Big Brother or Big Social?

By Annisa Tangreen May 21, 2021 Social Media No Comments

Jaron Lanier is right. 100%.

You are a lab rat, social media is the scientist, and the internet is the lab.

(And, by the way, you should Google Jaron Lanier. And probably delete your social media accounts.)

I am married to an expert in the field of digital marketing and the things he tells me about the ways we are being tracked make me shudder.

And yet, I have social media accounts. This January, I finally even broke down and installed the Facebook app on my phone after years and years of resistance. I have, maybe futilely, denied it every permission except file storage, and this is only so I can post pictures.

But I see it time and time again. People complain about how Facebook must be listening to them, because they keep getting served ads for something they talked about while their phone was in the same room. But surely it’s all in their heads, right? Surely Facebook isn’t listening to you.

Um, actually, Facebook has been listening to your Facebook Messenger audio chats with a natural language processor and then using that data to identify your interests and serve you unique ads. Other tech giants do it, too, including Google, Apple, and Amazon.

But even if Facebook were not listening to you, they still have incredible and incredibly invasive software methods for snooping on you. It’s all in the interest of giving you a good user experience, though. Right?

Let me explain.

It all boils down to pixels and cookies, according to my husband, who is a data analytics and SEO expert at a major SAS company.

Here’s the simple explanation: Businesses install Facebook tracking pixels on their websites as part of their marketing efforts. If you visit a website with a Facebook tracking pixel installed, Facebook then serves you ads from that business. The pixel triggers a cookie on your device that contains identifiers that link to your Facebook account and tell Facebook what you are interested in. They help businesses by laser-targeting customers.

To get more technical, it’s like this: Facebook puts a first-party cookie on your device the first time you visit Facebook on your device. It’s the same cookie whether you log into Facebook on your phone, your computer, or your tablet. Facebook analytics pixels on websites have a built-in permission to read that cookie anytime the user hits a website with the pixel on it. The cookie has a unique identifier that tells the pixel who you are, thus allowing Facebook to tie your activities together across multiple sites and multiple devices.

Behind the scenes, Facebook insights runs your data against numerous machine learning models to find things that might interest you, with the goal of serving you interesting content to keep you engaged while they also serve you ads that they think you will like.

To repeat, it’s designed to give you the best UX by serving you content to keep you engaged—while serving you ads that will convert.

So it’s all just innocent marketing—or is it? For myself, I think they go too far. A lot of people agree with me. Like the entire EU, in fact.

There are changes coming, largely in response to EU privacy laws. At least Google is planning on rolling this out in 2021, but you will only benefit from this change if you are using the Chrome browser. In brief, the third-party cookie (used for tracking and ad-serving) that gets sent out to other websites is going away. Instead, there will be a generic AI that resides permanently on your browser which will not personally identify you to other parties but will allow personalized content to be served to you.

So Jaron Lanier is right. We’re all lab rats.

Digital Marketing Strategy for Indie Authors

By Annisa Tangreen June 8, 2020 Branding, Digital Marketing, Indie Authors, Self-Publishing, Strategy No Comments

Digital marketing is essential today. Consumers live online, now spending more than 24 hours per week connected, according to a new study from USC (PDF). We chat with friends online, get our news online, order groceries online, and shop for products online. It only makes sense for you to take your products to where the customers are.

What if you’re a self-published author? Do indie authors need to know more than just how to publish a book? Do they need to understand digital marketing, too? The answer is a resounding “YES!”

Say you’ve just written a book and you’ve figured out the whole self-publishing thing. First of all, that accomplishment is, in itself, monumental (as I’ve written about before, here). So, first of all, you have my hearty congratulations!

So now what?

Considering that you are the brand new author of one book out of the 800,000 books that will be published in the U.S. this year, let’s have a little conversation about digital marketing. It’s the best way to get your book in front of customers instead of languishing at the very bottom of the Amazon sales rankings.

If you’re like most of the other new indie authors out there, you might not know a whole lot about marketing and selling books. You may have even wracked your brain for ways to market your book. Even if you’re not a first-time author, you could probably benefit from learning more about marketing for self-published authors. Never fear, I’ve decided to write a series to guide you through developing a strategy to sell your book.

Digital marketing strategy for indie authors

This post is the introduction to a new series all about creating a digital marketing strategy for indie authors to promote and sell books. The next post in this series will give you a basic understanding of what digital marketing is and why you need to do it. The following posts will help you develop and implement a digital marketing strategy.

So if you want to learn to build a great strategy for how to market a book, I hope you’ll stay tuned for the series. I’m really excited to share my knowledge of digital marketing strategy for indie authors with you!

I want to hear from you!

Have any great tips for selling books? Leave a comment.

