Neil Ostroff's Blog – January 2013 Archive (9)

I’ve spent the last few weeks doing a lot of marketing and promotion for my nine novels and it has paid off. My main blog, ALWAYS WRITING has reached a milestone 250,000 + page views, and the other sites that I post blog articles have reached a combined 150,000 + page views. Not bad for the twenty months they have been in existence.

Now that I’ve reached a comfortable level of exposure it’s time to get back to the business of writing books. I did manage a 20,000 word outline…

Two years ago, after amicably parting ways with my literary agent of four years, I decide to take destiny into my own hands and publish my books in eformat. I had a huge collection of completed and professionally edited novels and decided that publishing one every three months seemed feasible. So, that’s what I did.

Little did I know I was on the cusp of an indie publishing revolution. My books were available at the right time, for the right audience, and at the right price. Kindles…

I’ve been writing 50,000-70,000 word novels for a while now and to do it properly takes a lot of time. My fastest writing ever was last year when I finished a 60,000 word novel in eight months. And I do believe there will always be readers who want to immerse themselves in a long, detailed story. However, I also believe that a new wave of reading experiences will take over the future. What are these, you ask?

As our lives become busier and busier, it’s harder to find time to sit and…

I just got back from a three day trip to the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I brought my laptop but got little creative writing done. I did pretty well playing at the blackjack tables and also threw a few bucks into the slot machines. It was while playing the progressive machine that my mind began to imagine ‘the what if’s’.

The jackpot was for 1.2 million dollars. What if I suddenly hit it big? What if all the right symbols lined up and bells start ringing? How would…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a writer better. Certainly, you have to be creative, that’s a given, and you have to love stories and reading. But what is that will make you better? Here’s my answer; time.

What do I mean by that?

With the exception of a few very talented people, most writers take years to hone their skills. Some writer’s like Stephen King say that a writer’s schooling is never finished. That writer’s always have something more to learn about…

I’m nearing the end of my sponsorship blitz, but I’m at the point where I can start posting my views on the whole ebook selling phenomenon. First of all, unless you’re already famous, have a strong following, or the most amazing title and cover art ever, don’t bother with expensive sponsorships. My results have been pretty much the same in extra sales whether the sponsorship I ran was $10 or $300.

If you’re going to place a sponsorship, I recommend the Kindle Fire Department.com,…

Just wanted to remind all my followers that my latest mind-bending trip is now available on Kindle. Thanks so much and spread the word.

What if everything we perceive, all we experience, is just a figment of someone else’s imagination? And what if that someone is dying?

IMAGINATION

A botched military mission finds new recruit Christopher Parker in a hostile prison camp. His life has become pain. To escape the prolonged misery of torture, Christopher…

With my marketing efforts underway and my books uploaded on all the major writer’s sites, I am about ready to start my quest to write three novellas in the next year. I’m leaning toward the Dystopian genre, with a little sci-fi fantasy thrown in. I’m going to try and do a series, building on the plot book after book. I do have a few ideas that have been swimming around in my head for a few years and I recently pulled the “ideas” file from my cabinet. This file was thick with scraps of paper…

The New Year is here and I’m sure everyone plans on making 2013 better than 2012. And hopefully it will be for all of us. My free pre-release promotion for IMAGINATION has ended and the results were pretty much what I had expected due to the lack of my announcing it; a total of 857 downloads. My intention wasn’t to give away tens of thousands of books but to expose the book to heavy readers who would then ‘like, tag, and review’ the book before I rolled out the big guns and shared the link…