#goonwrites

[tydagoon]

Sneak Peek-A Dog Named Chance

Hey guy’s, here’s a look at a fic I’ve been working on for a while now. Enjoy!

@not-close-to-straight who inspired me to write about what I love and is one of my faves. Hope you like it! Also @naferty your fics rock!

This looks like the place. Steve thought to himself as he walked through the shelter doors, enjoying the sounds of animals as they began to wake up for the day. Throughout the past few weeks, the soldier had been to several breeders, all who were more interested in the price of there dogs instead of their health conditions(to which Jarvis had immediately had shut down), and instead only tried to stick to adopting an animal. After all, Steve didn't think his boyfriend would appreciate any dog purely based on its price, based on his past issues.

There was a woman waiting at the front desk waiting when he walked further in, greeting him with a friendly smile. She seemed nice enough, and he couldn't help flashing one back in return.

“Hi, I’m Amber. Welcome to Paws & Claws adoption center. How can I help you?” she chirped, brushing a strand of brunette hair behind her ear.

Steve chuckled at her enthusiasm, rubbing the back of his neck nervously, “I was actually interested in adopting a dog for my boyfriend.”

“Ohh!” Amber squealed, clapping her hands together excitedly, “That's adorable! Special occasion?”

“Something like that.”

“A man of few words, I respect that.” the girl grinned, before leading Steve to one of the doors behind her. “I’m assuming Captain America can introduce himself to some of our animals on his own?” she question, eyes shining with mirth.

Steve nodded, and she handed him small bag of treats to give out.

“Don’t be afraid to spend some time with any of the dogs individually, if you want. Every animal here is unique in their own way, even though some had rough starts.”  she informed, opening the door before waving him away, returning to her desk for other customers. 

Steve, after thanking the girl for her help, strolled further into the room. Large kennels lined either side far as he could see, and he grew a little nervous when barks and whines filled his sensitive ears. Never one to back down, the blond began to approach each kennel, dropping them bits of treats as he walked by. Most of the dogs were friendly enough, licking and nipping at the soldiers hands, the older dogs slumbering in their beds.

None seemed like good matches for Tony though, and Steve almost gave up when he began to reach the last few kennels. The last one had a small igloo inside it that seemed empty, until he peered inside, spotting a pair of warm azure eyes warily staring back at his blue. Intrigued, Steve snapped his fingers gently a few times, shaking the leftover treats in his hand as he crouched lower to the ground. He quickly read the tag attached to the kennel door, before glancing back towards the hidden canine.

“Come on out buddy,” he murmured, and he sucked in a startled breath when a fluffy head finally poked itself out, the dog finally coming out of its shelter, “c’mere boy.”

The puppy, Steve realized when he double checked the tag, slowly padded towards the man, and Steve saw how he looked fully. Most of his body was a beautiful mocha brown, with large white paws that seemed too big for him. His muzzle and chest were also white and darker brown framed two gorgeous blue eyes. He was broad shouldered for a puppy, and one of his pointed ears was partially ripped at the top. 

Steve inhaled sharply when he saw the mass of scar tissue covering the animal's chest, it’s pale pink a vivid contrast to its thick fur. The puppy sniffed at the treats in the blond's hand, before deeming the human safe enough to trust as he ate them quickly. Apparently that was all the pup needed before it jumped on the large man, nearly knocking the soldier on his butt as he washed the man's face enthusiastically, whining happily as his long fluffy tail wagged uncontrollably.

Laughing, Steve placed his hand on the pup's head, rubbing him gently behind his perked ears. “Easy buddy, it’s all right.” The pup rolled onto his back, grumbling happily as the soldier rubbed his belly. “Whats a cute thing like you doing in here?”

“He’s a rescue,” Amber’s voice suddenly spoke, causing Steve to jump slightly, the animal distracting him enough so that he didn’t hear the girl walk in, “taken from a place where he was used as a bait dog. Poor baby was really ruffed up when he got here a few weeks ago, chest all torn up. Almost didn’t make it.”