Storytelling is a Crucial Brand Strategy in the Millennial Age

By Annisa Tangreen May 18, 2020 Branding, Content Marketing, Content Writing, Storytelling, Strategy, Writing No Comments

“Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”

Storytelling is key for reaching and connecting with customers. Great stories build relationships and win customers. A story must resonate emotionally, especially if a brand wants to reach the generation known as “millennials.” Traditional advertising, the old way of selling a product by talking about how great the product is, does not work well anymore. For millennials, it is important to them to feel a connection with a brand, if they are to become loyal followers of that brand. Further, it is especially important that the brand be transparent and authentic—just as you would expect your friends to be. But how does a brand reach an audience and make an authentic, emotional connection? The most effective way to do that is through storytelling.

What is storytelling?

Storytelling is a form of communication that is uniquely human and has been around for probably as long as humans have had the power of speech. Storytelling is the age-old way to transmit information and cultural values. Storytelling transmits cultural narratives from one person to another, one group to another, or one generation to another. In this way, storytelling is one of the most powerful and most important means of forming connections and bonds that we have at our disposal.

Is story form important?

There are many ways to write a story, but one form resonates powerfully with most of us. It was discovered at different times, by different people. Joseph Campbell, famous scholar of comparative mythology, discovered an underlying “universal” story form that cultures the world over use to express their cultural stories and myths (1). Campbell called it “The Hero’s Journey.”

At the beginning of the Hero’s Journey, the protagonist loses or is missing something that is key to his or her happiness. The protagonist then sets out on a quest to find or recover the missing thing and encounters an ever greater set of obstacles along the way. At the climax, the protagonist has a life-changing experience and either recovers what was lost or finds some magical item with which he or she returns to make life better for those they left at home.

The Hero’s Journey follows the classical Aristotelian story form which dictates simply that every story has a beginning, middle, and an end (2). Form was further defined by Gustav Freytag, who developed “Freytag’s Pyramid,” in the nineteenth century (3). He observed that dramatic narrative begins with an inciting incident in part one that sets the protagonist off on an adventure, continues with rising action in part two when the protagonist is running around trying to solve the problem from part one, and finally the climax, falling action, and resolution in part three, when the protagonist completes his or her quest and then continues on in what is their “new normal.” This is the story form with which we are most familiar and which just feels “right” to most of us.

How do we tell an effective story?

First, it has to follow the traditional story form. If it does not, it risks losing our attention or not even grabbing our attention in the first place. Second, it needs to keep our attention. The Hero’s Journey does this by subjecting the protagonist to an increasing amount of tension or conflict as the story progresses. Third, it needs to evoke an emotional response.

How storytelling gets to us.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have discovered the mechanisms by which an effective story produces an emotional response (4). Paul Zak and his team of neuroscientists performed a series of experiments during which they asked subjects to watch a movie about a child with cancer and recorded their brain activity and hormone levels. They discovered that the rising tension portion of the story made the subjects’ bodies produce stress hormones which in turn increased the subjects’ attention and focus.

In addition, they noted that once a story had the subjects hooked and maintained their attention for a specific amount of time, they began to empathize with the characters in the story. It has long been known that oxytocin, a natural hormone produced by the body, induces feelings of compassion and empathy and helps us become more aware of social cues. Oxytocin, the researchers found, was responsible for the subjects’ transportation into the protagonist’s view. Further, Zak’s team discovered that once they were able to trigger empathy in their subjects, the subjects were far more likely to make charitable donations after the experiment was over.

Why is storytelling so important to a brand trying to connect with millennials?

Millennials, the generation who began to come of age around the turn of the twenty-first century, born roughly between 1981 and 1997 (although some demographers claim the years 1977-2000 are more accurate start and end dates (5)), have now exceeded the number of living Baby Boomers, making up more than one-quarter of the population of the United States (5, 6). With a population currently aged 19 to 35 years, this is a very economically influential generation and a target demographic of interest to businesses. Millennials are the first generation to have grown up with technology always at their fingertips and being connected via multiple channels, all the time. Millennials are digital natives who spend more time than any other generation online, and online is where businesses must be to connect with them (7).

What do millennials want?

Whether online or offline, to millennials it’s all about relationships. Rainer and Rainer call the millennials, “the relational generation” (8). They seek healthy relationships at home, at work, and beyond, prizing social connections highly. When asked what was the most important thing in their lives, 61 percent said family, and 25 percent said friends. Fromm and Garton found that millennials have a greater number of connections on social media networks than did users from other generations, with 46 percent of millennials saying that they have over 200 friends on Facebook alone, versus 19 percent of users from other generations (9).

Cultivating a deep, meaningful connection with millennials is key to winning their loyalty in the long game, and storytelling is the way to do that. It’s especially important for a social good / cause-driven brand to succeed in making an emotional connection with their millennial buyers because, according to Millennial Marketing, “almost 50% of millennials would be more willing to make a purchase from a company if their purchase supports a cause” (5). According to Michael Brenner, head of strategy for NewsCred, the majority of millennials—a whopping 62 percent—feel that web content heightens their feeling of connection and loyalty to the brands they follow (10). In fact, 55 percent of millennials say that they are influenced by the content they find on websites and blogs (8). So we see that web content—in other words, storytelling—is the most important medium of connection between a brand and its millennial customers.

