The title of this post is tongue-in-cheek, but it highlights an important issue. A lot of authors have been burned by predatory publishing companies, marketing firms or services promising the world and delivering little. Usually, authors spend way too much on their first book and see no results, then spend two years figuring out what
Being an author can be a thankless job. Not everyone appreciates how hard you work. So I made some “merit badge” style awards you can use as a visual reminder of your successes. I added in some common milestones, but you can white them out and replace them with your own goals. Remember that even
I’ve talked before about how doing boxsets and anthologies can be great for building your author platform – not only to reach more readers, but also to build long term relationships with other authors in your genre. And I’ve talked a lot about doing book giveaways to encourage shares and promotion; and also about doing
I’m writing this post in response to a new infographic dividing up the Myers-Briggs personality types into Harry Potter characters. First of all, I don’t think Malfoy actually fits the INTJ personality type, actually. But I do think “strategists” are usually misunderstood and often villainized. Recently I’ve...
I had good intentions. I meant to boil down my most recent book launch into a simple, one page roadmap. Instead, like usual, I have a sprawling document worth of notes – I’m going to share it here so it can start being useful. Make sure you scroll down to the end and read “my
I’ve wanted to be a 5-figure author since I hung out with Tom Corson-Knowles in Vancouver. He had dozens of books out and was making 10K a month in book sales. How amazing would it be to write books full time, and never need to work for anyone else? Last year I started publishing fiction.
Recently I figured out that far more people are searching for “how to write a book” than “how to market a book” – because far more people want to write books than people who actually finish writing one. The insight I gained from that was, I can’t just be targeting clients and customers where I want
Writing fiction is hard. I’ve said before that I don’t suffer from the insecurity most writers face when writing, because I know that my books will sell (because I’m writing them specifically to satisfy a target audience). But the truth is, I still flounder halfway through every book and doubt whether or not I can
UPDATE: after several months of work, we just launched a brand new 3D book cover mockup tool, and it’s amazing. Scroll down for the direct link (it’s free). I’ve been trying to find a way for authors to make better graphics for a long time – for book covers mostly, but also for book promotion
I’m a slow writer… I published two books in January but have been mostly brain-dead since. I even pushed back the preorder for my next book… but now it’s got to get done. To encourage myself to write more in March, I’m sponsoring a writing challenge. Two months ago I was on a cruise with
There is a demand for publishing short stories, but the money is in ebooks. Specifically, Amazon’s “short reads” section, which is broken down by reading time for books less than 100 pages. This week I got to peak at a report from k-lytics.com, who analysed more than 14,000 books to assess the commercial attractiveness of
I’m not a fast writer. And I’m not a pantser. I need to outline first and no exactly what happens in the story. But once I have that part, the problem becomes motivating myself to sit down and fill in the outline, consistently. I usually feel drained after writing for 15 minutes, and if I
