And then the first review comes in.

And they complain about the editing.

And you're crushed.

We've all been there.

Self-editing is hard. You get used to your story and the way it's written. This means that your brain, at a subconscious level, knows what you intended to write even if your hands developed a mind of their own. You read a sentence and see nothing wrong. Meanwhile, there's a glaring typo or grammatical error. Even your spelling and grammar checker forsake you as the sentence still technically works.

You need help to break your brain out of its know-it-all state and get it seeing every word again. This is where we begin.

Read it Backwards

Strange but true: if you read your manuscript backwards you will un-train your brain and get it looking at what you've written as though it's brand new. Take it one paragraph at a time, and do it slowly. Read every word, and make sure what's there is what you intended. This is also a good time to ensure that each paragraph can stand on its own.

Make a List

Chances are, if this is your first book, you won't know what your most common mistakes are yet. But keep your eyes open because as you edit you will learn what they are. Don't trust your memory to remember them all. Write it down into a list so that the next time you write something you can easily search for those mistakes and eliminate them. You will make the same mistakes over and over. It's nothing to be ashamed of. That's part of what makes you unique as a writer. That doesn't mean you can release your book with those mistakes still present though.

Your goal should be to become known for your fantastic writing, not your consistent mistakes.

Read it out Loud

This is a fantastic idea for new writers. It allows you to hear what your story will sound like in your reader's heads when they read it. If you stumble over a sentence, word, or paragraph, or something doesn't sound right, highlight it and move on. Don't try to edit while you read it out loud or you'll never get anywhere.

Better yet, record yourself while you're reading it and play it back. You should sound fluid and consistent when you read it. If you slow down or miss words, or change things as you go, mark it for revision in your manuscript. Be sure to follow along as you listen so you can compare what you said to what you wrote.

Look for Common Mistakes

There is a wealth of information online about the common mistakes writers make. You can look up these lists and use them to your advantage. I've used a number of them and always find some new mistake that I've been making that I turn around and correct. This is probably something you'll want to do as step one or two in your process.

Learn From Your Mistakes

Writing is a journey with many lessons to learn. Always keep an open mind about what you're doing and be sure to recognize and learn from your mistakes. Oh yes, you will make mistakes. I know I have. At every step of the way you will learn new skills, new tricks, and new methods and ideas. Welcome these lessons and grow into an author of the future.

Don't Edit Tired

You're going to want to get through the editing and get your book out into the world. I promise you, there will always be readers. In fact there are probably more active readers now than there has ever been before. But be patient and don't burn yourself out. You'll do better, more consistent work if you make sure you are well-rested. Editing while tired will cause you to miss more as your brain goes into a sort of auto-pilot mode.

Take your time, get into a groove, and you'll be writing much cleaner in no time. The second book will be much easier to edit, and the third even more so.

The Most Important Lesson

Don't go it alone. Writing may be a solitary job, but editing doesn't have to be. Get feedback from your peers, hire an editor, join local writing groups and get them to help, but above all else don't do this alone. I certainly don't. I'm an independent author who depends on a whole team of people to get my books published. I couldn't do it by myself and you shouldn't either.

It may be a lot of work, but the reward when the good reviews start coming in are totally worth it. Keep at it, and always move forward.

Eventually you'll get there.

Wherever "there" is.

I'm guessing very few actually.

So what went wrong?

I'm guessing you lost focus on what was truly important: passion. See, in order to sell somebody a book, they must feel the same kind of passion you had when writing it. Following the rules is important, but we need to feel the story as well.

"Bob and Jane lose a child and struggle to hold their marriage together."

That's a loaded sentence that tells us a lot about the story, but it has no passion. It's factual information with no feeling. I could just as easily tell you that the book is about a man changing a tire, and it would have the same effect. It's flat.

"Bob and Jane lose their new born child to SIDS and must learn to cope together, or spend the rest of their lives apart."

Yeah, it's more words, but it tugs at the heart strings, and instead of telling us what they are trying to do, it implies it, and fills it with passion. There are still facts, but they are woven into the sentence instead of stated. Note "their" rather than "a", the revelation of what took the child, something they "must" do, rather than something they "struggle" to do, and the implication that they will split up, rather than it telling us flat out.

Find the passion you felt when you wrote the book, and pour it into the words you will use to sell your book. If you can't feel passionate about your book, how can you expect other people to feel that way?

