I’ve been in love with these lamps since I saw them about a year ago, so I just ordered a bunch of them to use for Christmas presents. I’m planning to add covers from classic books to each of them. I’m giving away three of them for the holidays (they make great gifts!) I’ve seen these sell The 3 secrets to book...
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 The 3 secrets to book...
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 The 3 secrets to book...
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 The 3...
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 The 3 secrets to book marketing, and a haunted...
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 The 3 secrets to book marketing...
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 The 3 secrets to book marketing, and a...
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 The 3 secrets to...
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. I chose this one… it’s pretentious enough to make me self-conscious until I work my ass off and publish a legacy of books It’s great article, bemoaning the The 3 secrets to book...
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, The 3 secrets...
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 The 3...
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...
