News | Self-Publishing Review

Crime Writers’ Association Opens Up to Self-Publishers

The Crime Writers’ Associationis now open to self-publishers. From the CWA website:

For the first time in its 68-year history, the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association will allow self-published authors to join its ranks.

The move comes after the CWA consulted its members, who voted with an 84% majority in favour to accept self-published authors.

Maxim Jakubowski, Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, said: “The founding mission of the CWA was to support, promote and celebrate the crime genre and its authors. In the past, we only accepted traditionally published authors into the CWA, as this was the best indicator

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SPR2021-08-05T06:16:33+02:00August 5th, 2021|Categories: News|

Amazon Starts New Royalty-Driven Story Platform

Amazon has announced a new platform called Kindle Vella in which authors can earn royalties per chapter.

A new way to earn royalties.

To access episodes, readers will purchase Tokens and use them to unlock episodes. Authors will earn 50% of the money readers spend on the Tokens used to unlock their story episode.

To make it easy for readers to find stories they love, the first few episodes of every story are always free!

As authors have often revealed short teaser books in a series in order to grab readers, this may be an alternative to that model. In […]

SPR2021-04-14T07:49:59+02:00April 14th, 2021|Categories: News|Tags: Amazon News and Tips|

Announcing the Winners of the SPR Book Awards 2019!

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Cate Baum2021-06-02T06:22:33+02:00April 10th, 2020|Categories: Features, News|Tags: SPR Book Awards|

Introducing Bookvertiser: Book Marketing with Results

The team at SPR has created a new book promotion service for authors: Bookvertiser.

The service is a similar process to SPR’s own Amazon Promotions, but with more flexible options, such as the ability to gain 200 sales at once, and new monthly promotions where you can attain 4-5 sales and 50 sales a month to maintain momentum.

The full list of services are:

Kindle Book Sales

We target reader demographics who are likely to buy your book, based on age, gender, interests, and other important factors. You can receive 50, 100, and 200 sales at a time, […]

SPR2020-02-04T01:32:45+02:00February 4th, 2020|Categories: Features, News|Tags: Book Marketing Advice and Tips, Book Promotion Articles|

Kobe Bryant’s Death Ends Children’s Visionary Book Project with Paulo Coelho

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Cate Baum2020-01-29T08:29:44+02:00January 28th, 2020|Categories: News|

Keanu Reeves and Girlfriend: Indie-Publishing Since 2011

So for everyone under a rock for the past week, the top trending person on Twitter is beloved Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves. Because it has come to the world’s attention his girlfriend has gray hair, and she looks like Helen Mirren! (She’s over twenty-five years younger, but let the plebs have their say.) And drumroll, she’s only nine years younger than him! (see Jeff Goldblum, Dennis Quaid, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Sean Penn to see how, ahem, unusual this “small” age gap actually is in Hollywood.)

However, speculation about this “new” relationship pretty much dissolved when web-ferrets savvy and bored enough […]

Cate Baum2019-11-11T05:25:36+02:00November 9th, 2019|Categories: Features, News|

Amazon Eliminates Two Promotional Options

Sending emails to users, Amazon announced that Kindle Matchbook and Amazon Giveaway are shutting down.

First, Amazon Giveaway is shutting down, which allowed authors to run giveaways similar to Goodreads Giveaways.

Amazon alerted users:

After careful consideration, Amazon Giveaway is retiring. Thank you for participating in the program. Our records show that you have credits from previous eBook giveaways. These credits can be used to create new giveaways until October 10, 2019 and customers can enter giveaways until October 17, 2019. You can also download any remaining eBook credits as Kindle claim codes from the Amazon Giveaway dashboard. Claim

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SPR2019-10-03T07:00:58+02:00October 3rd, 2019|Categories: News|Tags: Amazon News and Tips|

Twitter’s New Design Isn’t Going to Be Great for Book Marketing

If you’re in the Twitter bookspace at all, you know that authors like to post their book covers. A lot. Twitter is going to have an upgrade and it’s changing the way images are displayed. Instead of variable sizes of images, there is going to be one main size – which isn’t conducive to book covers.

Here’s an example from author Neal Asher’s Twitter account:

And here’s what it looks like in new Twitter. It’s taking a small image and blowing it up horizontally, which means old posts are not going to be rendered very well: