Archive for the ‘Meets Girl’ Category

February 14th, 2012 by Will Entrekin

Cabin Baggage and Meets Girl: Both Free

Last week, after having enrolled several books in the Kindle Select program and taken advantage of a few free promotions for essays and short stories, I decided to see how my novel, The Prodigal Hour, would fare. And fare well it did, hitting high ranks, breaking into the top-1oo Kindle Bestsellers, and so far, at least, it’s been maintaining more sales than before. You can find it here, for $4.99.

In fact, it went so well Nick Earls and I decided to do something Exciting.

I’ve been thrilled to work so closely with Nick, an internationally bestselling author, and not just on the Kindle store. Nick’s books have hit many lists in more countries. He’s had books published by Saint Martin’s in the US and Random House in Australia and several other houses and publishers besides.

Now he’s partnered with Exciting Press to bring stories, novellas, and novels to Kindle. Today marks a new publication of a story, “Cabin Baggage,” and a new option:

For the first three days of its digital existence, “Cabin Baggage,” will be free. In addition, it includes a free excerpt of Nick’s novel Monica Bloom, which in its turn, and for the next week only, includes a bonus novella, Grass Valley.

And that’s not even all.

I know! A free short story from an international bestseller! For any other publisher, that’d be enough, wouldn’t it?

Exciting Press isn’t any other publisher, is it?

Well. We’re hoping not to be.

Which is why we’re also offering Meets Girl free, also for a limited time.

Two exciting stories. One lower-than-low price.

This Valentine’s Day, make romance Exciting.

Posted in Amazon, Exciting Press, Kindle, Meets Girl, publishing | Comments Off

November 25th, 2011 by Will Entrekin

A Second Annual Exciting Fire Sale

I never do anything today. Black Friday keeps me safely home, away from bargain-seeking crowds in the retail jungle.

Still, who doesn’t like a good deal, right?

Which is why, for a limited time only, all my books for Kindle are just 99 cents.

This includes the essays and short stories, of course, “Jamais Plus” and “Struck by the Light of the Son,” and “Blues’n How to Play’em.”

But it also includes both:

Meets Girl

and

The Prodigal Hour

Both of which have been consistently well received and so far well reviewed.

So if you’re looking for some Exciting books to give to people you love, filling up their digital readers or sending them a gift for their phone they can read during their morning commute, they make for a perfect gift. And just 99 cents for a very limited time only.

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Posted in books, Kindle, Meets Girl, publishing, reading, The Prodigal Hour, writing | Comments Off

November 1st, 2011 by Will Entrekin

Meets Girl, One Year Later

A year ago today, I began to serialize Meets Girl, then published it in paperback and on Kindle over the Thanksgiving holiday, three weeks into its serialization. I refrained from writing about it for a couple of reasons, the most major being that I didn’t want to spoil anything for anyone. However, given that a year–give or take–has passed, I feel the statute of limitations on spoilers has expired.

So I thought I’d take a moment to write about it. If you haven’t read it yet, pick it up here, for Kindle or in paperback, and come back.

If you have, more after the jump.

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Posted in Amazon, books, Kindle, Meets Girl, publishing, writing | Comments Off

July 19th, 2011 by Will Entrekin

How to Make a Better Book Teaser

In November 1913, Nils Granlund, a manager at a theater in Marcus Loew’s chain, produced a promotional video for an upcoming musical, which he intended to show after other movies had already finished, which was why such short promotional videos were called trailers. The Marcus Loew chain ultimately became Loew’s Theaters (now AMC), and savvy theater managers began to run trailers before movies, rather than after.

Now, of course, the trailers/previews/coming attractions are one of the highlights of going to the theater.

And they’re not just for movies anymore.

It was easy to appropriate the idea for television. Trailers were just commercials for movies, anyway, so previews for new and upcoming episodes and shows were just that. And then came MTV, which was basically trailers for albums in the form of music videos.

