The second half of 2017 kind of passed in a blur as my family (and I) caught a cold that makes me hum “The Never Ending Story” theme song when ever I think of it (yes, I’m humming now…). Over this 6 month period I published 11 books for Alternative Chef Kitchen (technically it was 10 brand new titles and 1 title was released as a second edition). I pressed publish on the final book on 18th January 2018.
It was a frenzy of recipe testing as well as preparing for a couple of public speaking events (one of the events was a cooking demo for the Adelaide Gluten-Free expo). In that time I also did an interview for an article which was published in Nourish Magazine (Australia), I did a 6 week course on grammar run by the University of Queensland for the edX platform (don’t judge my books by my blog writing by the way. My books are actually professionally edited – whereas this blog isn’t;-). And just because things weren’t busy enough, I ended up releasing A Touch of Magic as a standalone novella (more about that in the December 2017 summary post:-). So anyway, it was a pretty busy time.
Despite all the busyness I managed to read quite a few books. I just didn’t get the time to update this blog. So brace yourself…. here they come. I’ve forgotten what order I read these books, so I’ve divided them into logical (or not) groups to discuss each month.
So let’s get stuck into June!
Between June and December 2017 I read quite a few books about selling books (so this is a review for the indie authors out there).
- Marketing for writers who hate marketing by James Scott Bell This book couldn’t have a more perfect title if it tried. After a few very busy years with the Alternative Chef Kitchen stuff, I really don’t enjoy the hard-sell hypey online marketing type of marketing (as you may have gathered from the Writer Chats). It’s just not me, and I stressed myself out doing it because I felt like I had to (because my hubby and I invested so much money (our own money) into the show and first book). I’ve followed a lot of advice over the last few years and become very jaded about it all too. So my expectations for this book weren’t great. I didn’t expect there to be a short cut or a magic bullet. And the thing I appreciated most about this book was that James Scott Bell wasn’t proposing one. If you hate marketing, or don’t have the money to throw away on it, the best marketing you can do for your book is to improve your craft and write more books. (There’s more to the book, but that was the take home message for me). So if you’re feeling jaded, but willing to accept you’re now running a marathon… you’ll enjoy this book.
- Get your book selling by Monica Leonelle this book was also an easy read. I liked the breakdown of the different types of readers and the stages of reader in this book. Worth it if you’re just getting started.
- Discoverability by Kristine Katherine Rusch I really liked this book too. Again, the advice was sensible (e.g. it’s a marathon not a sprint and there is no quick way to get there). There were some new concepts in this book I hadn’t heard of or thought about before, and many others I had, but it felt validating to hear someone who’s been infinitely more successful than me say it. So I would recommend adding this to your reading list.
- Book review banzai by Jason B Ladd. I really didn’t enjoy this book. It was very short and read like an ad for his ecourse. The “system” was really downloading some programs or crawler bot programs (I’m not technically minded so the concept of that was a turn off in itself). What I disliked the most about this book was the dehumanising of reviews.
Anyway, I read another series of books for authors by Christ Fox and I’ll chat about them next.
