B Plot
Taking creative risks
Taking creative risks can push your skills as a writer. They can challenge how you structure your plot, develop your characters, and force you to come up with a unique twist.
Here are some pros to taking creative risks:
- you stretch your creativity and imagination
- you strengthen your writing skills
- you develop opportunities to collaborate (reaching out to new people, writing in a new genre, developing ways to cross-promote through blogs, etc.)
- you might discover that you enjoy writing in another subgenre/genre
- taking creative risks can develop into part of your brand
Here are some cons to taking writing risks:
- you might not have the current skill level to do the story justice
- you might alienate some of your readers if you switch genres or take too much of a risk
- the story might be so ambitious that it frustrates you, and you lose your desire to write it
- it can be a blow to your self-esteem to receive negative feedback
There are different types of risks an author can take. You can do something radical with the book cover. The issue with going too far off-genre with your book cover is that your audience might not recognise it and buy it. Many people do judge a book by its cover. If no one stops to read the blurb, they won’t buy it. You can do some A/B testing with your book covers to see which one gains traction. Sometimes, people will be attracted to an off-genre book cover. Other times they won’t. There’s plenty of opportunities to experiment with FB ads, IG, and reading groups.
I write romances, and romances rely heavily on tropes. If I’m reading a historical based in Scotland, readers expect a highlander in a kilt who often falls in love with an English bride. Let’s consider western romances where many stories involve saving a ranch.
I continue to listen to historicals and westerns, among many other books. There’s a certain comfort in knowing how the plot will unfold. I like seeing an unpredictable ending, which isn’t easy considering the sheer volume of stories in which the basic plot is the same: MC1 meets MC2, they need to save the ranch (or defend a Scottish keep), antagonist tries to kill MC1, the black moment between the romantic couple, resolution of romance and non-romance plots, an epilogue with babies.
The great books that stand out (for me) are those with moments of supreme humour (as in I’m walking alone on a highway listening to a book, and I burst out laughing) and unexpected resolution. Humour is fun to write and can push a writer’s skill. An original resolution that resonates is something that takes time, patience, and the willingness to push boundaries.
If you like historical romances, Say Yes to the Marquess by Tessa Dare and Sweet Revenge and The Switch by Lynsay Sands are (in my opinion) unique and funny. If you like contemporary romances, Running Wild by Linda Howard and Linda Jones might interest you. It’s not particularly funny, but it deals with a ranch-based romance that isn’t about saving the ranch (which for westerns is unique).
If you don’t like romances, Thirst by Katherine Prairie is a contemporary mystery with a unique plot. Sing the Four Quarters by Tanya Huff is a fantasy with an interesting plot. Stars Like Cold Fire by Brent Nichols and Duchess of Terra by Glyn Stewart also stand out in the sci-fi space. These books aren’t humourous, but they do stand out.
What’s common about the books I mentioned is that the authors took risks. They pushed the boundaries of expectations and crafted memorable stories. I remember each lot very well because they were different. The authors met my expectation for the genre (romance—the couple has a happily ever after, mystery—is solved, SciFi—has spaceships, fantasy—has second world), and they held my attention, adding something different.
What’s different? Their profession, the conflicts they face, their background, the dynamics of the world, the plot they need to address, humour, and how the couple addresses their interpersonal conflict to address the plot.
You can push your writing boundaries and still gain an audience if you position your book correctly. Test out the cover to make sure it will be well-received by your target audience. Write a blurb that accurately presents expectations. I wrote an article for A Muse Bouche on how authors have a contract with their readers. The blurb is the establishment of that contract. Ensure it accurately presents the plot and how it fits in the genre, and how you’ve pushed the boundaries.
When an audience has a clear understanding of what they’re getting involved with, they’ll follow you to the end.
Don’t be afraid to take risks—that’s how authors grow.
What creative risks have you taken? Reach out to me on Twitter @reneegendron to continue the conversation.
