What if I told you I could help you sell %500 more books in less than a month; that I had personal media ties; that I could get you top exposure everywhere and keep the momentum going to sell thousands of books for years to come? Obviously, such an opportunity wouldn’t come cheap. If I
I just saw an interesting sales letter for a program that generates a cheesy social media chatroom box. The idea is actually pretty awesome, and I’ve seen these around: instead of a big colorful ad that says “LOOK!!! CHEAP!!! AWESOME!!!” the ad seems to “reveal” a private conversation about some secret, insider...
I thought I’d take a break from graphic design and watch a scary movie. Danielle Radcliffe’s “The Woman in Black” (very good, very scary, by the way, had me jumping like a little girl). The first 10 minutes or so was a little rough and obvious – working the background story in deliberately and without
For a long time I’ve known I need to learn how to make and edit ebooks for kindle (.prc/mobi) and B&N (epub), but have been stuck by the steep learning curve. There are lots of different softwares to use, none of them seem to work well together, and converting word files into various ebook formats
Update: this is an older post that still gets a lot of traffic, so I made a video on some critically important pen name tips that will help you sell more books. Watch the video to learn more. For a long time I thought using an author pen name was disingenuous. Plus it gets confusing
Millions of people are dusting off manuscripts and cranking out self-published novels for the kindle and ipad market; and some indie authors are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. We are experiencing something of a “gold rush” of indie publishing, and everybody is desperate to sell more books. If you’re familiar with...
Creativindie is a good idea that I plan to explode into an enormous helpful blog for indie authors and writers; hence I’m looking for a wordpress theme that will make it user-friendly and have that “professional blogger” look that earns nearly instant credibility. If you know what I’m talking about – the clean...
How to advertise your book and why you should. There’s a self-published book being advertised on Facebook called “Replenish the Earth”. The cover is ho-hum. The first time I saw it I smirked, thinking the author was throwing their money away. The 10th time I saw it, I bought the book. Why? Exposure creates interest
I’ve been reading a bunch of thriller indie novels lately that aren’t at all thrilling. This is because newbie authors frequently make the same mistakes when writing thrillers and fail to build up any suspense – hence, in this post I’m going to teach you how to build tension and keep readers immersed in your
My name is Derek, which means “leader of the people.” My sister’s name is “Terra” which means earth. Both names reflect our parents’ backgrounds, ethnicity, and popular names of the time period. When you’re choosing character names for your novel, you can pretend you’re planning out the...
Preparing for Nanowrimo 2011, I’ve been reading Alan Watt’s The 90 Day Novel: Unlock the Story Within. I love it. Alan coaches you on how to relax and get the work done. Here are a few of the most important tips if you’ve been wanting to write a novel but can’t seem to find time. 1)
A novel, any novel, thrives on conflict, resolution and change. You need to show readers what’s at stake, then allow it to happen. Show the characters worrying and trying to prevent things – then always let those things happen. Everything the character does makes things worse. There is conflict on every page that is believable
