I once had a college professor remind me that, in some professions, doing everything right means most people won’t see the work you did. I can’t remember now if the advice came as part of a journalism or editing course, but after several years of working in both fields, I’ll admit it seems to apply […]
How Authors Can Use Ream to Build a Subscription Business As indie authors increasingly move toward wide distribution and direct sales, subscription services may offer a way to expand marketing opportunities beyond ads and newsletters, as well as build a predictable source of revenue. Anne Janzer, author of Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in […]
How Kevin Tumlinson Paved His Path up the Mountain If you had to write your first book in a large spiral notebook with a taped-together cover to become an author, would you? That’s how Kevin Tumlinson, an accomplished Thriller and Speculative Fiction writer, began his publishing journey in 2008. On an average Tuesday evening, I […]
Dear Indie Annie, I have been looking for books where the author strings together a collection of short stories that build into a larger story. The Magnus Archives is a fiction podcast that I have discovered, but I’m looking for other works that do something similar. Do you have any recommendations? Does this kind of […]
If you’re an author, your success is growing, even if it’s only from one book and ten readers. This status vaults you into the public eye. Are you ready? The accolades from strangers about your storytelling prowess can be strangely invigorating. The growing number of five-star reviews is intoxicating. Authors tend to work alone. We’re […]
When it comes to the formatting and design of your books, there doesn’t seem to be a clear path to ensuring readers’ expectations are met. It makes sense that readers would want an easy, bump-free read. Yet without a clear guide, it’s easy to miss little details that make a big difference. If your readers […]
From Bookshelf to Bookstore: Exploring Lulu.com’s Four Major Marketing Avenues In the intricate tapestry of self-publishing, indie authors are constantly searching for ways to better control their income and their relationship with their readers. Lulu.com stands out not merely as another publishing platform but as a comprehensive solution to the dilemma. The platform supports a […]
10 Tips for: Threads If you have previous experience with X, originally Twitter, Meta’s new text-based social media app for Instagram users, Threads, will feel familiar to you. With similar content-sharing capabilities and a limit of five hundred characters per post, the focus, as the name implies, is creating conversation threads with followers on topics […]
Independent authors wear many hats: author, editor, cover designer, blurb writer, and more. Among all those responsibilities, however, one self-publishing task that often gets funneled to the back of the queue is the formatting of the book’s interior. While not as top-of-mind as the book cover or blurb, interior formatting is a crucial element that […]
How to Balance Life and Work as a Creative We often think of work-life balance as an aim to keep work separate from our personal time. But as writers, our stories are almost always on our minds. For us, the traditional work-life balance might not exist; instead, aiming to separate our creative time and non-creative […]
Professional layout and formatting is crucial to a book’s success. All authors worry about their book covers, and rightly so, but a beautiful cover and wonderful content can quickly be overshadowed by poor layout and formatting. The Alliance for Independent Authors (ALLi) has a comprehensive book, Creative Self-Publishing, that covers the seven processes of self-publishing […]
Low-Cost Alternatives to Paid Advertising I focus a lot on paid advertising because that is where the real money is to be made. Paid advertising is highly scalable, so you can grow your income with it, especially on Facebook. But for those starting out, the question is often, “What can I do for free?” It’s […]
Re-examining the Golden Rule of Fiction As authors, the adage to “show, not tell” has been etched into our minds by well-meaning teachers from grade school to university. It’s for good reason. Showing detail rather than explaining things outright invites the reader to step into your story world and experience a character’s actions and emotions […]
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