Nanowrimo is coming! Whether or not you’ve participated before, it’s a wonderful chance to focus on your writing. It’s fun to commit yourself to writing 50,000 words in a month. It proves to you that you can do it, and that writing is just about adding more words everyday. The problem with Nanowrimo is that, after it’s over, you’ll probably …

UPDATE: This post was hypothetical, but I’m not actually going to do any of these things. The reason is, it’s important to keep your “also-boughts” clean; which means, you want people buying your books who are buying other books in your genre. There are lots of ways to make that happen. But getting a whole bunch of fast sales or …

Today we did an awesome live class on building a bestselling author website, including topics to writing about, content marketing, getting more traffic and email subscribers, and design and branding. One of the things I recommended was to write articles, then turn those into Powerpoints for SlideShare, then record yourself talking about it for YouTube, then breaking them into individual …

This is a slide from the live masterclass we ran today on building an author platform, but we went quickly so I’m posting it here. These are opt-in ideas you can use: make something that appeals just to your ideal reader. For the the #1 best idea is “Signup for a summary of my favorite (genre) books each month” or similar …

I made this infographic to help authors figure out their author websites. If you like it, share it on Pinterest/Twitter/Facebook/Everywhere! SELL MORE BOOKS (without spam). I wrote a free book with all my best book launch and marketing tips - if your book isn't selling and you're not sure why, this will definitely boost your sales. There's even a free …

    You can do anything. There is no limit to your glorious creative potential.   However, making things that other people like and that benefit other people are much more likely to bring esteem, financial security, comfort and happiness. Most creative people passionately buy into the idea that “True Art” is never made to please others – but you …

2018 UPDATES: Amazon has been doing “purges” of reviews and a lot of authors have seen hundreds of reviews deleted. Read this to keep Amazon from deleting your reviews. Also for a while Amazon was displaying the review with the most comments on top, instead of those voted most helpful… but that didn’t seem to stick, so the rest of this …

If you’re any kind of writer, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “show don’t tell.” It basically means, don’t tell readers what happened, or why it matters, or how the characters feel about it. You need to demonstrate those things with good writing, and by letting the scene and action and characters show readers what’s happening directly, without you getting in the …

I’ve been running this blog, and several other websites, without ever focusing on earning money. That’s a mistake for two reasons. 1. It means I’m more focused on myself than on finding out what readers want and giving it to them. 2. It means I didn’t pay attention to conversion rates. Conversion rates = getting accidental blog traffic to stick …

Update – I’m almost done with my first month living in a castle for Nanowrimo. I’ll post a wrap-up soon with what I’ve learned… and I set up a giveaway to get started for next year. >>Sign up here.<<   By 2016 I’ll be a full-time author, which means I can finally do Nanowrimo properly, with zero distractions and 100% …