Inventing Reality Editing Service

What is an Email List and Why You Want One

In the Age of the Internet, just about everyone has an email address at which they can be reached. Knowing the email addresses of those people interested in your writing would go a long way in helping you sell more books, as you could inform them when new titles are coming out, when you have events, when your books are on sale, and more.

An email list quite literally is a collection of emails of those people who are interested in your writing. Though an email list can be done by hand, you’ll probably use email marketing software or an online service to help you build your list, create your promotional messages, and then email those messages to people on the list.

The challenge is to find those people interested in your writing and then for them to willingly give up their email address to you. Never build a list in which you use the address of every person you’ve emailed during the past year or that you’ve purchased from a third party. In the first case, your second-cousin Sara and car mechanic named Jim probably aren’t interested in your book beyond polite conversation. In the latter case, many of those addresses really aren’t from people who know anything about you as an author or even like to read books in your genre. That doesn’t help you sell books and means your promotion often will be sent to a spam folder.

Instead, you want people to sign up for your email list. They should know that by giving you their email address they’re agreeing to receive regular updates about your writing. These are the readers who are most likely to buy your books – your ideal audience

So how do you find these people? There are plenty of ways:

• Collect emails at your in-person events
• Add a sign-up button to your social media sites
• Include a pop-up offer on your homepage
• Place an opt-in form in your website’s navigation or footer
• Build an opt-in landing page at your website

There are other methods as well that work well for some businesses but not so much for authors. For example, a bookstore might have the option to enter your email when a person pays via credit card. Since your books are sold online through Amazon and other distributors, that wouldn’t really work for you.

Usually to get people to give you their email, you need to offer them something in exchange. For retail stores, that's easy – a discount on their next purchase. For authors, it might be a free pdf of a book. Often the promise of email updates about your next book is sufficient though.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

A digital dilemma: Website vs. Web Site

Should website be one or two words and either way should it be capitalized? There’s no need to do an Internet search, as the answers follow...

A website is a location on the World Wide Web that one can access, as in Every major business today has its own website.

The term web site means exactly the same thing and is merely a variant spelling.

During the early 2000s, website as a compound/one word became the preferred spelling. Most stylebooks now recommend spelling it as a single word.

The same has occurred with capitalizing it. During the 1990s, the word generally was spelled as Web site. Just as the word has lost the space between its two syllables, so it also has dropped the capital letter. The AP Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Style, Garner’s Modern English Usage, and several dictionaries all go with website.

I advise sticking with that trend. About the only time you might use Web site is if letters or diary entries were written during the 1990s by a story’s characters.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Add audio to your authors website

Making a personal connection with your readers marks a great way to sell your books – and one solid way to do that is to use audio on your website.

When website visitors hear your voice, they’re more likely to pay attention than if they simply read text that they know is polished. Further, speech allows you to vocally emphasize points that readers might miss when they just scan your website.

The first step to getting audio on your website is to download and install software or an app that can record your voice. A number of such programs are available online. A popular one is Web Audio Plus.

You probably have a microphone on your computer, but it may need to be readjusted so that works best for you. If using Windows, you can adjust the microphone by going to your Control Panel’s Hardware and Sound section. Should your PC mic not be up to the job, you can purchase better quality mics that plug into your computer for under $50.

The next step is to write a script for your audio presentation. It can be as long as you like, but depending on its purpose, various lengths are better than others. A welcome to you website probably shouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes. A recording of an interview with you or a presentation you gave ought to be the exact length as the original so that visitors don’t feel cheated of information.

Topics of an audio presentation could be a welcome to your website, snippets in which you explain cool stuff about your books (like who your favorite character is, how you came up with the idea for the story, an alternative ending you didn’t go with), and an interview of you.

Once you write the script, rehearse it a couple of times then record. Always play it back before posting to ensure you’re satisfied with it. If you aren’t, then re-record.

Once you’ve got the recording you like, you can post it to your website. Usually this involves pasting the audio file into your web page’s html.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Generate business with membership site

One great way for authors to generate business is a membership site. This is a private website that people pay a monthly fee to join so they can receive exclusive content and usually the ability to interact with one another. Among the unique content you might include are monthly seminars, guest speakers, monthly Q&A calls, member forums, and weekly emails to members about your website’s highlights and forum topic discussions.

