Creativindie Experiments in self-publishing, productivity and building a creative empire

Writing fiction is hard. I’ve said before that I don’t suffer from the insecurity most writers face when writing, because I know that my books will sell (because I’m writing them specifically to satisfy a target audience). But the truth is, I still flounder halfway through every book and doubt whether or not I can make it good. Recently I …

UPDATE: after several months of work, we just launched a brand new 3D book cover mockup tool, and it’s amazing. Go check it out! I’ve been trying to find a way for authors to make better graphics for a long time – for book covers mostly, but also for book promotion graphics and 3D mockups. I’m still trying to find …

I’m a slow writer… I published two books in January but have been mostly brain-dead since. I even pushed back the preorder for my next book… but now it’s got to get done. To encourage myself to write more in March, I’m sponsoring a writing challenge. Two months ago I was on a cruise with some writers and we decided …

There is a demand for publishing short stories, but the money is in ebooks. Specifically, Amazon’s “short reads” section, which is broken down by reading time for books less than 100 pages. This week I got to peak at a report from k-lytics.com, who analysed more than 14,000 books to assess the commercial attractiveness of 144 Kindle Short Read categories. …

I’m not a fast writer. And I’m not a pantser. I need to outline first and no exactly what happens in the story. But once I have that part, the problem becomes motivating myself to sit down and fill in the outline, consistently.  I usually feel drained after writing for 15 minutes, and if I can do a couple thousand …

I’ve been making a living online for almost a decade, but I still have trouble pricing my services and offers. I usually focus on making everything a good deal. I include lots of bonuses and options to make the value seem incredible. I also tend to price low. This is probably a mistake. I see book coaches or other people offering …

I don’t always share income reports, and I wasn’t really going to talk about how much my books earn until I hit 10K a month in revenue, but I think it’s also important to point out that my methods are working.     5K a month from Kindle books is nothing to sneeze at, and the vast bulk of that …

I tend to go overboard with my courses and tutorials, and am trying to simplify.  Today I’m at the San Francisco writer’s conference and I keep finding myself repeating my book launch formula to authors. I told one writer, “Authors don’t like book marketing because they think it means telling strangers about your book.” She said, “But that’s what book …

This isn’t actually a huge deal, but my recent book on book marketing isn’t doing so well (ranking at around 5ok). But that’s embarrassing because books about book marketing should do well, right? I mean, if it’s a good book and they guy knows about book marketing, it should be smoking! But that’s not true, because, as I point out …

My friend Ricardo from Reedsy just sent this awesome infographic. It covers the basics of work with a designer, but misses some of the important stuff (what is a cover that sells? What actually goes on the cover?). They address some of that in the actual article on cover design – and the main advice is “hire a professional and let them …