I’m thrilled to see a new book out by Chris Guillebeau called “The $100 Dollar Startup.” I’ve followed Chris with a lot of interest, being a fellow globe-trotting Portlander, and have enjoyed many of his books and products. This one in particular looks like it will focus on precisely the topics that I’m developing Creativindie around: supporting yourself entirely through …

Book sales may seem like a mysterious void of uncertainty, but the truth is most authors fail for very predictable reasons. Luckily, if you’re doing these things wrong, they’re (mostly) easy to fix. 1) You have no reviews. Are you driving people to buy from an amazon page with no reviews on it? Good luck – reviews sell books. You …

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 said I can do all …

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 information. With our natural curiosity, need to socialize, …

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 subtlety… as the protagonist is …

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 takes finesse, coding and lots …

Update: this is an old post that still gets a lot of traffic, so I made a video in 2018 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 to readers if …

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 “The Secret”, positive thinking, goal setting, visualization, affirmation …

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, crisp, bold style of many pro blogger …

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 and curiosity. Who is this …