In recent years, authors and publishers have taken up the idea. James Patterson, who was successful in advertising before he became the brand-name author he has become, was pretty much the first author to use the idea successfully in 1993 to support the launch of Along Came a Spider. His publisher wasn’t exactly for it, but Patterson wrote, produced, and paid for the commercial himself, and if it wasn’t the first-ever commercial for a novel, it was certainly a milestone in the current big-name publishing landscape and brand-name authors. Now, the internet, YouTube, and digital cameras have made it simple for authors to make and distribute promotional videos for their books even more easily.

Now that the idea is more popular and more authors are using it, however, more people are wondering about how effective teasers are (I like to call them teasers. They’re not trailing after anything, after all). Should authors really be worrying about them, or are they a waste of time?

To answer those questions, we have to back up a ways.

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Posted in marketing, Meets Girl, publishing, The Prodigal Hour, writing | Comments Off

June 28th, 2011 by Will Entrekin

My Experiences with Lulu (and, now, CreateSpace)

I should open this post by noting that Lulu made possible many of my achievements as an author, and for that I’m grateful. Back when I first decided I wanted to experiment with publishing and make an actual book people could actually buy, Lulu was the best way to do so. CreateSpace was, of course, another option, then, but from what I gathered from research, Lulu put more of an impetus on the author. Lulu seemed to give me more control. In addition, it was totally and completely free. There was no “pro” option. There were marketing and cover-design plans and offers, but for the most part, I could do absolutely everything myself, without interference.

I could make better mistakes, in other words. And boyhow, did I. But I also did a lot of cool things.

Lulu, for example, made it possible to offer digital singles of my stories, allowing me to implement what I called, back in 2007, the iTunes model of publishing. I priced those stories, to start with, at 99 cents each, with the full collection download priced at $10 for the digital version and $15 for the print.

Without that option, my collection never would have become the first ebook, ever, on the iPhone, just a week after that device was launched, at a time when Steve Jobs was claiming nobody reads books anymore.

I’m still proud of that. I’m still proud of that collection, in fact, because it’s a good snapshot of where I was at the time, both personally and professionally. I think it was Hemingway who said something like, “Fuck ‘em all. Let ‘em think you were born knowing how to write,” and my collection, I think, very much demonstrates that wasn’t the case. It’s very early work. Nascent, if you will.

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Posted in books, Kindle, Meets Girl, publishing, writing | 4 Comments »

May 16th, 2011 by Will Entrekin

The Prodigal Hour, Revised

About a week ago, I got the final edits of The Prodigal Hour from my editrix. Though her education and training are as an editor, her current job is unrelated, so this most recent round of edits took a little longer than before. I think she turned Meets Girl around in about a week, give or take.

There are reasons unrelated to work that this particular edit took longer.

The Prodigal Hour is her favorite novel. It’s the project I was working on when we met at USC, and I think my first work she ever saw. In a way, that made it as personal a project for her as it always has been for me, and that made her want to be really careful and make it ever better.

Now that I’ve gotten the edits back and finalized a revision, I think she’s right.

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Posted in books, Meets Girl, publishing, The Prodigal Hour, writing | 1 Comment »

May 6th, 2011 by Will Entrekin

Another Exciting Sale

This weekend, I turn 33 (seriously? 33? When did this happen?). Well. I have a lot of things planned this weekend, including a luncheon tomorrow and a Walk for the Cure on Sunday and various parties and destinations between, so I’m trying to figure out where I’ll pencil in the “Turn 33″ part, but I’m hoping to get to it.

Maybe next weekend.

Who knows?

This past week, I completed my MBA. I got the “Congratulations graduate!” email yesterday, and today found that my final grades had been posted. After acing this past semester, and solidly, I pulled my GPA up to a respectable 3.769. Not bad for a guy with a background in literature and science.

If you’d asked me, when I packed up my car to drive to Los Angeles for USC, where I saw myself in five years, I don’t think completing an MBA in Pittsburgh would have occurred to me, but then again, I never would have predicted much of the past decade.

So in celebration of completing my MBA, and probably turning 33 if I can get around to it, and everything else that’s been going on, I thought I’d have a big Exciting Writing sale. May has always been my favorite month, because finally it’s actually spring, now boubt adout it as my pop used to say, and flowers are in bloom and the world’s turning green again and pretty soon it’s going to be summer and that means bikinis and reading.

