An author friend of mine used a phrase this week I hadn’t heard before: he said I need to make sure “my also-boughts were clean.” If you just drive your friends and family to your book during launch, your book will start showing up next to whatever else they bought on Amazon recently. Also-boughts are huge drivers of Amazon. After …

Tonight I had a chance to sit down with Mark Coker of Smashwords, and he convinced me to put the books I’m working on for sale as preorders. Although I’ve heard Mark talk about preorders before, I wasn’t planning on using preorders as part of my marketing plan. This article is about what changed my mind, why preorders might be …

This post is about how I used book giveaways to build a big list of targeted readers before published my first novel – it really helped with hitting #1 and getting a bunch of book reviews quickly. However, after getting over 50K readers on my lists, I realized I wasn’t engaging them enough – I didn’t have an autoresponder series to …

This feels like a very dumb post to write. But I just had an epiphany I thought I’d share. I’ve never liked emailing my blog posts to my email lists. I figure they signed up for free stuff, not to be updated with every post. But I just realized that’s a huge mistake. I should be sending links to my …

I wanted to make a quick video about how to use Mailchimp to setup your email optins, autoresponders and signup forms; instead I talked for three hours about email marketing. So here’s a free crash course video series on setting up Mailchimp and using it to build a list, and how to engage that list with great content, and how to …

For about a year (or more) I’ve been blogging about all the cool things I’m going to do to market my books, but haven’t had the chance to try any of them yet because I’m still working on the writing. The main thing everybody says to do is write a series. Other people are writing serials. Some authors get confused …

There’s a lot of things I could say about the Lego Movie (2014). It’s a perfect representation of the hero’s journey, pulled so closely from contemporary remixes (Tron, the Matrix) to seem like every movie at once. The hero, like all good heroes, is young and untested. Foolish, an outcast, alone. His motivation is merely to make friends and be …

I published this last year on Medium but since it’s almost November again… I recently found out about the “War on #amwriting” while researching for a tattoo befitting someone involved in publishing, that announces to the world what I do.A Defense of #amwriting (and NaNoWriMo)  I chose this one…it’s pretentious enough to make me self-conscious until I work my ass …

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 …