For Readers (and Authors, too)
This blog is for anyone that reads my books, as well as for anyone else who is self-publishing, thinking about self-publishing, or just curious about what it’s like to be an author during rapidly changing times. Whenever you visit here, I hope you’ll share your own comments and thoughts. If you’d like to know whenever I post a new entry, please type your email address into the box in the right-hand column and check the appropriate box (and the newsletter one, too, while you’re at it).
Liven up Your Web Pages with Public Domain Graphics
Sub-blogged below is a great list of image Web sites – new and old photographs, paintings, drawings, film and more (most are free), courtesy of the anonymous author of the Tracking the Words blog. Many thanks to Catana, and his generosity is very much appreciated, as I’ve relied almost exclusively on the Wikimedia Commons in the past. read more…
What a Great Author Would Like you to Know About Writing
One of the sadder consequences of the advent of Web-enabled self-publishing has been the number of races to the bottom it has unleashed: in price, in quantity overtaking quality in social media rapid-firing, and worst of all, in the quality of writing itself. Why? Because everyone has to spend half of their time – or more – in promoting their work. And also because having multiple titles to work allows you to use the most powerful mix of promotional tactics available to you. Given that there are so few tactics that do move the needle at all, kicking out titles as fast as you can is becoming the norm rather than the edge case. read more…
Adventures in Self-Publishing: Using Social Media to Promote your Book
Last time I promised to talk about setting up Twitter and Facebook pages. For many people this should be the easiest part of establishing a Web presence, since so many folks already use one or both services. If you’re one of them , the biggest challenge may be to unlearn existing habits and start using social media in a very different and more purposeful way than before (after all, unless your book is about LOL cats, pointers to their Youtube videos isn’t likely to help sell your book). If you’re not, the biggest challenge won’t be setting up the pages (which is easy) but finally taking the plunge into a bottomless pit that you may understandably have been scrupulously avoiding for a long time. Like me. read more…
BookDaily Authors Nominated to be Featured On Noveltunity®
Including, ahem, mine.
I haven’t gone in for the contest route so far, and that’s not exactly what this is, but throwing my hat into the ring was easy (and free), so I thought why not? The host is a new book club site called Noveltunity, which is affiliated with the BookDaily.com site. It’s currently in its Beta phase, meaning that for the time being you can sign up for free and enjoy the privileges of club membership, including three free eBook downloads per month. read more…
It’s Interview Time!
One of the traditional ways to inspire someone to read an author’s book has always been the interview – in print a newspaper or magazine, live on the radio or TV, or in front of a face-to-face audience. These days, all but the last are much harder to get, because there are fewer venues that run interviews but many more books competing for those that remain. But there are two new types of interview opportunities that have become available: the text interview, hosted at a blog, and audio and video live interviews, hosted at Youtube, book sites and any of a number of other venues. read more…
Adventures in Self-Publishing: Establishing a Web Presence (Part III)
In the last post, we talked about the different types of Web sites you can create or take advantage of. In this entry, we’ll talk about actually creating the Web-based pages you’ll need to sell your self-published book, leaving to a later date how to create and manage more social-media oriented pages such as Twitter and Facebook. read more…
Establishing a Web Presence (Part II)
It’s obvious that any self-published author needs a Web presence. Why? Because promoting your books at many venues is free and most of the rest are cheap, and the Internet is where people go to find out anything and everything. read more…
Launching a Promotional Campaign: Establishing a Web Presence
This Friday, the latest installment in my long-running Adventures in Self Publishing series at my other blog will focus on all of those things that you need to do to take advantage of the Internet to promote your book, not in the dynamic sense (e.g., Twitter), but in the comparatively static sense, as described below. The essential moral of the story will be that it is time consuming in the extreme at the front end, and a significant time sink on an ongoing basis, because if you don’t commit to continuously update what you’ve spent a lot of time creating at the front end, most of that time will have been wasted. read more…
Heaven Help me, I’m Tweeting
Certainly one of the most intimidating and/or distasteful tasks for a SelfPub author is to dive into social media if he has never had to before. True, as a lawyer, and a technology lawyer at that, I’ve not been able to totally avoid it. I’ve got over 600 LinkedIn contacts, even though I’ve never extended an invitation, because it’s hard to turn down the invitations of peers, and especially clients. But Facebook and Twitter? No thank you. I just don’t get it. read more…
Adventures in Self-Publishing: Launching a Promotional Campaign
According to proponents of the Brave New World of self-publishing, there’s never been a better time to write a book. They seem to have caught a few ears with that claim, since in 2012, 391,000 new titles – an incredible number – were self-published in the U.S. alone – up an even more incredible 59% from just the year before. For the lucky few, that approach has succeeded brilliantly. read more…
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