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 [...]
An indie author friend of mine, Kait Nolan, was talking about formatting on her blog recently and how it’s just not rocket science. She was speaking specifically about ebook formatting. And really, when we’re talking about Smashwords and Kindle, no, it’s not that hard. I will admit that my Kindle formatting equals: “Follow the Smashwords [...]
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 [...]
If you’ve done an ebook release and a print release, the next logical idea is an audio release. There are three different ways you can get audio out into the world for your book: podcast, selling audio rights, self-publishing an audiobook. 1. Podcast This is a fairly straight-forward DIY approach to getting audio out into [...]
An interesting phenomenon is starting to happen. Self-publishing is starting to look attractive, not just to those who have never had a NY publisher before, but to those who have. There are an increasing number of midlist authors with established careers who are either breaking away from traditional publishing altogether, or hedging their bets by [...]
I may have talked about this before, but it is really important for indie authors to unplug and decompress. The funny irony is that, while there were many reasons I chose to self-publish, one of them was that I didn’t want the pressure of working under someone else’s deadline. And yet, it’s hard to imagine [...]
A few weeks ago I went on about how I really don’t like book trailers (except for a few which have almost converted me to them). So it might come as a surprise that I actually made a video for the purposes of entertainment, but also obviously to market myself and my ideas. But this [...]
When I digitally self-published my first novella, people were thinking that “maybe” ebooks would take off. But no one was sure yet. This lack of certainty kept anything from getting too cut throat. I plopped the thing up on Kindle and Smashwords and didn’t have to think about it. Now, it’s getting a little more [...]