own project if they want.

Two separate classes, each offered 6:00 to 8:30 on Tuesday and Thursday, will send you home knowing what to do next. Register soon, it’s just around the corner!

Go to Bel-Tib Recreation Adult Writing & Film to see the classes offered by Suzanna Stinnett and Anne Hill. See you there!

Suzanna Stinnett

Bay Area Bloggers Society

As I view the coming year of BABS meetings under the umbrella of “Authors Go Public,” I keep hearing this little message in my head. “It’s a reader platform.” Readers are as unique and eccentric as you, dear author, so making the transition to see your outreach efforts (your blog, your Goodreads presence, your Shelfari friends and your book extras, all of that) as a Reader Platform is the most succinct advice I can offer.

READER PLATFORM?

What does it mean? It means you’re circling around your reader, knowing where they hang out and what they say to their friends. It means you spend more time understanding them than you do talking about yourself. So you built an author platform, didja? Who cares? We’ve all got one of those.

A reader platform should be a big love-fest. Somehow, you’ve got to find your own way of connecting with your readership and growing that into a fertile, active playground.

Publishing these days is certainly author-centric, to use a phrase I hear from Anne Hill. And that’s a good thing. An astoundingly good thing. But your outreach — your platform — better be reader-centric. Because that’s all you’ve got going forward.

Read more in Anne’s new ebook: Three Steps to Selling Your eBook.

Learn what happened in 2011 and what authors are doing with it in my ebook: Indie Authors in the Publishing Sea-Change

Get your Kindle series rolling with The 4-Hour Publisher

Suzanna Stinnett

Follow me on Twitter: Brainmaker

Visit my Shelfari page: Suzanna Stinnett

Bloggers are authors too, and if they know what’s goin’ on in the marketing world, authors are becoming bloggers. We’re in Marin County, San Francisco, and Sebastopol, teaching and sharing tricks and techniques for being a published author in the 21st century. Already have a book or an ebook up? Come for the Author Recognition photoshoot and collaborate to get the word out about your books.

See you there,

Suzanna Stinnett

Follow me on Twitter: Brainmaker

Blogs have a way of accumulating lots of great content. How long have you been posting on your site? A year? Two or three?

If you are like many conscientious bloggers, you have been working hard to offer your readers valuable insight, guidance, discoveries and news. It’s time to take a new look at your writing.

Your audience most likely consists of people who are active on the web. They are either already comfortable with searching for blogs and reading on their computer screen, or they are learning to be. There’s another audience out there, possibly a very large audience, who has not seen your work. And they won’t, as long as it exists only on your blog.

What audience? The lovely readers who are enjoying their Kindles, Nooks, and other digital devices. Millions of ‘em. And they want good content, lots of it, and they expect to pay something to read your work.

That’s a very big difference from your blog-loving online loyals. Never forget them, they are your friends and supporters. But by taking a little time to convert your posts to fit into an ebook, you can offer all that value to the e-reader crowd. It’s a new experience for many bloggers: actually monetizing your work.

I’ve created a guide that helps you see just how to go about that task. It’s called “Turn your blog posts into eBooks,” and it’s available on Kindle. Keep in mind you don’t need a Kindle to read a Kindle book. You can read it through the free Kindle app, which you can load to your phone and computer.

I hope you’ll dive in and have the unique experience of converting your content to this new platform. It’s a rush!

GET THE BOOK ON AMAZON HERE

Authors publishing on Kindle are growing ever more savvy about how and when to build their readership. (This is a major element of the massive transition from old publishing models to an indie-dominant new world for authors). How do we bring readers across the bridge?

I’m the founder of Bay Area Bloggers Society, a large and growing membership of bloggers and authors who meet in person around the San Francisco Bay area. Our group is chock-full of amazing brains and talent, many published and self-published authors, and many beautiful, informative blogs. Starting in April, we are hosting a year-long series called “Authors Go Public.” We’ll celebrate the many newly published books (and older ones too), and make sure everyone knows how to proceed from their particular spot on the publishing and marketing merry-go-round. You can learn more on the website by clicking here: Bay Area Bloggers Society. And take a look at the two books at the end of this post. Both of these are being used by BABS members to get their own publishing empire growing.

It’s a great place to ask questions and meet more people who are actively writing and publishing today.

Suzanna Stinnett
Bay Area Bloggers Society
@Brainmaker on Twitter

Get The 4-Hour Publisher and learn serial publishing for Kindle!

Get Turn Your Blog Posts into eBooks and reach Kindle readers who aren’t seeing your blog!

Within a few hours of receiving the email from Amazon about KDP Select, I had a dozen more emails from clients and associates. Not the first time we’re startled by the stark light coming from O Most Powerful Amazon.

So off we march into two general camps.

Camp 1. Amazon-Centric Authors
You’ll find me here. It’s not that I don’t want my books available in all digital readers. I do. But I have only so much time to upload, groom and market on an individual platform. They all take time. Amazon provides such robust tools for authors, I haven’t made it through all the ways I can market in their system. My books are selling well in Kindle and I need every possible remaining hour to write. At this point I have zero investment in any other platform.