Why transparency, authenticity and honesty are important parts of your brand’s storytelling strategy.

It is important to remember that for stories to be successful in creating emotional connections, they must be honest and authentic. In the same way that an individual would be authentic with a friend, a brand must strive for transparency and authenticity in order to win the loyalty of millennial customers (9).

In short, brands must use storytelling to connect with their customers on a human level.

Connecting emotionally through storytelling.

Connecting through storytelling requires telling a story that evokes an emotional response, enabling a deeper connection. That requires powerful story content. The most powerful stories are the ones in which the audience can put themselves in the place of the protagonist. In fact, a powerful brand strategy is to develop personas which represent members of the company’s specific target audience and make the persona the protagonist of the story. According to Felder, a persona is a hypothetical user or reader based upon real details gathered from the target audience (2). In making the protagonist just like your target audience, customers are more likely to be able to relate to and identify with the protagonist. In other words, make the customer the hero of the story, not your company (11). Telling a story that makes the customer the star and the company simply a supporting character is one of the most powerful strategies in content today (12).

Harness the power of visuals.

There are many ways to connect emotionally through storytelling and one of the most effective ways is through visual storytelling. Images can evoke other senses besides just the visual, as well as evoking emotional memories (13). Images can help humanize a business, images can surprise and delight your customers, and images can spark a sense of wonder. A recent social media campaign by the travel industry on New Zealand’s South Island has been successful in increasing travel to participating destinations simply by hiring social media influencers to share travel photos of their destinations (14). The campaign saw a 14 percent increase in visits to their island from overseas as a result. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, turns out to be true in this case and in many cases like it.

In conclusion.

Great stories build relationships and make people care. They bring us together and make us feel more connected to each other. They are memorable. According to the Indian proverb, “Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever” (2). Stories evoke emotion and action. And most of all, stories help people and communities form a bond by building a relationship of trust and care through transparency and authenticity. In the digital age, the best way for brands to reach the largest demographic of consumers—the generation known as millennials—is to use storytelling to make connections, build trust, and drive loyalty that will engender a long brand to customer relationship.
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1. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 21st edition, 1973. Print.
2. Felder, Lynda. Writing for the Web. Berkeley: New Riders, 2012. Print.
3. Hartley, George. Analyzing a story’s plot: Freytag’s Pyramid. Ohio University. n.d. Web. 2 Oct. 2016.
4. Zak, Paul J. “How Stories Change the Brain.” Greater Good. University of California, Berkeley, 17 Dec. 2013. Web. 1 Oct. 2016.
5. Fromm, Jeff et al. “Who Are Millennials?” MillennialMarketing.com. Millennial Marketing. n.d. Web. 1 Oct. 2016.
6. Fry, Richard. “Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation.” Pew Research Center, 25 Apr. 2016. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.
7. “TNS Study Reveals Millennials Spend Nearly One Day Every Week On Their Phones.” Kantar TNS. 19 Nov 2015. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.
8. Rainer, Thom, and Rainer, Jess. The Millennials. Nashville: B & H Publishing Group, 2011. Print.
9. Fromm, Jeff, and Garton, Christie. Marketing to Millenials: Reach the Largest and Most Influential Generation of Consumers Ever. New York: AMACOM, 2013. Print.
10. Brenner, Michael. “Millennials Don’t Want Ads. They Want Stories.” Entrepreneur, 22 Oct. 2015. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.
11. James, Geoffrey. “Marketing 101: Make the Customer the Hero.” Inc., 27 Jan. 2014. Web. 2 Oct. 2016.
12. Patel, Neil, and Puri, Ritika. “The Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing: Chapter Three.” Quicksprout. n.d. Web. 3 Oct. 2016.
13. Rettner, Rachael. “Brain’s Link Between Sounds, Smells and Memory Revealed.” Live Science, 5 Aug. 2010. Web. 3 Oct. 2016.
14. McMahon, Shannon. “How Instagram Is Changing Travel.” Smarter Travel, 23 Jun. 2016. Web. 3 Oct. 2016.

66 Days of Writing

By Annisa Tangreen April 9, 2016 Blogging, Instagram, On Writing, Productivity, Twitter, Writing No Comments

Today I shared the final post in my Twitter series called 100 Days of Content (#100daysofcontent) where I tweeted a curated list of 100 articles on content marketing over the course of 100 days and now I am happy to announce the launch of my new series called 66 Days of Writing (#66daysofwriting).

Over the next 66 days I will share articles that will, I hope, help you get your creative juices flowing and hone your writing skills.

The articles that I have chosen will most likely appeal to you whether you are a full-time novelist or a business writer. Or a business writer by day and novelist by night, like I am.

Writers are in high demand because the internet, and thus the written word, has become the center of the business universe.

Remember the days when they said an English degree was worthless? Remember when they said you’d never get a job where you could put that English degree to work

It turns out “they” were wrong.

