A couple of years ago, most readers were against e-readers. All the same arguments came up about eyestrain and loving the smell of paper and holding a book in your hand, and blah blah blah. These are all arguments I once made myself. But, once a reader *tries* an e-reader, the vast majority of them, [...]
One of the few big drawbacks of being an indie author is that indies are pretty much on their own when it comes to distribution and marketing. While it’s true that many NY pubbed books get limited distribution in bookstores and sometimes very little marketing, indies don’t get any. Any marketing an indie gets they [...]
One of the complaints given over and over about self-published books is that “even if” there are some jewels out there, without the gatekeepers, how will readers “find” those jewels without spending an inordinate amount of time looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack of crap? Answers run the gamut of showcase sites/bookstores that [...]
Last week on the author blog I talked about spending your money where it matters and brought up formatting. People have very strong opinions when it comes to indie publishing, how things should be done and how they shouldn’t be done. One area in which there tends to be a lot of behind-the-scenes debate, is [...]
One of the big things a lot of indies are told might help them with marketing their work is doing a podcast. For those who might not know, a podcast is basically just an mp3 audio file that you can listen to on your iPod (or other mp3 player), or from your computer. Podcasts tend [...]
With print books, prices are fairly settled upon and readers know what to expect. With printing costs and other necessary overhead of a physical product, there is a fixed price a book must retail at to break even and then turn a profit. Then there is only a few dollars spread from that before you [...]
And so it begins. One of the arguments for indie music and film and against indie authorship is that very often big Hollywood studios and big record companies seem to like to cheat artists out of money. It’s like a fun hobby. Most people are fairly aware by now of how abusive many record companies [...]
An indie author friend of mine sent me a book trailer for his book in email the other day. And I don’t know, I think it was some kind of straw that broke the camel’s back and turned me into a big bag of crazy. (Though I might have already been there.) Because I kind [...]