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Adding more diversity to your Scrivener name generator
I read somewhere online that authors spend more time browsing baby name sites than parents. I don’t actually know how much time parents spend online looking for baby names, but I can absolutely confirm that I spend a lot of time on baby name sites. There are fewer sites for Filipino names, but they’re there. And if you live here, you know that a lot of Filipinos these days have Western names anyway.
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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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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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AfA – 04 – Fandom and Fiction with Liana Smith-Bautista at B&B (part 2 of 2)
Happy new year! In this episode I explain why AfA episode 4 is super late, and what I’ve been doing on the last day of 2018. We also have the second part of my interview with Liana Smith Bautista at the Books & Brews Cafe. We chatted about fanfiction and the communities around them, and more writing productivity tools.
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#PHRomCon2017: Steamy Romance Authors Panel
I don’t have a video of me on my panel (“Writing Online: Challenges and Advantages”), but I did manage to record a short video of another discussion panel. This is the steamy romance authors panel with Mina V. Esguerra, Jennifer Hallock, Georgette Gonzales, and Bianca Mori.
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Writers’ Resources: Podcasts! — Part 1 : Craft
Writing is hard sometimes, and for me, I kinda need all the help I can get. As with most writers, I learned writing from reading. However, it’s always great to hear from actual professional writers who want to share their knowledge and experiences with others. While blogs and writing books are fine, I’ve always enjoyed podcasts about writing. Here are some of the writing podcasts I listen to that discuss the craft of writing.
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I will answer your questions about online serial fiction writing and publishing
On March 29 (11am to 11pm Manila Time), I’ll be holding a Question & Answer session on Facebook on the topic of Writing and Publishing Serialized Fiction. It will be hosted/moderated by my friend and author Mina V. Esguerra. Attendees may ask relevant questions, and even share their experiences during the discussion. Please note that I write only in English, so this forum will be conducted in English and may only be applicable to writers in that language. Writers and authors of all genres are welcome.
Preliminary Questions (and the Answers)
- Q. What is serial fiction? A. Serial fiction is stories (novels, novellas) that are published one chapter at a time on platforms like Radish and Wattpad. Successful authors of serialized fiction may have thousands, even millions of followers. Some of them have gone on to get book deals from publishers and self-publish their work on Amazon and other markets.
- Q.Why would anyone want to ask you questions about online serial fiction writing and publishing? A. Because it’s what I do! I publish serialized fiction for both Wattpad and Radish with considerable success. My first novel The Billionaire’s Price racked up 22 million reads on Wattpad (before I unpublished it so I could sell it on Amazon and iTunes and a bunch of other online book retailers) and it hit the no. 1 spot in the Romance hotlist several times in a period of five months. My ongoing serialized novel The Billionaire’s Lie has gotten over 111,000 reads on Wattpad since it debuted last month. It’s also published on Radish, where it’s currently the third most-read story on the app. Oh, and my Wattpad account has over 177,000 followers.
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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.
