129 – How to Build an Email List Before Your First Book Comes Out Using Short Stories
Summary: Question:<br> <a href="http://MeredithAbernathy.com">Meredith Abernathy</a> Beyond the Midnight Mountain 25% on her 6th draft … She loves:<br> <br> Dr. Pepper<br> Musicals<br> Road trips<br> Details of everyday life of everyday people in other times and places<br> Details in general (I tend to over research)<br> Brownies<br> <br> <br> “I keep hearing the advice to start marketing/start a newsletter as early as possible, even before you’re published. But whenever I ask for help in my Facebook writer groups, they say I’m putting the cart before the horse.<br> <br> I have no books to offer free in exchange for newsletter signups, so of course I have 0 signups. I’m not sure about offering sample chapters of my novel, in case they change again between now and publication. So, is there something I can offer that readers care about, or am I doomed to launch a book to 0 readers?”<br> <br> Meredith, we have the answer for you and in two words it is this: Short Stories.<br> <br> Talking Points:<br> <br> Introduction:<br> <br> In our <a href="http://novelmarketing.teachable.com/p/5-year-plan">five year plan</a>, we talk a lot about the value of writing short stories for developing your craft. <br> <br> Short Stories Make You a Better Writer<br> <br> I was in my neighborhood swim team for over ten years as a kid. We won every meet every year for at least five years in a row. We won the championship all but two years I competed. <br> <br> Our secret: we swam mostly drills in practice. Focusing on specific aspects of technique. We might swim for 15 minutes with kickboards to work on making our kicking faster. The other teams swam hard. We swam smart. We did not swim a lot of “garbage yardage.” <br> <br> <br> Writing a full length novel as your first project is the slowest path to publishing success. As a beginning writer, you are just reinforcing bad habits you don’t know you have yet. <br> You typically don’t get a lot of feedback on it until you are finished writing the whole thing. Then you end up re-writing it over and over again fixing the same problems over and over again. This is exhausting and a lot of authors give up on this process. <br> Writing short stories allows you to focus on specific aspects of your craft to improve on them. <br> David Story:<br> <br> My brother is one of the writers going through our five year plan. One of the things he struggled with in his early days of writing was character voice. All his characters sounded the same. So to work on it, he started writing short stories in the voice of various characters to learn how to make them sound different. He wrote a whole short story from the POV of a computer to force himself to see the world in a different way. <br> The short stories are fun and it allows him to work on specific writing muscle groups. They are the writing equivalent of the drills we swam in swim team. In one of his short stories, there is no dialogue. That was not what David was working on, so he left it out. The short story is brilliant and fun. It wouldn’t work for a whole book but it works great for the drill he was working on. <br> Some of the stories are from the POV of unimportant characters in his storyworld. So the short stories are also a way for him to do world building. <br> <br> <br> Short stories make it easier to get feedback. <br> Short stories make it easier to make changes. <br> Short stories are easier to abandon if things are not working out. <br> Adam Grant- Originals. Making pots. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XIYGCDO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XIYGCDO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1</a><br> <br> <br> Next we are going to talk about how Short Stories help with marketing. But first, we have our first ever Patron Plug. If you want to hear your book plugged on the podcast,
