This is a topic I have been thinking a lot about since I decided to venture into the Kindle Scout program. Since you are required to provide an opening to your book and try to entice them to vote for your book based on what they see in that brief extract, being able to obtain and hold their attention is extremely important.

With that being said, I thought I would gather some tips on how to grab your reader’s attention at the beginning of a book to help out others as you create your masterpieces.

Give a hint of what to expect

In your opening, you can tip off your reader on what will be coming. I have tried a few different style openings in my own books. Since they are usually murder mysteries, I have sometimes used a variation of what I call the “Columbo opening”.

If you remember…

Often, when I mention brand and platform, writers assume I am talking about promotion and marketing (ads). That is not only a false assumption, it can be a fatal one.

When we (regular people) hop onto Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook or whatever social site, only to get barraged with book spam, a big reason it annoys us is because the author hasn’t taken time to build rapport, earn our trust, and gain permission to sell us stuff.

I kid you not, I signed in to LinkedIn for the first time in like a YEAR the other day and, in less than an hour, some author sends me PM with a link to buy his book. No introduction or hello or liking my stuff or asking if I had pets…

HERE! BUY MY BOOK!

….sure. Right on that. Nice to meet you, too.

*grumbles* *now remembers why I hated LinkedIn*

I’m reposting this from a few years ago. Back then, I didn’t have many readers so now, I wanted to share these pithy thoughts–including a few updates–with all my new efriends!

There are a lot of difficult parts to writing. I mean, besides the whole write-edit-revise-rewrite-market-start over thing. That cutting a vein and bleeding on the page can get touch-and-go at times. Channeling your muse often gets someone you’d prefer to avoid. And it’s well documented that trying to make a living as an author is pretty near impossible unless your last name rhymes with ‘Fancy’ or ‘Brawling’.

Despite all that, it’s a profession people flock to, spend thousands training to be, and wouldn’t give up for anything. Widely-accepted studies show 80% of us have a book we want to share–despite that industry stats show it takes five years to hone and deliver an acceptable novel.

It may–or may not–surprise…

Every author I know dreams of finding the perfect ‘set and forget’ book promotion.

I’m here with some bad news: it doesn’t exist.

Effective book promotion is about engagement and communication. It’s letting people know your book exists, what it’s about, and why they should read it… without stuffing it in their face and demanding that they buy it.

What many people don’t realise is that effectively promoting your book is a process, not an event. You cannot simply advertise it once, post it on Facebook and/or Twitter, then sit back to wait for the sales to roll in.

Personally, I’d love to think that everyone I know who sees my book will buy it, and that would flow on to lots of people I don’t know buying it. That isn’t how it works. The people you know are often less likely to be interested and willing to buy and…

Whenever employees are asked about their thoughts about their bosses, they would often keep silent about it in the fear of repercussions to their job.

As a manager or a boss, it is difficult to work with this silence because you have no clear idea if your team respects or trusts you and your help.

However, if you feel like your team is closing itself from you, you can improve your relationship with them by communicating with them actively.

But, how can you do it?

I’ve been writing since I was old enough to discover books. Some of you may not know but I was serious about being a writer at the age of eighteen but then an abusive marriage cranked into the works and many dark years later, I started over, determined to follow my dreams again. Here’s what I’ve learned.

1. If someone doesn’t believe in you, they’re not quite worth ruining your life over. I have a new support group now in my kids, my family, my friends, my crit partners, and the bloggers I’ve met along the way. Not to mention, one day, I can finally add readers to that list.
2. It takes as many drafts as it does. First drafts are messy unless you edit as you go along. I try not to. Yes, I do a lot of rewriting, but each draft makes it that more polished than before. Sometimes…

One of those dastardly little conundrums of self-editing is the apostrophe.

Our writing center at the institution where I taught had a handout titled “Rogue Apostrophes,” in recognition of the way these nasty squiggles had a way of popping up here and there in student papers, wherever the mood seemed to strike them.

””””””’ !

As with many punctuation marks, misplaced apostrophes don’t always get in the way of a reader’s understanding. But they can. When readers encounter something that looks as if it was a possessive but turns out not to be, they’ll mentally backtrack to clear up the confusion. Sometimes the reader doesn’t even notice the glitch in his or her attention, but it’s there all the same.

And even the slightest glitch in attention means that the reader has been kicked out of your story, even if just for a moment. Not good.

There are only

on Just Publishing Advice:

We use abbreviations and acronyms all the time, but what do they mean?

The English language uses many forms of word abbreviation.

We use shortened forms increasingly for text messaging to reduce a word or phrase.

Very often these are acronyms using initial letters such as LOL, ROTFL, BRB.

Other forms also use a capital letter from the start of each word but are pronounced as words. A good example is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which forms the word, NATO.

Many common abbreviations, however, are pronounced letter by letter. The United States of America is most commonly referred to as the US or the USA, and the United Kingdom as the UK.

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