Confession: I let mediocre movies run in the background on my computer when I’m working, so I can “watch them” without them really sucking up too much time. Normally, the Night of the Museum movies are a little fun and cute. Not serious, not hilarious, but not terrible either. Except this one. The quest: the tablet is failing, so EVERYBODY …

It’s Sunday. I’m feeling sad, nostalgic, as I tend to do on Sundays (through strangely, haven’t in a long time…) I’m not stressed, which is a major change – I’ve been behind on work for going on two years, but I stopped accepting clients until I can catch up and things are starting to become manageable again. The strange thing is, I’ve …

This year will be my third WDS (Word Domination Summit – a meetup for people living unconventionally). I wrote this post just before last year’s conference, and had a lot of people tell me they’d read it before coming and it had set their mind at ease. So I’m updating it and reposting it for 2015, in hopes it will do …

Today I saw this post about Richard Prince taking other people’s Instagram photos without permission or warning and selling them in a New York art gallery for $90,000 each. It’s not his first offence: he’s previously taken photos from magazines or from other photographers and changed them just a little bit (like cutting out and swapping them figures). He’s been …

The title of this post is a little too violent, but it exemplifies the purpose of this post: your subtitles and taglines need to engage readers. Firstly: a subtitle is usually what goes on a non-fiction book, and non-fiction book readers are mostly looking for information and content, so you need to focus on keywords (sort of, more on that later). A …

It’s hard to double your income if you have a “normal” job. You need to control your own salary first. But luckily, you don’t have to quit your job and move to Thailand to do it. Instead, build a ‘side gig’ business you can run in your time off or on weekends. Keep at it until you’ve replaced your full-time …

A couple years ago I learned how to format my own ebooks; since then I’ve done hundreds. Now I’m fairly decent at taking a Word or InDesign file, converting it to epub and editing it with Sigil, a free editing program. Recently I decided to break apart one of my first non-fiction books, a 150,000 word beast of historical non-fiction, …

I’m finishing up a Udemy course on book cover design and uploading some videos to YouTube. My videos aren’t very professional or well done, and I don’t have a lot of followers, but at least my cover designs don’t suck. This video from AuthorHouse, on the other hand, uses dozens of very ugly, unprofessional book cover designs as examples of “Good” …

  Indie authors have gotten much better at understanding the importance of a professionally designed book, and many of them are hiring quality designers to help make their book look just as good as any other in the bookstore. To differentiate their books from the self-published horde, however, traditional publishers have increasingly been using specialty printing options unavailable to indie …

I talk a lot about book cover design, but when you start out with that blank canvas and your eager imagination, you’re bound to get lost in the possibilities of what to put on your book cover. So let me simplify things for you, a lot. First you can write down all the stuff you dream about putting on the …