I'd like to thank @RCameronThomas for suggesting this blog topic.
James' and Mirabelle's story will be released in Fall 2021. It's a high heat contemporary romance set in eastern Ontario.
I write romances and strive to create realistic characters. Yes, I do write grand romantic gestures, but I lean on the side of plausible—a romantic dinner, a public declaration of affection at a party, and so on. One aspect that I incorporate in my writing is medical conditions.
Characters can have an array of medical conditions, from an illness to injury to a genetic disorder. Some medical conditions are life-threatening, others require regular maintenance with physiotherapy or counselling, medication or surgery, and others have no upkeep.
Characters are more than a medical condition. Maybe your MC’s knee is busted, and they can’t run anymore (at all, or they are significantly slower). The damaged knee impairs your MC’s ability to catch the antagonist. But the damaged knee can also impact character development. The obvious impact is on personal frustration. Perhaps the MC enjoyed going on 10km runs but can’t anymore. Perhaps there’s a constant pain in the knee that keeps the MC up on rainy nights. These developments drag down the character with regret, frustration, and anger. Anger that they can’t do what they enjoy doing.
Let’s flip the situation. The medical condition may have obligated your MC to change hobbies. The broader range of experience gives them more tools to address the plot. Let’s say your MC can’t go on runs because of a bum knee, but they do Tai Chi or ride horses or swim. If a person does Tai Chi, they might have improved powers of focus and emotional self-regulation. If they ride horses, they work different muscle groups. Working with large animals also gives them a different perspective on life. And, if they swim 2k a day, well, they have incredible endurance.
My point is, there are opportunities to write more balanced characters in which medical conditions aren’t uniquely portrayed as impediments. I’ve known many people who have experienced extremely traumatic events. They’ve survived depression, suicidal episodes, and PTSD. It was brutal for them to live the experience, work through it, and find ways of managing it daily. However, outside of the episodes, they gained profound insight. They’ve gained insight and wisdom and (some, not all) have turned their experiences into products and services to help others.
It’s easy to write the flip side where a medical condition is motivation for revenge. It’s a little more nuanced to weave in medical conditions as a source of positive motivation and resilience.
In my fantasy series, I have a General named Roderick. His first wife died, and he became an alcoholic. Whenever there’s an event that reminds him of his first wife, he lapses into a bender for days, sometimes weeks. The alcoholism has significant impacts on his personal life and job, not to mention the city he’s charged to protect. Throughout the fantasy series, his alcoholism comes up, and there are times where he has more insight when he’s blind drunk. There are moments when Roderick is drunk, and another soldier steps up into a leadership role. The second soldier takes a radically different strategy than what Roderick would have done, and there are different consequences on the battle and the town. Some consequences are beneficial, and others aren’t.
In my contemporary sports romance, Seven Points of Contact (release Fall 2021), Jonas has a knee injury that keeps him from playing a sport he loves. The injury weighs down his self-esteem, and he finds himself on a trajectory he didn’t want to take. His life takes a few more twists and turns, and after a series of devastating events, he returns to his hometown. He regrets and finds strength. Without his injury, he wouldn’t have had the skills and experiences to help Miranda, his love interest.
What medical conditions afflict your MC? How do they impact the plot and character development?
Reach out to me on Twitter @reneegendron to continue to conversation.
I’m raising funds for a professional book cover for James’ and Mirabelle’s story. If you can, please consider chipping in $1. Thanks.
Let’s state a few things about mental health. Experiencing a mental health illness doesn’t make you weak or flawed. People fall ill with COVID, cancer, colds and other illnesses that don’t begin with c, all of the time. There are resources for individuals experiencing a mental health illness. (1)
What most new writers don’t recognise is that writing is a grind. Sure, there are moments where it’s fun and exciting to write a character or a scene. Typing the end is absolutely a wonderful feeling. And it’s a fantastic feeling to sell your first book.
