One of the (many) side projects I’m working on is a Zombie Guide to Good Grammar. I’d like to finish in December and have it out by Christmas, but I’m having a little trouble with it, so I thought I’d ask for some help. I have 25 common grammar mistakes, but I need to write 25
I’ve decided to run 12 days of giveaways, and give away cool and fun things that only a writer could truly appreciate. This is all the stuff I’d like to buy for myself, basically, but I’m giving it away instead. ‘Tis the season, after all. I’ll run the giveaways from December 1st to December 12th. If you want
I’m on a quest to become a full-time author by 2016 – that means, I need my books to earn enough to meet my needs, so I can do what I want with my time. If you live in the US, that figure might be $5,000. I’d like to get up to $10,000 a month
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
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...
I’ve been in love with these lamps since I saw them about a year ago, so I just ordered a bunch of them to use for Christmas presents. I’m planning to add covers from classic books to each of them. I’m giving away three of them for the holidays (they make great gifts!) I’ve seen these sell
An author friend of mine used a phrase this week I hadn’t heard before: he said I need to make sure “my also-boughts were clean.” If you just drive your friends and family to your book during launch, your book will start showing up next to whatever else they bought on Amazon recently. Also-boughts are
Tonight I had a chance to sit down with Mark Coker of Smashwords, and he convinced me to put the books I’m working on for sale as preorders. Although I’ve heard Mark talk about preorders before, I wasn’t planning on using preorders as part of my marketing plan. This article is about what changed my
This post is about how I used book giveaways to build a big list of targeted readers before published my first novel – it really helped with hitting #1 and getting a bunch of book reviews quickly. However, after getting over 50K readers on my lists, I realized I wasn’t engaging them enough – I didn’t
This feels like a very dumb post to write. But I just had an epiphany I thought I’d share. I’ve never liked emailing my blog posts to my email lists. I figure they signed up for free stuff, not to be updated with every post. But I just realized that’s a huge mistake. I should
I wanted to make a quick video about how to use Mailchimp to setup your email optins, autoresponders and signup forms; instead I talked for three hours about email marketing. So here’s a free crash course video series on setting up Mailchimp and using it to build a list, and how to engage that list with
For about a year (or more) I’ve been blogging about all the cool things I’m going to do to market my books, but haven’t had the chance to try any of them yet because I’m still working on the writing. The main thing everybody says to do is write a series. Other people are writing
