How to Write a Mystery

by Mystery Writers of America

  Self-published authors, as well as writers of cozies and paperback originals, have other challenges. Many newspapers and magazines will not review self-published books, but many blogs and websites will. Authors, or their publicists, should contact these venues directly.

  For more coverage, be creative. Suggest a story on your background, your novel’s unusual backstory, or innovative research, and tie that into a speaking engagement at a local bookstore, library, or organization that is open to the public. That would get you the much-needed publicity.

  How Authors Should Use Reviews

  Maximize that review for everything it’s worth, and do it often. Post it on your website and every social media platform you subscribe to. Post it on your own Facebook page but also the pages of every bookstore, library, or venue at which you’ve scheduled an event, and your publisher’s page. Ask your friends, acquaintances, and fans to do the same. Pluck out a pithy quote that you refer to on social media, your website, and so forth. Even a negative review probably has at least one positive word or phrase you can use. (And be sure to keep that website up to date!)

  Writers shouldn’t think of reviews as adversarial, but as a learning opportunity. A good review points out the positive and, if necessary, the negative aspects of a book. A review discusses patterns that can help writers hone their craft. If several reviews point out the overuse of the same plot or character tropes, the author might want to pay attention when writing the next book. Chances are the reader also is noticing these deficiencies.

  But authors shouldn’t write with visions of glowing reviews or awards. Instead, focus on the story you want to tell. Your passion will show in the book.

  While I think it is perfectly fine to drop a note thanking a critic for a positive review, it is not necessary, and will not influence the critic when your next book comes out.

  While it may be tempting to respond to a negative review with a nasty note or worse, resist. Please resist. Better to complain to your friends and family. No matter how you phrase it, your response to a negative review will come off as whiny and immature. Do not try to humiliate a critic on social media or launch an angry writing campaign, or, as one British writer did, start stalking the critic. None of this will do any good. The review will not be changed.

  Publishers also frown on authors who go after critics.

  Unfortunately, critics should develop a thick skin as well. A colleague once received a box of human waste after a negative review. I had at least two authors try to get me fired for daring to dislike their work. Neither of those actions are the conduct of a professional author. Yes, a writer is upset because the critic has just called their “baby” ugly. But they need to move on. A negative review for one book doesn’t mean a negative review for the next; nor does a positive review ensure a career of accolades.

  A critic should never be influenced if an author has been rude or condescending or has a different political agenda. All that needs to be put aside to concentrate on the book.

  A good critic reviews the book, not the author. Just as authors—and readers—review the critic for the fairness they show.

  Are We Friends?

  If Facebook has taught us anything, it’s that not all friendships are created equal. Being Facebook friends doesn’t translate to being real friends.

  I am a friendly person who attends many mystery writers’ conferences and often moderates or participates in panels with authors. But that doesn’t mean we are all going shoe shopping and then taking a cruise together. Being friends on social media and following an author or a critic are professional situations. By all means, feel free to like a comment, share a post, or even thank a critic for a review that’s posted. That is welcomed and further gets out the word about the book. But don’t ask why a critic hasn’t reviewed your book.

  What I Owe the Reader and the Writer

  With each review, I make a pact with the reader: I won’t give away plot points. If a twist is a surprise to me, I want that twist to be a surprise to the reader. I will look at the book as it is, not what it could have been. I’ll view the characters with an open mind.

  And finally, I’ll just be honest for the reader and to the author.

  MARILYN STASIO

  (THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)

  How Not to Get Reviewed:

  Send multiple copies of your book to the reviewer’s home and keep bugging her by email.

  —Marilyn

  Self-Publishing

  How to flourish as an independently published writer.

  LILIANA HART

  At the time of this publication, I’ll have sustained a successful self-publishing career for a decade. Anyone who’s been in publishing for more than a minute knows two things: first, success is defined differently by different people, and second, publishing (no matter how you do it) is hard.

  If you’re reading this, I’m going to make a couple of assumptions. The first is that you’re a writer—that you’ve learned to cope with the voices in your head, felt the rush as fatigue and boundless energy wage war with each other as you get closer to typing “The end,” and fallen into the pit of despair when the story isn’t right or your career has taken a nose dive, even though you’ve done everything you’re supposed to.

  Let’s be honest. Publishing is weird. We never know why one book resonates and others don’t. Or why one book becomes a bestseller over another. Believe me, self-publishing is just as weird and unpredictable as traditional publishing.

  The second assumption I’m making is that you want to write and make a living. It’s important to have dreams. Twenty years ago, I fantasized about the day when I’d be able to quit teaching and write full-time. I had vivid Technicolor dreams about becoming an eccentric recluse who lived in soft pajamas and toiled away at my computer like Kathleen Turner’s character in Romancing the Stone. I’m not going to lie: I’m living my dreams. And it’s fabulous. But still hard, because writing is hard.

