Podcasts about highfall

Ani’s business education helped her enjoy a successful corporate career for more than 12 years, but at some point she felt that this job had no taught her all the lessons it could. It allowed here little to no time for her personal life and simple life pleasures. Perhaps more importantly it killed her dreams. Drumming up the courage to hand in her resignation, she followed through and that was one of the best decisions she made in her life. Now she’s encouraging and helping writers to become authors with the help of her podcast and publishing services. In today’s episode, Ani will share her experiences in becoming a bestselling author and a podcaster to specially give advice to starter authors and which path to take in publishing a book.

In the previous days I have come across the same topic several times. Then I thought that maybe you have not heard of it yet so decided to let you know about this. What I am talking is Amazon Giveaways. Amazon let’s you create and promote a giveaway of items that are sold there. The interesting part of this for us is that we can now create kindle ebook giveaways. What many authors did before was organizing book giveaways – mainly on Goodreads. Unfortunately you could give aways only paperbacks. I tried a giveaway of my first novel Highfall on Goodreads and although it did bring visibility to my book it did not impact the sales figure.So why is Amazon giveaway different you may think. Well before I dive into this, I have to make a disclaimer. It seems like the Amazon giveaway can organize only the US residents, so if you have amazon.com account but no US address linked to your account then you won’t be able to make it… Hopefully they will roll over to the other markets soon too. The good news though is that you don’t have to be in KDP Select to be able to organize giveaways and of course giving away ebooks is more affordable and there are no shipping charges involved obviously.Ok now let’s see why would you as an author possibly want to make an Amazon giveaway.The first obvious reason, of course is get your book front of more people. And since those who have already purchased your book are not eligible for your giveaway you will end up will be reaching new potential readers.The second good thing is that all the participants, who have not won the giveaway get the free sample of your book. Which means that the potential new readers will probably get the taste of your writing style.Another good thing is that when you organize your book’s Amazon giveaway you can choose chose an option where in order to participate people have to follow you on your Amazon’s author page. This means that whenever you have a new book out all who follow will be notified. It is not as good as having them on your e mail list of course, but it is most probably the closest thing you can get with Amazon.To wrap this topic up I’ll just need to say that your giveaways can last up to 30 days, ebooks purchased for the giveaway are non-refundable and you can check there is a Twitter hashtag #AmazonGiveaways you can follow. And maybe the best part of it all is that those who have tried the Amazon giveaways tell that it impacts book’s sales ranking.Ok, that was it about the Amazon.Now I will share my ideas about giveaways in general.I personally feel uncomfortable, when things are not under my control. That is why strategies, which rely on specific social media channel, or only one platform, or an audience, which is not mine are not my favorite. I mean what if something happens to Facebook one day? Where do I find all those people who liked my page… You see what I mean right?That is why I prefer to put time and effort bringing my audience to my place, that is my website and my e mail list. Are you already there btw? If no check out anialexander.comHaving that said I prefer to use KingSumo’s giveaway plugin for WordPress. The giveaway is done so that it increases participant’s chances to win when they share your contest like crazy and therefore it easily goes viral. But that is just the bonus. The best thing is that you are getting the list of all participant’s emails, which you can later use. I have used this only twice for now, but have seen great results with both giveaways.The things is… if you are unknown writer like me, most probably people will not be interesting in your book’s giveaway, because they have not read you yet and they have not heard your name either, right?Continued on anialexander.com/giveaways-and-your-book-marketing/Click to view: show page on Awesound

