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TWITCH Livestream: Scrivener for Romance Writing (18 February 2023)
I’m doing a livestream to talk about using the Scrivener app for writing romance fiction. This includes a 30-minute (ish) demonstration and a Q&A at the end.
You’ll learn how this writing app — used and loved by thousands of authors all over the world — can help boost your creativity, increase your output, and achieve your writing goals.
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Revisiting old spaces
I have a Tumblr account I hardly use. I think about it once in a while but I never made plans for what to do with it. It’s work having to maintain social media sites and because of the current Twitter meltdown, I’m already on two new ones I have yet to post on.
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Endings
I just posted the final chapter of Unmasking Mr. Darcy on Radish. It clocks in at almost 83,000 words and 46 chapters.
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How (and Why) I Organize My Manuscript With Scrivener
Listen, I tried. Even though I wrote my first book writing by the seat of my pants (a.k.a. pantsing, a.k.a. discovery writing), it did seem like plotting a book before I start writing would be an efficient way to go about the business. And who doesn’t want to save time, right?
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Writing Wednesday : Learning
A couple of Saturdays ago, I attended a lecture about writing LGBT characters by Brij Bautista and Ronald Jeffrey S. Lim. It was great. I’m a cisgender heterosexual romance author, I’m grateful for any wisdom I can get from LGBTQI authors about writing LGBTQI characters, especially in romantic situations. [read more]
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Writing Wednesday
I’ve decided my free writing-related posts on Patreon will be going up on Wednesday every week. Writing Wednesday! It did not get off to an auspicious start, as I barely made it yesterday — I published the post five minutes to midnight. Oh boy.
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[PATREON] For Writers: If Facebook shuts down tomorrow, will you be able to cope?
I didn’t want to wake up one day and find out that the platform I’ve worked hard to cultivate and get followers to is suddenly gone and there was no way my readers could find me. Twitter and Facebook and Wattpad are owned by companies — we have no control over their business decisions. But my website? I have control over that.
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How to get people to read your story on Wattpad
People ask me how I’d gotten all those reads for my story The Billionaire’s Price. These are usually new writers who ask me this, or writers who have had their works up for some time but haven’t gotten as many readers as they would like. It’s quite frustrating, I know, spilling your guts out in a story and posting it online for everyone to see only to get a handful of reads after several months.
TBP has racked up 18.5 million reads as of this writing. There was a time when it didn’t have even a million reads. There was a time when it didn’t have a thousand reads, or even a hundred. When I started posting TBP, I didn’t have any followers on Wattpad because I was new and TBP was my first story.
This is what most new writers have to deal with in the beginning. So don’t be discouraged! There are steps you can take to find your audience, it’s not all dependent on luck. Everyone could use some luck, of course, but if you rely entirely on luck, you probably won’t get anywhere.
First, I will tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t go around Wattpad posting links to my story on people’s account pages. I didn’t message random Wattpad users with links to my story, begging them to read it. (I’m not sure spamming Wattpad users and begging them to read your story works, but let me tell you this: if some random person spams me with a link to their story, I ignore it.) I didn’t even have a Twitter or Facebook page in the beginning, so I wasn’t able to promote my story in either of those platforms.
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A.C. / TBP FAQ #3 – Will you read my story?
Q. Will you read my story? A. Probably not. I don’t like unsolicited advertising (a.k.a. spam). Some authors don’t mind if you send them a message asking them to check out their stuff, but I do. When I get messages like this, I normally don’t bother replying. Q. Will you ask your readers to check out my story? A. Probably not. If I do endorse a story (I haven’t yet), it’s because I have read it and liked it a lot. There are some stories I like, and I will put them in a reading list which you’ll be able to see on my profile. I have a couple of stories on my one reading list so far, but I will add more.
Q. Will you read my story and give me honest feedback?