  Publishing (no matter how you do it) isn’t for wimps.

  I get asked often about the “secret sauce of success” for self-publishing, as if there’s a switch you can flip or a genre you can change to, and KABOOM! You’re an immediate bestseller. It used to drive me crazy when I first started giving keynotes and workshops, because people would introduce me as an “overnight success.” But I’d get up to the podium and remind them that just because readers discovered me seemingly overnight didn’t mean I hatched from an egg the day before. I wrote for thirteen years before I ever saw a dime from one of the books that I put blood, sweat, and tears into.

  I do want to give a word of encouragement for anyone who wants to self-publish or who is currently self-publishing. I do believe you can still be successful in self-publishing. Yes, even after the “gold rush” of the early years. There is no such thing as easy publishing, and publishing never has been, and never will be, a get-rich-quick scheme. Just write great books and put in the work. You can do it!

  Which leads to my first tip for successful self-publishing.

  1. There Is No Secret Sauce

  You’ve got to write a good book. Period. That was the truth ten years ago, it’s the truth today, and it’ll be the truth ten years from now. The longevity of your career depends on the content you create.

  2. Write More Than One Book

  Self-publishing is not the model you want to use if your goal is to write one book. Or even one book every couple of years. I like to think of self-publishing as a machine that needs constant maintenance. When I first started self-publishing I wrote like an insane person. I wrote full-length novels and novellas. I wrote a romantic suspense series and two different mystery series. I’m a data nerd. I wanted to see what readers wanted to read, how long it was taking them to read it, and which series they bought more of.

  You don’t have to do that. It’s just what I did because I realized the potential of self-publishing once I started doing it. And logic dictated that I’d make more money if I wrote more books. Just wr
ite.

  I’m currently writing three books a year, and maybe a novella or two if the whim strikes me. I’m perfectly happy with that production pace, so if you’re a slower writer than I am, you can still be successful self-publishing.

  3. Write a Series

  I still believe this is the best way to hook readers, especially when you’re a new author and you’re looking to establish a reader base. One of the amazing things about self-publishing is that it’s only about you, your book, and the reader. Want to write cross-genre? Do it! Want to write shorter or longer lengths? Do it! There are no rules. Only good books.

  Getting readers to keep reading is what every author wants. If you write a great series with great characters that keep readers coming back for more, you’ll have done your job and you’ll benefit by getting a much higher royalty rate through direct sales channels than through traditional publishing.

  I gave this advice when I first saw success, and I still believe it today. There’s strategy to self-publishing, and one of the best strategies that worked for me—and dozens of authors I’ve mentored through the process—is to write at least three books in your series before you hit the publish button. Writing one book in a series and leaving readers hanging, especially when you’re first starting out, does two things: it irritates your readers, and it gives them time to forget you while you’re writing the next book (especially if it takes too long).

  Patience in self-publishing is key, and in my experience, it’s something that most authors who try it lack. There’s a reason there are a lot fewer self-published authors now than there were over the past few years. They want things to happen fast—fast money, fast books, fast readers. And if you really want a career as a writer, you’ve got to have a vision that extends past the most recent deposit that dropped in your bank account.

  4. Don’t Quit Your Day Job

  You’d be surprised how often this happens. Again, patience is key. You’ve got to make a living if writing is not making the living for you. Yes, it’s hard to be creative and write while holding down a full-time job. During those thirteen years while I was becoming an “overnight success,” I moonlighted as a high school band director, and I still managed to write three books a year.

  And before you say it, you do have time. One of my biggest pet peeves is listening to someone expound on how busy they are and how they wish they had time to write. You can go ahead and insert a giant eye roll here. Bruh, everyone is busy. I worked ninety-hour weeks and was a single mom to four kids. If you want something bad enough (whether it’s scrolling through social media or watching episodes of your favorite TV show), you’ll find a way to do it. If you want to write, you’ll write. Period.

  When you start making a consistent income as a writer and you can meet your financial goals, then quit your day job.

  5. Don’t Chase Shiny Objects

  There are a couple of things I mean by this. Write what you love to write. Your genre might not be popular right now. Or maybe your genre was selling like hotcakes and now it’s dead in the water. Don’t jump ship and write something you’re not comfortable with or don’t love just to chase the current trend. Be patient. Publishing is cyclical and you’ll see your genre rise in popularity again.

  The second part of this is for those of you who may already have found success in self-publishing: It’s possible to drown in opportunity. The more books you sell, the more things you’re able to do. You make more money, so you can spend dollars on advertising or something like audiobooks, where you’re making more of an investment. But remember that the book is the core of your business. It’s easy to get caught up in doing everything but writing your next book. Focus on what you’re good at. Focus on the core of what’s going to make you money.

