A wonderful article by Sandy Appleyard (Who tends to pop up in Of Note, because her articles rock!) speaks of a little feature on Createspace that is often forgotten about, Previews. It’s available to all members free of charge, and it acts how you would imagine it, it’s a preview. Described as a free way to promote a novel, I quickly gave it a try for The Dragon’s Tear.
Previews are nothing new, and if you’re familiar with ebooks, most sites give the first 10% as a sample. With the Preview feature with Createspace, the author is in charge of what to show, with no minimum or maximum. The up side is, five questions can be asked of the people who actually read these sample chapters.
I would have liked if there were some stock questions to fill in the blanks, because I am awful with setting up a good question. Ideally, you want questions put in place that will help determine if the sample is working as intended, which is hooking the reader. Conflict establishment, use of suspense, and protagonist motivations are all fair game to ask. Maybe, just maybe, some good feedback will filter through.
Questions can come in as five stars, or up to 100 characters, or up to 1,000 characters to rate. I went with the star rating system, because that’s easy to use and it’s not as intimidating. One question isn’t a star, but I felt like I was skimping on the experience of Previews by not putting it up.
This is an experiment I’m trying, and I hope to see results, but in reality, I’m continuing with my writing. Big changes are happening with my schedule. I posted on Twitter that my release schedule this year will be pushed towards the fall and winter. (for my Google Plus readers, and there are lots of you, I recently found an app for my phone. Expect tons of doggy pictures) All the details will be in a future blog post, so I’ll leave on this, “I’m workin, I’m workin!”