17th July 2016 | for Creatives | awards, artist integrity, novel writing, the successful artist, writing, reaching your audience, reviews, writer-reader relationship, artist's message, Donald Maass |
What is success in the 21st century? It's novels that invent their own unique form, spring from a personal place, enact a passionate intent, and prove it by reaching a broad readership. It's both great reviews and great sales. It's moving hearts and changing minds. It's winning accolades and winning the devotion of readers. It's finding a way through your fiction to convey what you alone see, yet we all come to accept as the truth.
"I'm inspired when I literally can't put a book down. I'll leave the dishes in the sink. I'll bore friends and family talking about people they don't know and situations they've never read. In short, I'm pitching to everyone around me. If a book connects with me to that extent, it will connect with others. The biggest seller of books is still word of mouth, and the most successful books are those people can't stop talkinga about, agents included."
"Aren't the people who have had the most influence on you the ones who caused you to look at things in a new light? Bingo. Be that novelist."
"They are all based on one premise: what happens next? If the reader doesn't care, the novel is a failure."
"I do believe that making one's book free remains an effective way to reach new readers who might not otherwise take a chance on your book. I've had a number of positive reviews from readers who said they liked my book but would never have downloaded if it weren't free. I do not agree with the argument that an author who makes his book free is inviting bad reviews from those readers who are trying a novel that is not in their preferred genre and may be less inclined to like it. I believe a good book is a good book, and anything you can do to attract a new reader is worthwhile."
"I didn't follow my gut. After that, I said, I'm never doing that again. And the book after that, when I went back to doing what I wanted to do, wound up being, at that point in time, the bestselling book we ever did."
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