Choose your words carefully.

Every word counts when you have only 250 words (or less) to make the sale. This is why I stress to use a character-based pitch rather than a plot-based one. It's very hard to form an emotional connection with a plot, whereas people easily form emotional connections with characters. With the right words you can sell anything, as long as you can achieve that connection with your audience.

Once you have a pitch you are happy with, read it out loud, put it away for a day, and then read it again. Are the verbs the strongest you could possibly use? Have you made use of every word, and cut out any extraneous ones? Is your pitch using an active voice? How many "be" verbs have you used, and do you really need them?

Does it give you chills?

Focus on the conflict

At the core of every book is conflict. Without conflict, we don't have a story. Don't let your pitch get bogged down in details or secondary characters. They are important to the story, but not to the pitch. Instead, narrow down your conflict until you find the heart of your story. What motivates your characters and drives your story forward. Why will people read this book? They certainly aren't reading it to find out what Bob does for a living, or to find out what Jane bought at the grocery store. I'm sure those are very interesting details to some, but that's not what will sell this book.

The conflict is in how Bob and Jane will handle the loss of their child, and how they will find the strength in themselves and each other to move on with their lives. When you boil a story down right to its bones, there must be something there that is driving the plot forward. Find that.

Raise the stakes

If you have nothing to lose, nobody cares about how it ends. That's a universal truth. There is always something to lose, some choice, something that hangs in the balance if the conflict is not resolved in a favorable way. These are your stakes, and this must be believable in order to sell the book.

Bob and Jane stand to lose their marriage, and possibly more when you weigh the emotional cost if they can't find a way to move on together. They may blame each other for the death, or blame themselves. Two people brought together by love, and perhaps torn apart by a tragedy so powerful it can transect even the most powerful bond. They must find a way to move on, or they lose each other, and that's the true tragedy.

You can't sell a book without passion.

If you enjoyed this, you'll probably like the rest of the Perfect Pitching Series.

That phrase was on a poster in the classroom where I once learned the basics of the French language. It was put there by my very wise French teacher. He lived by those words, and pushed those words on everyone. It's about setting goals, but also, it's about setting targets.

Marketing is such a huge topic that it would take me months of steady writing to cover it. There are whole books, whole courses, and people who dedicate their lives to marketing. They do it full-time and get paid big money for it.

I don't get paid big money. In fact, as far as marketing goes, I'm pretty much a novice. But the one basic concept I do understand is the most absolute fundamental and important concept in marketing: you must have a target.

Nobody starts a marketing campaign without a target audience. In fact, it's impossible to make any real decision in marketing without knowing your target audience. The success or failure of your marketing campaign, no matter what the form, will depend on you knowing your target. Knowing your target will also have a big hand in whether you succeed or fail on Amazon.

Being an author, the rest of this article will be geared toward book marketing, but the concepts are the same for any product you happen to be selling. Whether it be generic widgets, books, or trips to Cancun, in order for you to really make sales your target must be well defined.

A while back I made a blog post about the Amazon Recommendation System. If you haven't read it, follow that link and read it now. Much of the following post will reference concepts introduced in that post.

Amazon's recommendation system depends very heavily on two items having lots of common purchasers. The more purchasers two items have in common, the more likely Amazon is to recommend one item to customers of the other. On top of that, only purchasers in the last six months are considered in their recommendation system. Why? Because they want to keep the recommendations fresh. They understand the value of targeted marketing. People who bought one item are very likely to buy another item that has already been purchased by many of the same customers. Their system is designed to do the targeted marketing for them.

Having a Good Product is Important

The rating on any given product makes a difference in the Amazon recommendation system. Given two books with identical purchasers, the product with the higher rating will get recommended first. This means that when the reviews start rolling in, you better make sure you've put the best product up that you possibly can.

It's also important to know who buys the type of book that you are selling. The idea is to target just the right people with your efforts so that you make the most of the purchases you get. And no, this doesn't mean relentlessly spamming message boards and Facebook groups full of people who are trying to have real discussions. You need a real plan in order to draw in those customers, and it's almost certainly not going to happen with the first book you release.

What About Amazon Select?

Select is no exception. Here's a secret that many people don't consider when they decide to have an Amazon Select free promo:

Every single person who downloads your book for free counts as a purchaser.

