Category: My Books

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This Plague of Days: The mind virus is created

An autistic boy + The Ungrateful Living versus The Running Dead
An autistic boy + The Ungrateful Living versus The Running Dead

Look around at your world: power, conveniences, gasoline for your car and lots of food to choose from. The food chain is changing. A virus is spreading. Your world is falling apart. You’re meat.

Welcome to young Jaimie Spencer’s world. See the collapse of civilization through the eyes of a boy on the autism spectrum in America’s heartland. Watch the rise of the zombies  destroy London. Two forces. One collision course.

This Plague of Days is a horror serial. You can get five episodes for 99 cents each, week by week for a summer of grim fun or you can get all of Season 1 at a discount for just $3.99.

It’s going to be an amazing summer.

 

 

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#Video: This is the End movie review

This Plague of Days is launching this week! Watch this space for announcements, or, better, sign up for the newsletter!

Each new sign up gets a shout out for their book, podcast, website or business on the All That Chazz podcast.

For more information about this cool horror serial (featuring a hero who’s autistic and a mix of The Stand, Cell, World War Z and 28 Days Later) check out ThisPlagueOfDays.com.

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Another first on Vine! A contest and a reading from Self-help for Stoners

Self Help for Stoners JPEGHere’s the 411: I’m reading a funny short story from one of my books on Vine.

I’m skipping an All That Chazz podcast this week for something new and different. One of my favorite things is the Vine app. One of my favorite short stories from Self-help for Stoners is “Another Day at the Office.” Over the next few days, I’m going to post the excerpt on Vine, six seconds at a time. A little crazy, but fun. 

No one has ever read on Vine before, so I get to make my own rules. I’ll do a little at a time so I won’t flood anyone’s feed. Each post will have the entry number in sequence and the tag #SHFS. 

The Vine Contest

To enter to win this crime novel in paperback, put your guess in the comments of this post. Closest wins.
To enter to win this crime novel in paperback, put your guess in the comments of this post. Closest wins.

The person who guesses closest to the number of vines I have to post to get to the end of the story will get a paperback copy of my crime novel Bigger Than Jesus. (Hint: “Another Day at the Office” is around four pages long in trade paperback size.) Good luck!

Comedian Steven Wright (among a metric ton of Japanese schoolgirls) have written whole novels on Twitter, so an author reading a short story six seconds at a time isn’t that outlandish. I don’t have any stop motion skills, but I still wanted to try something different with Vine. This is it! Enjoy!

You can buy Self-help for Stoners and all my other books here.

Six Seconds 0301If you aren’t on Vine yet and you have an iPod, iPhone or iPad, click here to join the party. It’s free. Sign up. Then look me up (Robert Chazz Chute) and subscribe. Cheers!

Also, in case you didn’t know, I also wrote the first book about the Vine app. Grab it for just 99 cents by clicking the cover image. Please and thank you!

(If you’re really jonesing for a new podcast, you can always slip over to my Cool People Podcast and listen to the interviews there.) Have fun, everybody!

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Throttling You: And some of this isn’t very nice

Find Part 1 of this post, Amazon Throttled, on ChazzWrites.com.

Skip to Part 3: Me, Full Throttle for another answer for finding readers.

Time to wrestle and tell the dirty truth.

What else can you do to find readers for your books and give them the best chance in the Marketplace of Awesomeness? And what sucks? Here’s my take:

1. Are blog tours really doing it for you? Are blog readers converting to book readers? They should…but I don’t think they do nearly as much as we hope. If they did, I’d have certainly sold more books by now. Blog tours can work, but it takes a lot of work to provide unique content to each blog. Do that if you’re going to tour and hit the largest blogs first. (Also, once it’s posted to one blog, don’t repost it on your blog. Bad SEO.)

2. We complain readers focus too much on Free and reap the benefits without commitment. Oddly, we’re hoping to win over the world without paying a dime. We don’t have advertising budgets. It’s time to get real and set a budget and pay for help selling your books. Yes, we all want it to happen organically without extra work or money. We all just want to write. That’s not the way to bet. Grow up, stop wishing and spend money to make money.

3. Don’t do another author interview on yet another small blog unless you’re going to make it different and/or funny. Go for funny because those interviews all sound the same and yes, I know, we all drink coffee. I win for most caffeinated. What else you got? I’d rather hear about your choice of lingerie than endure another answer to the question: “How did you start writing and where do you get your ideas?”

4. Don’t do another blog post about how “content is king.” It’s either self-evident or it doesn’t really mean anything. I need more meat than that to click the buy button on your next marketing book. 

5. Don’t ask me to read another interview with one of your characters. I might be interested in that, but only after I’ve already read your book, not before. I’d love to know what happens to the main character in Fight Club after the book hits “The End”. However, before I knew what that book was, he’s just be another guy struggling with macho bullshit issues and a sleep disorder.

6. Will you please just take my advice and get Kit Foster to help you with your book cover? Get a graphic designer to help you. Do not do this yourself. Don’t even do it yourself if you’re a graphic designer. Please! Sweet baby Jesus, I’m begging you! Help me help Kit help you! Great book covers do not suck. Bad book covers hurt you. We all judge books by their covers.

7. Revamp your website. Get a custom banner. (Kit does those, too. Look at the top of this page.) Also: White field, black type, no exceptions. Your pretty pastels and all those flowery serifs are repelling me from your site and making me squint so, perhaps unfairly, your book doesn’t get a shot.

8. Be bolder with your next book. Come up with a new angle. There are no truly original stories, but you have to find something fresh to sell us. Have you read a single description of a romance book that doesn’t sound like hundreds of other romance books? Do something different and experimental. Whatever you do: Stand up and stand out! Start thinking audiobooks, for instance. (But it’s still way too early to bother with setting up an app for your book. People aren’t using the medium that way in any numbers.)

9. Work harder with your editorial team. Expand your beta reader bunch. Make it cleaner. Don’t wait for perfection, but excellence will do nicely.

10. We write to be read. Shyness is not helping you. Do something to promote your books every day. Do not whine that this is necessary. If you aren’t going to promote, you may as well write for your desk drawer. That’s okay, if that’s what you want. (I sincerely doubt that’s what you want.) And stop tweeting book links without imagination.

Six Seconds 030111. Use video more. We are visual creatures, so use YouTube more on your website or try Vine. If they’re quick, video blogs are interesting. (WordPress allows you to do audio blogs pretty easily, too.) Reach people in new ways. Buy Six Seconds, The Unauthorized Guide to How to Build Your Business with the Vine App by Robert Chazz Chute. (I told you it didn’t pay to be shy.) The Vine app is an example of a new way to reach new readers. It’s video Twitter and the time to jump in early is slipping away. Join now. 

In Part 3, Me: Full Throttle, I’ll show you how I’m reaching out to new readers in new ways. You could do this yourself or even be part of my strategy, if you’re cool enough. Are you cool enough? Click here.