Author: John Biggs

Dad’s Garage

John Biggs Writing 16 Comments

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If you needed a hammer or a saw or a roll of red caps or a broken broom handle or a nest of telephone wire or a anti-seize paste or anything you could ever imagine you could find it out in Dad’s garage. The core of the garage was a beautiful old work bench, so dark and scarred that it looked medieval. There was an iron vise bolted to it and jar after jar of screws, nails, and nuts arrayed along the back edge. An old radio, tuned forever to the local NPR station, would crackle on and and stay on while you worked out there. If you needed a tire iron or a jack or a bucket for used motor oil or a length of tubing to start work you’d dig around that bench and risk jostling that radio until you pulled it out, a prize that came at just the beginning of the race.
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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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