First, let me catch you up to speed. I’ve been doing online business for about 10 years. I get pretty good, very specific traffic (people who want to publish a book) and get about 100 optins a day with no ads or promotion. The problem is, I’ve had trouble turning that traffic into real revenue.
Last year I shared a castle with some writer friends for Nanowrimo and got featured in CNN. We’ve decided we like living in castles and want to do more of it. Specifically, I love how effective I can be with someone when I’m actually in the same room, and can really dig deep and focus
A few years ago I started collecting quotes and book marketing tips from publishing experts – I put them up online and divided them into topics for easy navigating, but forget to tell anyone about it. Someday I’ll organize the content into a book or course, but for now it’s all free. If any
It’s really hard to describe how to make a great author website, so I made a video critiquing 15 real-life examples. These aren’t *perfect* author websites, but they are representative of the type of websites most authors have. If you watch the whole video, you’ll learn a lot about setting up a website for authors.
“Can you really make a living as a writer?” Last year I decided to put my PhD in Literature to good use and write some novels; specifically, I wanted to see whether I could actually make a living as a writer. The short answer is YES. I made about 35K in six months publishing fiction
Last year I rented a chateau in France for Nanowrimo. We got some great press coverage and had an amazing time. All in all, I think we did pretty well. I love the idea of running writing retreats in castles, so I’m doing it again this year. Last year I built a big sales page
Over the past seven years, I’ve built a few platforms that get a decent amount of traffic. For the past three years, I’ve been trying to convert some of that traffic into revenue through digital products and courses, so I can focus more time on my writing. Although I have had some success, I’m also
We’ve spent several months in the USA this year, and I’m already itching to get back to Europe. The slow pace, the clean air, the historic buildings… I just always feel more creatively inspired if my surroundings are uplifting. Our current plan is Portugal in September, Prague or Frankfurt in October, a castle in Austria
A few years ago I wrote a post about how authors can use press releases to actually sell books. But the main takeaway was that authors shouldn’t try and do a press release because most of the time, they haven’t actually done anything newsworthy. I’ve somewhat modified my position, because: doing a press release might
I was pretty sure I sucked at Amazon ads. Which is mostly fine: I’m still making money and I figured I couldn’t *really* spend big on Amazon ads until I had a bunch of finished series out. Tonight I took a look at the ads I’m still running. My average cost per click is about $0.30;
Full disclosure: I wrote the title of this post in 2015, before I’d actually published any fiction, so 1000 reviews and 100K downloads was my intended outcome, the biggest goal I could dream off. That said, a year and a half later, I’ve gotten far more than 100K downloads (194179, to be exact) and do have
Tari Akpodiete made this awesome chart of cover design resources. Click the image to view the PDF in Dropbox, then zoom in to see all the links and content. Follow Tari on Twitter Derek MurphyI’m a philosophy dropout with a PhD in Literature. I covet a cabin full of cats, where I can write
