I made this for an event recently, it was a handout – decided to post it here in case it’s helpful… #1 Write a book people want to read. #2 Connect with influencers or other authors in your genre/topic. Review their books. Share their stuff. Comment on their posts. Get noticed. #3 Set up a
For the last few days I’ve been hitting 5000+ words a day writing fiction. It’s exciting to think what that kind of habit will mean if I keep it up for a few months. But there are times my brain hits a wall and I get stuck. This is probably especially true because the book
Today I saw that Hugh Howey had posted an article on book cover design. “That’s cool,” I think. Hugh Howey is one of the most successful self-publishing authors in the world. He started out with pretty unprofessional book covers that embody the design tastes of most indie authors (they focus on scenes and symbolism and
Confession: I let mediocre movies run in the background on my computer when I’m working, so I can “watch them” without them really sucking up too much time. Normally, the Night of the Museum movies are a little fun and cute. Not serious, not hilarious, but not terrible either. Except this one. The quest: the
It’s Sunday. I’m feeling sad, nostalgic, as I tend to do on Sundays (through strangely, haven’t in a long time…) I’m not stressed, which is a major change – I’ve been behind on work for going on two years, but I stopped accepting clients until I can catch up and things are starting to become manageable...
This will be my fifth WDS (Word Domination Summit – a meetup for people living unconventionally). I wrote this post years ago before the 2014 conference, and had a lot of people tell me they’d read it before coming and it had set their mind at ease. So I’m updating it and reposting it for
Today I saw this post about Richard Prince taking other people’s Instagram photos without permission or warning and selling them in a New York art gallery for $90,000 each. It’s not his first offence: he’s previously taken photos from magazines or from other photographers and changed them just a little bit (like cutting out...
The title of this post is a little too violent, but it exemplifies the purpose of this post: your subtitles and taglines need to engage readers. Firstly: a subtitle is usually what goes on a non-fiction book, and non-fiction book readers are mostly looking for information and content, so you need to focus on keywords (sort of,
It’s hard to double your income if you have a “normal” job. You need to control your own salary first. But luckily, you don’t have to quit your job and move to Thailand to do it. Instead, build a ‘side gig’ business you can run in your time off or on weekends. Keep at it
A couple years ago I learned how to format my own ebooks; since then I’ve done hundreds. Now I’m fairly decent at taking a Word or InDesign file, converting it to epub and editing it with Sigil, a free editing program. Recently I decided to break apart one of my first non-fiction books, a 150,000
I’m finishing up a Udemy course on book cover design and uploading some videos to YouTube. My videos aren’t very professional or well done, and I don’t have a lot of followers, but at least my cover designs don’t suck. This video from AuthorHouse, on the other hand, uses dozens of very ugly, unprofessional book
Indie authors have gotten much better at understanding the importance of a professionally designed book, and many of them are hiring quality designers to help make their book look just as good as any other in the bookstore. To differentiate their books from the self-published horde, however, traditional publishers have increasingly been using...
