I’m on a campaign to bring some of the accumulated wisdom of copywriters and internet business to the world of author blogs. If you think about it, a nonfiction author with a book to sell is a perfect candidate for online business. If you can sell your book as both a printed book and a […]
self publishing
Jessica Kaye: The Making (and Selling) of a Good Audiobook
Audiobooks are mostly the province of large traditional publishers with the resources to produce them for their top-selling authors. But the tools of production are now within the reach of self-publishers as well.
Self-Publisher’s Quick Guide to Copyright: A Report
Back when I started this blog I really didn’t know what information would prove to be most useful to today’s self-publishers, or what would be the most popular. A couple of months in, once I had paused long enough to figure out Google’s Analytics program and dig into the numbers a bit, I was pretty […]
The Typographer’s Curse: Automatic Leading
Automatic leading is about as satisfying as a robot dog. Increase or decrease leading to make your document look more professional.
26 Ways to Win at Self-Publishing
The secret is this: when you publish your own book, you get to decide what winning looks like, how success feels. You’ve taken back control of your writing destiny. You know winning comes in many ways, in many small moments, and you can finally relax and savor them.
Self-Publishing: Are We There Yet?
Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine had a brief and cheery write up by Virginia Heffernan in a section called The Medium. Heffernan uses the release of last year’s numbers of books published to contrast the self-publishers of old, disrespected by the marketplace for their odd, not “booky” books, with the situation today. I also covered […]
Big Blog News at TheBookDesigner.com
I’m pretty excited. Not quite as excited as the day I went down to East West Bookstore on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to see my book Body Types on a bookstore shelf for the first time. That was pretty awesome, even if Jill had to rearrange the stock a bit to show the book to […]
iPad’s ePub: The “Book” of the Future?
A few weeks ago Smashwords made it possible to get self-published books into Apple’s iBookstore for sale on the iPad, and from what I read there are already several thousand Smashwords titles in the iBookstore. Some of Apple’s approved content aggregators have also put out mechanisms for making contact with content creators and rights holders. […]
5 Things That Shouldn’t Surprise You About Self-Publishing
Sometimes it’s good to just kick back, push off the deadlines, turn off the ringer on the phone, and daydream a little. If you’re self-employed, doesn’t that mean you get to goof off once in a while? That you’re the boss, not that pesky little nagging voice in your head? Starting off in self-publishing can […]
Nonfiction Authors Are Keyword Naturals: Case Study
Today I’m following up on my earlier post about how authors can use keywords to help them both find readers and market their books. Instead of my hypothetical pizza book self-publisher, I’m going to use real examples from my blog to illustrate how you can get started using these long-tail, search-oriented marketing techniques. I know […]