Brittany Geragotelis is the latest self-published author to be snapped up by a major publishing house after selling a ton of books through WattPad (an online writing community).
Here are some commonalities of her success and the success of people like Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath. Since stories like these are becoming more and more common (yay!), I am keeping a list of them, and every time I hear about one, I make notes on what they are doing right, so I can tell my clients (and my readers) to do the same.
No surprises here, this is the kind of thing we tell authors, agents and publishers every single day:
She’s smart: She blogs, she writes, she was managing editor at American Cheerleader magazine for 10 years. Holla!
She’s social: Geragotelis has engaged a large community of readers (this time over on WattPad, which I had not heard of until today, but which I am now totally going to check out). She is also active on Twitter and her Facebook Fan Page, at http://www.facebook.com/BrittanyTheBookSlayer.
She’s findable: Geragotelis is absolutely discoverable through her blog (http://www.brittanythebookslayer.blogspot.com/), on Twitter, and of course on WattPad.
She’s savvy: As if to illustrate the point of a whole different article I’m writing, Geragotelis engaged a real-live art director / designer to make her (super awesome) book covers. These covers are genre-appropriate, show that the author is savvy about her demographic (which indicates that her writing will appeal to them as well).
She put in lots and lots of writing hours. Before this “Cinderella” moment, Brittany Geragotelis was a writer just like you with SIX UNPUBLISHED NOVELS. This basically means if you have five unpublished novels, you are not allowed to get depressed.
Here’s the full Publisher’s Weekly article, in case you’re interested!