Two of my favorite things ever.

So, for the weekend (and probably a couple extra days), Meets Girl is just 99 cents.

As is my collection. As are all Exciting books, for that matter.

So you’ve got a novel, a collection, two short stories, and a long essay concerning literature and poetry and medical education to choose from. Heck, get it all for less than five bucks, and you’ll have enough reading material to last you a month or two.

At which time, The Prodigal Hour will be available.

Pretty cool how that’s gonna work, right?

And again with the link. Right here! Exciting writing for a dollar! Read all of them!

Posted in books, grad school, Kindle, life, Meets Girl, reading, writing | Comments Off

May 3rd, 2011 by Will Entrekin

Meets Girl’s Original Allusions

I’m still unsure how much I want to talk about Meets Girl. I’m still unsure how much I want to talk about a lot of things, honestly. I read an article last year-ish, I think in either The Atlantic or Harper’s, in which the author discussed the temptation to write a book on writing. Apparently, books on writing sell tons of copies. It makes sense; I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t think he or she had a book–whether novel or memoir–in them.

I guess, for me, it comes down to a dilemma. I think, for a long time, I thought one should let the work speak for itself, but I wonder if that’s outmoded in a world of social networking, where everyone is not only a writer but a publisher, too.

And, of course, where everyone seems to have a position on how to write. Or how to market. Or how to fill-in-the-blank.

I guess maybe one aims at maintaining a balance. Here’s what I did, and here’s how I did it. Or something like that.

I’ve also always been the sort of writer who believes that the author’s role is finished once a reader opens the book. Up until that moment, the book itself is a vision of the author, but the moment a reader sees that first word, it becomes a mutual vision, and sometimes I wonder, when considering that mutual vision, how much authority an author has in it. When readers pick up, say, symbolism in Meets Girl, who am I to say that there isn’t any?

When writing, does an author really get to say whether a cigar is really just a cigar if readers think there’s more to the cigar than the cigar? Perhaps an author has intention, but if an author doesn’t fulfill that intention, well, the novel mightn’t either, right?

Yeah. You can tell I’m a writer because this is the shit I think about.

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Posted in Meets Girl, writing | Comments Off

May 2nd, 2011 by Will Entrekin

An Interview at The Evolution of Nikki

Last week, Meets Girl got a review from Nicole Ireland of The Evolution of Nikki, who called it “beautifully written” (aw, shucks).

This week, Nikki did an interview with me, which you can read here.

Gave me a chance to talk a little more about Meets Girl (and note that I think of it as The Colbert Report of debut literary novels, which I intend to elaborate on). Also, some more on The Prodigal Hour.

Which has been with my editrix for a few weeks now. I’ve put in a few of the revisions already, and I think it’s already gotten to be a better book (and I already, obviously, thought it was good).

I’m hoping to be finished all the revisions this week.

*

In other news, I think all the coursework for my MBA is finished. I have an email in to my most recent instructor. Just waiting for confirmation, I think.

More news to come.

Posted in grad school, Meets Girl | 1 Comment »

February 11th, 2011 by Will Entrekin

How Much Is That Writing on a Kindle?

After several years in a will-they/wont-they purgatory, the digital revolution in publishing has finally become more a matter of when than if, where “when” seems to be 2010. Apple’s launch of the iPad–which featured five of the big six corporate publishers as partners and only ignored the sixth because someone within the company had outed the device the day before official launch–got the ball rolling and demonstrated that ebooks were not just a novel trend but rather new media for novels and all sorts of other forms of storytelling. In late August, Amazon’s third-generation Kindle, with its improved screen and form factor and its lower price, effectively killed the counterargument. The only thing left to really argue about is price.

But really, that’s fodder enough.

Since Apple got all those publishers on board and got its iBookstore rolling (or did it? Has anyone heard anything about the iBookstore? All I hear about are the devices–Kindles, nooks, iPads. Not so much about the stores), there’s been a debate about what’s a “good” price for ebooks. One common idea discussed when the iPad launched was the so-called “agency model,” which basically meant that publishers got to set their own price. Tech Eye mentions that this is in opposition to allowing, say, the vendor to decide the price. In other words, it’s the difference between, say, Harper setting the price of its books and Amazon doing so.

