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

About a month ago I became obsessed with making some adult coloring books. The first few are nearly done (will be one Amazon in a few days), so I can start talking about them. This one is a memorial coloring book for the 2016 presidential election.     I’m still thinking of putting it on Kickstarter, except I don’t really …

This week I wrote and published 3 adult coloring books, with several more in the works. This is one of my favorites. It’s a very different kind of adult coloring book. There are no lines. It’s more like a guided set of self-actualization exercises, which asks you to imagine and draw specific scenarios. I’m giving 5 copies away – you can …

Since I started writing fiction, I learned my design skills and art background make me really good at visualizing scenes. I even developed some mental tricks for creating powerful, resonant scenes that stick in people’s minds. I started thinking of each scene as one perfect picture, with a flash of color to draw the eye – an object representing the …

I got a negative review today. It’s not bad; actually it’s pretty good for a negative review… because it’s complaining about how I’m choosing to publish, while admitting the writing is good and she’ll probably buy the next book. Negative reviews like that are probably better than positive reviews. People don’t really trust 5 star reviews and most people will …

Yesterday I sent out an email about how I published 4 books in 3 months. I didn’t write them all in 3 months, they were all half written already and I finished them. Still, I got some skeptical comments, for example about how I skipped the editing process (oh the horror!). But I also got an email saying I was …

For the past 2 years I’ve been procrastinating on my PhD program. Classes were hard, but I finished my credits with a high GPA. That’s not the problem. One of the requirements for graduation is submitting an article to a peer-reviewed journal and getting it published. This was a major hurdle for me. In part, because I don’t like writing …

This video is about some of the major platforms you can use to market your books – and how to use them (without being annoying or spammy). I also talk about repurposing content, using LinkedIn Pulse and Medium, answering questions on Quora, Reddit and Facebook, and using Goodreads to show up #1 in Google for your exact genre. Want to …

These could easily be three separate topics but I’m lumping them together because they form one branch of my marketing efforts… repurposing your content. Let’s say you wrote a great blog post and you want more traffic. Turn your blog post into a Powerpoint (I hate Powerpoint actually, I use Google Slides). Then make a video of you giving the …

A few weeks ago I got obsessed with adult coloring books, after realizing that about half of the top bestsellers on Amazon fall into this category, and that even the boring ones are doing pretty well (top 1000 or so, any are in the top 100). In contrast, my fiction is closer to 10,000, which means I’m selling about 10 …

A month ago I published my first fiction. I was stressed about it. I checked my ranking every 20 minutes. And I wrote two major tutorials chronicling the experience, including all the stuff I did to make my book a bestseller. Yesterday I published two more. And it was so .  much . easier … Firstly, I built a huge …