I’m a big fan of helping indie authors – I don’t think anyone can call me selfish with my time or resources (I give away a lot of both, freely). But I also don’t retweet other authors very often. In fact, I actively purge my feed of book promotions or spam. And I unfollow authors who share them. Twitter is …

Hitting #1 in the Free categories on Amazon isn’t that hard. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t qualify you as a bestselling author. Hitting #1 in the Paid categories is harder, but not that hard. I did it today with 64 sales. I’m a bestselling author on Amazon right now. And some of my books are bestsellers semi-often. But that …

Firstly, let me say I don’t always do a “year in review” post because I’m inconsistent, and I don’t think many people would read or care. I should also tell you I have no idea what I’m doing, am very much a beginner at this game of online blogging, making money on the internet, or making money from book sales. …

A while back I was going to write a post or email about this topic: the majority of authors have been doing it for years, spending a lot of money, and don’t see a profit. It’s an expensive hobby. So they start asking “how do I sell more books?” or “when should I just quit?” And the standard advice is …

The title of this post basically gives away the whole thing, but I hadn’t considered it before, and you probably haven’t either. I’ve written about how to use keywords in your description, title field, etc… but I just noticed one author on Amazon doing really well (a free campaign that’s up to #10 free on all of kindle). My Kindlespy says …

I’ve thinking about this post already, but then saw someone in the Nanowrimo group share this article: Alan Moore Advises New Writers to Self-Publish Because Big Publishers Suck Alan Moore says: “Publishing today is a complete mess. I know brilliant authors who can’t get their books published. Publish yourself. Don’t rely upon other people.” People who have already adopted self-publishing …

There’s a lot of things I could say about the Lego Movie (2014). It’s a perfect representation of the hero’s journey, pulled so closely from contemporary remixes (Tron, the Matrix) to seem like every movie at once. The hero, like all good heroes, is young and untested. Foolish, an outcast, alone. His motivation is merely to make friends and be …

I published this last year on Medium but since it’s almost November again… I recently found out about the “War on #amwriting” while researching for a tattoo befitting someone involved in publishing, that announces to the world what I do.A Defense of #amwriting (and NaNoWriMo)  I chose this one…it’s pretentious enough to make me self-conscious until I work my ass …

UPDATE: This post was hypothetical, but I’m not actually going to do any of these things. The reason is, it’s important to keep your “also-boughts” clean; which means, you want people buying your books who are buying other books in your genre. There are lots of ways to make that happen. But getting a whole bunch of fast sales or …

Today we did an awesome live class on building a bestselling author website, including topics to writing about, content marketing, getting more traffic and email subscribers, and design and branding. One of the things I recommended was to write articles, then turn those into Powerpoints for SlideShare, then record yourself talking about it for YouTube, then breaking them into individual …