Next HSW Meeting
Saturday July 9th at 10 am in person
at Scheels and via Google Meet.
We are delighted to welcome Kitty Turner, who will be speaking about How to Successfully Launch Your Book. Getting your book off to a visible start is an important aspect of marketing, and it’s one that many writers know little about. You can’t just hit the publish button and expect readers to find it. Kitty has helped to successfully launch over twenty books for her clients, so she’d going to share some knowledge with us.
Kitty Turner is an author and six-time entrepreneur who has been instrumental in publishing over twenty books, including Motherwhelmed by Beth Berry, It’s Not That Simple by Pam Ostrowski, and The Trauma Map by Dr. Karol Darsa. She is an expert content creator specializing in feature articles, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and books. As a pro-blogger and travel writer, her contributions have appeared in many publications online and off, including Scribophile, The Tradewinds, Condé Nast, Onboard Magazine, and the Caribbean Compass. Books she authored include The Bestseller List, Financial Freedom Through Writing, and her upcoming novel, Zone Trip. As a marketing professional with 30 years of background in data science and application development, she has mastered organizing complex systems into easy-to-follow steps. Her marketing methods have been tested dozens of times in the live market with consistent, measurable, and profitable results. Visit Kitty’s website at: https://dailyhouse.media/
Mark your calendar now to attend this meeting.
FIRST PAGES
Matt will be doing First Pages at the meeting if we have submissions. To submit the first page of your book, please send it to Matt by Friday, July 8th. Follow these guidelines: Do not put your name on the page, do include the title and genre, use 12-point Times New Roman or an equivalent font and double space. Send to MattBayan@aol.com
AFTER THE MEETING CRITIQUE GROUP
Lynda Bailey (Enos) will be conducting the critique group discussion after the regular meeting is concluded.
If you have not been to a meeting at Scheels, here’s how to find us. Enter from the parking lot and go to the escalators/stairs past the aquarium. Go upstairs and turn left past the Abraham Lincoln statue. Beyond the arcade are the restrooms so turn toward them, then go left to the door alongside that has a badge control on it. The door is unlocked and you can go into the hallway where the meeting rooms are the three doors on the left. We usually have two of these rooms, so look for us.
From the President:
BOOKS TO SCREEN
Last year, Netflix spent over $200 million to acquire book content. That’s not counting screenplays. They bought books. Why? They can’t get screenplays fast enough. They have staff who can take a print project and convert it to a screenplay. Others such as Amazon, Disney, HBO, etc. are doing the same. Total content expenditures easily exceed a billion dollars per year.
Can we tap into this?
The answer is yes. Both directly and indirectly.
However, expect gatekeepers. These behemoth production companies consider materials submitted by either literary agents or movie agents. The key word here is “agents.” That’s the direct approach.
So, we might think, “Well, I self-publish. How is this going to be available to me?”
Good question.
So, let’s consider the indirect benefit of thinking about movies. I bring up the existence of this goldmine because it raises an important perspective for writers of every background. If we think “movie” we naturally make the distinction between movies and books. Everything about a movie is about showing. Too often, books are about telling.
If we think of how a movie unfolds, how characters are developed by what we see them do, we can better avoid telling.
If we look at the way a movie jumps from location to location, or from one POV to another, we can see the tricks that make a story more intriguing for the audience. Movies take liberties with linear storytelling. They focus in and out on what characters are doing.
Can’t we use the same techniques in writing for the page? Even if we never intend to write a screenplay or to sell a book for movie production, the elements of movie-making can provide a toolbox that enhances what we put on the page.
Formatting Change in Books for Amazon
Just this morning, I got an email from Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur advising authors that Amazon is changing their format from Mobi (their proprietary format) to ePub, which is the common format that almost every other digital publisher uses. This change has already begun with Amazon not accepting any mobi files in their uploads. If you submit your book via Word or a PDF file, this won’t affect you. But if you format the book from other sources to mobi, you can no longer submit them.
However, if you have a book currently published in the mobi format and your copy is a mobi, then it will cause problems if you want to make changes or update data in that book. You will need to convert the mobi file to ePub and upload it again. Dave made a five-minute video explaining this change and what you will need to do. You can view it on YouTube by clicking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQEzMnYG8Hk
July Author Signing
On Sunday, July 17th, please show your support for fellow HSW members, Jacci Turner, April Wildman and Lynda Bailey for an author’s signing at Great Full Gardens restaurant at Legends in Sparks. Time is from 10-2.
Have You Renewed Your Membership?
It’s July – six months into the year, and our membership is down by about 40%. Have you forgotten to renew? If you’re finding value in your HSW membership, then please renew it. Your dues help to pay for our meeting space, guest speakers, and other benefits. If you’re in a critique group, this is also a benefit to paid members, so renew now while you’re thinking about it. Last call, if you don’t re-up, you will be dropped from the mailing list.
Camp NaNoWriMo Starts July 1st!
That’s right. NaNoWriMo runs three events a year; the main one in November where you attempt to write a 50,000 words book in 30 days, plus the Spring Camp in April and the one in July. For the April and July events, you set your goal, whether you want to write or edit and how many words you want to do. The idea is to encourage the habit of working on your project every day.
To sign up, go https://nanowrimo.org/ and declare your project for the month. Need encouragement and support? Join the Facebook NaNo-Reno group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/228421943949873
Darcie Chan Video Now Available
The video from the May HSW meeting with Darcie Chan is now available on YouTube. This is an unlisted video so you need to use the link below to access it. We had technical problems during the meeting. We could hear and see Ms. Chan, but she couldn’t hear us. So, Rene typed in most of the questions and Darcie answered them as they came up in chat. Rene tried to edit this the best she could, but might have missed a pause or link or two.