7 Essential Tips for Writing a Romance

If you've ever thought of writing a romance, you’re not alone. Romance is the bestselling fiction genre, so it makes sense that a writer might think about trying her hand at one. But romances are harder to write than you might think. Here are some tips for avoiding the most common mistakes in writing a romance.

1. Read romances. A surprising number of people who think they can write a romance don’t actually read romances. If you’re not interested in the genre as a reader, that’s going to come across in your writing. Although it helps to read in a variety of sub-genres (such as romantic suspense or paranormal romance), it makes sense to focus on the type of romance you’re thinking about writing.

2. Follow the formula. Romances do follow a formula—but it’s probably not the one you think. Here’s what a romance reader expects from a romance:

• A hero she loves and a heroine she sympathizes with.
• A believable conflict. Something has to keep the hero and heroine apart, and it can’t be a pointless misunderstanding that could be cleared up with one twelve-second conversation.
• A happily-ever-after. The couple doesn’t have to get married or vow undying love but it should be clear that they’ve resolved their differences and are mutually committed to one another.

That’s it. That’s the framework within which you write your novel. Now, different lines may have more specific expectations than this (for example, if you’re writing a Harlequin Suspense, the editors will expect you to hit a specific word count and to have a certain type of plot) but this is where you start.

3. Focus on the emotional payoff. Readers read romance because they want to feel something. Romances can have difficult subject matter and any number of dark moments but at heart they are life-affirming and the ending is always positive. If you kill off your hero at the end, you may have a love story but you don’t have a romance. Often the emotional payoff requires both the hero and the heroine to make a sacrifice for the sake of love. Be sure that you’re even-handed about this. Romances require mutuality to be satisfying to readers.

4. Keep the action going. Although romance is about feeling, spending a lot of time inside a character’s head mulling things over is the kiss of death for a romance novel. Your story needs to keep moving along to the conclusion. That doesn't mean you should dump in a bunch of pointless action; you can have a romance where not a great deal of objective action happens. But characters need to be doing something: having conversations, going to work, throwing things.
5. Don’t head-hop. This refers to the jumping around from one character’s point of view to another character’s point of view in a scene. This prevents you from deeply exploring one character’s feelings and situation, and is a deal-breaker for a lot of readers and editors. Also be aware that most romance is written in third person, past tense. Unless you have an extremely strong reason for doing otherwise (and you probably don’t), stick with what readers want and expect.

6. The love relationship must be front and center. In many romance sub-genres, such as historical or paranormal, a lot of  world-building has to take place for the reader to understand what’s going on. But you have to keep the love relationship front and center from the start of your novel to the last page. If your hero wanders off for fifty pages midway through the book, readers are going to be unhappy. They want to see your hero and heroine together, falling in love.

7. Convey physical attraction. Even in the tamest of romances, the reader needs to have a sense that your two main characters are physically attracted to each other. Romances are about sexual love relationships, even if your characters never do more than kiss. Physical attraction and desire are important parts of your characters’ love journey, and your readers want to experience them.

Following these tips will help ensure that your romance is one that readers will love.

How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Book

There was a time when MySpace trumped Facebook for creative types, but the tide has turned, at least where writers are concerned. As Wendy Gardner, of Gardner Publicity, notes, the site serves writers well because "Facebook allows you to create a fan/group or book page, where you can post a photo of your book cover, a synopsis of your book, and news, as well as send email messages to your fans or members without necessarily having to be 'friends' with them."

When setting up your Facebook page, be sure to include the URL for your website, then go to settings, click on "Blog/RSS," and input your blog's public URL. This will automatically stream your headlines as updates onto Facebook. But don’t be afraid to get creative. Social networking sites are like LEGOs: they provide the materials; you figure out what is possible. Tom Rob Smith used his "Info" tab to post reviews of his latest book, The Secret Speech, and Amanda Eyre Ward created a book group for Love Stories in This Town, which includes information about her book tour. This allows her to communicate directly with her biggest fans about this book in particular -- and allows them to communicate with each other.

If you feel frustrated getting Facebook set up, however, know that you aren't alone. The interface isn't perfect; getting it to do what you want can take some time. And it can be unclear which type of page will serve you best. Again, I look to Jeffrey Yamaguchi's advice. Don't think of it as a place in which there's a wrong and right way of doing things. Experiment with the site to find ways of getting it to do what you want it to do.

However you use Facebook, decide at the beginning what kind of image you want to project. This may not be the arena for frat boy humor or personal revelations. Keep fans and professional contacts in mind when you post updates or photos. 