Now we all get to be writers.

Thanks to the internet (which, by the way, according to the forthcoming edition of the Associated Press’ AP Stylebook, no longer has to be capitalized) the world now runs on the written word. Writers are in high demand because the internet, and thus the written word, has become the center of the business universe.

Writing jobs abound and many of us who were formerly only writers at night, after our day jobs had finished, are now employed in positions where we put our writing skills to the test day in and day out.

In addition to the more traditional writing jobs such as journalist, technical writer, columnist, novelist, and ghost writer, an entirely new crop of writing jobs has opened up in business. Thanks to the online revolution, here are some of the new types of writing jobs that are in high demand:

Content Strategist
Content Marketer
Blogger
Copywriter
Digital Media Marketer
Social Media Strategist
Social Media Marketer
Web Content/Web Copy Writer
Brand Consultant/Branding Officer

There is a lot of crossover in some of these jobs, and small business owners or entrepreneurs may find themselves playing many or all of the above roles. Larger companies are creating new positions for writers all the time. I guarantee you that if you search any of these titles on an employment website, you will find positions being advertised.

Which is great news for those of us who cannot—or who have chosen not to—pursue a full-time career as a novelist.

The 66 Days of Writing posts are curated to appeal to writers of all types and I bet that you will find something in these articles that resonates with you.

The five Ws:

What:

Who:

When:

Where:

#66daysofwriting

live.write.bliss

Why:

But Why 66 Days?:

an average of 66 days of consistent effort to make a habit stick

I hope you enjoy the next 66 days! Please follow me on Twitter at @AnnisaTangreen and watch the hashtag #66daysofwriting every morning for the next post on writing.

I want to hear from you!

Have any great tips for writers? Leave a comment below to start a conversation about this post. Happy writing!

Important New Google Best Practices for Product Bloggers

By Annisa Tangreen March 11, 2016 Blogging, Content Marketing No Comments

If you’re a blogger who receives free stuff in return for reviews (book bloggers, I’m looking at you, too), you need to listen up.

Google has just released some new best practices that you’ll want to know and follow ASAP.

This morning, Google released “Best practices for bloggers reviewing free products they receive from companies” on their Webmaster Central Blog.

The two most important takeaways you should know are:

2. Bloggers should use the “nofollow” tag on any links they put in the post that take readers to the sponsoring company’s website, social media links, online store, company’s app, etc.

They also want you to “create compelling, unique content”, but that’s what serious bloggers are already trying to do, right?

What’s a nofollow tag, anyway?

Nofollow tags are html tags that you add to the code surrounding the link, telling search providers not to follow those links and not to count them in the ranking for the linked page. The nofollow tag is a way to keep pages from “gaming” the search engine ranking system (i.e. buying influence to move them up in the results).

You want to provide your readers good content about products, but you really don’t want to appear as if you’re helping a company game the system. Trust me.

So how do you place nofollow tags on your links?

How to add a nofollow tag depends upon what content management system (CMS) you’re using. In some it will be as simple as a checkbox.
In most CMSs, including some of the most popular like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, you will be working with a tinyMCE text editor. Follow these simple steps:

2. Find the line of code for your link, then add rel=“nofollow” inside your < a > code for the link. What order you put it in doesn’t really matter that much, but here’s an example:

< a href= “http://www.example.com/” rel= “nofollow”> Link text </a >

3. Save your changes.

That’s it. Simple, huh?

For further reading about nofollow tags, see:

Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
WordPress: https://codex.wordpress.org/Nofollow
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

I want to hear from you!

Have any great tips for using nofollow tags? Leave a comment below.

Follow me on Twitter for more useful tips on blogging and SEO.

Tweet More Effectively For Your Business: 3 Valuable Tips

By Annisa Tangreen February 6, 2016 Content Marketing, Social for Business, Twitter No Comments

Put your phone down or the bird gets hurt!

Seriously, now that I have your attention: Chances are if you’re using Twitter as a business tool, you’re using it incorrectly.

Read on for my tips and tricks for using Twitter to build relationships, get your tweets read, and draw visitors to your website by increasing clickthrough rates.

1. Build Relationships

You wouldn’t stand on a street corner yelling “BUY MY PRODUCT” at the top of your lungs, would you? If you’re tweeting nothing but product ads (whether you’re selling books or dream vacations to Iceland), that is in effect what you’re doing. And you’ll scare people away in droves.

Instead, you want to build relationships with your followers by offering them something of value. In fact, that’s what content marketing is all about.

Be relevant.

Tweet things that are relevant to your followers’ interests without asking them to buy anything. It’s as simple as that. Every once in a while it’s okay to throw in a product offer, especially if it’s on sale, but don’t do it too frequently. I would say no more than 5 to 10% of your overall tweets.

Build trust.

By offering valuable, authoritative content in your tweets and only occasionally mentioning your products, you’ll gradually gain your followers’ trust. And isn’t trust the basis of relationships, if you get right down to it?