Yep. When Amazon starts recommending your book to people after the free promo ends, it will consider all those new "purchasers" in its system. If you target your promotion right, you can enjoy an extended period of strong sales as a result of those recommendations.

If you splash your free promo out in front of thousands of people, and do no targeting, then many of the new "purchasers" will have no books in common, and your recommendations will be next to worthless. Even worse is if those new "purchasers" have the wrong books in common, which will end up recommending your book to the completely wrong audience. This is a situation you want to avoid at all costs.

If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time.

It's such an important concept that it warrants stating it again. You can't sell a book effectively without targeting your marketing efforts. Do yourself a favor before you do anything else to market your books, and take some time to define your target. Write it down, focus it as narrowly as you can, and then create a plan on how to hit that target. This will help you get the absolute most out of all of your marketing efforts.

Good luck!

If you haven't already, pick up a copy of The Time Weaver (Book I of The Time Weaver Chronicles) from Amazon.com today. Subscribe by email to my blog, and don't miss a single post!

That's what this is all about today, coming up with that all-important pitch. It's 250 words (or so), how hard can it possibly be? This is the deadly secret of the writing world that nobody wants you to know: writing a sales pitch for a book is the hardest 250 words you will ever write.

I have some guidelines that can make it easier. (Note the terminology: guidelines, not rules. We'll address that later.) If you follow this list, and capture your plot, you'll have a pretty good pitch to start out with.

The "Do"s:

• Keep the word count to 250 words or less. That's not many words to capture the essence of a story that took 50,000 or more to tell.

• Include your main character, the central conflict, and the stakes.

• Use active language.

• Use present tense.

• Write in the same voice as the novel.

• Show us the story (vs. telling it to us).

• Leave the reader with a cliffhanger.

• Be concise.

• Make every word count.

The "Don't"s:

• Try to write the entire story in 250 words.

• Introduce too many characters or proper names in the pitch.

• Start the pitch with a rhetorical question.

• Include self-praise of the work.

• Use adverbs.

• Overuse in-book terminology.

• Give away the ending.

That's a lot of guidelines to follow, which is part of what makes this process so incredibly difficult. Anyone who knows me, knows I've gone through at least four complete rewrites of my pitch, and countless minor revisions.

Anatomy of a Pitch

The basic anatomy of a pitch is three simple paragraphs: character, conflict, and stakes.

Start out by introducing us to your main character, and add in a hook. As a reader, I need something to care about. Don't just tell me that your character Bob is an accountant. That's boring. How bout an accountant who can bend steel bars with his mind? Okay, that got a lot more interesting. Perhaps your book is more down-to-earth, but your character is broken in some way: Bob is an accountant who is clinging to the last dredges of a life he has destroyed through alcoholism. You get the idea. This is where you make the reader care about your character. Why character? I'll explain that later.

Having an interesting character is awesome, but you need plot to go with that. Conflict is what drives the plot. All we want in the second paragraph is the central conflict of the book. How did the character get there? Who else does it involve? Don't get too involved with details, but make sure the reader can understand what the story is about.

A cool character, loads of conflict, and now? We need to know what's at stake. The third paragraph wraps this up and shows the reader what the character stands to lose, or what could happen if the conflict doesn't get resolved in a positive way. The idea here is to build it up to be nice and juicy, and make them beg for more. At this point, the reader should be sold and writing up a request letter or hitting the "buy" or "preview" button. That's how bad they have to need your book.

Breaking All the Rules

What good are rules if you can't break them? Of course, there are only guidelines, and yes, you can venture outside of those guidelines, but understand that the further away from those guidelines you go, the bigger risk you are taking.

What are you risking?

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The pitch is your first impression. Put your best foot forward. Proof read it, have somebody else proof read it, tighten it, read it out loud, have your best friend read it out loud to you. If they stumble while reading it, so will a potential buyer, agent or editor.

Make. Every. Word. Count.

Character vs. Plot Based Pitching

This is a guideline that I really push people to follow. The reader must connect with your story in some way, and the easiest way to get into somebodies head, is through a character. You can write a plot based pitch, but it becomes much more difficult for a reader to connect to it. If you can make that connection, and get inside their head, you've made the sale.

Never Say Never

The guidelines above can be bent, and even erased if you're careful. But there is one rule I stress to anyone and everyone I help out with a pitch:

Never, ever, ever start a pitch with a rhetorical question.