Steve shuddered slightly, patting the pup one more time on its belly, before standing up, brushing the fur off his body. The dog stood up as well, and Steve realized that he just made it up to his knees, showing that he would be large when fully grown. He whined loudly, nudging the soldiers palm with his nose, and Steve knew he wasn’t leaving without him.

Squaring his shoulders, Steve faced the girl standing behind him. “I think i’ve found the one for me.”

Amber simply smiled, eyes twinkling in excitement, before handing the man a leash. “Then follow me, Captain Rogers, and we’ll get you and the little guy on your way.” She paused, looking back at him as he simply carried the large pup. “By the way, what are you gonna name him?”

Steve pressed his face slightly in the dogs thick furred head.

“I think I know just the thing…”

#Avengers #stony #tony stark #Steve Rogers #goonwrites

[spnsmile]

Castiel out of Purgatory to save Sam and Eileen! #theory of Dean gets left behind in Purgatory 2.0 is strong! Dean will have a redemption arc 😭

#i love the theory

#but 12 episodes left and wtffff separating destiel again! #goonWriters 💔

#castiel #castiel x hunter #castielangel #castiel spn15 #supernaturalends #angelofthelord supernaturalends spnend #supernaturalfinale #supernatural edit #supernatural #spn #spnedit #spnwriters #spnfinale #spnfandom #spn spoilers #spn season 15 #dean #deancas #deanwinchester #eileen

[stevensavage]

Indie Authors Versus The Money

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve's Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Right now you want to sell your books.  Maybe it's a future career.  Maybe it's a hobby that pays (like mine).  Maybe you're just trying it out.

Either way, you want to sell.  As I noted in There's No Honor In An Unread Book, your goal is to reach the right people.

And to do that, you're up against many things, but one of those things is money.  Namely money other people have and spend to sell their books.  If you have a lot of money, well then good on you, but this isn't for you (except to say, hey use that cash to help out others too).

You may think "wait, I'm up against other indies and self-publishers" with cash and worry about that.  Let me ruin your day further by noting it's also you being up against publishers and marketing departments and everything else companies large and small have at your disposal.  When you're trying to promote your works, you're up against organizations older than we are.

It sounds overwhelming.  But we've all seen and heard of success stories out there.  Sure there's a ton of survivor bias there, but there are people to learn from.  People who inspire us and give us hope.

Right now I'm not going to focus on that inspiration, I'm going to focus on what people are throwing money at to sell their books and such.  You can either throw money at those things, or if you're like most folks coping with the world today, how you work around your limits.  Forewarned is forearmed, so roll up the sleeves on those forearms and get to work.

Here's where money is getting spent.

Advertising

It's easy to throw money at advertising on Google, Amazon, and More.  You can, with diligent research, at least break even at advertising if not make a profit.  It's just other people and companies can buy advertising at a loss if they need to in order to drive up sales and get reviews.

Advertising also has a feedback effect.  If you advertise your book or product and people buy it then it gets into recommendations.

My cheap suggestion?  Study up on advertising and aim to get to the break-even point at least to get your book out there.

Book Tours

Publishers can send people on book tours.  It's a great way to get attention on authors.  Other authors can send themselves and do their own book tours at indie book stores, conventions, and more.

Book tours are mixed bags in my experience - some sell some don't.  Do them if you want.  It's just to do it cheap, you'll want to line it up yourself with local stores.  I like the idea, but I'm also the kind of person that likes to meet people.

The only challenge is that a lot of Indie stories are fussy about what they carry - usually amazon print books are a no-no.  That leaves Ingrahm Spark or Lulu for print.

I also do a lot of public speaking at conventions and libraries.  I use that to meet people and network.

Covers

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a good book cover can wrap many, many more up in a single image.  Good covers sell, as I have found the hard way.  People can throw money at a good book cover.

If you're not going to do that your options are to learn to do it yourself (which is useful), get someone to help you (which is nice but can be exploitative), or use a premade cover service (like GoOnWrite, which I adore).  I find you can do pretty well with these if you're careful.

