Other Stuff

Jeff Goins has a new book that he’s giving away to help you find your life’s purpose called “The Art of Work” with $250 worth of bonuses. If you like ‘The War of Art’ you should click here to check out his offer. All of Jeff Goins’ materials and websites are super professional and well-designed, so make sure you poke around his platform …

I’ve written before about author websites but now that I’ve started making videos I can offer a more ‘hands-on’ approach. I volunteered to fix Randall Wood’s website, which was an eyesore: his books are already doing well but I knew he could be selling twice as much if he fixed up his website and his marketing funnel a little. As …

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 that if you write, then …

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 for Tshirts. You set a …

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 least I thought I did, …

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 to practical.   Here are …

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 have one of those, but …

I made ebooks for a client recently – the ebooks came out at 15mb. I’ve never paid much attention to file size, but she pointed out that, if you are participating in Amazon’s 70% royalty option, they charge a fee per MB every time your book is downloaded – right now in the US it’s $0.15 per MB. Check the …

For a lot of authors, “book marketing” still means something like advertising or publicity. In other words, you put something in front of people that tells them about the book, and that they should go buy it. Here’s why that doesn’t work: People need repetition before they notice, then take action. So they’ll need to see whatever it is you’re …

I’m at the airport in Houston, waiting for my connecting flight back to Portland (after spending a few days talking about book marketing in Cleveland). Since I can’t get much work done on the road, I just watched the new Houdini mini-series starring Adrien Brody. It shows Houdini in a mostly sympathetic light: he’s a struggling self-starter, and entrepreneur, a …