Tag Archive - The Emotion Thesaurus

The Connection between Character Emotion and Reader Empathy

Today’s guest post is by Becca Puglisi.

Do you know how many books are on the market today? Neither do I; I can’t count that high. I do know that in 2015 alone, over a million books were published.

This is awesome for readers, but it creates a problem for authors looking to create a fan base. Not only do we need customers to find our books, we need them to love them—enough to finish them and go on to consume everything else we have to offer.

To make it in this crowded space, we need to attract readers who are obsessed with our work. We want them staying up late and oversleeping because they couldn’t put our book down, texting friends to tell them how awesome it is, and running to the computer when they’re done to see if there are more coming out.

Basically, we want raving fans—customers who read all of our stuff and do the word-of-mouth marketing for us. But how do we get this kind of response to our books? Continue Reading…

Making Your Book Launch Stand Out

I’m always too busy to do book launches, but I know they are important—just one of those things I shake my head at, wishing I had the time and knew the best way to go about doing one. Last year I watched my blogger friend Angela Ackerman (The Bookshelf Muse) launch her nonfiction writing craft book The Emotion Thesaurus—a compilation and expansion on many months’ posts on how writers can show characters expressing emotion (showing, not telling, which is so important). I joined in on some of the fun the week of the launch and helped by tweeting and posting about her book. One year after launch, she’s sold more than 20,000 copies, so I asked her to share what she did and how writers can launch their books successfully. What interested me particularly was how and why she decided to self-publish. Here’s her post:

A book release is both exciting and terrifying. When my coauthor Becca Puglisi and I launched The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To Character Expression, we seesawed between euphoria and dread. Two writers, unpublished and unproven, launching a self published “how-to” book about writing? How could we possibly compete with books like Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel, Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, or an arsenal of popular writing books from Writer’s Digest? Continue Reading…