Camp 2. Other Authors
Members of the other camp tell a variety of stories. They may have gotten into Smashwords, or Nook, or the iBookStore, and be very invested in one or more of those platforms. If they are established anywhere besides Kindle, it’s going to be a tough decision to remove books from platforms and make them exclusive to KDP Select.

What I Did and Why
As soon as I grokked what Amazon was offering, I went straight to PubIt (that’s Nook) and removed the two books I had managed to load there. That took a big three minutes including taking a look at my sales record which, of course, was still at “zero” since I have not had time to groom or market for the Nook.

The Why
For 90 days I am more than glad to experiment. Do you get that the half a million dollars set aside for December is divvied out among the authors who participate in KDP Select? This is the first 90 day window. There will never be fewer authors participating than there are right now. I hope you don’t do what I did. Get it?

The Future
We’ll see how all this lending goes. Yes, there are huge ramifications floating in the Amazon-colored sky. What is happening to the whole lending system? I grew up in Carnegie libraries. What about Amazon’s ever-growing clout in publishing? Sure, it’s dangerous ground. Eyes wide open. Amazon is formidable and doesn’t seem to care much about rules. For now, however, they need authors, so I’m being fed well at the table of giants.

The Challenge
It’s the same challenge in every corner, people. To thrive today as authors, we need to be intrepid experimenters. We need to keep our eyes on our readership and our hearts in the next (ever better) book. As a lifelong writer, my experimental time and energy is going to the place where I find the biggest readership and the most respectable royalties. And for both of those, I say it’s about time.

Suzanna Stinnett

Get The 4-Hour Publisher here.

Get Turn Your Blog Posts into eBooks here.

Bay Area Bloggers Society and ePub Clubs

Join the Independent Authors Network

Join World Literary Cafe

Read The 4-Hour Publisher

In a discussion on Twitter with #OTable folks, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu and I came to prefer the term “micronovel” for short novels being prepared for digital readers. I write to a Kindle audience and secondarily to all the other e-readers. After publishing a few non-fiction ebooks, I’m now happily wading in the murky waters of a long-worked-on novel. But I’ve always wanted to publish it in a series. Huzzah! and Shazam! Now that option is a good one for both writer and reader. To describe the whole writing and reading experience of this type of thing, I’ve hit on “episodic micronovel” with Kevin’s nod of approval, which is meaningful to me.

Back to “What the heck is that?” Okay. You got the series part. The micro part means that it’s longer than an average short story but shorter than a novella. I could have used “novelette” but it just sounded so powdery. The micronovel episodes are going to come out about 70 pages each.

Form-wise, that’s long enough to sink into some characters and some painterly scenes. Long enough to reveal humans moving through the mandates of their minds and a few outcomes. Maybe even long enough for a reversal or three. We’ll see about that. Please join me in a crowd-sourced finger-crossing that I’ll meet my goal of publishing Episode 1 before the end of the year. I promise not to hurry.

Suzanna Stinnett

More about writing a series for Kindle in the 4-Hour Publisher

The Writers Have Left the Building

Writers may now begin to inform the publishing industry. Do we want to do that?

Writers who have stabilized their income through digital publishing can start telling publishers and the pool of professionals contained in that industry how to work with writers. We can ask for what we want.

As part of that new conversation, we can feed back what we are learning about our readers and how to engage them. How to keep readers and writers happy.

It’s really different to say what you want when you’ve got what you need.

Writers are in the driver’s seat now. And the roads aren’t particularly friendly toward the old school.

Publishers, blinded by self-serving ignorance and hobbled by greed, have made few friends of writers in recent decades. There’s a big dollop of hostility on the publishing pie as the world seems to turn its back on the traditions of the industry. The last few months have seen stories of publishers holding white-fisted to the rules they think still apply, like preventing authors from playing in digital publishing on their own.

Publishers seem to be turning out their own lights, going dreadfully stupid while writers get smarter by the hour.

What’s happened in the last months — we can barely call it years — is that writers have figured out how to live without publishers. I’ve been a self publishing advocate since the 80s, drinking from the fountain of Dan Poynter from his very first book. It’s not new to me. The opportunities now presenting are quite different from anything that came before. The biggest difference was mentioned in Sunday’s New York Times article on Amazon’s newest blow to publishers, “…only one relationship matters now: The one between writers and readers.”

Writers are in control now as long as they realize that readers are in control.

What am I proposing? That we abide by the 21st century mandate: Collaborate. Recognize interdependence and value all the players from a position of self-realization.

What do we have to gain? The best of what publishing can bring to the table. Brilliant editors, agents, forms of distribution and marketing. Recognition. Even as writers discover these are all available outside the “industry,” I see value in the bank of accomplishments, the deep understanding of book design and reader experience, still alive in the remains of the publishing nest.

