Julia Goodfellow-Smith is the Secretary of OWPG and author of Live Your Bucket List and Cycling King Alfred ’ s Way : A Piece of Cake ? visual and this showed strongly in the �irst draft of Live Your Bucket List . It was less evident in the �irst draft of my latest book , Cycling King Alfred ’ s Way : A Piece of Cake ?
□ Have you used strong verbs ? For example , using the verb ‘ striding ’ gives a far clearer picture of what is happening than simply ‘ walking ’.
□ Are you helping the reader to experience emotion , or just telling them about it ?
■ Is your writing easy to understand ? I use the incredibly useful online Hemingway app ( www . hemingwayapp . com ) to help me identify linguistic knots that I need to unravel .
■ Is your grammar correct ? I run my manuscripts past Grammarly ( www . grammarly . com ) to check for any obvious errors .
By this stage , you may have made a lot of changes to the manuscript . I �ind that reading the whole thing out loud before sending it to the editor allows me to spot additional errors and areas for improvement .
Sell your book
This article is about how to create an Amazon bestseller , so that is what I am focusing on . Around 70 % of all book sales are through Amazon , so if you don ’ t sell through them , you are missing out . I used a professional editor , cover designer and formatter to make sure that I did justice to my efforts . If a book is not professionally produced , it will not sell as well as one that is . While that is being done , it ’ s a good time to recruit a launch team - the
lifeblood of a successful Amazon book launch . Members buy the book in the �irst few days , talk about it on social media , leave Amazon reviews and drive sales . However , the book is your priority , not your launch team ’ s . You will need to remind a lot of them a few times before they do what they have pledged to . Within two weeks of publication , most of my launch team bought the book and around half left a review . I understand that ’ s pretty normal . So , if you want 50 reviews – enough to give your book credibility on Amazon – you will need at least 100 people on your launch team . If you want your book to be a # 1 Amazon bestseller , you need to pick your categories carefully . You can choose up to ten for each format . Make sure that at least one of those categories has lower sales volumes , making it easier to hit the # 1 spot . I use Publisher Rocket for category sales data ( www . publisherrocket . com ). Having a launch team gets you noticed – Live Your Bucket List quickly became a ‘ hot new release ’ in various categories and # 1 bestseller in one . For me , being a bestseller was valuable , even if it didn ’ t relate to £ 1,000 ’ s of sales in the short term . Having good reviews and being a bestseller validate the quality of my work . I have secured a well-paid corporate speaking gig with the help of this accolade , and my book sales are higher than average for non- �iction books . Only you will know whether there ’ s value for you in doing something similar with your next book . www . juliags . com
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