Never.

It doesn't build suspense. It doesn't hook the reader. All it does is ask the reader a question before they have a reason to care about the answer. Don't put potential readers in this position, because it means they have to work to get to the good stuff, and most people simply won't. Most agents and editors will toss a pitch that starts with a rhetorical question. Most potential readers will pass over it.

Take Frequent Breaks

If you get frustrated, or just can't seem to get it right, stop and take a break. Shelve the pitch for a day or two, a week, or even longer. Come back to it when you have a clear head, and fresh eyes. Have other people look at it and see if they can suggest something. Find a writers group that might be able to help you. This doesn't have to be a solitary effort.

Above all, have fun with it. Whether you write as a hobby, or as a career, you should always try to have fun with what you do. Get yourself excited over this, because the more excited you are, the less like work it will seem.

If you enjoyed this, you'll probably like the rest of the Perfect Pitching Series.

What Recommendations?

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, you should stop reading right now, go to Amazon, and look at any page, even their home page. Everywhere you look on Amazon, you'll see "More Items to Consider", "Customers Who Bought This Item, Also Bought...", "Inspired By Your Wishlist", or any number of other recommendation lists that they feed you while browsing. These lists are where you want your book to be.

"Why?" you ask? Because these are going to be some of the best recommendation lists that you will ever encounter. Seriously. The technology that goes into creating these lists is unmatched by any other site in the industry, except maybe Netflix. These lists will sell your books, I guarantee it. You just need to get your book there.

Oh, sure. Is that all?

Thing is, Amazon wants to sell your book. They want to sell everyone's books. They want to sell millions and millions of everyone's books. Know why? Because they make lots and lots of money. How do they make sure they sell the maximum number of books possible? By creating really, really good recommendation lists. Don't believe me? They're not the #1 book seller in the world for no reason.

Item-to-item Collaborative Filtering

Holy crap. I hit you right over the head with those great big words. Here's where the technical stuff starts. Put on your hard hat, and watch for falling math.

Amazon has some of the biggest data stores in the world. They keep track of everything. Every item that you've ever purchased, when it was purchased and for how much. Every item you've ever clicked, what you clicked after that, how often you visit certain pages, how often you purchase an item after visiting the page, and how many times you visited the page before you bought it. Thing is, Amazon is greedy. They don't like to share data, because that's their competitive edge over everyone else.

I don't blame them.

Their recommendation system is based on one thing and one thing only, and it's really very simple when you tear it down to just this: who bought what items. But they don't even care about who bought what, all they really care about is how many people bought the same two items.

Here is the basic algorithm, in all it's glory:

This list is computed based on something called a Commonality Index (CI). The CI of any two items (Item_X,Item_Y) is calculated using the following equation:

Take 3 items:

• Item_X = purchased 300 times (N_x)

• Item_Y = purchased 200 times (N_y)

• Item_Z = purchased 30000 times (N_z)

Find which item (Y, or Z) has the most in common with Item_X, where:

• N_common(Item_X, Item_Y) = 20

• N_common(Item_X, Item_Z) = 25

So:

• CI(Item_X,Item_Y) = 20 / √(300 * 200) = 0.08165

• CI(Item_X,Item_Z) = 25 / √(300 * 30000) = 0.00833

Meaning?

Item_X has MORE in common with Item_Y than Item_Z, even though Item_X and Item_Z have more common purchasers.

This is important. It means that you have no immediate hope of being paired with Item_Z until you have a fair number more purchasers in common. Want to be recommended to people who buy the big guns at the top of the list? You need to get MORE people who buy the top books to also buy your books. In this case, Item_X and Item_Z would have to have almost 250 common purchasers in order to top CI(Item_X, Item_Y), and get recommended over it.

But Wait, There's More!

It's still not as simple as just a single score, and you had to know it wasn't. So what's the catch?

Your sales have an expiry date. That's right. When working out the recommendation list, Amazon only considers the last six months' worth in sales data. By doing this, they keep the recommendations fresh. They don't sell books by recommending what was popular last year. They want to show you what's popular now.

The rest of the recommendation lists are figured out based on what you've looked at recently, what you've bought recently, what's currently in your cart, what's currently in your wishlist, what products you've marked as "liked", and what products you've reviewed. Each of these factors produces a different list of items based on the same equations above.

