This is an interview with indie author Chris Fox, a fantasy novelist and YouTuber who has been killing it for years and is a self-publishing legend. It’s part of an online Q&A we did on Facebook, and I’ve reposted the answers here so they can help more indie authors. There’s a lot of valuable content
Working with writers, one issue pops up often – authors don’t know which of their three dozen book ideas they should start working on. Or they get distracted and want to be working on a new one before finishing the old one. So they often ask, How do I know which book idea will be the
I’ve been meaning to share a book launch checklist for months (years?) but this question popped up in one of my private Facebook groups and I thought I should answer. I am releasing a book soon but still don’t have the comprehensive “what that should entail” list. I’ve been starting to line up advance reviews,
One way to find more reviewers for your book is to look at what’s selling in your genre, see who has reviewed them, and then reach out to those people. When I started publishing fiction I did my own research. It’s easy: you just go through all the reviews, and copy down any contact information.
In one of my private Facebook groups, an author is asking whether he should change his author photo and use initials for his author name – to be more gender neutral. His books aren’t selling as well as he’d like and he’s wondering if this will help. If your books aren’t selling, first you need to
It’s December, and I’m on a cruise ship cruising the Atlantic (with surprisingly good wifi). We’ve been in Europe three months and are heading back to the Americas. We left from the Canary Islands, the night sea is dark and the steam from the boat is white. There’s a very Titanic feel. I’m hoping to
Years of publishing has taught me that a book written and published quickly can be just as good (or better) than one that took ten years to polish. Even though I have a PhD in Literature and spent nearly a decade as a book editor, I’ve seen far too many beautifully edited books fail; I’ve
Since I write young adult fiction, for the last few months I’ve been trying to build up stable, long term traffic to a few of my websites. The advantage of having your own traffic is that you don’t need to chase down readers, spend money on advertising or promote your books on social media. You
Today I redid some of my covers. I’ve actually gone through at least 5 covers for Shearwater (my YA mermaid romance novel), and since publishing part one I haven’t been happy with it. Even though most people like it, and it performs OK, I wanted something stronger. But people are asking me why – why switch
The first time I published, I went with Ingram Spark because I heard it would be easier to get into bookstores and libraries. That claim is false. While theoretically your books can be ordered by libraries, it’s unlikely they will – you need to get them reviewed by MG/YA book reviewers or big organizations. You
A few years ago I started publishing nonfiction ebooks to boost my business. I still recommend ebooks as a simple and easy way to generate leads, get more traffic, dominate your industry and establish yourself as an expert. It’s relatively easy to get your Amazon page to rank well in Google. The problem is that
I just wrote up a case study of my first course launch (which made 18K in 48hours). Although I did pretty well, I could have done much better. I actually wrote this post several months before my course launch, because I was already dealing with anxiety and lack of confidence. For several years I’ve run this blog
