If you’ve visited https://indieauthormagazine.com this week, you may have noticed that things looked a bit different. This week, we redesigned several of our websites and platforms to hopefully make them easier to use—and secretly made an exciting announcement for Indie Author Training at the same time.
First, Indie Author Magazine got an updated website design, and we’ve re-organized some of our topics to hopefully make browsing our older articles easier. We also added new links at the top of the homepage. There, you can find our latest print issue and links directly to Indie Author Training and Wide for the Win.
We also fully redesigned our app to make it easier to use and more convenient. Now, you can find the latest articles, podcasts, and webinars from any of our publications and platforms in one spot, updated daily. You can also flip through the latest print issue PDFs, listen to recent podcast episodes, and sign up for Indie Author Training webinars and courses directly from the app. The Indie Author Magazine app is free to download on the Apple App Store and Google Play—you can find it here.
And finally, our sister sites also got a refresh. Wide for the Win is easier to navigate with tabs for the community, bookshop, courses, newsletter, and more, and Indie Author Training has a new homepage that shows you our upcoming webinars, product tours, and events.
That homepage also announces Indie Author Training’s newest venture. Earlier this year, IAM publisher and Author Automations founder Chelle Honiker hosted a two-day summit on automating your author business. That event was so popular, we’ve decided to host more of them, on a range of topics that matter to indie authors—publishing wide, direct sales, and health and wellness, to name a few. Starting in October, Indie Author Training will host monthly summits, most lasting two days. Day 1 will be entirely free to attend and explore the foundations of the topic, and day 2 will include workshops and how-to classes, plus additional tools and resources to help you implement teachings in your business while you’re learning them.
You can explore upcoming summits and sign up to be notified once registration opens now. Visit https://indieauthortraining.com/#summit-season to learn more.
We hope you’ll take the time to scroll through our summits and consider registering. We’d love to see you there. In the meantime, keep reading to find out what else we’ve been working on this week (and check out our new website designs in the process)!
This Week’s Indie Author Magazine Articles
Balancing success and sustainability in the publishing industry can often feel like a mystery to solve. But if that’s the case, Cozy Mystery author Sara Rosett has solved it. She’s written more than thirty Cozy Mysteries through both traditional and independent publishing, plus published nonfiction craft books, hosted podcasts, spoken on panels at conferences, and collaborated with other authors to shed light on the parts of publishing that once puzzled her. In this week’s Monday Close-Up, IAM staff writer Jenn Lessmann explores Sara Rosett’s journey from traditional publishing to a full-time independent author and educator who still makes time for life outside of writing as well.
Jenn Lessmann
Teachings from Indie Author Training
Webinar: “Outlining for novelists who don't outline"
You love the freedom of discovery writing—but sometimes writing into the dark leads to dead ends, rewrites, or stories that wander off track. Outlining for Novelists Who Don’t Outline is a webinar for discovery writers who want practical tools to strengthen their stories.
Presented by Paul Austin Ardoin, a discovery writer, this session rejects the condescending, one-size-fits-all advice so many “plotting” trainings offer. Instead, Paul shows you how to borrow the parts of outlining that actually help—without sacrificing spontaneity, character surprises, or the creative rush that made you fall in love with writing in the first place.
You’ll identify the specific problems holding your manuscript back, from structural issues and weak conflict to character drift, missing story beats, and unmet reader expectations. You’ll also explore flexible techniques such as reverse outlining, using broad plot structures, tracking clues and reveals, and building an outline that works for your brain.
If you’re a pantser, discovery writer, or “write into the dark” novelist who wants more control without losing your voice, this webinar will help you write smarter, finish stronger, and stay true to your process.
Watch the replay here: https://webinars.indieauthortraining.com/talks/outlining-for-novelists-who-dont-outline/
More Indie Publishing News
Here’s a look beyond our pages at the latest headlines and happenings in the publishing world.
- Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, announced earlier this week that any output, including text, generated with the platform will soon carry an invisible, permanent watermark in order to comply with a new EU regulation. The watermark will carry over when text is copied and pasted from the platform and remain through some editing, according to the announcement. Other companies, including Google, Meta, and OpenAI, are expected to follow suit in order to comply with the EU’s regulations. You can read an article on the change by TechCrunch here, and read Anthropic’s announcement here.
Chelle Honiker
- Instagram recently began rolling out a new feature on users’ profiles allowing them to share what they’re currently reading. The feature appears as a banner on the user’s profile page and allows others viewing your profile to tap on the banner and send you a message about the book. If your Instagram app has recently updated to include the feature, click on “Add banners,” then select “Fill in the blank,” choose “Reading,” and type any book title up to 20 characters in length. Users have options to add a range of other banner options as well; read more about the update at https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/instagram-rolls-out-new-feature-37479586.
Anything we’ve missed that you think we should cover? Any topics or questions you’d like our team to explore? Let us know at feedback@indieauthormagazine.com. Your suggestion may just make it into an upcoming article.
