selfpublish Archives ⋆ Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it...

Kindlepreneur’s write-up of a boatload of Writing and Publishing courses that are on Sale

Ever think you need help with the entire writing and publishing process? Have you ever thought about taking an online course, but you don’t know where to start and they look too expensive? Here is some great news…

Dave Chesson — the owner-operator of Kindlepreneur — has put together a very nice summary (including the review ratings) of about 50 of the courses most relevant to writers, and better yet, they are all on sale for $9.99 until 28 August.

Even if you don’t get the news on the sale until after the 28th of August, Dave’s write-ups are still a fantastic resource to help you make sense of a lot of great Udemy content.

As always, I have no affiliate relationships. So there are no kickbacks for me on this. Rather, it looks like a good deal and Dave’s summaries are super helpful so thought I’d share to help you on your writing and self-publishing journey.

Head over to Kindlepreneur for all the details. Good luck!

Do Self Published Authors Suck?

Yet again, I was party to a discussion about traditional publishing fiction vs. self-publishing fiction. The question was if self-published authors are any good? And yet again, the discussion had several flawed assumptions:

– If you are traditionally published you write well. If you write well you will be traditionally published.

– If you self-publish, you can’t write and you did a poor job of preparing your manuscript. People who self-publish do so because they are not good enough to traditionally publish.

As in most such discussions, there is some truth to all assumptions, but when the generalizations become gospel thoughtful discussion ends. So what is the truth of the matter?

Continue reading “Do Self Published Authors Suck?”

Indie Publishing and Traditional Publishing

Joanna Penn, an accomplished writer and blogger about writing and publishing has penned (pun intended 😉 ) a nice article about the pros and cons of indie publishing and traditional publishing.

Note that it is not indie versus traditional publishing. It is indie and traditional publishing. Neither is perfect, both have many challenges, and some writers might pick one over the other for one book, and the other for a subsequent book.

If you are trying to make up your mind about which way to go, take a look. It’s a good article. Check it out.

Three things to do to ramp your Book Sales

Two and a half years after I published my novel, it is still selling several copies a day.

Earlier today it had a sales rank of 50K (see the above screenshot). Sales have certainly declined from where they peaked about nine months after I published, but sales continue at a steady pace. And my novel is in a pretty small niche, so book sales have only so much upside in this niche.

My book is priced at $1.49, and it has been at that price for almost the entire time it has been for sale on Amazon, so I’m not wracking up sales by selling it at $.99.

Below you can see my Author Rank as tracked by Amazon. Even two and a half years after I launched my book it is still doing better than it did the month after I launched it. Again — see my blog on keywords. That dip the month after I published my book was because I did not know what I was doing (like most indies) with keywords. After that, I got my keywords figured out and my sales did much better.

I’m going to cut to the chase on why it continues to sell so well. There are three primary reasons, three things that anyone can do ramp their book sales and keep them up. Continue reading “Three things to do to ramp your Book Sales”

A Goodreads Group’s “Reviews Initiative”: How Indies can get legitimate reviews

There is no understating how important it is to get reviews to help ramp sales of your new book. And I’ve previously written about how to get great reviews from some of Amazon’s top reviewers. But I’ve just discovered this: There is a group on Goodreads that is helping authors get thoughtful reviews posted to three sites (Goodreads, Amazon US and Amazon UK) from readers they don’t know. It’s a great and simple system. How much does it cost? No money involved. You just have to pay it forward and review a book from someone else. And there is no limit; you can get as many reviews as you can give.

Continue reading “A Goodreads Group’s “Reviews Initiative”: How Indies can get legitimate reviews”

Targeted Marketing for authors: Be precise or go home

In a recent blog, Neil Patel shared an article titled: “Modern Online Marketing Education: 18 Courses and Resources”. There are only a few blogs I follow closely, and Neil’s is one of them. I know of no one who provides so much value so clearly. In his most recent post, his intent is clear given the title. Too many writers don’t understand that their success has as much to do about marketing as it does about writing well. That is why most books published on Amazon never sell more than 20 copies. Writing blogs can help you write better, but you have to know who you are targeting to sell.

Continue reading “Targeted Marketing for authors: Be precise or go home”