Tag Archives: self-publishing

Can someone explain Booktrope to me? I don’t get it. It looks like people can volunteer to be part of a creative time to produce the book, then earn a percentage of the sales revenue (and, apparently they only publish quality books that the community has supported, which means a better chance of revenue.) If I design the book cover …

I got an email today from a wife helping her husband publish and worried about the book’s potential success. Putting your book out there is scary. Spending a lot of money and not earning it back is a very valid fear. There are ways around it, but it’s mostly a gamble. You can mitigate the risk by producing the book …

Most of the people I know who are working online are selling hot air. In other words, they fill people with hope, motivation and inspiration. They get them charged up and excited. They tell them “You can do anything you want, if you just BELIEVE in it!” They say, “Just follow your passion and the money will take care of …

This is a short post: I hear a lot of indie authors complaining about how everybody is against them. Reviewers won’t touch their book. They can’t get into bookstores. Everywhere they try to promote their book they hear things like “we don’t work with self-publishing authors.” That can seem like prejudice. It can seem unfair to group all indie authors …

This past month I’ve been thinking big and buying up online platforms related to publishing and book design. My little blog gets some traffic, and my book cover design business is doing fine – I just want to be a bigger player. A couple weeks ago I found a little blog network for indie authors – it had a website …

For years I’ve been dancing around the idea of offering author websites. I’m a WordPress pro PLUS a graphic designer, so I’ve got the skills – and WordPress author websites are in huge demand and average around $1000 to build. Why I don’t do it? I don’t want to become the author’s life-long tech person who helps them change pictures …

A lot of indie publishing gurus talk about being an Authorpreneur or Entreprenauthor – basically referring to the importance of treating your writing and publishing as a business. But something real entrepreneurs are very familiar with is the guy going through the motions of business without actually doing anything. Trying to act like a ‘real business’ and getting everything done …

Using the right fonts on your book cover helps tell the reader what genre your book fits into and elicits an emotional response. You want it to look great, but also be appropriate, fit in well with the cover design, and (probably) be just a little more interesting than a standard font. So I’ve put together some cheat-sheets of the …

I’ve been sitting on this post awhile. It’s opinionated. I’m rankled. Which means my judgment may be clouded, and I don’t want to pass my cloudy judgment on to you. On the other hand, I’m getting pretty damn good at helping authors publish books and just about every aspect of self-publishing. I can take a book, format it in InDesign, …

I’ve just started watching “Saving Mr. Banks” – the story of how Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) acquired the book rights of Mary Poppins from the author P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson). At the beginning of the story, P. L. Travers is a control freak, absolutely paranoid that her creation will be modified, changed, ruined. Disney has been chasing her for 20 …