My Today's guest is James Thorn. J. Thorn is a Top 100 Most Popular Author in Horror, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure and Fantasy (Amazon Author Rank). He has published over one million words and has sold more than 130,000 books worldwide. In March of 2014 Thorn held the #5 position in Horror alongside his childhood idols Dean Koontz and Stephen King (at #4 and #2 respectively).
James believes that reading dark fiction can be healing. James admires strong people who are not afraid to speak their mind.
You can watch this presentation at the Author Marketing live where and find out about all the mistakes he made at the very beginning. You can get more details and contact James through his website.
Impressive Quotes
"I figured out what to do by failing over and over and over again"
"I think talent is overrated. Perseverance is essential in becoming a writer"
"There was a moment when I was sitting at my desk and had my finger on a delete button on a title at KDP"
"Horror is like pizza"
"I like my books to be escape for people"
"Even the best book is gonna get really harsh criticism"
"Reviews are for readers. It's readers' space and authors should stay out of it"
Advice from James
[spp-tweet "When you are starting just write the story you wanna read."]
Writing a novel is a long lonely process and if you are not really excited about what you're doing - it's gonna be hard.
If you can't take criticism or you can't accept rejection writing is not the business for you.
[spp-tweet "You have to keep writing and you have to keep growing."]
If you give up easily you're not gonna be successful writer because there are way more rejections than there are rewards in this business.
You should chase what you're passionate about in life no matter what anyone else thinks about it.
If you're doing it for money you will eventually lose interest. It will become a job and you'll wanna do something else.
Your biggest challenge is not sales - your biggest challenge is discoverability. What you're trying to do is get eyes on your work and in order to do that you have to sacrifice your compensation.
[spp-tweet "Giving your book for free to certain people at certain times does pay off."]
Personal branding is the single most important thing you can do besides the writing.
Be patient. It takes time for you to develop your voice as a writer. It takes time to understand how to unfold a story. You're gonna doubt yourself. You're gonna have moments when you want to quit. You will have people tell you that you should quit. And if you listen to it all you will quit and you won't write.
Just persevere, be patient and at certain point if writing is for you you'll know it and if not you'll know it. And that should come from inside and from your own judgement and not based on the things that people are telling you.
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