Whether you’re an author, artist or entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard “the money is in the list.” Building your email list gives you direct access to your clients, customers and fanbase. For the past several years I’ve used Mailchimp, and I continue to do so despite it’s problems (which I’ll discuss...
It’s almost November, which means Nanowrimo (national novel writing month) is coming. The rules are simple – start and finish 50,000 words of a new project in 30 days. Although it’s supposed to be fiction, many people use the momentum for non-fiction or to edit previous projects. As I mentioned in this article I wrote
I’ve blogged before about the book giveaways I’ve been running – they work well and build a targeted list quickly – but the added value in book giveaways is that the authors you include are likely to share your giveaway with their following. This week I put up a new giveaway, and got Lauren Kate
In several groups this week, a lot of my author friends started reporting worst-ever months and a drastic drop in income due to a sudden drop in page reads. For authors in Kindle Unlimited, page reads could often be as much as half the income generated from Amazon Kindle. Today, I saw a *hypothetical* explanation
UDPATE – also read this: Are advanced reader copies (ARCs) for book reviews illegal (against Amazon’s terms?) Amazon has been doing review purges for some time, but today was a massive glitch, with many authors seeing ALL of their reviews disappearing – both indie and traditionally published authors lost hundreds of reviews at once...
In the writing community, there are two basic ways of writing books. Pantsers just write, not knowing where they are going to end up. Plotters go into it with an organized plan and chapter outline. Neither (I believe) is inherently better. However, I do think:A) it’s much easier to finish a book if you plot it
I recently watched the movie “Genius” – which is about Thomas Wolfe and the editor who got him into print. The topic is a fascinating one, something I’ve discussed in previous posts, but fleshed out in more romantic detail in the movie. In short: “genius” is the pure, uncivilized, manic, raw, passionate...
RESULTS: The winner is Lauren Smith, who writes historical romance (and an upcoming dragon shifter). Thanks everyone for entering, I’ll link to your articles and try to drive some traffic. I plan to do more writing contests like this in the future! For the past 10 years I’ve been helping writers publish and
A few years ago I published a book called Write, Format, Publish, Promote. It’s a little outdated, so I just went through and fixed it up a bit – I’m going to make it permafree, to get lots of downloads and widen my funnel (free books are a great way to reach your target audience).
I think I spent $250 on my first book trailer, but I don’t do them anymore. There are better ways to market books, and it’s one more thing that sucks up time and energy. However, I have thought about the idea of grabbing some cool movie clips from Video Hive and getting someone on Fiverr to
There are some benefits to doing preorders on Kindle, but the main drawback is you can’t get reviews posted on a preorder book until after it’s live. Or can you? Actually there’s a way around this: Set up the book on Createspace also. Publish it to Amazon. But then, upload a new interior file and don’t
This is a very short post – mostly making a note to myself so I can use it later. I’m usually against “book promotion” on Twitter, instead I focus on connecting and providing value, sharing my blog posts but not usually selling my book or doing promotion. BUT Megan Crewe pointed out that “RT&F” (retweet...