In the previous days I have come across the same topic several times. Then I thought that maybe you have not heard of it yet so decided to let you know about this. What I am talking is Amazon Giveaways. Amazon let’s you create and promote a giveaway of items that are sold there. The interesting part of this for us is that we can now create kindle ebook giveaways.  What many authors did before was organizing book giveaways - mainly on Goodreads. Unfortunately you could give aways only paperbacks. I tried a giveaway of my first novel Highfall on Goodreads and although it did bring visibility to my book it did not impact the sales figure. So why is Amazon giveaway different you may think. Well before I dive into this, I have to make a disclaimer. It seems like the Amazon giveaway can organize only the US residents, so if you have amazon.com account but no US address linked to your account then you won’t be able to make it… Hopefully they will roll over to the other markets soon too. The good news though is that you don’t have to be in KDP Select to be able to organize giveaways and of course giving away ebooks is more affordable and there are no shipping charges involved obviously. Ok now let’s see why would you as an author possibly want to make an Amazon giveaway. The first obvious reason, of course is get your book front of more people. And since those who have already purchased your book are not eligible for your giveaway you will end up will be reaching new potential readers. The second good thing is that all the participants, who have not won the giveaway get the free sample of your book. Which means that the potential new readers will probably get the taste of your writing style. Another good thing is that when you organize your book’s Amazon giveaway you can choose chose an option where in order to participate people have to follow you on your Amazon’s author page. This means that whenever you have a new book out all who follow will be notified. It is not as good as having them on your e mail list of course, but it is most probably the closest thing you can get with Amazon. To wrap this topic up I’ll just need to say that your giveaways can last up to 30 days, ebooks purchased for the giveaway are non-refundable and you can check there is a Twitter hashtag #AmazonGiveaways you can follow. And maybe the best part of it all is that those who have tried the Amazon giveaways tell that it impacts book’s sales ranking. Ok, that was it about the Amazon. Now I will share my ideas about giveaways in general. I personally feel uncomfortable, when things are not under my control. That is why strategies, which rely on specific social media channel, or only one platform, or an audience, which is not mine are not my favorite. I mean what if something happens to Facebook one day? Where do I find all those people who liked my page… You see what I mean right? That is why I prefer to put time and effort bringing my audience to my place, that is my website and my e mail list. Are you already there btw? If no check out www.anialexander.com Having that said I prefer to use KingSumo’s giveaway plugin for Wordpress. The giveaway is done so that it increases participant’s chances to win when they share your contest like crazy and therefore it easily goes viral. But that is just the bonus. The best thing is that you are getting the list of all participant’s emails, which you can later use. I have used this only twice for now, but have seen great results with both giveaways. The things is… if you are unknown writer like me, most probably people will not be interesting in your book’s giveaway, because they have not read you yet and they have not heard your name either, right? Yup… But what you can do is - choose several bestseller’s in your genre or around your book’s topic and have a bundle of those books with yours inside as a giveaway. Like that you will gain a list of people, who are interested in your genre or topic and are your potential readers. And even if they don’t read your book (although part of them will check it out I think) you will still have their names and email address.

As most of you – especially the fiction writers know – November is the National Novel Writing Month and around 300k people are writing their novels right now. Their challenge is to complete 50k words in 30 days, which may sound hard but I think it sounds much harder than it is in reality. Many of you were reaching out to me asking if I am doing NaNoWriMo this year or not so I decided to make a separate episode letting you know and providing explanations and thoughts about the subject too. I wrote both of my novels Highfall and DreamDown participating in NaNoWriMo and it was a great experience. There are few elements to it that I think are very important for newbie writer. Most of us struggle to finish writing our novel – especially if it’s our first novel. NaNoWriMo adds motivation and encouragement to your writing process. First of all you have a deadline and target wordcount + a challenge. And second, the forums with writers like you who have the same struggles and are as excited as you are adds to the emotional support that you will definitely need while writing your book. So that is why I participated in NaNoWriMo 2 years in a row and as a result wrote and self published my 2 novels. This was the good part. Now let me continue by saying that this year I am not doing NaNoWriMo and am doing something different instead. Before you think that I am contradicting to what I just said let me explain why. NaNoWriMo is good at making sure that you finish writing your first draft. And as all of us know the first drafts are very bad. After that you will need to work on it. The first draft is definitely not what you’d like your readers to