This article is older, make sure you read this new one about a more recent press campaign. I just finished a rather long post on book advertising – in it I mentioned a mediocre book promotion blog making a lot of money on book advertisements. I was curious what sort of traffic they get so I used www.alexa.com to find out. …

I’m a casual browser of book marketing and promotion sites. I also deal with a lot of authors asking about book promotion companies and services. In general, I say to steer clear. Paying someone else to market your book is a losing gamble, and you’ll very rarely make even a fraction of your money back. As they say on their …

If you’ve published a book, you probably already know that reviews are essential to sales: having a bunch of reviews on your Amazon page should be your #1 pre-marketing goal. But recent book review scandals have made everybody skeptical and overly prejudiced against paid book reviews. Paid book reviews – it is assumed – are automatically untrustworthy, false, fake, misleading, …

Recently a lot of my authors have been sending the printing requirements for the small presses and publishers they’ve signed up with. These are author services companies, that usually charge a huge up-front fee (average $1000 for ebook publishing, $3000 for ebook and POD print book). But since these publishers and small presses have really ugly cover design options and …

Developing my own philosophy of Creativindie and working on a manifesto for this site, I’ve been reading all the books on creativity that I can find. Some offer valuable tips. Others are inspirational but mostly useless in terms of making your own success through creative talents. These books range between academic researchers with real evidence, and seat-of-the-pants artists who got …

I mainly use stock photography for my book cover designs, but if I can’t find anything, I search long and hard to find an alternative. With book cover art, you need to be careful to get permission so you aren’t breaking copyright. But at the same time, copyright laws are confusing and open to creative interpretation. Here are some things …

I’ve been designing covers for a few years, and I often have to confront cover design myths perpetuated by indie-publishing gurus and thought leaders. There’s a lot of advice out there for indie authors, and some of it is contradictory, which has the unfortunate effect of allowing indie authors to accept the advice they like and agree with, and ignore …

Indie publishers are slowly coming to realize the importance of an amazing book cover. Since many self-publishing authors are starting out on a very small budget however, homemade, DIY book covers are still a popular choice. But be forewarned: although book cover designs come in a wide variety, publishers consistently use reliable, time-tested techniques and guidelines to catch your attention …

I’ve been slow to adopt to social media. I’m only finally getting used to and starting to enjoy Twitter, mostly because I have an iPhone now and the user interface is more intuitive. People follow me and I follow them back; because I operate in self-publishing circles, that means I have a ton of authors and author services on my …

To spam or not to spam? This shouldn’t even be a question anymore, but now that Creativindie is growing, I keep seeing spammy comments all the time. I’ve decided (probably unfairly) to make an example out of a comment I just got by Peter Sacco. This is what a blog owner sees when you post a comment on their blog, …