Here’s the other side of writing. Editing your WIP for the twentieth time. Staring at a screen, waiting for the words to come. Struggling to find a solution to your plot hole that doesn’t require you to rewrite half of your story. The isolation. To develop your skill as a writer, you need to spend a lot of time alone in a room. Many people don’t do well in isolation, especially for prolonged periods. There’s the added difficulty that most non-writers don’t understand the appeal of writing. That adds a layer to the isolation.
There’s a grind to writing. Churning out five hundred words a day seems easy until you have to do it. Pile edits onto those five hundred words, and it takes a toll. It can be mentally draining to sit in front of a computer and crank out the words, especially when those words are subject to constant critique. Many people appreciate the talent and skill of a professional athlete. Most people don’t recognise the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a manuscript. The work involved in creating a polished manuscript is difficult to explain to a non-writer.
How to stay mentally tough? Adopt a healthy self-care regime. This means eating well, exercising regularly, getting away from the computer daily, scheduling time for friends and family, and scheduling writing time.
People who want to be writers feel guilty not writing because they don’t make time for it. Then, when they do make time for it, they feel isolated from friends and family. The key to that is finding the right balance. Permit yourself to write. It’s okay to close your office door to work. It’s okay to ask your partner to look after your child while you take thirty or sixty minutes to write.
New authors often don’t realise how much rejection there is to writing. Reviewers spot all errors and plot issues. Agents and publishing companies reject manuscripts. Reviewers and readers leave negative comments on public fora. Then there’s the occasional reader who will contact you and point each issue they had with your book, not with the intent of supporting you in becoming a better writer but destroying you and discouraging you from writing the next book.
None of these things boosts morale or ego. All of these things, except the nasty email, are required to be a writer.
Joy.
How to stay mentally fit as a writer? Learn to learn. People wrongly believe that professional athletes are born that way. Top-performers in any field spend years improving their skills and adopt a learning mindset. There is always something to learn, improve upon, and hone.
Surround yourself with positive people. Every author needs beta readers but select beta readers that are helpful and supportive of you. Yes, some criticism can be difficult to swallow, but it can drive you to improve when it comes from a well-intentioned place.
Know when to take a break. Some authors can write every day, and others can’t. There are periods in a person’s life where disaster strikes, and they can’t write. There are constraints on physical and mental health that impede the ability of an author to write. Life happens, and it’s okay to step away from writing to sort things out.
Learn to recognise the signs of burnout (2). Burnout is often accompanied by depression, anxiety, feelings of hopelessness, an overwhelming workload, and a desire to strive and be at the top of your profession. It’s a terrible condition that strikes the ambitious who push themselves too hard. The worst part about burnout is that once you have one, it often takes years to recover. Once recovered, a burnout survivor is unlikely to resume activities that once gave them joy or their previous profession.
Preventing burnout is far easier and better than trying to recover from one. And honestly, one doesn’t really recover from burnout. Like PTSD survivors, even a decade after burnout, you can be triggered by something and relapse.
Mental fitness requires a daily regimen. It requires experimentation to find out which routine and practice works best for you. It requires self-awareness to know when you’re struggling and need to take a break or reach out to resources. Perhaps, more importantly, it requires that you be kind to yourself.
The world is harsh enough. You don’t need to add to it by being brutal to yourself.
Writing is meant to be rewarding. Make sure the rewards include fulfilment and joy.
I'd like to thank @AuthorIvanScott for the topic suggestion.
Please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @reneegendron to continue the conversation.
If you liked this post, please consider leading $1. I'm raising funds for a professional book cover for James' and Mirabelle's story. There's a donation tab in the top left hand corner of the screen called Ko Fi. You can read a bit of the mystery in James' and Mirabelle's story here. Over the summer, I'll be posting a section of the romance element. You can receive an advance section of the romance element by signing up for my newseltter.
If you'd like to be an advance reader for James's and Mirabelle's story, please reach out. The book is in its last stages of edits and will be released in Fall 2021.