2. Get Your Content Read

So how do you get your content read—and read widely?

Write a catchy tweet.

First think in terms of writing catchy tweets. Just as the journalist must write a catchy headline to get the first line of her article read, you need to write a catchy tweet in order to get your reader to click through for more. If you want to think of your tweets as headlines, here’s a great tool from Co-Schedule to help you write stronger headlines that will get more attention.

Write a proper tweet.

While there is no set formula for composing a tweet, it’s best to avoid certain practices that will put off readers, like including multiple links and too many hashtags. What follows is a rough guideline for tweeting. Like I said, there’s no set formula. You may want to experiment a little until you find something that works for you and gets clicks, then stick with it.

Include some of the most essential elements. For starters, you should write some text. Not too short, not too long. Then ideally you’ll add a shortened link (Use bit.ly or another link shortening app. Social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer will also shorten links for you.). After that, use a couple of hashtags that pertain to your tweet. Also, statistics say that tweets that include an image get more engagement, so don’t be afraid to use images if you have them.

Use relevant hashtags.

You may be asking yourself, “How am I supposed to do that?” Well, a quick and easy way to figure out the best hashtags to use for your business is to look at the leaders in your field—the influencers—and see what are the most frequent hashtags they’re using. Here are two helpful posts from Twitter Counter and Convince & Convert with some other great ideas for hashtag research.

Tweet at the right time.

It’s important to tweet when a good number of your followers are on Twitter so your tweets get maximum visibility. I use the Twitter analysis tool, Tweriod, to determine exactly when that will be. It’s easy as pie.

Head on over there, click on “sign up with Twitter”, let it log into your account to get the data, and, voilà! The free analysis will show you when the peak times are for your followers on weekends or Sundays only, weekdays or Mondays only, and every day of the week, combined. It will also show you hourly graphs and graphs of when you get the most @replies. All in all, Tweriod is a Twitter tool I can’t do without.

3. Increase Your Clickthroughs

So you’ve done all of that, now how do you get more clickthroughs to your website?

Well, to start off with, if you’ve written a catchy headline-style tweet with a link and hashtags, and posted it at the right time of day, you have a much better chance of follower engagement than if you’ve just scheduled ten posts saying “buy my product” at random times of the day.

Tweet a short headline.

According to this study done for Content Marketing Institute by Outbrain, titles (or headlines) with exactly eight words performed 21% better than the average tweet in clickthroughs.

Ask a question.

According to the same study, titles ending with a question mark had a higher clickthrough rate than those ending with exclamation points or periods.

Use a call to action (CTA).

If you ask your followers to do something, chances are, they’ll do it. Historically speaking, calls to action have been some of the best marketing tools ever. Not sure what kind of calls to action to use in tweets? Here’s a great post from Twitter that gives you several examples of what they say are the “most effective calls to action on twitter.”

Use a conversational tone.

This goes back to the trust issue, see above. If you come across as stiff and stilted, your followers are going to think you’re trying to sell them something. Use language that’s easy to relate to. Use short words. Use words that appeal to emotion.

Spread your tweets out.

Remember Tweriod? Go check those graphs again and find the peaks during the day where most of your followers are active. Use a Twitter scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer to send your carefully crafted tweets out at those peak times.

Please don’t just schedule all your tweets to go out at the same time. Your followers will think you’re spamming them.

Place your link correctly.

And finally, here’s one you can try that surprised even me.

Put your link about 25% of the way into your tweet. I know, it sounds really weird, but this guy says it works.

Remember, you’re not just marketing to your customers, you’re developing relationships with your followers. It takes time and effort, good relationships don’t just happen overnight.

I want to hear from you!

Have any great tips for using Twitter for business? Leave a comment below.

Follow me on Twitter for more useful tips on using social media for your business.

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100 Days of Content

By Annisa Tangreen January 1, 2016 Content Marketing, Social for Business, Twitter No Comments

Here it is, January first again.

Since it’s the beginning of a new year I thought I would start it off right by making a goal. It’s not a lofty goal, but it is a goal, nonetheless. And yet, we all know what those New Year’s goals are good for—breaking! Don’t worry, I’m not going to do that!

This goal is a rather easy one to keep. My goal is to deliver you a curated list of great articles—a veritable reference library—all about content and content marketing. One hundred of them, in fact.

So from January 1 through April 9, 2016, I will be tweeting a link to one article on content per day. Just watch my Twitter account every morning for the hashtag #100daysofcontent and enjoy some of the best content on content that I could find.

You see, I’m really excited about content marketing and I think you should be, too. Whether you’re an author trying to promote her books or a travel service trying to promote vacations to Norway, chances are you are already doing content marketing. These days, content is queen!

Maybe you’re asking yourself, “what is content marketing, anyway?” It’s simple. Content marketing is providing free content to your audience that will be valuable to them in order to convince them to be your customers and buy whatever it is that you’re selling.

