I don’t always post every time Amazon gets weird – because it happens a lot. Mostly, they will get their act together and fix the problem… but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, small changes indicate big site-wide policy changes that can negatively affect indie authors. And it’s only the very big sellers, with...
I screwed up. Months ago I agreed to be part of a multi-author box set. I usually say no to these, but I have personal relationship with Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (I even featured it in my PhD Thesis) so I submitted my chapter. The authors all offered a free course or bonus to
From page 7, to page 3 in one hour… When I review other authors books on Amazon, I usually point out they need more keywords in their description, title, and even author bio. Why? Because Amazon is a search engine. If you don’t have any WORDS in your description letting Amazon know what kind of
My Guerrilla Publishing course has lots of information and can seem overwhelming, so I just wrote a summary of all the important bits. This includes some of my launch strategies and a basic glossary of useful publishing terms. If it’s useful, please share! To self publish a book on Kindle, prepare the manuscript and
This week I’m launching my new program, Guerrilla Publishing – which I’ve built over the last year while travelling full-time. I made a free “Bookselling Bootcamp” challenge while staying at the 5 star Regent Hotel Montenegro (I wanted to be comfortable going into Nanowrimo, and I also did a 2-week sugar...
There are some interesting discussions that are happening right now. I’m going to massively paraphrase the situation as I understand it, without naming any of the main players involved. The story goes like this: Some people are cheating by uploading large collections of recycled content and getting people to click through to...
I talk a lot about writing books that sell, but I don’t always take my own advice. Out of the 5 novels I’ve published, most do pretty well with no promotion – but I’ve been having trouble keeping the rank up on one. There are reasons – mostly it’s a less popular mix of genres,
Two things I’m taking very seriously right now, are Amazon search results and Google search results for my upcoming novel. There are lots of ways to add keywords into your Amazon page, to increase the chances that someone on Amazon will discover your book, but it’s also crucial to Google your keywords and see what pops
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
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
Archive note: First published in February 2013. The Kickstarter project and backing invitation below belong to that original post. After I started doing book cover designs, I knew I needed to learn to make ebooks. All of my author clients needed to have their books formatted for Kindle, iBooks and all the other ebook stores.
