Hands down, the best book marketing – virtually the only book marketing that is still effective – is growing your email list. To do that, you need a powerful optin offer. Optin offers have to be concrete, specific and give free value that your target readers desire. Recently I made a small change on mine:
UPDATE: After months of work, we’ve just launched the coolest online 3D book cover creator in the world. It’s amazing, and totally free. Go check it out! My graphic design skills give me a huge advantage for book marketing. It’s almost unfair. That’s why for years I’ve wanted some free online tools you can use
Somebody asked me to recommend a book list recently so I did some searching and found a dozen or so lists of “best books for writers.” But few of them are very good. The majority just deal with the inspiration and motivation, to get you to actually start writing. The current pop culture ideology is
I got sucked into a novel yesterday, which I rarely do. The writing is great. Opening sentence: “In strewn banners that lay like streamers from a longago parade the sun’s fading seraphim rays gleamed onto the hood of the old Ford and ribboned the steel with the meek orange of a June tomato straining at
Recently Nick Stephenson and Joanna Penn have been talking about “reader magnets” – or list building by giving people a reason to follow you (usually a free ebook). This isn’t a new tactic, I’m pretty sure I stressed it in Book Marketing is Dead over a year ago, but I still see very few authors doing
Bestselling horror writers James Thorn asked for some design feedback on a logo he’s making. Something kind of scary, like this one from American Horror Story. This was his first attempt: Not bad, I can see what he’s going for. In general, bevel and inner shadow should be avoided. They look cool and 3D,
I’ve written a lot about book marketing. Some people read my books and learn how to do it right. Other people are lazy, so they just wait for any old offer to appear. Something I see being done far too often, is the invitation to write a guest post for a small blog with low
I don’t remember exactly how we decided to move to Prague; we were in Bangkok talking to Simon Whistler (Rocking Self-Publishing Podcast) and I’m tired of Taiwan – mostly because, I need to be surrounded with people excited about similar projects and there are extremely few self-publishers here. And now suddenly it’s...
The world is changing quickly, and a large part of that change is the shift from standard 9 to 5 career jobs to life-affirming, self-fulfilling creative small businesses. But the edge between creative expression and commercial success is a harrowing journey demanding delicate and dangerous balance. Can our love for creation persist amid client...
This year I met a lot of people who are making Tshirts. Why Tshirts? Because creative people who can draw cool things have trouble selling just arts or prints. Tshirts are wearable art, and people like to wear cool/indie/artsy shirts that stand out. First I met the TeeSpring guys. TeeSpring is like Kickstarter – crowdfunding
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
