First time visiting the Essentials section? Read this article to help you navigate this portion of Written Well.
Using Vellum to Format Your Book
Though there are other tools out there, Vellum is simply the best we have found for formatting your book. Let’s walk through formatting your book using this excellent program. Start Up Start Vellum and pick either New Book or Import Word File I picked new book just to look at a clean interface before importing a Word document. You can write your whole book directly into Vellum, but it lacks robust editing tools, especially change tracking if you are having critiqued or working with a coauthor. Better to write your book in something else and then import it. There are...
Email Lists
There is no other marketing tool as effective as a list of emails people have voluntarily given you. Besides the fact that it is proven out by every metric tested, it just makes sense: people gave you their email, so they are receptive to your pitch. They may even be anticipating it. Email lists have the greatest success rate of any other "advertising" and their cost-per-click? Absolutely free until you have at least 500 subscribers, at which point it is profitable to pay for the mailings you are doing.
Anthologies: How to Create, Edit, and Publish an Anthology
What is an Anthology? Classically, there are two specific definitions you need to know about short fiction. A Collection is a group of stories, all by the same author. An Anthology, conversely, is a group of stories by a variety of different authors. We’re here to talk about the latter. Generally, an anthology has a central theme, around which all the authors involved have written. It might be sword and sorcery fantasy. Or hard-boiled private detectives. Or military science fiction. (I’ve owned and read all of those at one time or another.) Alternatively, it might be part of a “Year’s...
The Indie Mindset
Let’s talk mindset. Many of you have come out of the Traditional Publishing (TradPub for short) world, either directly, or having been raised and trained to think that way. You see a specific career arc that you need to follow, in order to achieve success. Does this sound familiar? Start in short fiction, honing your craft at 5000-word stories until you think you have the ability to write a pretty good story for one of the periodicals in your genre. Then you start submitting them and to various open anthology calls until you start to achieve some level of success....
Horror Study Materials
Remember to read the articles in the Essentials section. These cover all the essential skills you’ll need as a self-published author. They are not just for beginners either. They go in depth on how to successfully write, publish, and market your own books.
Should I write Horror?
If you read horror, enjoy scary movies, and like coming up with unexpected twists on every day life, then horror might be right for you. And the business is good. The market is big and a significant portion of the books are written by self published authors.
Services
We built Written Well to give self-published authors all the tools they need to make a living writing and publishing their own books. But many authors don’t want to be their own publisher, cover designer, blurb writer, formatter, and marketing expert. It can be a lot. Having so many authors asking us to help them publish their books was one of the reasons we started the site, and because we know many authors don’t want to do everything, we continue to offer those services. There is no guarantee of success with these services, and anyone who offers you a guarantee...
Memoir Study Material
Remember to read the articles in the Essentials section. These cover all the essential skills you’ll need as a self-published author. They are not just for beginners either. They go in depth on how to successfully write, publish, and market your own books.
Should I Write Memoir?
Have you led an interesting life? Or better yet, can you write interestingly about your life? Memoir is for those who can turn their personal stories into a tale with meaning, with humor, with characters and themes that people can relate to on a personal level. You must be a good storyteller, and an excellent stylist. It is difficult to find true life that is more dramatic than fiction, so you have to bring that drama with your words.
Memoir Guide
Memoir gets its own guide simply because of its uniqueness among nonfiction. Most nonfiction can be easily split into instructional or informational. And while it's definitely not instructional, it's not precisely informational because no one is looking for information about you. Unless you're famous. But if you're famous, you don't need our help, someone is already offering you a million dollars and a ghost writer for your memoir. And this is all before creative nonfiction comes along and tells you that memoir doesn't even have to be true. at least not the whole time. So, what even is memoir?