(1)
https://www.ccmhs-ccsms.ca/mental-health-resources-1
https://www.mhfa.ca/en/general-resources
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/mental-health-services/mental-health-get-help.html
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/find-help/
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health-resources#types-of-providers
https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/getting-help
https://mhaustralia.org/need-help
2
https://myparo.ca/6-signs-of-burnout-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/
When most people think of romance, they think of people in their early twenties to mid-thirties finding the love of their lives. However, romances also happen between older couples.
Let’s start with the basic structure of a romance. Both love interests have internal conflicts that prevent them from entering a romantic relationship. Internal conflicts cause external conflicts (conflict between the love interests). For the love interests to have their happily ever after, they must first resolve internal matters and focus on external issues by working out their differences.
There are two types of setups in a romance. The first is the love interests don’t know each other at the beginning of the story, get to know one another, and resolve their matters by the end of the book. The second is the love interests are in an existing relationship that is on the rocks. The love interests need to work to maintain and strengthen the relationship.
Whether you write younger characters or older ones, those structures remain the same. I’ll let you in on a secret about writing romances with older characters—there’s a lot of emotional depth to mine. I’m certain you’ll find emotionally mature nineteen-year-olds who have been through a lot and conduct themselves with poise and grace. Let’s not forget different historical times when most women were raised to marry by the age of twenty. That’s a different mindset than the way most people raise their children in Canada in 2021.
When you write older characters, especially characters with a lot of history between them, there’s a tremendous opportunity to explore emotion, resiliency, pain, loss, and triumph. Romances work because of emotional payoffs. Every romance reader knows there will be a happily ever after, but they don’t know how the characters will get there.
A forty-year-old who is divorced and has one child has different emotional baggage than a twenty-year-old who has never been in love. The constraints on the forty-year-old’s life are different than those of the unattached, non-parent, twenty-year-old. Making time to date when raising a child, working full-time, dealing with an ex who does all they can to make your life miserable while dealing with all of the other bumps and hiccups life throws at you is difficult.
Romances explore choices and how they relate to conflict. Let’s take that forty-year-old single parent and call him Léonard. He works full time, and he has to pay alimony to the ex. His commute is extended because he has to swing by the daycare/babysitter to pick up his daughter Claudette. He has to clean and cook and help Claudette with her homework. A fellow like that is going to be more practical in his approach to finding a romantic partner. Léonard isn’t likely to hang out in pubs and clubs, he’s unlikely to have a lot of time for hobby groups, and he probably won’t take a four-day vacation to a resort because he had a good deal (Claudette has school, after all).
Léonard is more likely to meet a potential love interest at one of Claudette’s after school activities, or through a neighbour, or a friend. When Léonard meets the potential love interest, he has to evaluate the potential not only through his lenses (do they get along, is he attracted to her, do they share similar interests, and so on), but also through Claudette’s perspective. Any love interest that isn’t interested in being with a man with a child, well, for responsible fathers, that’s a non-starter.
Let’s take a moment to consider some of the emotional issues Léonard faces when considering dating. He was married for six years and dated his ex for an additional two years. Prior to that relationship, he had two other serious, long-term relationships. Each relationship was different, but each relationship also left him with unique scars. One woman wanted children right away when he wasn’t ready. One woman wanted to travel the world working gig to gig, while he had to stay in one place to develop his career. And his marriage, while things were good at first when Léonard and his ex were aligned with interests, hobbies, wanting to start a family, the toll of running a family tore them apart.
These different decisions have impacted him and alter the way he views a potential love interest. Léonard needs to weigh his past hurts versus a stable life for his daughter versus his current reality of being a single parent (time constraints, resource constraints, the messiness of coordinating schedules when a love interest also has split-time with their children) versus his interest in dating.
These constraints and conflicts are interesting to explore. How each person and romantic couple addresses these constraints allow for an enriching experience for the reader.