Content is any information that your customers can put to use. It could be an article, a press release, a song or podcast, images such as photos or illustrations, a video, a webinar, a newsletter, an ebook, an infographic, a slide show, a spreadsheet… You get the picture.

To give credit where credit is due, the real geniuses over at Copyblogger put these excellent articles together for us.

I hope you enjoy the next 100 days! Please follow me on Twitter at @AnnisaTangreen and watch the hashtag #100daysofcontent every morning for the next post on content.

Here is the first article, in case you haven’t followed me on Twitter yet:

100 days of content: The Future of Content Marketing – Copyblogger https://t.co/5eFI3nUi1P #contentmarketing #marketing

— Annisa Tangreen (@AnnisaTangreen) January 1, 2016

Behind Every Successful Indie Author is a Great Team

By Annisa Tangreen May 8, 2015 Productivity, Self-Publishing, Writing No Comments

What does being an indie author really mean? Does it mean that you, the writer, do every single thing in the process of publishing your book all alone, by yourself, without any help? On the contrary. Make no bones about it, it takes a team to self-publish an indie work and achieve success.

What Should Your Team Consist Of?

Let me break it down:

Writer (that’s YOU)
Developmental Editor
Beta readers
Cover artist
Copy Editor/Line Editor
Proofreader
Formatter
Street Team

(You will also need an accountant, because admit it, self-publishing is a business, although I won’t get into that in this post.)

Why Do You Need a Team?

To keep you from publishing amateurish writing that will not sell and that will further deepen the slush pile of indie publishing, thus keeping other authors’ works from being discovered and selling, as well.

Wait a minute–let me state that more positively: To help you make your work the best version of itself that it can be. To make your work stand out from the crowd of less-polished books. To help you sell more books. Getting the picture?

What’s a Slush Pile?

In traditional publishing a slush pile is exactly where you don’t want your manuscript to end up—buried beneath hundreds—even thousands—of other hopeful submissions waiting for an editor to find it. In self-publishing, it’s the thousands of terrible-to-mediocre-to-decent-to-absolutely-great self-published books that are also out there for readers to wade through.

You don’t want to be buried under there, either. Especially if your book is just mediocre.

At publishing houses, editors and their assistants have to wade through slush piles—-that’s their job. Readers, however, do not want to wade through slush piles of poorly written books filled with grammatical errors and typos. Unfortunately, that is exactly the position they are being put into in today’s era of self-publishing.

Your book needs to stand out from the crowd.

What Does Having a Team Do for You?

Well, first of all, if you are a newbie—excuse me, a writer just starting out on the road to authorship—or if you’re just venturing into a particular genre for the first time, you may need a writing coach or a developmental editor. Believe me, not everyone starts out an Ernest Hemingway or a Neil Gaiman or a Nora Roberts. Even they needed a lot of time, practice, and guidance to hone their techniques.

Beta readers are extremely well-suited for finding those areas that need a bit of fine-tuning or even a bit of an overhaul, patches where your story just doesn’t seem to flow or to make sense, places where you stray off the plot. They’re also really great at letting you know what worked.

Your copy editors and/or line editors help you check facts, grammar, pace, consistency, and spelling, among other things

The proofreader is the final member of the team to polish your story. Proofreaders are the last line of defense before you put your story out to the world. Proofreaders catch grammar or spelling issues that your other editors did not. A good proofreader can often times make the difference between a bad review and a good review.

So, you’ve enlisted the help of a developmental editor, beta-readers, a copy editor, and a proofreader. Are you ready to hit “publish”? No! Don’t forget about the visual appeal of your book! For that, you will need the services of a cover designer and a book formatter. A book formatter will make the inside of your book visually pleasing and easy to read. A cover designer makes your book attractive to potential readers.

If your cover is not professionally designed (or at least designed to professional standards), it will not help your book sales and it might even hurt your book sales. You know the saying, “you can’t judge a book by its cover”? Well, I’m telling you—people DO judge books by their covers!

Your book cover is the first thing your prospective reader sees and it plays a big role in their decision-making process. Our brains process imagery faster than text, you can thank millions of years of evolution for that. If your cover is emotionally appealing, matches the expectations readers have for the genre, and has attractive, well-chosen typography, it can be the deciding factor in whether they buy your book or not. Even if your book otherwise has great reviews.

Your cover conveys a lot of information about your book. Enlisting the services of a professional, experienced cover designer can help you make sure it’s conveying the right information.

Finally, we come to the super-important, but sometimes overlooked, members of the indie author team: your street team.

What’s a street team? A street team is a group of people who actively work with you to spread the word about your book. That’s it. Plain and simple. A street team could consist of family and friends who talk about your book to their other friends and family, who post your book links on their Facebook pages or blogs, or tweet about your book, or suggest your book to book clubs or libraries. You get the picture. A street team could also consist of fans of your other books, who follow you avidly and count down the days until your next book hits the shelves.