25 Pieces of Advice You Need to Build an Awesome Facebook Page

During the last couple of months we’ve all read a steady stream of complaints about Facebook’s most recent changes and how they affect business Pages. Yet anyone who pays close attention to what’s happening at Facebook shouldn’t be terribly surprised.
After all, as Scott Ayres over at Post Planner noted in a recent post,
“Facebook was created for people — not businesses. Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions were never for businesses to rule Facebook. The social network was created to provide friends & family members better ways to stay in touch. Business pages were an after thought added after too many people were abusing their personal profiles by selling junk.”
He’s absolutely right, of course.
But now what?
No one (at least no one over here) is blaming Facebook for their decision to implement recent changes that affect businesses. This is life. Things change.  Plenty of people are frustrated by the fact that we all got to use Facebook for free for so long and now all of a sudden we have to pay for advertising if we want our content to be seen by a wide audience. But the reality is that Facebook is a business and, as such, anyone who wants to do business with Facebook and reach the 1.1 billion people who are on it, will probably have to spend some money.
The good news is that algorithms and other Facebook changes aside, there are still a variety of tips and strategies that any business can use to market successfully on  Facebook. At ShortStack, our goal is to provide you with these valuable resources to help you be better social marketers. Are these tips and tools going to take your reach from 6 percent to 50 percent, probably not. But reach isn’t everything!
In today’s world, Facebook is about leveraging the fans you do reach and positioning your brand so that when your customers/potential customers choose to follow you on Facebook, they also choose to actively check-in with and engage with your Page.  It’s also about collecting valuable information from your audience so that you can turn followers into paying customers and you can leverage what you learn into your everyday marketing strategies.
It’s time to take actionable steps towards marketing your business better on Facebook. To do this we’re revisiting some of our top resources you can use to make sure your Facebook presence is in tip-top shape.

Collect Data from Your Fans

Data collection is one of the most powerful opportunities that can come from social media efforts. The following resources will show you how to collect valuable information from your Fans for marketing outside of Facebook:
• Grow your Email List Using Facebook
• Get Better Leads from your Facebook Page
• Make Your Facebook Habit Profitable
• 8 Tips to Make Customers Give You What You Want

Enhance Your Reach

Facebook’s algorithm changes frequently. These resources will help you learn how to adapt to the changes and reach more of your fans.
• How to Get More Shares On Your Facebook Page
• Do you Know the Best Way to Engage Your Users?
• 10 Totally Irresistible Facebook Status Updates
• 25 Ways to Make a Statement With Your Cover Photo
• The One Crippling Mistake Businesses Make on Facebook
• How to Work Around Facebook’s Latest Algorithm Changes
• Small Business Sabotage: How to Make Facebook’s Latest Changes Work for You

Be a Smart Marketer

There are many brands that do Facebook right. These resources will help you become a successful Facebook marketer.
• 19 Things Successful Brands Do Different
• Make Your Facebook Page Pull the Weight of 3 employees
• Make your Marketing Mobile Friendly
• Must Know Facebook Tips
• Make your Like Count Move
• Build a Community on Facebook
• Evaluate your Facebook Page

Running Facebook Apps

Social campaigns are the key to increasing your brand’s visibility on Facebook. These resources provide quick tips and insights into building apps for Facebook Pages, mobile and web browsing.
• Beyond Contests: Using Facebook Apps to Connect with Customers All Year Long
• How to Prevent Cheating on your Facebook Contests
• Be Social All Year Long: 12 Months of Apps
• Best Practices for Building Facebook Apps
• 12 Ways to Promote Your Facebook App
• 5 Time-Saving Tips for Building Better Facebook Apps
• 15 Ways ShortStack Can Increase Your Brand’s Visibility on Facebook

5 Tips for Publishing Your Own Book 

   Here are five steps to help you get started:

1. Decide on an engaging topic. Not sure what to write about? Stay away from recapping your company blog posts or simply publishing marketing material. You want to demonstrate your expertise in a distinctive, engaging way, says Cavanaugh Gray, founder of Entrepreneur Café, a Chicago-based small-business development firm. "Don't get too theoretical or too technical, unless you are speaking to a very specific niche of readers." Both print and e-books can be as short as 100 pages or as long as 300, he adds. 

Related: How Pre-Teen Entrepreneurs Cut Their Teeth in Book Publishing

2. Know the basics. Do your homework on the rules of publishing before starting out. For example, owning the International Standard Book Number, which can be purchased at isbn.org for $125, can help you retain publishing rights in the future to more easily create updated editions of your book and allow you to switch publishing platforms, says Marna Friedman, an Atlanta-based consultant who advises small businesses on self-publishing. But some publishers acquire ISBNs on your behalf, which means you'll need to stick with the same company for future editions, she adds.

