We tend to think of writing a book as a solitary task, but in reality, we all need a team. Here are some of the teammates you’re going to need. Beta readers Once a full draft is complete, it is time to allow other people to read the manuscript. However, for each stage you need …
Author Archives: Christine Dillon
Writers Life | Financial costs of self-publishing
Publishing is not for the faint-hearted. There are significant up-front costs. Below, I will list the ones I spent, but also give suggestions for how to avoid various costs. First, let’s differentiate between self-publishing/independent publishing and pay-to-play publishing (known as vanity publishing and now calling itself ‘hybrid’ publishing). Self-publishing is more like project-managing. You will …
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Writers life | Giving authors a hand
Anyone who has published a book knows how hard it is at the start. This is especially the case as a Christian author based in any country besides the U.S. The U.S. is by far the largest market for English Christian books, and they have access to far more resources. Yet there are some simple …
Writers Life | Book Clubs
For most authors, it would be a dream to have one of our books read by a book club. I have had this happen five times that I am aware of. Three times for my non-fiction book, Sword Fighting: Applying God’s word to the battle for our mind, and twice for my Grace series. I …
Diminishing returns on marketing
Last time I wrote an article about the necessity of needing patience when marketing books. If you’re writing a series (which I strongly recommend), then often sales don’t begin to pick up until you reach Book 4. It can be very hard to wait until then. The effectiveness of marketing also diminishes over time as …
Writers Life | Have patience!
We have poured our heart and soul into writing a novel. That first one may have taken us from two to twenty years. We climb the mountains of effort to get it published and then launch it and it disappears with barely a ripple into the huge sea of books. It is hard to even …
Biblical (era) fiction – a PR problem?
I said to a friend, “I’m going to write some Biblical fiction.”She looked at me. “If you do that, I won’t read them.”I was dumbfounded. This was a close friend who had been tremendously supportive of my contemporary Christian novels.“I don’t want to read anything that leads me away from the Bible,” she added.Therein lies …
Practicalities of writing different genres
I’ve heard it said numerous times, “Don’t switch genres. Every time you do it is like starting all over again.” Yet authors still switch genres, myself included. My experience of writing in different genres (non-fiction and contemporary) I started by writing non-fiction and never dreamed that I would write novels. All of my non-fiction was …
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Direct sales – how to get started
What are direct sales? First of all, let me be clear that we are talking about an online store. It usually sells ebooks first but may include audio books, subscriptions, courses, and link with print-on-demand stores to sell print books. If you have decided to be exclusive to Amazon through their Kindle Unlimited exclusivity programme, …
Advantages and Disadvantages of Self-Publishing
My first two non-fiction books were published by traditional publishers: one a smaller Scottish press, and another, a mid-range US publisher. Since those first two books, I’ve self-published eight novels across two series, and two more non-fiction. Why did I switch to self-published? The initial reason was that it was becoming harder and harder to …
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