Publishers, of course, want high prices. This was why $10 ebooks were so common during the beginning of last year. Right after the iPad? Seems like publishers–corporate and otherwise–got a little high off the power of the partnership and suddenly decided that the right price for ebooks was between ten and fifteen bucks. The New York Times discussed the phenomenon.

To really get into the discussion, though, we have to consider factors regarding price. There are myriad.

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Posted in books, Kindle, marketing, Meets Girl, publishing, reading, writing | 3 Comments »

January 24th, 2011 by Will Entrekin

A Few Contests I’d Enter over the ABNA

Let’s say you’re a business. You have a product that you dedicated a lot of time to. You’re not sure you can properly distribute that product on your own. Sure, you might be able to handsell your product door-to-door, but you realize that, maybe with some help, you can get your product distributed on a wider basis, and maybe even generate some great attention for the product. There are a few companies who specialize in distributing your product, companies who have a stranglehold on distribution, in fact–if you don’t partner with them, chances are you’ll never get that wide distribution.

Already it’s a problem.

Here’s the big question, though; say one of those specialty companies came to you and said they’d help you distribute your product. Would you enter into any business arrangement with them without reading a contract? Would you sign said contract without reading it?

That’s exactly what all the writers entering the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award are doing.

Now, I’d mentioned I considered submitting Meets Girl to the contest. I think it would have a solid shot at winning on merit alone, and that’s not even to mention that I think it would probably be right up the alley of Lev Grossman, who wrote The Magicians and who is one of the major judges of the contest. The Magicians was the first full-length novel I read on my Kindle, and it was solid–if not great–in a genre-bending sort of way that crossed literary with fantasy, which is what I think Meets Girl does.

I mentioned, in passing, there are other, better contests writers could enter. And commenter Sid (the only Sid I know is my graduate writing advisor, Sid Stebel, but I can’t tell by the email address if the commenter and my advisor are the same person) asked after those contests.

So here are the top-five writing contests I’d submit Meets Girl to over the ABNA.

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Posted in books, marketing, Meets Girl, publishing, reading, writing | Comments Off

January 21st, 2011 by Will Entrekin

Objectivity & The Exciting Promise

The other day, I mentioned a positive review from Shannon Yarbrough at the LL Book Review. Today, I’m going to mention a few others, and make an announcement about something I’m rather excited about.

Today, Raych at Books I Done Read gave it high-caterpillar review. A juicy blurb:

Silly and poignant and real … totally hilarious … basic love story meets girl Tarot card battle royale

Now, Raych disclaims: if you’ve finished Meets Girl, you know that Raych gets a shout-out at the conclusion. Some people might fear some lack of objectivity.

I don’t. I started reading Raych’s blog pretty much as soon as she started it, and I love what a fool she is, and by fool, I mean the n’uncle sort, who says perhaps many nonsensical things and who maybe distracts you with the bouncy jingle balls on his hat but is, often, the wisest person in the room. The canniest. The one who knows what’s what.

I felt the same thing about Veronica’s brother Tom, in the novel. I could see his band–Foolish–doing something silly and poignant and real. Some of what I think are exactly those moments in the novel–the ones that are silly and poignant and real–belong to Tom. When Tom handed our young hero-narrator Foolish’s CD, I saw him offering one with a jaunty, silly, hand-crayoned cover because leave it to the wise-fool to leave the name of the band off.

So it fit, and when I needed a title for that album, I cribbed Raych’s blog.

She doesn’t seem to have minded. Thank goodness. I’m glad she didn’t sue my ass. For cookies. Because who’d sue a broke-ass grad student/novelist/professor/personal trainer for money?

I do wonder about objectivity. Not Raych’s. Just in general. Like, is anyone objective anymore?

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Posted in books, editing, internet, journalism, Meets Girl, publishing, reading | 1 Comment »

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