I just clicked on a few goal-setting articles like this from Facebook, and they sucked. So I wrote my own. For me, and a lot of other people I know, 2014 was a solidly mediocre year – some growth, some sales, some new experiences, but also a lot of mediocrity and boring stuff. That’s not
I used to be a copious journal writer. I still am, but now it’s all digital in a text file, and I never go back through it. I can’t pick it up like I can with notebooks and flip through, rediscovering my younger self. Instead, as of 2014, I have Facebook’s “Year in Review.” At
I’ve known I needed to be using SlideShare for some time, but haven’t mustered the motivation to complete the labor intensive task of making Powerpoint presentations. If you’ve never heard of SlideShare, it’s like YouTube for Powerpoints. It’s automatically connected with LinkedIn, so you can publish your...
Earlier this year I spoke at the Author Marketing Live conference in Cleveland about book cover design and book marketing. Today Jim at AMC sent me the video – which is not publicly listed and not supposed to be given away for free – but he’s letting me share it with you. I’m an awkward,
Christmas is coming! You need to buy something that literary genius in your family will love, but they are so hard to please. You can’t go wrong with something that encourages them to finish their book, and tells them that you support and believe in their dream. Here are some gift ideas, ranging from silly
Today I read two articles. The first is the plagiarism case indie author Rachel Ann Nunes raised against Tiffanie Rushton, an elementary school teacher. Tiffanie allegedly took Rachel’s self-published book, added some sex scenes and republished it as her own. Rachel has already spent $20,000 in court fees and is using PRweb.com to get the...
Just saw this on Twitter: Medium is appealing to Nanowrimo authors to boost traffic. That in itself isn’t a big deal. Around 400,000 writers participated in Nanowrimo this year. That’s an easy, clear target. I appealed to some of the same target with my 30 covers in one day stunt. And we put out a
This week I published a side project – a book I hadn’t planned to write but developed in under 1 month – as a way to test out some things. I was motivated to write it because a group of my Facebook friends were putting a joint promotion of productivity and time-management titles. I didn’t
I wanted to participate in Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) so I offered to do some book covers for Nanowrimo authors. Here are the results. I did them all in under one day, so they aren’t my finest work, but some of them are plenty good enough to use. I made duplicates of a few.
I keep telling people to make their books free, followed by 99cents, and they keep ignoring me. So here’s a short case study to show how freaking effective pricing hacks can be for dominating Amazon. Take a look at #2 up there, the “Feel Good Myth.” Prime real estate you couldn’t even buy –
I see a lot of small publishing companies and book publicity “experts” offering book marketing packages that look something like this: Standard Author website Fan e-mail list for your website Social media accounts with weekly updates (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+) Search engine optimization Book listing on Goodreads...
Hopefully you’ve figured out that you want your authors website to sell books. Maybe you also know you need to get people to sign up to your email list somehow. But here are 5 other important things you’ve probably never thought about. 1. Get out of the way You’re a writer, not a photographer or