Some questions to ask when developing romances between people who are divorced with children still at home
- How much does the ex still loom in the picture?
- What are realistic expectations as to how much time the couple can spend alone versus childcare responsibilities?
- How do complicated family arrangements (blended families with different parental structures) impact the ability of the couple to act in the best interest of the couple?
- What are the sleeping arrangements? (This is particularly relevant if you’re writing a high heat romance and are writing sex scenes. What are realistic conditions in which the couple can have a sleepover?)
Let’s age the characters up a bit. Let’s say you’re writing a romance in which the romantic leaders are sixty years old. Let’s say you’re writing Céline, and she’s sixty-two years old. Her first husband died of a heart attack ten years ago. They were married twenty-eight years. It took her years to overcome the grief, and last year she met Pierre.
Céline has three adult children and four grandchildren. She may or may not work full-time. In the years since her husband’s death, she’s taken up new hobbies and has reinvigorated her social life because her husband wasn’t the type to go out. She’s sixty-one. She’s likely to have health issues, and she’s likely to be the primary care provider for her parents or aunt and the emergency babysitter for her grandchildren. There are a lot of pulls on her time.
She’s also likely been through a lot of emotional pain (given that she’s lived longer than a twenty-year-old). She might be more set in her ways for some things, behind the times on many other things, and wise in some areas.
If you write Céline the way you would a twenty-year-old, you’re cheating the character and the reader. You’re depriving the reader of an emotional experience gained for the school of hard knocks, and you’re depriving Céline of the ability to apply all of her knowledge and insight to resolving the issue that needs to be resolved. Remember, Céline’s been around sixty-one years. Maybe there’s a pattern or a similar situation that keeps popping up in her life that she has to learn to move past it. Maybe now, after decades of failing, she has the self-confidence to do something she’s always wanted to do. Maybe she can guide her grandchildren in a way she wished she could have with her children.
Questions to ask when writing older characters:
- Have they grown more patient or impatient with age?
- Are they more vocal about pointing out issues and problems than they were when they were twenty?
- How have they stayed the same since they were a child?
- How have they changed?
- What are three major events that have changed how they behave, act, and feel?
In what way does their health impact their daily life? If you write high heat romances, you’ll need to incorporate some aspects of health and perhaps the need for pharmaceutical supports.
The structure of a romance between twenty-year-olds is the same as writing one between sixty-year-olds. What changes are the emotional depth, the amount of baggage each character has to resolve, and the tools each character brings to the table to address their issues.
Writing romances between older couples can be richly rewarding. Don’t be afraid to stack the conflicts and constraints each character faces. Explore realistic meet-cutes and flesh out each character’s world. Romance is romance.
Keep an eye out of James' and Mirabelle's story. He's fifty years old with four adult children and she's forty five. I'm in the last stages of editing it and will release it in fall 2021. If you liked the excerpt (still in draft) and/or this blog post, please consider chipping in one dollar towards a professional cover for their book.
Thank you to @SStaatz for the topic suggestion.
Let's keep the conversation going on Twitter. Reach out to me @reneegendron and let me know how you write romances with older characters.
Building An Author’s Platform
It’s tough being an author. Even if you write a perfect book that every reader loves, you may sell only a handful of copies. This is not because you are unlucky. It’s because you don’t have an author’s platform.
Just in case you don’t believe me, here’s an example from literary history. Back in 1846, three unknown young ladies self-published a poetry anthology titled Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. This carefully collated work of accomplished poetry only sold 3 copies.
Today, those same poems are studied in detail in high schools and universities across the world and have become the subject of many doctoral theses. Why? Because Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë later published bestselling novels, and their author’s platform expanded exponentially.
What is an Author’s Platform?
An author’s platform is a collective term for the goodwill accumulated by a writer. If you’re an accountant or familiar with fiscal terms, you’ll understand what I mean by this. Otherwise, let me explain.