Running a membership site offers several advantages. First, it can be a source of regular monthly income, especially if you set up an autopay system for members. In addition, you’re now able identify a group of loyal customers who you can stay in touch with. There’s no better way to sell a book than making a personal connection. Finally, your website can be a proving grounds for new book ideas as you discuss concepts, offer samples, and receive feedback.

Of course, there’s a downside to running a membership site: You must constantly create new content. This can cut into your regular writing time or compete with other items on your busy schedule. You can turn this downside into an advantage, though, if you plan to use t least some of this content in new books you will publish.

Setting up a membership site is fairly easy albeit initially time-consuming. Begin by designing a website. Examine other membership sites that cover topics similar to yours to get ideas. Also look for what they’re not doing so that you can differentiate yourself from them. Then begin building the website and creating content for it. Once you’ve got the site looking the way you’d like it to, go to the next step of promoting it. Use all of your book’s social media platforms – such as Twitter, Facebook, and your blog – to announce its launch and each time new material is posted to it.

Start at a very low fee. You want to build membership and get people talking about the site. As you have probably very little content to offer when the website starts, the low fee makes up for it. Once you have more to offer and membership has grown, then raise your prices. In addition, you may want to offer a discounted price for some. You’ll inevitably have people say they can’t afford a membership. Some of them may be trying to scam you into giving away something for free, but the majority probably are being honest. Giving discounts to students and senior citizens can help ensure some of those people do sign up for a membership.

You must constantly maintain your membership site. Specifically, you have to regularly come up with new content for members and you have to interact with them. To meet those challenges, you could:
• Add regularly scheduled blog posts, Q&As, and courses. Only introduce one at a time so that you don’t overwhelm members, though.
• Host live seminars/webinars every three months in which members can ask you questions.
• Post daily in forums, specifically by offering members tips, advice and encouragement.
• Start new topics on forums, especially when existing ones don’t generate much interaction.
• Hold regular hours in a text chat room or a private Facebook group in which members can talk with you.
• Provide online group events and challenges, such as writing so many words per day. Members then can share their successes and encourage one another. You even could offer prizes (such as exclusive access to new content or free copies of your book) to those who succeed.
• Update your home/welcome page every couple of days. Point out new material as well as old material that members may have missed.
• Offer a contact form in which members can email you.

Always remain flexible with your membership site. See where your members’ interests take you. For example, if you write murder mysteries and originally planned to focus on how to pen a mystery but find that your members are more interested in general writing tips or how to self-publish a book, run with it.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Pay attention to tone on your author website

Along with achieving the right level of readability in your web text, you need to strike the appropriate tone. Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject. It might be angry or weary or irreverent or any of a thousand other emotions and physical states.

Visitors to your author site who find your tone unbefitting almost certainly will leave. Though the desired tone varies among your website readers, we can anticipate what the average person expects.

Culturally, people have come to associate certain tones with specific genres. If your website’s tone is flirty and suggestive and you write westerns, you’ve likely misjudged your reading audience. Of course, each genre can possess a range of tones, but even then each one often is related to a subgenre.

A good strategy is for your website’s tone to match that used in your books. Readers often expect that. The website, after all, is like a book blurb. If the tone of either is humorous while the tone of your books are dead serious, the reader usually will feel jilted.

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If you’ve written multiple books in which each has a different attitude, then your website will need to use more of a default tone that works for any genre. To achieve that, follow these four basic guidelines...

Be personable
Write as if you are speaking directly to the reader by using words like you and your. In addition, use active voice to sound less bureaucratic and formal (passive voice also unnecessarily lengthens your sentence, reducing readability). Suppose you write a travel guide to national parks; your website text might say something like, “You’re visiting a national park but don’t have a lot of time. Maybe you’re just passing by or have only one day of your vacation to stop. What should you see, and how will you find those spots?”

Be upbeat
Always be energetic rather than dull and positive rather than negative. This helps generate interest and then excitement in the reader. Writing “The books' trails are short enough that you can spend just a couple of hours on them so you can enjoy a leisurely day with plenty of time to do other stuff!” is a lot better than saying “Each trail takes about two hours to do. You’ll probably want to do a couple a day to keep the fat off.”

