Lindsay - November 18, 2021For this week’s show, Jo, Andrea, and Lindsay discuss characters, book openings, pacing, and other writing craft choices that can help or hurt your book sales.
Are you turning off potential readers in your opening (sample) pages? Are your characters boring or even repulsing readers? Are you trying to be too clever with your hook or a mystery element?
If you’re great at marketing, you might be able to sell your first book no matter what’s inside, but if the story doesn’t grab the reader, they’ll never go on to purchase more books from you.
Before we jumped into the main topic, we discussed the news that Spotify is buying out Findaway Voices as a way to go thundering into the audiobook world (and what it might mean for indie authors). “Spotify is bringing in Findaway’s full team of around 150, it says, and then plans to build on Findaway’s existing investments in the audio industry. It also plans to bring expanded access to audiobooks to Spotify’s 381 million monthly active users.”
You can read about it on Techcrunch: Spotify expands into audiobooks with acquisition of Findaway
Andrea also started a Facebook group for authors writing in the medical romance genre. If that’s you, you can join it here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/647429396627693/
Some of the subjects we covered during our craft discussion are:
- Book openings that get readers to buy (or keep reading if they downloaded it for free).
- Things that turn us off as readers.
- Mistakes we’ve personally made with our own openings.
- Things that make readers want to continue reading, such as reader promises, inciting events, and compelling characters.
- The importance of well-rounded villains and how to craft them.
- What makes a strong character and how to write one.
- Things that stop us from reading the current book and maybe even future books from an author.
Thank you for listening, and thank you to Joshua Pearson for producing the show.
