Writing

How Writers Should Use Email Marketing

John Biggs Tips, Writing 7 Comments

I was talking with my buddy John Sundman about email and social media and email. He, like me, found that Facebook was useless as a sales medium and Twitter was worse than useless. I’ve had plenty of retweets from folks with more than a million followers and the sales results have been abysmal. In fact, the only surefire way of selling a book is via email. End of story.

John asked me a few questions: “How many people get it? What kind of response do you get when you send out a blast? What mailer tool do you use? How did you build up your mailing list? How long did that take?”
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The 1,000 Words Rule

John Biggs Tips, Writing , , 11 Comments

An excerpt from my book, Bloggers Boot Camp: Learning How to Build, Write, and Run a Successful Blog. It’s my 1,000 Word Rule and it is what drives me as a writer even though I have plenty of other responsibilities.

You must write a minimum of 1,000 words a day.

Every new endeavor requires a period of ascetic dedication. This is yours. Some writers make this their ceiling, but many make it their floor. Either way, you must produce on a daily basis. How do you do this? You can crank out, perhaps, three posts of a few hundred words each in the morning and three in the evening. Or you can write one big post. Either way, do the word count. Why is this important? Because if you have a goal, you can meet it. After his heart attack, blogging great Om Malik set this number for himself to ensure he produced quality content in a timely manner and did not kill himself in the process. Sadly, Om’s heart attack was brought on by the blogging lifestyle, as well as too much booze, cigars, family history, and bad luck. It took a massive change in his everyday life to reorient him toward a saner blogging schedule, and he found this 1,000-word limit invaluable.
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Hugh Howey Shows You How To Prepare An Indie Book For Printing In InDesign

John Biggs Video Tips, Writing 4 Comments

The inimitable Hugh Howey has a great video up about how to paginate your manuscript into a PDF for printing. He’s also including two templates for InDesign (you can download them here if they disappear on his site). Don’t have InDesign? Pick up a copy. It’s worth it. Word is useless for desktop publishing and having a version of InDesign can help you make really nice manuscripts.

Read The First Chapters Of My New Book, More Gods Than Men

John Biggs Updates, Writing 8 Comments

I’ve been posting chapters from my new book, More Gods Than Men, on Amazon’s WriteOn. This invitation-only service is a sort of fiction workshop that allows folks to comment and edit books on the fly. The best thing is that I can give you guys access to the service now using the code V6BBECGE. Simply cut and paste that code into the box!

Read on to get a taste of the new book.
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The First Chapter Of Mytro II: Nayzun

John Biggs Updates, Writing 5 Comments

The old man thumbed his rosary and looked out at 8th Avenue and the river of trucks and bikes that passed. He was wearing a hooded jacket, old and grey at the edges, and his face was hidden under a soft plaid hunter’s hat. He leaned against the iron fence that protected the front door of his apartment building. It was here where the superintendent left the trash that stank all summer, forcing him to walk the three blocks to the park to the north where, until last year, he sat with his little dog. This summer she was too lame to climb down the stairs and he was to tired to walk without her so he was the only one who spent his time in this silent ministry in the stink of the garbage.
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No One Ever Died Here

John Biggs Writing 20 Comments

This is a true story. A few summers ago we bought an old house in Brooklyn from the estate of a woman who had passed. She had a Polish caretaker who was in the house when we visited a few times and she noticed that my wife was Polish and so they struck up a few conversations. One morning, as we were getting ready to sign the contract, the told us, adamantly and in Polish, that “No one ever died in this house.”

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Kurt Vonnegut On Our Dancing Selves

John Biggs Quote Writing 1 Comment

“[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
—
Interview by David Brancaccio, NOW (PBS) (7 October 2005).
Kurt Vonnegut

Dreams

John Biggs Writing , , 1 Comment

I haven’t been sleeping well lately – the heat and allergies have conspired together to wake me every few hours and I’ve had some strange dreams that were quickly cut off by a sneeze or an inability to breathe.

But I had a fascinating dream last night that I wanted to share, if only to express the imagery of it and how deeply ingrained some writing has gotten into my unconscious. I’ve dreamt of my grandmother’s old house in Martins Ferry – the house my father grew up in – for a decade now. It was a one-story post-war brick ranch salt box with green carpeting and white walls. It was two hours from my home in Columbus and we spent entire summers there, leaving my parents to their own devices. The kitchen floor was linoleum and there were wooden floors in the bedrooms. I remember staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live re-runs, the 1980s episodes, and listening to the house creak and settle in the heat and bottles shatter on the street outside as kids rode through the night in American muscle cars. This was 1980s rural Ohio and there wasn’t much else to do besides watch classic comedy, play Nintendo games, and drive around in the dark. I was too young to drive.
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