When people decide to put their books on more than one retailer, they invariably face the question: should I go direct to other retailers or use one aggregator who does the distribution for all the books? There are some very good aggregators like Smashwords and Draft2Digital. They make life very…
There are many things you can do with short stories. They don’t take as long to write as novels and you can try out a lot of different worlds and styles. They can be pilots for books you plan to write or expansions or delving into backstory of characters of…
On most retail platforms, self published writers now have the opportunity to use pre-orders. Should you do this? There are some people in the industry who are very much in favour of pre-orders. There is a Smashwords survey that says that authors who use pre-orders sell better than those who…
In the days of what seems like instant success, viral posts and overnight careers, a lot of people seem to forget that for someone to have a decent amount of success takes time. When a writer or a blogger or a singer or anyone creative puts out a product which…
The mention of the word marketing gives a lot of writers hives. I think this is mostly because they misunderstand what is meant by marketing. They think that marketing means shouting buy my book on Facebook and Twitter. They think that marketing means sleazy tactics and mentioning your own book…
In the three year plan that is the foundation of my self-publishing books, I mentioned the example of writing 1000 words per day to achieve a publishing speed of four novels year. But this is assuming that you write relatively clean fiction. How many words do you really need to…
I admit, that’s a click-bait title. I don’t actually hate Amazon at all, although sometimes people could be mistaken for thinking so. I certainly make enough comments about the things that they do and we have to watch out for. But hate? Nope. My position on Amazon is indifferent. Amazon…
The end of the year always offers time for reflection, and I make no exception for this blog. Here are some trends I see coming in 2018. More people going wide or diversifying income As the market becomes more mature, people who are interested in a lasting writing career will…
I first started publishing in 2011. It was an exciting, vibrant time when the sky was the limit and the world was your oyster. There were a couple of well published cases of writers who started making a lot of money that got a lot of publicity from the news….
Recently, the email marketing company Mailchimp announced that the default setting of their signup forms was going to be single opt-in. A lot of people who use email marketing were up in arms about this. Why and what should you use? In most email list providers, double opt-in is the…