A new author does not have an existing fanbase. They are an unknown commodity. This makes them unattractive to publishers and agents because they may invest money in publishing the author’s books and make a loss.
A published author who has successfully sold books has a fanbase. If they release another book, it is likely that people who enjoyed their previous books will buy their next one. The more successful books this author releases, the bigger their fanbase, and the easier it is for them to sell more books.
So, success breeds success. The established author is a safer investment for publishers and attractive to agents. As a business, that author has what an accountant calls goodwill. But if this is the case, how can a new author ever catch a break?
Building an Author’s Platform
An author’s platform consists of more than a fanbase of readers who have read previous books. It also extends to an author’s social networking accounts, their website visitors, and book reviews.
Quite often an author will have contacts through social networking who have never read one of their books. Despite being unfamiliar with previous books, that contact will still promote their future books for their own reasons.
An established website with a high DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) provides another platform for marketing your new novel.
Book Reviews are ESSENTIAL to increasing an author’s platform. When somebody is considering buying your book on Amazon or another platform, they will often skip the blurb and hit the review section to find out what other people said about your book.
If you have no reviews on the platform, this puts potential readers off. But if you have lots of reviews with an average of 4 out of 5 stars or higher, you’re likely to sell a book. That’s why you need to get readers to review your book as part of your author’s platform.
Social Networking
If you have never published a book in your life, you can still open accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and other social networking sites. These are all free to join and make great networking tools.
I focus on Twitter because I find it easy to navigate and gain followers. And, more importantly, I have met people on there with similar goals to myself who are willing to work together with me to our mutual benefit. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m @TheRomanceBloke.
The same principles apply to any social networking platform, and many find Instagram a great place for writers. For some reasons, a lot of publishers like their authors to have Facebook Author pages. These are easy to set up and completely free. I have one, though I rarely use it.
It’s not easy to start from zero on a social networking site, but it’s not impossible. I opened my Twitter account in December 2020 but didn’t send out my first tweet until sometime in January 2021. At the beginning of January, I had zero followers. By mid-May, I had over 7,300.
Many of my followers have over 50,000 followers of their own and regularly retweet my tweets. That is why my Tweet Impressions for the last 28 days stands at 626,000. This means that my tweets have been viewed over half a million times in the past month. That’s a lot of potential readers for any books I publish in future.
How do you gain followers?
The same basic principles apply to all social media platforms. To become popular, you must interact with other members of the writing and reading community and offer them something of value.
Since you are mainly interested in finding readers for your books, you should focus on book-related posts. What I mainly offer in my posts are links to articles about writing, publishing, book marketing, and book reviews.
Instead of posting links to the same article ten times a day, I have built up a portfolio of articles and book reviews that I rotate so that there are different articles featured on my profile every day.
But interaction is key. By regularly retweeting/sharing the posts of other members of the writing community, I am helping them to market their books and products. Because I am helping them, they are more inclined to help me.
I also offer to publish guest posts on my website. I invite other members of the writing community to write articles about their books, products, or writing techniques. These guest articles help those authors to market their books.
I usually keep a link to one of these guest articles as my pinned tweet on my Twitter platform. This not only promotes the guest author, but it also directs people to visit my website and encourages more book readers and authors to follow me on Twitter. For me, it’s a win-win situation.
Website
Many authors’ websites are white elephants. If you check out their DA and PA scores, they’re around DA 1 and PA 1. But what does that mean?
Domain authority (DA) is a measure of how authoritative a website is. A higher DA means that the website is respected as a source of information within its speciality. Page authority (PA) is a measure of how likely it is that a page on that website will rank high in a Google search.
The DA and PA range is between 1 and 100 for all websites, but few sites come close to 100. Wikipedia, for example, stands at DA 93 and PA 81. An established publisher like Penguin UK has a high DA and PA. Penguin’s scores are DA 73 and PA 63.