3. Plan your budget. A big expense will be publication costs, which run about $5 to $20 per printed book. (Most e-books have minimal fees.) Friedman recommends choosing a publishing platform that offers a print-on-demand option, which lets you order books as needed rather than paying for a bulk order. Otherwise, you could end up ordering too many copies and getting stuck with leftovers. Sites typically ask authors to buy at least 15 copies to get preferential bulk pricing.
Related: Website Creates Author Community for the Self-Published
You also need to factor in editing and graphic design costs, which can together total $4,000 to $8,000, says James Altucher, a New York-based hedge fund manager who has self-published four books. If you're tempted to cut corners on editing and design, remember that a visually unappealing book with errors will hurt your credibility. "Nothing looks worse than grammatical mistakes in a self-published book," Altucher says.

4. Develop a marketing strategy. Even if you didn't set out to write a bestseller, you should figure out a marketing strategy for the book before it's published. Will you promote it via Twitter or Facebook? Or will it simply be mailed to potential clients? You also can use your company website to promote the book by creating a separate tab on your home page or a special blog. If you plan to market your book to a larger audience than your target customers, compare royalty fees from various publishing sites to see where you'd make the most money.
Related: How to Create an E-Mail Marketing Campaign That People Will Notice

5. Pick a publisher. Here are four sites worth considering. All of them offer self-publishing software and allow users to publish and distribute their books.

CreateSpace: Started in 2007, Amazon's self-publishing arm lets users publish e-books for the Kindle, as well as print hard copies. The books are sold on CreateSpace or Amazon.com. The site offers expanded distribution options for an additional fee. Creating the book is free, as is the Kindle version. But printing-on-demand costs about $4.50 per copy for a 300-page book. If that same book is sold for $15, the author can expect $4.50 in royalties when using Amazon.com.

Blurb: The six-year-old site enables users to create coffee table books with colorful photos, as well as other types of printed books. Hardcover books cost from $3.95 to $49.95 per copy when ordering on demand, depending on the book's size. Authors retain all the revenue from selling copies themselves.

Booktango: Started earlier this year, this self-publishing service offers only e-books. It's free to publish and distribute the e-books, while writers pay from $49 to $359 for more services including editing, marketing and design. Writers retain all sales revenue. Books are sold through the site, but can also be uploaded to other sites including Amazon and Apple's iBookstore.

Lulu: Founded in 2002, this website offers e-books and printed books. Authors pay $8.50 per printed copy of an average size book, while e-books are free. The company takes a 20 percent commission on book sales, and writers collect the rest. Lulu offers e-book distribution to iBookstore, Barnes & Noble's Nook bookstore and the Lulu Marketplace, as well as Amazon and the Lulu Marketplace for print books.

Intimate Moments [Kindle Edition]

With summer on the horizon, finding the right book for the beach or vacation can be daunting. The search ends with Intimate Moments, the debut romance novel by Jeané Sashi. It’s full of love, beautiful women, handsome men and difficult decisions.

Who says a woman can’t have it all? Who says a man cannot be successful? A group of friends has just that. They’ve dedicated hard education, determination and hard work to be where they are within their lives.

You can feel like you have everything in the world and wake up one morning and reality hits you right in the face. That’s when you realize that you don’t have all that you want and are seeking…something is missing.

Tonju is successful, attractive, educated and single. Her life is on the right track. Her goals are being met just as she has outlined them to do. There is only one thing missing in her life. The one thing she thought she had but was mistaken. She longs to have a love of her own, that someone who is going to love her for her. She longs for intimate moments.

Amazon Link => http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Moments-Jeané-Sashi-ebook/dp/B0051V6P52/ref=la_B0051RKNKY_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399064705&sr=1-1

Tips to Get Your Book as a New Author Featured on a High Traffic Blog or Website

When new authors start to make decisions about how to execute their book marketing strategy one of their hopes would be to be a featured author on a high traffic website. Well that's actually easier to do than most authors would believe and it only takes a few simple tips. Now one of the important points to keep in mind before using this strategy would be to remember these websites don't do favors. They will sell you their most prized slots on their web page but they wont give them away to anyone whose book subject doesn't align with the goals and mission of the website.

