A few years ago I wrote a post about how authors can use press releases to actually sell books. But the main takeaway was that authors shouldn’t try and do a press release because most of the time, they haven’t actually done anything newsworthy. I’ve somewhat modified my position, because: doing a press release might The 3...
I was pretty sure I sucked at Amazon ads. Which is mostly fine: I’m still making money and I figured I couldn’t *really* spend big on Amazon ads until I had a bunch of finished series out. Tonight I took a look at the ads I’m still running. My average cost per click is about $0.30; The 3 secrets to book...
I’ve talked before about how doing boxsets and anthologies can be great for building your author platform – not only to reach more readers, but also to build long term relationships with other authors in your genre. And I’ve talked a lot about doing book giveaways to encourage shares and promotion; and also about doing The...
This is a free mini-series I put out at the beginning of 2017. Now that my YouTube Channel has almost 500,000 3 million views, I’m going to start organizing it and producing better quality videos. If you want more, you should follow me there (I have more recent videos on book marketing of course, but The 3 secrets to book marketing...
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 3 secrets to...
Even though I don’t consider myself an expert at doing online courses, I did pretty well with my first one. So this is an (epic) case study explaining everything I did to make 5-figures with my first course launch – without any affiliates promoting it for me, and without doing any webinars. I hope it will be The 3 secrets to book...
Since I started Creativindie I’ve been running it as a personal blog. Sure I try to get some traffic, and want people to sign up on my list, and maybe eventually hire me or buy something… but it’s been sloppy and haphazard. However, since I’ve decided I want to be writing fiction full-time, that means The 3 secrets to...
UPDATE: I made a video talking about this stuff but it’s down at the bottom of this post. Scroll down to see it. I’ve been self-publishing for about a decade, and have sold about 50,000 books. I haven’t made a living (yet), and like most self-publishing gurus and experts, I make my living in services The 3 secrets to book...
Recently I wrote about how most authors will never make any money. I was surprised by the comments, which I expected to be more negative. It seemed to comfort people to learn that they weren’t failing at being an author – they were doing as well as 99.9% of other self-publishing authors, because almost everyone fails. But...
Stumbled across this fun site tonight: it’s basically a book about how to draw camels: http://howtodrawcamels.com/ Except, that’s not all. The author does a bunch of interesting stuff, and some important social work, in Western Africa. But rather than starting a personal blog about himself or his projects, he chose to do...
Recently I finished a guide to book marketing, and discouraged authors from using a free or paid press release service because I don’t think it’s worthwhile for authors or book promotion. But you might want to do it anyway, especially if you A) have a non-fiction book or B) are promoting some kind of business. The 3 secrets to...
I just saw an interesting sales letter for a program that generates a cheesy social media chatroom box. The idea is actually pretty awesome, and I’ve seen these around: instead of a big colorful ad that says “LOOK!!! CHEAP!!! AWESOME!!!” the ad seems to “reveal” a private conversation about some secret, insider...