Be useful
If writing nonfiction, you want to show how visitors can benefit by reading your books. If writing fiction, you want to show that your books are suspenseful. Let your content or your writing style reflect this. To that end, a travel book website might include words such as “The series ensures you make the most of your limited time by focusing on the must-see wonders at our most visited national parks.”

Be descriptive
You don’t want to write long prosaic paragraphs, but you do want to sprinkle in descriptive phrasing and apt similes that connects the reader to your books’ subject matter. For example, in a travel guide to Wisconsin, you could write, “Bayfield County boasts crystal blue waters, lush green forests, and friendly Mayberry-like villages.”

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Usually issues with tone can be resolved by fixing a couple of sentences. Be forewarned, though, that sometimes you may need to take a whole new approach to the web page and start from scratch. As you outline each of your main points that you want to make in the text, focus on delivering them in a personable, upbeat way that demonstrates your book’s usefulness.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

How to improve your web text’s readability

Every word counts when you write text for the web. The moment readers have difficulty following you or are no longer engaged is the moment they click to another website. Because of this, you must focus on achieving readability and the right tone.

Readability is how easily visitors to your page can understand what you’ve written. Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject, and we’ll focus on that in a separate blog entry.

Unfortunately, readability can be a moving target. Each visitor to your website reads at a different level while bringing unique experiences, personalities and expectations. So we can only talk in generalities here.

Optimum readability is writing at an eighth grade reading level, according to various studies. If your audience is well-educated (master’s and doctorate’s degrees) and your subject matter more serious than usual (say science, philosophy, or literary analysis), then you can aim for a 12th grade reading level. That doesn’t mean you write as if your reader is 13 or 18 years old, as doing so requires age-specific considerations about maturity and development levels. You would, however, use vocabulary and sentence structures that a typical person of that age could easily read.

To strike the right level and readability for a general audience – 8th grade reading level – follow these four basic standards.

Sound conversational
You want to be plainspoken. That means no jargon, no acronyms, and probably no prosaic passages. If you have to use jargon or insider words, then you could include their definition in parentheses. You’ll also want to use short sentences, as long sentences can strain the reader’s memory. A lot of subordinate clauses and conjunctions simply make a sentence difficult to follow. As a side note, shorter sentences offer the advantage of making your writing sound more authoritative; readers often infer a lot of hedging in long sentences.

Hence, rather than write…

Generally, thru-hikers on the PCT can use one of two types of hiking backpacks – frameless and pack frame, the latter of which can be divided into two kinds, external and internal – as they hit the verdant mountain trails weaving beneath a brilliant turquoise heaven. (19th grade reading level)

…instead write…

Generally, Pacific Crest Trail hikers can use either a frameless or pack frame backpack. Pack frames in turn come in two types, external and internal. (9th grade reading level)

Use active voice
Avoid passive voice, which uses is, am, are, was, were, be or being as your sentence’s main verb. In contrast, active voice makes your sentences sound less bureaucratic and formal. Indeed, passive voice unnecessarily lengthens your sentence. So, instead of writing This study was conducted on 168 young pigs in an authentic farm environment over a 26-week period by researchers from America and Australia, go with America and Australian researchers studied 168 young pigs in an authentic farm environment over 26 weeks.

Use memorable phrases
The more you can compress complex points into simple maxims, the better. Readers are more likely to remember short, pithy statements than your point-by-point, detailed explanation of a concept. So don’t write To act civilized out in the wilds, as a hiker always minimize damage to your surroundings but instead Leave no trace.

Don’t wander
Your writing needs to stay on point. That means no rambling or telling long stories. Always remember that the visitor wants to quickly learn you main points not go in-depth or study side issues. If the above “Sound conversational” point had included as 12-sentence anecdote about the time I wrote a really long, rambling sentence and got a bunch of emails asking me what I meant, then I’d have wandered. Cut that kind of writing from your web text.