Giveaways

You've probably seen newsletters like Bookbub that promote book giveaways - for a fee.  I can't speak directly to how effective they are, but they keep going and I hear good thing.  It's just they cost - you guessed it - money.  Also they usually only promote if there's a discount.

It's hard to top these for sheer volume.  You can of course give away books to friends and newsletter subscribers, or use things like ProlificWorks.com (which still costs but not as much).  It won't get you a huge blitz, but still.

Reviews

Book-wise you can pay for reviews.  This may sound unethical (and there's debate about it), but the model is simple - companies or publications keep a staff of reviews around and farm out entrants to them if they're interested.  Similar models have existed for decades.  I'll leave you to decide on the ethicalness of the situation.

But people are using this.  You can throw a few thousand dollars at a review service and get a lot of reviews.  So guess what, you compete with that too.

The cheap solution of course is to get as many reviews as possible.  Ask friends.  Ask family.  Ask fellow authors.  Go to sources of reviews and review sites and ask for reviews.  Offer free copies of your book.

Some people are throwing money at reviewers.  If you can't or won't, it's time to get tactical.

In Summary

People are going to throw money at promoting their books.  If you don't want to do that, can't do that, or disagree with some of the approaches, you need to work around that.

One thing I can definitely suggest is to team up with your fellow authors.  Share tips.  Promote each other.  DO giveaways together.  One thing that's free is friendship.

You'll probably make some pretty awesome friends and you can plot together.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

#writing #self promotion #self publishing #marketing

[thebookjunkiereads]

Nobody ever said dying would be easy . . . SPOTLIGHT w/INTERVIEW - YA Urban Fantasy - Out of the Shadows (Shadowlands, #1) by Ashlee Nicole Bye #AshleeNicoleBye #BewitchingBookTours #Exceprt Cover Artist #GoOnWrite https://goo.gl/d762EI

[stevensavage]

Self-Publishing: Where To Start

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve's Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

This question has come up among my friends and my writing groups - when you want to self-publish where do you start.  It's overwhelming - not because there's not advice, there's too much.

There's advice on what to do.  When to publish.  What format to use.  How to market.  Everyone has advice, and there's so much of it, for many people it's overwhelming.

So I'd like to talk how to start with self-publishing.  I'll probably improve this over time and re-publish it.

The Split

So first of all, there's really two sides to writing.  First there's creating the book and all that entails, then there's marketing it.  One of the biggest problems is how this all gets so overwhelming - because marketing is way different than writing the book.

So my first advice?  Get to writing.  You can't market without a product, without something to sell.  You want to be able to get something done, after all - otherwise there's no reason to do all the marketing and such.

For a first timer, I would get your work to a first draft (or even a zeroth draft) if it's a book.  If you want to do smaller works like serial fiction, get 2-3 smaller pieces done.

Remember it's not done.  it's ready for edit.  It's proof you can get something to sell.

Plus you can focus.

While You Write

While you write, take time to do research on marketing - websites, ads, etc.  Don't do anything with it.  Just record ideas, get them into your head.

To make it easy on you, set aside a timeframe.  Read one article a week.  Finish one book a month.  Make it paced, relaxed, and with no other goal than knowledge - not things to do, ideas of what you can do.

Also remember a lot of the advice is survivorship bias, repetition, 101 stuff, and so on.  That's fine, we'll sort it out later.

Editing - And Formatting

So next up is editing your book.  This is probably less pressure than writing the damn thing.  Set yourself a timeframe for editing to get it done and get it off to an editor.  Yes, you want an editor.

At this time, focus about 70% of your time on the first edit or two and the other 30% on learning how you'll do your cover and how to use publishing tools like Jutoh.  Learn enough that you can make a temporary eBook copy in your chosen formats.

By the way if you plan to hire someone else to format, great, less stress for you.

Also figure out how you'll get a cover.  I strongly recommend you hire someone or go with premade covers like you find at GoOnWrite.  If you want to do your own, then make sure you can.  I do a lot of my own, or do them partially, but I learned some hard lessons.