see. I guess what I want to say is that NaNoWriMo is good in making sure that you put out those words and that you complete your first draft. It is also very good in developing your habit of writing every day and if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you know how important that is. But NaNoWriMo has absolutely no impact on the quality of your writing. And that’s what differentiates the good book from the bad one. So what I did this year instead of NaNoWriMo was enroll in writer’s bootcamp, where I will hopefully learn how to write well. And as a non-English speaker the challenge for me is bigger than for most of you out there. This is the second month I’m learning at the bootcamp and I’d like to give a big shoutout to Randall Andrews, who is putting up with my complicated character and unpolished writing. The first side effect that I got from being able to differentiate good quality text from the bad one was realizing that what I had written up to now is not written well. It’s one thing when you know it as an abstract fact and it’s completely another thing when you have proofs for that. And believe me, that realization was not a very pleasant one and at some point it even made me think of not writing anymore. But then I understood that by learning how to write well I will be able to correct what was not written well up to now, instead of deciding not to write at all. So why I am doing re-writes and concentrate on the quality of the writing is because if I did my 3rd NaNoWriMo I would most probably write my 3rd novel in the same manner I did the previous 2 ones and end up with the same results in terms of quality. So what I am doing now is going through my first novel Highfall and applying what I have learnt so far to what I had written back then. Like that I will learn on my mistakes, make sure I am aware of the most common ones and make it easier not to repeat them again in the future. So I guess this whole episode gets down to one conclusion – NaNoWriMo is good but it is not enough. It’s the first step of the process and there is a lot to come after. Those of you who have not taken that first step – I encourage you to do so. And don’t worry that NaNoWriMo has already started – set your own timeline and make your own challenge. It will still work. And those who already have the first manuscript – work on the text and make sure that you’ve done your best and you’ve worked on the quality. And if you have – then our self-publishing services can help you with all the rest that needs to be done, like editing, book cover, formatting, etc. Simply visit www.publishmybook.today let us work on your book and save your time, so you spend it on writing. I guess that was all I had for you today. Don’t give up and keep writing!

As most of you – especially the fiction writers know – November is the National Novel Writing Month and around 300k people are writing their novels right now. Their challenge is to complete 50k words in 30 days, which may sound hard but I think it sounds much harder than it is in reality.Many of you were reaching out to me asking if I am doing NaNoWriMo this year or not so I decided to make a separate episode letting you know and providing explanations and thoughts about the subject too. I wrote both of my novels Highfall and DreamDown participating in NaNoWriMo and it was a great experience.There are few elements to it that I think are very important for newbie writer. Most of us struggle to finish writing our novel – especially if it’s our first novel. NaNoWriMo adds motivation and encouragement to your writing process. First of all you have a deadline and target wordcount + a challenge. And second, the forums with writers like you who have the same struggles and are as excited as you are adds to the emotional support that you will definitely need while writing your book.So that is why I participated in NaNoWriMo 2 years in a row and as a result wrote and self published my 2 novels. This was the good part.Now let me continue by saying that this year I am not doing NaNoWriMo and am doing something different instead. Before you think that I am contradicting to what I just said let me explain why. NaNoWriMo is good at making sure that you finish writing your first draft. And as all of us know the first drafts are very bad.After that you will need to work on it. The first draft is definitely not what you’d like your readers to see. I guess what I want to say is that NaNoWriMo is good in making sure that you put out those words and that you complete your first draft. It is also very good in developing your habit of writing every day and if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you know how important that is.But NaNoWriMo has absolutely no impact on the quality of your writing. And that’s what differentiates the good book from the bad one.So what I did this year instead of NaNoWriMo was enroll in writer’s bootcamp, where I will hopefully learn how to write well. And as a non-English speaker the challenge for me is bigger than for most of you out there. This is the second month I’m learning at the bootcamp and I’d like to give a big shoutout to Randall Andrews, who