As a writer who loves self publishing, I’ve worked hard to put my best-edited work up on Kindle. I am turning a profit, unlike the results of my traditionally published print book. I see this as a thrilling time to be a writer — probably the best time ever. But I also love print and I think it warrants a special place in our future. I think it can be valued for what it is: a sensory, artful form of delivering pages. Publishers might want to be involved in that. Writers might find more satisfying success by collaborating with talented professionals who once rode elevators to their offices.

Amazon’s recent actions to publish authors directly threw a real skull-crusher to the traditional publishing industry. Authors should beware, though, as Amazon’s tremendous service to authors can easily take a dark turn. Their focus on “end-to-end” publishing starting with “development of the writing” makes me feel like a cloud just blocked the sun on a cold day. But I see where they get the idea: That’s what traditional publishers did once upon a time. Could writers advocate for great editors and designers for their Amazon books? We don’t want Amazon to be the next Decider, now, do we?

That’s another reason why I think we should invite all the players, old and new, to the dance. Let’s keep looking at how we can two-step together for mutual benefit.

What might writers tell publishers?

It’s the giant neon sign of modern living: What has been unsustainable is now ceasing to exist. That’s just math. What innovative collaboration rises in its wake, however, is up to us.

Suzanna Stinnett

Get The 4-Hour Publisher and start your own series of ebooks

Get Turn Your Blog Posts into eBooks and find a whole new audience for your content

Kindle announced amazon.fr this week. Huzzah!!

Go read about it on Amazon.

Get your ebooks ready, Kindle is selling!

Follow #epubchat on Twitter. Use Tweetchat.com to make it easier.

Escaping the editor
Today on the Twitter chat called #writechat, we were talking about different tools that spur our writing along. I referred to the “wild mind” technique given to us by author Natalie Goldberg in her book by the same name. I’ve used this tool for 20 years and it always does something good for my writing brain. Sometimes it even does good for my work-in-progress.

The idea is to keep your pen moving so that crusty old editor sitting in your head doesn’t have a chance to stop your flow. This is no simple feat, but it can be cleverly eluded with wild mind writing.

Use home base words
I don’t have Natalie’s book in front of me but here’s what I’ve been doing all these years. I come up with three words that will be my “home base” words. The best sets of words are mostly nouns, some verbs, and rarely a conceptual term or descriptive. Try looking in the newspaper for ideas. I once kept a brainstorming journal with words for Wild Mind. Nouns that are more on the specific side are cool, such as sandal instead of shoe. It’s really great when they seem to have no relation to each other or even look silly together. I write the three words across the top of the page. Then I set the timer. I like going for ten minutes for a couple of writings and then doing a big twenty minute session. Even five minutes can be quite a ride.

Now I have my words and I say, “Okay, handstand, elephant, and sandal for ten minutes. Go!”

If I don’t immediately have a sentence form in my head, I just start writing the words. The creative brain has plenty to say, so if you bore it by writing the words a couple of times it will jump in and take over. Or you can start with “I don’t know what handstand, elephant and sandal can possibly do together on this page but I’m trying wild mind writing since Suzanna says it’s so great…” Just write terrible, boring things. Natalie says to write the most terrible stuff you can. Soon you’re off and running. It is not about speed, it’s about continuity. Keep the pen moving.

Poor baby
Wonderful things happen in wild mind writing. The inner editor tries hard at first, badgering as usual, “This is stupid! Why write this? What a waste of time! Put a comma in there! It’s time to empty the trash! The dog needs to go out!” But if you stick with it for just a bit, it will give up and you may find yourself lost in the writing. Heaven! You may not know what you’re writing half the time. Even better!

Your writing process might be stuck in a loop. This is very common. In that case, you may be annoyed with what you’re writing, and feel it is worse than ever. You might be writing things like “My sandals are on the porch. The elephant is in the room.” You might feel quite dreary about it. But guess what. There is story in those simple sentences. Keep going. Any time it slows down, go back to writing the home base words over and over.

When I feel dreary, I try to to take a big breath, shake it off, and do this exercise as often as possible. Your creative mind just needs a chance to break the surface. Even a little hole in the ice will let your imagination come streaming through and – voila! – an eruption of words.

Write the crap
I believe Natalie Goldberg said, “You are free to write the worst crap in America.” Imagine how the inner editor hates statements like that. Try doing the writing in unusual places. On the bus. In the car. In line at the grocery store.

Ideas from Little Shifts
My book, “Little Shifts,” has a chapter called “The Force of Your Voice.” There I talk about 10 minute writings to connect to imagination. I made a list of words that could stimulate imagination for the timed writing. Here are some of those (all descriptive):

lavish * gleaming * roomy * quicken * plush

and a few “moving” words: caper * locomote * frolic * glide * zigzag

Doing this exercise with a few other people is extra-satisfying. It’s so fun to hear what others come up with, and laugh at how different our minds are.

Enjoy your imagination. It’s the biggest part of you.

Suzanna