1) Making the trailer. There are two ways to go. One is high quality, professionalism. Like a movie trailer from WB. These can be pretty expensive but stand out from the majority of book trailers (which are […]
There’s no doubt that her behavior is frustrating. She makes self-publishers look bad because people can point and say: Look, self-publishers write terrible books! They’re unhinged! Actually, this reaction doesn’t make much […]
Fast forward to 2011 and already the stories are hitting the news. Indie authors are on the bestsellers lists, indies are crossing over from self-published ebooks to mainstream deals. The digital war has been fought, the armistice signed, and we won.
But hang on. “We” won? Who’s we?
It’s my contention that what we have here is a classic semantic slippage, and it’s one we should have seen coming (no one […]
To have a chance at selling your book on amazon or online, you need reviews. Lots of them. And if you’re like me, you hate pushing all your friends and family to review your work (is it really fair to ask them?) and leave comments. So most authors do this:
1) Search online for book reviews, indie book reviewers, self-published book reviews, how to get book reviews, etc.
2) Email or contact those reviewers asking them to take a look at their books and comment.
Here’s why that doesn’t work. First of all – those few sites that offer […]
What if my next page-turner doesn’t have any pages?
As I write this post I am up to my elbows in finalizing the formatting and interior lay-out for the print version of my new thriller Grave Undertakings (sequel to the acclaimed Asylum Lake). The entire frustrating process has me questioning the future of my titles in print. The far-less cumbersome e-book formatting has been done for some time and it begs the question: am I committing author suicide if my next page-turner doesn’t have any pages at all?
Don’t get me wrong, I love print books. I still haven’t invested […]
Q. How did you come to self-publish?
A. When I completed By the Light: A Novel of Serial Homicide, I merged into the insane traffic on the traditional publishing highway. My thought at the time was that the only way I could validate myself as a writer would be to entice an agent to represent me and for that agent to entice a publisher to cause my story to appear on bookshelves across the land.
That pursuit became my hobby for quite some time. Queries were sent to about 80 agents. They all have different ways in which you […]
For the past few months I’ve been trying just about everything to get people to read and comment on my indie non-fiction. I’m giving it away for free on my website. I sent out massive email campaigns to related bloggers, basically begging them to take a look at get the free copy. Response has been good – but limited. As of right now I’ve got only a handful of amazon comments and the book is ranked well over the 1,000,000 mark on amazon. But I’m still optimistic, even excited, because I’m learning a lot about what works and what doesn’t, […]
The two cross paths when Casey Shenk, the vending stocker everyman who mulls over international political puzzles on his blog as a hobby, writes about a hijacked Russian ship in the Baltic Sea. The ship turns out to have stolen missiles on board – something Susan