The Writer’s Round-Up 8
The writer’s round-up is a weekly column that provides reflection, advice, and articles in the skills you want to develop as a market-savvy author: reading, writing, blogging, and marketing. I do the research so you don’t have to!
This week:
Use market research to increase your story’s marketability
Using real-time data to make your articles more appealing
The appropriate uses of free and paid content in a writing and marketing strategy
If you want last week’s entry, look here.
Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash
Writing
Market research—an oft-neglected part of the writing process, but a necessary one for writers breaking into commercial writing. It reveals the type(s) of writing and tropes that are currently popular with your specific audience. This data is best used as a guide rather than a roadmap, as trends fade. Market research—like any other research—can be tedious, but need not be overly complicated. In How to Do Market Research for Your Next Book, Monica Leonelle breaks down the activities the comprise market research. (It’s more than just reading the “comps.”)
Reading
In light of the previous section, I have decided to try a different tactic. Since my market research—therefore, reading—is work, I need to treat it as such and make sure it gets done. To this effect, I will read 1 hour per day—or as close to it as I can stand. Doesn’t have to be all at once, but it should get me much closer to reading one book biweekly or monthly than I was doing before. I discovered Robin Hobb using http://bestfantasybooks.com/. Her books come up often in discussions of adult fantasy fiction, so I think it’ll serve as a good first step into market research.
Blogging
Some bloggers primarily write to inform, while others write to entertain—in both cases, the content can be made more attractive by using social media as the data gold mine that it is. Tim Denning explains how real-time data gleaned from Twitter and Medium can be used to write and improve articles. Twitter can show interest and trends in real time—just look at the engagement metrics: likes, replies, and retweets.
Marketing
Marketing yourself as a writer is fraught with decisions—what to write, what aspects of it to write about, where to post, when to post, etc. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Nick Wolny succinctly simplifies at least one such decision: what content should be free and what content to monetize. In short: free content describes what and why; paid content describes how. Naturally, you should tease the “how” in your free content.
Meta
Whether you love or hate Apple, you can’t deny that they are excellent at creating a friendly user experience. I can’t see myself giving up Windows (not for lack of trying), but the temptation is real. The lack of a Linux shell is solved easily enough by Cygwin, but not being able to divide my workspaces was annoying. However, I finally have something good to say about Windows 10.
After a few months of accidentally invoking it, I learned how to use the desktops feature. I can group my windows by project now! Microsoft even had the foresight (maybe) to show selected windows on all spaces. For me that’s Evernote and MediaMonkey. It makes focusing easier—I’m one of those people that perennially has 50 windows and 500 tabs open at once. Being able to move windows around makes my desktop environment much less cluttered.