You don't have to have it ready, just know how you'll do it.

Why do this?  Again, by the time you got through an edit and are sure you can publish, you'll know there's something ready.  Then you can focus on marketing.

Off To Edit - Off To Market (ing)

Somewhere when you're sure a book is about to get published, when you're ready to do it, it's time to market.

For your first book (or books if you have smaller stories), when you send things to final pre-readers or editors (depending how confident you feel), start working on actual marketing plans.  I recommend planning marketing during the editing phase of a large book, and the prereader phase of small works.

So what do you do?  Take inventory.

Write down all the different distinct things you want to do in marketing.

Next, rank them in order of importance as far as you know.

Now rerank them by how able you are to do them and how well you can handle them.  It's OK if that violates whats important or what people tell you - you have to evaluate what you're capable of.

Decide the minimum you have to do out of these.

Figure out the minimum you need to do for each.

How are you going to use this list?  Simple.  Start at the top while you wait for feedback, and do one after the other.  If that's setting up a Twitter account, fine.  If that's getting a website, well that may be a little longer.  Either way focus on one item at a time.

By the way, it's fine to outsource or ask for help.  In fact if you can do that and have the friends, money, etc. do it.  Again, reduce stress.

What Do I Recommend?

So what's my minimal recommendation for self-promotion?  Here you go, in "least stressful order."

Register a domain for yourself.  If it's a one attached to your real name, just point it at your Twitter or LinkedIn Profile.

Set up an author twitter if you don't have one already.  If you're using a pen name, now's the time to direct your new domain at it.  Figure out a Tweeting plan.

Set up a website if needed.  You can use something like Wix if you're in a hurry, but I do recommend a blog, so you can go with wordpress.com or a good host like Dreamhost.  Start with one page.

Look at how to use Amazon ads and Google ads to see if they'll help (if you want to blow the money, they can be low-stress).

Consider a newsletter like MailChimp.  This may not be something to start, but you will want one anyway.

Consider promotional sites like Prolific Works for giveaways.

There's a good starting point.  You can do all the other stuff you need later.  Heck, three of these are maybes.

Back At It

So at some point you get the book back from pre-readers/editors and are getting it into shape ready to go.  At this point, you probably need to start engaging your audience.

This could be as complex as setting up a Twitter feed and starting to post on a blog and blog tour.  This could just be setting aside money for online ads.

But at the same time don't you have to edit and prepare for publishing?  Yes.  So you may need to split your time.

I do this by setting aside goals and blocks of time.  So maybe you edit for X hours a week and once a week take an hour to blog.  If anything gets too stressful, re-adjust.

One important thing - do not announce any dates until you're quite sure.  At best, do general announcements.

Publishing

When you publish, if its your first time, my advice is to focus as much on the publishing as you can.  If you have some regular newsletter, website updates, etc. be sure not to take on anything you can't handle.

I usually line everything up then just spend all my time on publishing- which even at my best is still probably 5-15 hours of work on ensuring files work, getting things published, putting it on my website, etc.

Now, once that's done and the book (or first of your smaller pieces) is out . . .

Market It

Now that you have a work out, you can tear into marketing.  Set aside time in your post-publishing schedule to do the marketing, set up ads, whatever.  It may be you got such a good schedule and a good plan that it'll be surprisingly unstressful.

A note if you're putting out smaller works, you may interlace their release with publishing.  That's fine.  In this case alternate - spend time to publish, then market.  Break things up.

Develop Your Rythm

Finally, with works out, with you doing the marketing that you can handle, find a rhythm for the future.  Do you put out regular tweets?  Blog once a week?  Write three times a week and market one?

Find what works for you.  And it'll take time.  Experiment.  Learn.

In Conclusion

Everyone is going to tell you the right way to self publish.  The right way to market.  The right way to do all of this.

But you need to find your way.  And the first thing you do when you start is to find a way that won't drive you crazy.

Your way.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

#self-publishing #writing #marketing #writing marketing #self-published marketing