  6. Marketing and Promotion

  Here are a few tips I’ve learned to keep momentum going in your business and increase visibility:

  Your next book is the best promotion. Write the next book and stop worrying about promoting your one book to death.

  Cultivate a newsletter list. Social media is fickle. Don’t rely on people seeing your posts or following what you’re doing. Social media changes constantly. People who sign up for your newsletter want to hear from you. You’re not bothering them. They asked to be kept informed about your books.

  Advertising and marketing are for visibility, not for sales. A lot of people get disappointed when they invest in an ad campaign and they don’t see immediate sales results. Marketing is about visibility. It doesn’t equate to sales. So when you invest your money, keep that in mind.

  The days of books getting visibility in retail stores through algorithms is gone. Invest in Amazon ads. It took some time, but we’ve learned how to do them. This is another one of those things that takes lots of trial and error. And patience. That word keeps resurfacing. There are a lot of companies that charge a lot of money to do ads for you. I’ve used them. You can do just as good of a job, if not better, learning to do it yourself. No one will care about your business and your product like you do. Getting readers to follow you on BookBub is also time well spent, as well as getting BookBub featured deals. Those are the three main marketing tools I use that I know have gotten my books into the hands of new readers—new readers who are going to invest their time in the entire series. (See “Write a Series” above.)

  7. It’s a Business

  I’m going to repeat that. Self-publishing is a business. I’ve found that some people don’t like to hear that. They want to be creative, write beautiful words on the page, let people discover them, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. If you don’t want to treat self-publishing as a business, then you shouldn’t do it. Unless you’re publishing so your mom and your third-grade teacher can read your art.

  It’s a business. Have a business plan. How many books do you want to write a year? What genre? Do you have business hours and writing hours? What’s your budget? Do your covers represent your genre and who you are as an author? Are your books identifiable to the reader through your covers or how your name appears on the cover?

  Seriously, I can’t stress this enough. I hear from authors all the time who are frustrated and angry that their book sales aren’t better. The first thing I ask them to do is to describe their business to me. You can’t just write a book and expect the fairies to magically transform it into a million sales. I know I’m probably preaching to the choir for most of you, but I get a lot of questions about how to make sales better, and I come to find out the people asking often aren’t putting in any of the work on the business side of things.

  I love having an end-of-year vision meeting. I look at what book sales did for the past year, and I make goals for the upcoming year. I set budgets for everything. I have a release schedule and know what books I’ll be working on in which series for the next twenty-four months. I get editors and cover designers scheduled. It’s a business. The things that a traditional publishing house does to get books out (with a few exceptions) are the things you should be doing.

  I do want to talk a bit about covers. We’ve already established that you have to write a good book. But you also need to invest in a great cover. It’s the first thing readers see as they’re scrolling through the store, which means it not only needs to be a great cover, it needs to be a recognizable cover in thumbnail size. You want them to click on your book. They’ll do that before they ever read your blurb, reviews, or sample pages.

  As long as we’re talking about self-publishing being a business, professionalism should be in evidence in every aspect of your work—not only covers, but also editing, formatting, graphics, social media posts, and newsletters. It’s a business. You’re the CEO and president of your own publishing house.

  8. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

  There are a lot of ways to publish your book and get it out to readers. I’m a big fan of experimenting and testing the waters. Do what works, and when it doesn’t work, change it and move forward. I’ve published more than sixty books and I�
��ve done it in every way possible. I’ve self-published, I’ve been published with a small press, and I’ve signed big contracts with major publishers. I’ve distributed my self-published titles among every possible vendor, and I’ve strategically moved an older series into Kindle Unlimited.

  Try everything. And stick with what works. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I make the most money in three areas:

  My mysteries sell well across all platforms, and most specifically at Apple Books. They sell well at Amazon, too, but Amazon is not the be-all and end-all for these types of books. There are a lot of readers using a lot of different devices to read. Take advantage of that.

  My romantic suspense series sells better on Amazon, so I put it in Kindle Unlimited. This is where I use Amazon ads to boost page reads, and then I amplify that by using my free days and rotating my Kindle Countdown Deals.

  I highly recommend audiobooks. They’re worth it. I started doing audiobooks for self-published works back in the early days, and I can tell you the sales have more than doubled every year. Audiobooks are huge, and if you’re looking for a good investment, then look no further.

  9. Don’t Be a Jerk…

  Seriously, don’t. You’d think this would be a given, but I’ve seen a lot of crazy things happening in the self-publishing world over the last ten years. When I first started writing, back in the day when you had to mail out all your manuscripts and query letters with an SASE, the writing community was extremely professional. It’s not a huge community. Word gets out about behavior. Especially bad behavior.