So with that being said you will need to find websites that are in the niche of your book with high traffic. For example if your book is about radical hairstyles of the rich and famous you shouldn't approach websites that specialize in engineering. Instead contact tabloid websites and online news magazines as their in your niche, while many may believe this is common sense, you would be surprised at how much time is wasted by web masters reviewing totally inappropriate requests from new authors.

Now that we have the correct mindset here's a few tips to get you started;

1. Create an email that shows them exactly how your book will benefit their web visitors and falls in-line with what they offer.

2. Offer to give them free e Book copies of your book, it costs you little to nothing. However make sure you put several ads for your business in your e Book.

3. Ask their advice about how your book could help them improve the results they want. Are they for example focusing on traffic, click troughs, or email sign ups this month. Once they inform you, than offer to let them use your book to giveaway as a prize to help them achieve better results.

4. Remember that the website is operated by a person, so offer the web master gifts that demonstrate whats in your book; for example offer discounts and weekly email tips.

What your working on is to let the web master know that your book focuses on their niche and that it can help their visitors. 

9 Tips for Writing Effective Web Copy

Composing for the web is completely not quite the same as composing for print distributions or composing a book. Print distributions have a constrained measure of space, yet on the web you have boundless space and exceptionally restricted consideration. 

Here are 9 tips for customizing your duplicate to catch however much of that consideration as could be expected.

Tip #1: Keep your copy tight

Say what you want to say, as briefly as possible. Then stop. You don’t want to say the same thing several different ways in order to emphasize your point. That will only bore your readers.

Tip #2: Write Short Paragraphs

Along those same lines, you want to avoid long paragraphs at all cost. Nothing screams “Don’t read this!!!” louder than huge blocks of text. A good rule of thumb is to keep your paragraphs 3-5 lines in length.
This same rule applies to sentences. Keep them short and sweet.

Tip #3: Use Headings

Headings help break up the monotony of simple text, and they make your writing easier to scan. Remember, on the web, attention is in limited supply. You want to make your work scan-friendly. 
Additionally, headings help you organize your thoughts into a logical outline, which improves the quality of your writing.

Tip #4: Use Bullet Points and Numbered Lists

1. They help break up the monotony of text,
2. They are super easy to scan, and
3. They are fun to write.

Use bullet points and numbered lists anytime you find yourself writing a list. Even if each item is a paragraph, a bullet-point list can be very effective. Just put a line break between each item (in WordPress, press shift + enter for a line break that doesn’t end the bullet point or numbered list sequence).

Tip #5: Avoid big words and complicated phraseology

Michael Hyatt says it best:

I love language, so I am often tempted to use big words. However, I have learned to avoid this. My goal is to communicate, not to impress my readers with my vocabulary.

A cardinal rule of good web design to avoid making your visitors think. This same principle applies to web copy as well as design. It shouldn’t be work to understand what you’re saying.

Tip #6: Use Emphasis Sparingly

Underlines, bolded text, and italics are all very good tools for emphasis, but it’s easy to overuse them.
In order to create the effect of emphasis, these elements have to be used sparingly. In addition, there’s no quicker way to make your writing look cluttered than to underline every other sentence and bold or italicize the rest.
Additional tip: Never use all-caps. They are hard to read and they’re the internet-equivalent to shouting.

Tip #7: Use Images

Images provide a delightful visual break in contrast to the words. You want at least one picture, and if it’s a long post/page, it’s better to have several. Unless they are really small images, don’t wrap the text around them.
“A picture speaks a thousand words,” as the saying goes, and the right pictures can really reinforce your writing.
Helpful resources:

• How To Pick The Right Stock Photo Every Time
• 11 Places to Get a Free and Legal Photo for Your Blog
• 9 Premium Stock Photo Sites

Tip #8: Take the Time Needed to Craft a Good Title

The title is the single most important part of a blog post, both from a reader perspective and an SEO perspective. Your titles need to be irresistibly click-worthy and they need to incorporate good keywords.
The most effective bloggers sometimes spend almost as much time crafting the right title as they spent writing the post.
Helpful resources:

• Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click Worthy & Viral?!
• The 6 Magic Words That Always Get Clicks
• How to Write Magnetic Headlines

Tip #9: Know When to Hire an Expert

Sometimes, the level of expertise needed is just beyond most of us. That’s when it’s time to hire a professional copywriter. Here are some some times when hiring a professional can be a good investment:

• If you are writing sales copy
• If you need to boost your SEO
• If you need help with branding
• If you think “Welcome to my website” is a good way to start your homepage (hat-tip to James L. Rubart for that one)

What are your tips for writing good web copy? I’d love to read them in the comments!