Getting your text to be more readable can be a challenge at first, but it’s really just a matter of identifying these four issues. Always edit your piece looking for such problems. You then can run your article through any of a number of free online readability apps and continue to revise if necessary. In fact, this article started at a 13th grade readability and after a revision is down to 10th grade readability.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Six Ways to Boost Author Website Visits

• How to drive traffic to your website
• Increase website visits with strategic
• Employ right keywords to boost book sales 
• Use Google’s Keyword tool to sell more books
• Boost book sales via backlinks to your website
• Advertise your book via web widgets 

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Use Google’s Keyword tool to sell more books

When promoting our books, getting to the top of the first search engine page is important. Stats show that page 1 gets 95% of all search traffic, that 61% of all traffic go to the top three spots, and that 33-40% head right to the No. 1 listing. Attaining those coveted spots requires search engine optimization, or the placement of keywords on your website, blog and social media posts promoting the book. So just how do you figure out which keywords are best, then?

The Google Keyword Planner tool is an extremely useful tool. As Google is the most widely used search engine, focusing your efforts there will yield maximum results. In addition, people who use other search engines, such as Bing, tend to follow the same habits and make the same word choices as Google users.

Anyone can utilize the Google Keyword Planner tool for free. You do have to sign up for a Google AdWords account, however but do not need to actually place AdWords on any of your pages. As a side note, there’s no need to buy expensive ads; only 10% of people using a search engine ever go to paid ads.

Once you’ve registered, go to the Keyword Planner link above and click “Start Using Keyword Planner.” Next, in the drop down menu near the top let of the page, click “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.”

You then can enter the product or service your offer, the URL for your website’s landing (home) page, or your product category. Any of the three are useful, though I prefer entering the product or service I offer, if only because it tends to give you a wider range of keywords to choose from.

What comes up next is a set of search terms and keywords with their accompanying average monthly searches during the previous 12 months. Words with the highest average monthly searches ought to be incorporated into the text of your website, blog and social media posts.

Another piece of info provided is the level of competition for each keyword or search term. If you were to take out an ad, this gives a rough estimate of how many other websites use that wording. This is useful to know as you might be able to find a niche that you can specialize in when the competition is low but the search engine results are high.

There also are a number of ways to customize Keyword Planner searches. You can use geotargeting that allows you to determine which keywords are most used in specific counties or language. You also can use filters to block keywords that don’t reach a specific threshold of monthly searches. If you don’t do any of this, you’ll simply see what Americans are searching for using the English language.

Make a list of the keywords that best apply to your website, blog and social media promos. Remember that when adding these keywords, you want your text to sound natural. You’ll probably need to write several drafts to do so, but it’s better to put in the hard work now to get the keywords in then to quickly write something (even if it reads well) that lacks them.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

How to put a “buy now” button for your website

If you sell your books or services from your own website, you’ll want to take the time to set up a “buy now” button there.

With a buy now button, readers or clients can make a payment via credit card with just a click.

Doing so ensures that impulse buyers purchase your book or services immediately rather than wait, giving them the opportunity to then talk themselves out of. It also gives your website credibility, as asking potential buyers to send checks or go to another site to make a payment is a little suspicious for some in this automated age. A buy now button also helps you capture some of the international audience, as it avoids currency exchanges.

To set up a buy now button, you’ll need to use a payment gateway. This is a third-party company that handles credit card transactions. Begin by exploring which payment gateway you’ll want to use. Some factors to consider are the initial cost of setup, fees for services, reputation, and the company’s longevity. Once you decide, you’ll have to set up an account with that company.

Next, you need to customize and obtain imagery, order forms and html coding that will appear on your site. Look for text like “Buy Now Buttons,” which usually is under a “Merchant Services” or similarly worded tab. Once you’ve found that, you should arrive at a page that allows you to customize your buy now button and order forms. Follow the instructions there. Be aware that if you don’t customize your order form, it usually will work with the default settings that the payment gateway company sets.

Once you’ve customized the order forms and buy now button, you’ll receive html coding. You’ll need to copy this. Store a copy of it on your computer then paste it on the web page where you want it to appear. Check out the page to make sure it looks the way you want it to. If it doesn’t, go back to the payment gateway company website, tweak, and recut and repaste.

And then watch your profits grow!

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Writing Inspiration: What are your intentions?

What are your individual intentions? That is, what do you most deeply hope to accomplish in life? To live true to your values? To be at peace with the person you are? To inspire others to find serenity and happiness in their lives? List at least three of your individual intentions. How can you incorporate these intentions into your writing?

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Little Rock, Arkansas, or a small town like No Name, Colorado, I can provide that second eye.