Staying connected to readers and making sure that you can interact with them isn’t just a necessity in this industry, it’s vital. Social media has given us some incredible opportunities, as authors, to be able to stay in touch with readers. Quite honestly, not only does interacting with readers on social media help me as […]
Smashwords released the findings of their fifth annual 2016 Smashwords Survey this week. The survey takes a data-driven approach to identify potential best practices that can give authors an incremental advantage and identifies habits of the most successful authors. Mark Coker has done a great job of summarizing the key takeaways here. If you’re going to read one article this week, the survey findings should be it.
Hugh Howey’s predictions for the future of publishing, how Amazon’s ranking algorithm works, Goodreads hits 50 million reviews and more in this week’s roundup of indie news.
Having a great author website is an important step toward becoming a successful author. If you’re doing it right, you will increase your audience, grow your engagement, and look more professional. How do you do it right? What do the best author websites have in common? Here are the 7 website design features that all good […]
Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, had an article in Publisher’s Weekly touting the benefits of giving away free ebooks as a marketing strategy. The New York Times ran an article this week on the booming romance novel market and how it’s impacting male cover models.Authors and publishers are getting their giggle on today with various April Fool’s stories.
This post appeared on April Fool’s Day 2016. In an unexpected show of unity, President Barack Obama and current GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, met to share their opinions on the state of the publishing industry. On the front steps of the Library of Congress, the message from opposite ends of America’s political system were surprisingly similar. “It’s true, […]
The KDP Select Fund for February announced a pool of $14 million for the month of February. Kindle Book Review released the latest results of it’s survey of indie authors. James Patterson plans to publish 40 “short and propulsive novels that cost less than $5” this year under a new brand called Bookshots.
You’ve probably heard the term “content marketing” bandied about in the past few years. If you’re still not quite sure what content marketing is, you’re not alone. You may have heard of SEO (search engine optimization) before, and content marketing is very similar. It’s really just the modern term for SEO-like practices that focus more on the written content than on the technical structure of the article. In this article we’ll break down the ins and outs of content marketing and how you can use it as an author to market your ebooks.
Over the past week KDP authors have been on an emotional roller coaster as Amazon cracked down on titles whose Table of Contents (TOCs) were at the back of their book, and then changed their mind and said that having a TOC at the back of a book was permissible. What has been going on and […]
Amazon is the #1 place for readers to discover books. Love ’em or hate ’em, Amazon is king, and your book needs to be listed there in order to get in front of readers. Marketing a book on Amazon is a very specific task and can be different from general book marketing, since you have […]