When you start a new website, you begin with DA 1 and PA 1. That means that it is unlikely anyone will visit your website without being invited to do so. They won’t stumble across your website in a Google search. If you want to get noticed, you need to improve your DA and PA.
To increase DA and PA, you need to publish new articles on your website on a regular basis. You also need to attract readers to view these articles, and you need other websites to build links to those articles on your website. The more visitors that come to your website and the more links that are constructed, the higher your DA and PA will grow.
I have divided my website into different areas for different kinds of articles. I have a Book Reviews tab for storing all my book reviews, an Articles tab for the writing-and-book-related articles that I have authored, and an Experts Opinion tab for the guest articles written by authors I have met via social networking. This makes it easy for my website visitors to navigate and find what they want to see.
The Cost of a Website
Unfortunately, you have to pay to set up a website. However, it’s not as expensive as you might think. You need two things: the software and a host. You can get the software for free from corporations like Wordpress but you must pay for the hosting, which is the place where all your website’s information is stored and processed when you run a site.
I paid around US$90 for a 3-year deal with HostGator for my hosting and then imported WordPress software for free. Shop around and never pay the full price. There are always ads that offer a discount on hosting at various hosts if you use their discount code. If you want to keep setup costs minimal, you can get hosting for a year for less than $40.
The biggest expense on your website growth and maintenance is your time. Websites don’t grow on their own. You have to write articles and post them. If others write articles for you, you still have to format and post those.
Book Reviews
As I said earlier, book reviews on Amazon and other platforms are an essential part of your author’s platform. When you are planning to publish a book, it’s a good idea to hand out a few Advanced Review Copies (ARC) to people you are confident will read your book and write reviews.
The authors and readers you’ve connected with through social networking are ideal candidates to read and review your ARCs. If you’re previously read and reviewed their books, they’re even more likely to agree to read and review your ARC.
There are also organisations like Reedsy Discovery, Book Sirens, and Book Bub who will distribute your ARCs to readers who promise to read and review your book in exchange for a fee. Now, it’s always better if you can get your ARCs read and reviewed for free. But these services do help you to gain more reviews quickly if your “volunteers” fail to deliver.
I have found writing book reviews to be one of the best ways of quickly making new friends in the Writing Community. Authors love to receive reviews, especially if it’s clear you’ve actually read their books and noticed what they did. On Twitter, authors have become much warmer to me and likely to retweet my tweets after I’ve reviewed their books.
My Final Word
After reading this article, I hope you understand why building an author’s platform is so important for new authors. Don’t be daunted. Anyone can build an author’s platform.
I would advise you to avoid the temptation of publishing your book before you’ve built an author’s platform. No matter how good your book is, you will most likely be disappointed by a low level of sales.
Once you’ve established a loyal author’s platform, you should find it much easier to get volunteers to read your ARCs and even find customers who buy your books. The larger your author’s platform, the more likely you are to publish a successful book.
Also, if you dream of traditional publishing, agents and publishers will be much more interested in your unpublished manuscript if you can demonstrate to them that you have a huge author’s platform. An established website with a high DA and PA alongside a social media account that shows you have thousands of followers will go a long way toward you receiving that elusive acceptance letter.
Thank you Robert Baker for your guest post on Building an Author's Platform.
Robert Baker — The Romance Bloke @TheRomanceBloke
Robert is the founder of The Romance Bloke, a website devoted to romance book reviews and articles about books and writing.
He passionate about reading and creative writing. He has published short stories and poetry in magazines, such as the ASP Literary Journal, Open Door Magazine and Meet Cute Press. He is frequently found hanging out on Writing.Com with other wannabe authors.
Robert is a freelance content writer and website manager. He has written informational articles, reviews, and blogs for a wide range of online businesses in the fields of travel, health, technology, and outdoor adventure.
When he is not reading or writing, he loves traveling with his family and horseback riding. Robert is also on the judging panel for the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Awards 2021.