is putting up with my complicated character and unpolished writing.The first side effect that I got from being able to differentiate good quality text from the bad one was realizing that what I had written up to now is not written well. It’s one thing when you know it as an abstract fact and it’s completely another thing when you have proofs for that. And believe me, that realization was not a very pleasant one and at some point it even made me think of not writing anymore. But then I understood that by learning how to write well I will be able to correct what was not written well up to now, instead of deciding not to write at all.So why I am doing re-writes and concentrate on the quality of the writing is because if I did my 3rd NaNoWriMo I would most probably write my 3rd novel in the same manner I did the previous 2 ones and end up with the same results in terms of quality. So what I am doing now is going through my first novel Highfall and applying what I have learnt so far to what I had written back then. Like that I will learn on my mistakes, make sure I am Click to view: show page on Awesound

I would like to start this pos by saying that I am very excited to let you know that The Ani Alexander Collection of all my 3 fiction books is already available on Amazon for pre-orders. You can check it out at http://bit.ly/aaacollection I basically combined my books Highfall, Emotional Moments and DreamDown. Amazon's Pre-Order Feature I am experimenting with Amazon’s pre-order feature to see how it works. So far things went quite smooth. If you want to put up a book for a preorder. You basically go through the same steps you usually follow to self-publish a book on Amazon. The only difference is that you select the release date and may upload not the final version of the book, but the draft document. When you select the release date Amazon tells you when is the deadline by which you will have to submit the final version of your book. Of course that is days before the release. Meanwhile, people see your book’s page on Amazon and can pre-order it with one click. As soon as the book goes live they receive it in their Kindles. In case you don’t submit your final book document by the deadline, Amazon will penalize you and you will not be able to use the feature for at least year, I think. How to Create Book Bundle on Amazon? Unfortunately Amazon does not allow you to bundle individual books through their ASINs or in some other way. After talking to many writers I understood that the only way to do this is create a new book, which has all the books in one file. So you basically combine all the books files together and make one Kindle book file out of it. And then you upload that as a new book – with a new title and a new cover. Now, when the bundle is for series, it is easy – you can create a box showing the books inside the series next to each other in that box. Then you can put a title of your series and say something like volumes 1-6. Or the entire and whichever your series name is. In my case, I had a challenge because I had 3 separate books. From which 2 novels and 1 book of short stories. So I had the concern that if I put those in a box, people may get confused and think that all three are part of the same story, which is not the case. That is why I approached the cover differently. I created a simple flat cover, which features all the 3 covers of my books. So far I am getting positive feedback about that and it seems to work. And again if you visit my collection’s Amazon page at bit.ly/aaacollection you can see it yourself. Building Landing Page for Your Book As to book’s landing page.. well I am still debating with myself about whether I needed one or not. Since for me it does not take a long time to create a landing page I created one… but I am not sure, which is best – to drive people to the landing page or directly to book’s Amazon page. The thing I am not comfortable with is that when people go to your book’s landing page they eventually click and are directed to the Amazon sales page. This means that they have to make one more extra click, which I am not sure is good. You can check out my book's landing page here. How to Direct Readers to Your Book's Amazon Sales Page No matter Which Country They Come From So let me explain what I did with the bit.ly/aaacollection url, which takes you to my my collections’ Amazon sales page. I found this really nice website at http://authl.it/ where you can fill in your books ASIN and it will create a link, which will take your reader’s to their respective countries Amazon book sales page. Let me explain. What I mean is – if one uses the Amazon.com link but is from the UK he usually ends up on your book’s Amazon.com sales page which says that you can’t buy the book through this website from your country and directs you to the Amazon UK page. Which sounds fine… but there is a problem. The problem here is that it takes you to the Amazon Uk homepage and not your book’s page. So the person will have to search for your book again, which may not happen if that person is not a die-hard fan of yours. So what the http://authl.it/ link does is take everyone to their respective country’s sales page of your book… which is pretty cool I think! And as a final touch I created a url through bit.ly so I can track how many people clicked at the link. This will help me see the conversion rate. So Basically, all you need to launch your books bundle is: new cover new Kindle formatted document new book description (in my case I have mentioned there which books are included and put each book’s description below) if you feel like it maybe book landing page on your website crazy promotion. If you manage to promote the ore-order well, then by the time the book is released it will already have pretty high rankings as a starting point. Which will help enormously.  