Happy To Say Everyone Hit It…

Everyone who is writing a weekly short story got a story in. And a new person started and a couple others have not yet started, which is fine. In fact, perfectly fine to sign up at any point still. The Great Challenge is not filled and I am enjoying reading the stories. (Remember, you get workshop credit when you miss.)

I won’t talk much about this challenge going forward, since life will cause writers to miss from this point onward. That will just happen. My hope is that a number of them make it all the way. That would be so cool!

But that doesn’t matter. Right now those who started the first week have three new stories done and that is a total win.

So onward. I hope all the writers are having as much fun writing as I am reading the stories.

Regular Weekly Workshops Starting For May…

Amazing how the Time of Great Forgetting is hitting the workshops this month, just like it does every May. In fact, right now Research, Author Voice, Writing Sales Copy, Writing Short Stories, and Novel Structure have no one signed up for them.

Again, this is normal for May and June. But sign up now for any of those and pretty much you will be getting a private workshop from me. What I am amazed about is how every time we offer the Writing Sales Copy, it gets no takers or almost none. At any time of the year. Yet I constantly see horrid sales copy with books, so we leave it on the schedule just because…

Sales copy is the most important thing you can do to help sell your book besides your cover.

Let me give you an example. I just randomly went to Amazon and wrote science fiction and grabbed the blurb from the first book I saw. Here is the first two lines of a very long blurb.

DRAGONS.
They exist, but have been in a state of hibernation for millennia. Will mankind survive their violent awakening?

Dauria was young and idealistic when she helped create the pact to force all dragons to withdraw from the world of Man in Earth’s distant past.

(It goes on and on into really dull plot from there that would be far too much work to fix, but this is enough to give you a basic idea of a very basic point I am talking about.)

How about instead of that dull, passive attempt at a sales blurb, how about this instead? I am not changing much at all, notice. Just helping the reader be excited. And this is only one reason to take the sales copy workshop.

DRAGONS.
They existed in a state of hibernation for millennia. Will mankind survive their violent awakening?

Dauria, young and idealistic, helped create the pact to force all dragons to withdraw from the world of Man in Earth’s distant past.

So simple. But sales is a different language and just because you can type a sentence, doesn’t mean you understand sales copy.

Now back to your regularly scheduled time of great forgetting… (grin)