Lighting the Fire

So how do you take this information and use it to light the Amazon Recommendation fire?

Two Words: Targeted Marketing.

Most people don't know what that means. Do some research, and get started today. I'll do that as well, and will bring you another post later on, all about it.

Good luck!

I hope this helps at least some of you out there. If you're looking for a way to help me out and spread the word, clicking the Tweet and +1 buttons below are quick and simple ways that I would greatly appreciate!

If I Knew Then What I Know Now...

Many of you know that I'm a full-time software developer by trade. I write my books in my spare time, and publish them as a hobby. I bring this up only because it gives you some background on how I look at the world. I don't see things through a normal person's eyes. If you've ever spent time with a software developer, you'll know that we see things from a unique perspective.

When I look at a system, I don't just see a black box with an input and an output. I see all the inputs and how they relate to each other. I see how a small change in one can create a big change in another. I see the processes, data structures, algorithms and code involved in that system. I can't help it.

It drives my wife nuts sometimes.

Here's the thing: I didn't start looking at Amazon in any real detail until just recently. But now I understand so much more. I wish I had done this a long time ago.

On With the Show

When you first publish a book on Amazon, their system will file your book into a number of lists:

• Bestseller Lists

• Popularity Lists

• Recently Tagged Lists

• Recently Popular Lists

• New Release Lists

• Movers and Shakers

• Hot New Releases

• 90-day New Releases

• and many more.

A great many of these lists are then subdivided by genre, price, and so forth. Amazon is basically just a complex filing system. For the first thirty days, forget all of those, except the New Release list. This is a list of all books that have been released in the last thirty days.

Why forget all the others? Because Amazon's current sales rank system (THE list) bases your position on many factors, but most particularly your last thirty days of sales. If you don't have thirty days in sales, it doesn't count this against you, it simply considers what you DO have. But for the first thirty days, you enjoy some extra publicity. All those grand slam blockbusters that fill the top of the bestseller lists are not in the New Release list (unless they are less than thirty days old) and many of the greatest books of all time are not on this list. It's just you and a whole lot of other fresh meat.

For the first thirty days, if you focus your promotional efforts using a layered approach, you can drive your book to the top of the new release list and pick up a whole lot more sales from people just browsing. More sales = better sales rank = more exposure on Amazon = more sales. See how it works?

Setting the Fire

If you're looking to really make a run at being the next great indie author, consider this advice: don't just create sparks all over the place and expect things to burn. Lay out your tinder, your kindling, and then your wood on top, and when the time is right, you'll only need one spark to set that blaze.

This was a piece of advice that I was given by a very wise indie author by the name of Rodney Walther. He's sold more than 30,000 copies of his book, Broken Laces, and is still sitting up in the top 1000 month after month. So there must be something to this.

What does it mean? It means stop floundering around and wondering what to do. Use a planned approach. Get lots of people on your side: Twitter friends, Facebook friends, book bloggers, reviewers, and yes, even some paid promotions (select these wisely!). Have them all focus on promoting your book in that critical first thirty days, and make sure to carry some forward as well. If you pull it off, your sales rank coming out of those first thirty days will carry you forward for a long time.

A Note About Amazon Select

If you know me, you know how I feel about this program. Having a successful book launch is all about exposure. Limiting yourself to Amazon for your eBook is only going to limit your exposure. You may not see tremendous sales on the other sites, but I promise you, if you remove your listings, you will see a drop in your exposure on search engines like Google.

Even if you do choose to embrace Amazon Select, I don't recommend using a giveaway promotion anywhere in the first ninety days with your book on Amazon. Each time your book goes from free to paid, your sales rank resets and is recalculated based on the last thirty days of sales. The catch is that the freebies you give away are not counted 1:1 with sold books. It is more like 10:1 free:sold, meaning you need ten free books to equal one sold book. Not only that, but long term sales ranks barely consider freebies. If you supercharge your first thirty days on Amazon, you'll never need to use a free promotion for exposure.

Putting It All Together

There are hundreds of factors involved in a successful book launch. Amazon's algorithms and understanding how it all works is just a small piece. You absolutely must have at least a decent book to begin with, a professional cover, a good blurb, and lots of other stuff. Don't cut corners. Get your book professionally edited, take the time to set up web pages, blogs, etc before you go live. Build up some hype about your book, and get people excited about it.

Good luck!