Bundle Pricing Obviously readers should be encouraged to but the book bundle by a much lower price, compared to if they bought the books separately. More they will save, more attractive the bundle will be. From those 3 books in the bundle I have 2 that are selling at 3,99 and 1 is selling at 2,99. With the bundle readers are saving over 60% of that and paying for all the 3 books only 3,99. So basically it is 3 books for the price of 1. So to see all I told you and to check out the book please go to http://bit.ly/aaacollection That was all I had to share with you. Keep writing and stay in touch. Please feel free to connect with me and other Write 2B Read listeners in the closed Facebook Group. Don't Forget to Get Your Free Book Click Here to Download  

This time I’ll talk about something that seems to be important to many of us. I’ll share my thoughts about being a writer and how you get there. Every year, here in Armenia we have the TEDx Yerevan. I truly enjoy those events because every time they end up being really inspiring and uplifting experience. I’ve been there for three years. Usually at similar events During coffee breaks and lunchtime, the most common question people ask each other is, “So what do you do?” At the conference in 2012, when people asked that question it was very hard for me to answer. At that time I had quit my job and just started writing my first novel called Highfall. Back then I did not even have the title, so it was just a novel. Maybe that is why I answered to that question with insecure and lame phrases, such as “I am trying to write”, “I write a bit” and “I want to be a writer.”  Sound familiar? I’m sure it does. The next year at Tedx event it was completely different. That time was different because my life had gone through an important change over the past year. That year I had no problem saying, “I am a writer” believing in every single word. The last time, which was this September, when I went there again, people were already introducing me to others saying – “This is Ani. She’s a writer”. That sounded like music to my ears. So let’s get back to the very beginning. Those insecure phrases with “I’m trying to write…” “I write a bit…”. What keeps us from saying “I’m a writer?” It seems like we need permission to write. We are looking for someone (preferably a publisher or a famous writer) to tell that what we write is good, so we can keep on doing that. What do all those insecure phrases mean? Who is “aspiring writer,”? Who is “pre-published writer,”? Who is “undiscovered writer,”? Who is “almost a writer,”? What are those words we put before writer for? To me personally, Someone is either a writer or he is not. Jeff Goins in his book You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) says Becoming a writer begins with a simple but important belief: You are a writer; you just need to write. And I completely agree with him. You don’t need to seek anyone’s permission to write. You don’t need to pass an exam to be called a writer and be able to share your story. You don’t need to obtain any license for that. You don’t have to want to become a writer… You simply need to be one. Writers write. And no one can take it away from them. Whether what you’ve written is liked by many or only few is another question. You will never write a book, which will be liked by everyone, so don’t even try. By trying to please every single reader you will only lose your unique voice. After all it’s better to be loved and adored by few than simply liked by many. There will always be writer’s doubts and you will always have different challenges along the way. But that does not mean that you are not a real writer. In fact there are no real or unreal writers. Don’t WANT to be a writer. Don’t decide to BECOME a writer – decide to BE one. I’m sure that if you are here now listening to me, then you have decided to be a writer. And you are… You ARE a writer! Don’t wait for someone to acknowledge that fact. Don’t waste time waiting for others permitting you to call yourself a writer. Do your thing – write. And please do me a favor. When someone asks what you do – gather all your confidence and faith and reply “I am a writer!” That was all I wanted to tell to you today. Hopefully I managed to pass my message through. Have a nice day and be writers! Please feel free to connect with me and other Write 2B Read listeners in the closed Facebook Group. Don't Forget to Get Your Free Book Click Here to Download