Simply put, a street team consists of your biggest advocates (mom? dad? bff?) and your biggest fans, who will “hit the streets” for you to promote your work. This is one of the most effective ways to promote your book. I mean, just think about it, when was the last time that you picked up a book that someone else suggested to you? Word of mouth works.

Putting It All Together

The takeaway message here is that successful indie authors do not (typically) achieve success all on their own.

Not only must you put in the work of writing a good book, but you must also enlist others to help you polish that book to really make it shine and stand out among the millions of other traditionally published and self-published books out there, and then enlist the aid of people to help in promotion to increase its discoverability.

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17 Easy Ways To Be A More Productive Writer

By Annisa Tangreen March 13, 2015 On Writing, Productivity, Writing No Comments

Writers write. That’s what they do, but should it be all they do? If you’re a writer and you’re experiencing writer’s block, burnout, or just feeling like your writing is suffering of late, this list might be just what you need to get back in the groove and be a more productive writer.

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

Get enough sleep. We hear this time and time again because—you guessed it—it’s one of the very most important things you can do for yourself. If you’ve been burning the candle at both ends, trying to juggle a 40-hour-per-week job, a family, a home, a social life and writing, chances are you’re not letting yourself get enough rest. Make sleep a priority, starting tonight, and see if you start feeling better, more energetic, and more able to live life.
Get enough exercise. Our literary habits, both as writers and as readers, work against our health in many ways. Being sedentary cuts down on the amount of blood and oxygen that your brain receives, leading to sluggish thinking and lower creativity. Want to think clearly? Get up and move for at least 30 minutes every day and your writing will thank you for it.
Give yourself permission to daydream. Seriously. Where else do those creative ideas come from? “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You
Socialize. Yes, I mean it. Get out in the Real World and interact with people. It’s amazing how much creativity good conversation and social interaction can spark.
Eat properly. Yes, I’m pointing at that jumbo-sized bag of Skittles I see on your desk there. Unhealthy eating wreaks havoc on your blood sugar levels, causing irritability and an inability to concentrate. Not to mention all those food dyes in that pack of Skittles! Yuck! Did you know that yellow and red dyes have been linked to hyperactivity in children (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/05/22/artificial-food-dyes.aspx), among a whole host of other things, including cancer? You’ll be far better off eating a healthy balanced diet with plenty of high-quality protein, fresh, organic vegetables and fruits, as well as healthy fats such as that found in coconut oil, nuts, and butter from pastured cows. A healthy diet will give you the ability to concentrate and sustain your energy for the long periods of time you need it while writing.
Drink in moderation or not at all. But wait a minute! Hemingway was a lush and a prolific writer, wasn’t he? Actually…no. I can’t vouch for the lush part, but I can tell you that Hemingway’s average word count per day was about 650 words, according to this interview he gave in The Paris Review in 1954 (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway). I don’t know about you, but on a good day I can type about 650 words in 30 minutes. I know this because I write in short bursts, called “sprints”, of 30-minute increments. So, modern technology and all arguments about typewriters versus computers aside, I think Hemingway’s daily word count was maybe a teeny bit on the low side. Nothing that I would call “prolific” at all. And, again, let’s talk about being able to concentrate and being able to think clearly, two of the most important abilities of a writer. Excessive alcohol consumption just plain gets in the way of that.
Take a vacation from writing once in a while. Everyone can get burned out if they work too hard for too long. Most writers I know—yours truly included—occasionally hit a wall and just can’t write no matter what they do. Often that is because we’ve been pushing ourselves too hard and just plain need a break. I think of it as running a rechargeable battery all the way down. The device stops working so you take the battery out, put it in the charger, and leave it there until it’s fully charged again before you take it back out and put it in the device. What happens if you never fully let the battery charge? You will eventually ruin the battery and it won’t be able to hold a charge at all.
Read. A lot. Whether it’s a book on craft or the latest New York Times fiction bestseller, reading a lot will help improve your writing and give you plenty of juice in your writing batteries.
Bake a cake. Or do other things that also stimulate your creativity, such as listening to music, painting (whether it’s a room or a canvas), drawing, or gardening. Or whatever else it is that you do to be creative. It’s all coming from the same creative center within you. When you stimulate that well of creativity, lots of great things can happen.
Make the time to write. Don’t let it be your last priority, that thing you squeeze in whenever everything else is done. If it’s important to you, you need to let everyone else in your life know it’s a priority.
Take the time to write. Claim it. Take it. It’s yours. Don’t let others commitments steamroll over your writing time.
Never stop learning. Whether it’s about craft or about the daily habits (pun intended) of nuns in 16th century France, knowledge is the bedrock and the fuel of writing.
Pursue a non-writing-related passion. Whether it’s traveling or cooking, blacksmithing or dog shows, get into something. Get really into it. More fuel for writing, right?
Give yourself permission to write badly. You heard me right. Just do it. Sometimes writers get so caught up in the idea that they have to write everything perfectly in the first draft that they become paralyzed by their internal editors.
Make writing a ritual. Set up your writing space as your own little personal temple that nobody else is allowed to mess with or bother you in. When you go into your writing temple, make sure that all you do there is write. Make it like your bedtime ritual, you know, the little set of things you do that sends a signal to your brain that it’s time to go to sleep, like brushing your teeth, washing your face, etc. If you can’t write without a big glass of iced tea and a bag of peanuts at your elbow, make sure you have those things. Ritual is very important to our brains. It signals it to perform or behave in a certain way.
Turn off the distractions. If you find yourself getting distracted by social media, turn off your wi-fi when you sit down to write. Make your research and writing time separate if you find that whenever you sit down at the computer you get sidetracked by news articles or shopping or social media. You set boundaries for your kids—no TV until their homework is done, right?—why not set boundaries for yourself during your writing time?
Work at your own pace. Don’t try to measure up to others, or to what you think others are doing. Sure, there are writers out there who crank out books at mind-boggling rates, publishing four to six “novels” a year. Some of these writers are good writers, I admit. But most writers who churn out content at such speeds are either not good writers, and/or have a paid staff of editors who can polish and finish their work to make it publishable. You don’t need to be them. Be who you are because no one else can be, as Neil Gaiman said (or something to that effect). Write at your own pace. Rewrite your first draft. Polish your work the best you can. Send it to an editor who will help you polish it more. Then, and only then, when it’s the best work you can do, let it go out into the world. Let it go. And move on to the next thing.

