Narrating your own audiobook? Yea or nay? As I have said previously, producing audiobooks is expensive. You may economise on it by finding a cheaper narrator, but it is still a fair chunk of money. If you have a large back list, especially one that is not breaking the bank…
Banned from Amazon. How to get banned from Amazon? It’s easy. Write a book that has a no-no word in the title. Or subtitle. Even if the word means exactly the opposite from what is insinuated. Or a word that smells like a swear word. Well, I received notice that…
Should I sell audiobooks? There is a lot of talk about the rise in audiobooks. Some articles show that the sales of audiobooks are surging. Many of these reports need to be taken with a grain of salt, because a number of the sales figures are based on trade published…
Do you wonder how to sell books without ads? Have you just joined the selfpublishing community? Have you been at it for a while? The first question people ask is: what about marketing? The refrain goes that you have to hand over cash to advertising sites because otherwise you won’t…
How much should you spend on advertising your book? This question gets asked a lot, especially by beginning writers. They’ve heard that it is probably a good idea to advertise your book, and they like to be given some kind of clear guidelines as to how much they should spend….
The Secret Pen Name experiment that’s not so secret anymore. Some of you will be aware that I started a pen name in July. There were several reasons for this (in order of importance): All my books are widely distributed. I’d experimented with Kindle Unlimited with the Dragonspeaker books, but…
If you focus on the three Ps of selfpublishing you increase the likelihood of success. In the world of selfpublishing, it’s easy to lose track of what to do and what is a waste of time. You can fill up your entire day with busy work, but which things are…
In a recent post on his blog, David Gaughran suggested the solution to the tide of scamming is “honest authors lifting each other”. If you’ve been following David’s journey over the past few years, you will know that he is very vocal against black hat tactics employed by some to…
Here is a view from the trenches about the state of indie publishing in 2019. Recently, there was much ado about this post by Russell Blake which made the point, in short, you must hand over wads of cash to the various advertisers (mainly Amazon Advertising) or die. I think…
Exit Kindleboards. Those of you who know me or have read my self-publishing books will know that I’ve been a fan of the Kindleboards as a place where new writers find out about news and best practices. As of this week, I no longer recommend that anyone even goes to…