Books on Craft – Writing the Breakout Novel

By Annisa Tangreen March 7, 2015 Books on Craft No Comments

Why I suggested Writing the Breakout Novel to my writing group.

Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass was written in the year 2000, when the number of titles published by traditional publishers per year was much lower than now. The author states in chapter one that over 55,000 titles were published the previous year (1999).

Fifty-five thousand? Boy how times have changed! That doesn’t seem like much to us today.

Indeed, the book industry has seen explosive growth over the past fifteen years. Para Publishing, in their report, “Book Industry Statistics“, cites an article by R.R. Bowker in Publishers Weekly in 2003 as reporting that the total number of titles published in the U.S. 2002 was 150,000.

In 2013, the total number of ISBNs for U.S. self-publishers that year, in print and ebooks combined, was 458,564. Total print books were 302,622, total ebooks were 155,942.

The total production of print books by traditional publishers in the U.S. in 2013 was 304,912 (Source: Bowker’s Self-Publishing Report 2013).

Of course, we’ve all probably seen Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings Report in which he breaks down the percentage of book sales from all publishing types (indie, small or medium publisher, Amazon, Big Five, uncategorized single-author publisher). When I first read it, I was amazed to see that traditionally published books only accounted for about 42% of daily unit sales of genre fiction ebooks.

So what does all that data have to do with writing a “breakout novel”?

The single most important fact we can get from this data is that there are over three quarters of a million new books going out onto the U.S. market alone every year as of right now; and, almost as important, traditionally published books account for a little less than half of those books sold. That means that we indie genre fiction authors have some pretty steep competition! If you’re following the math, it means that we have fourteen times the competition that authors had in the year 1999. Nowadays, not only do we have to compete with traditionally published titles, which have been somewhat “vetted” by agents and editors who supposedly weed out the bad books, but we also have to rise above the mishmosh indie pub slush-pile in order to be discovered by readers.

Bottom line–we need to write very good stories in order to get noticed.

How do we do that? We hone our craft. We write deeper, stronger, and more memorable novels, to paraphrase Maass. We deepen characters, add layers to plot, add conflict to every page, and intensify our themes. This book gives us a guide as to how to do that. No matter how much success we achieve in the end, I think this book will help us learn to craft even better stories.

And there’s the off-chance that it may actually help us write “breakout” stories. I’m willing to take a chance on that.

I liked this particular book for a few reasons.

First, its author is a literary agent with two and a half decades of experience in the book publishing industry at time of writing. He has been personally involved in the development of many books which otherwise would have been mediocre at best, but went on to attain “breakout” status. He knows what works, what qualities are necessary in order to make a book stand out from the crowd.

Second, I liked his straightforward writing style. He is informational and engaging. His examples are relevant and clearly illustrate his point.

Third, I liked his exercises. I believe they have been selected for their immediate usefulness to a writer. I also feel that they are useful to writers of all skill and experience levels, and immediately applicable and implementable.

Do I feel that the entire book is valuable? The answer to that is? “yes, maybe.” The first chapter was written in 2000 and is completely outdated. In fact, some of his predictions about the future of the publishing industry were patently wrong and are highly laughable now, 15 years after publication. Yet even that chapter is instructive to us from the standpoint of giving us information about the elitist attitudes of traditional publishing. Know thy enemy, so to speak.

I highly recommend Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass and I am happy to be reading it in a workshop group. I am confident that all writers can gain something useful from reading it and grow their craft as a result.

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Why I suggested Writing the Breakout Novel to my writing group.

So what does all that data have to do with writing a “breakout novel”?

I liked this particular book for a few reasons.

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