Ed: Monday’s blog will be this month’s Ebook Cover Design Awards (over 100 covers this month!) and Wednesday I’ll have a remarkable article from an author who posed the question, “Which is more important; your genre, or your author platform?” and then went out and answered it in the real world. You won’t want to miss it. After that I’ll be shutting down for a little extra time with the family. Enjoy the holidays no matter how you celebrate them, and I’ll meet you back here next year.

As the year winds down to its inevitable burst of holiday cheer, there’s still lots going on in the indie publishing world. Maybe it’s the rush of all that buying at retail that spurs us on, or maybe we just get caught up in the season like everyone else. No matter, there’s some great reading for you today, so enjoy.

Dan Wagstaff on The Casual Optimist
50 Covers for 2013
“I decided to go in a slightly different direction with my covers list this year. It’s just a straight up list of the fifty covers designs with a few annotations and links a long the way.”

K.S. Brooks on Indies Unlimited
A Grindable, Clickable eBook Table of Contents
“You can use this table of contents method on an existing document or a new document, that’s not a gating factor. I usually do it in an “assembly line” fashion, as that’s faster, but I’m going to do it one “chapter” at a time so the sequence is clear.”

Porter Anderson on Jane Friedman
Writing on the Ether: Where Publishing Surveys Cannot Go
“Howey wants us to understand that this is a double standard. He is not wrong. We cannot count the dollars made by traditional authors only if they get published, but count those made by all the self-publishing authors, no matter how they fare in the open market.”

Nate Hoffelder on The Digital Reader
Indies Are Getting Clobbered by Big Name eBook Discounts – But Not For The Reason You Think
“Oh, I don’t think that indie publishing is going to die, but I do think we’re going to go into a brutal Darwinian period where the weak and the merely unlucky will be slaughtered. The next 6 months to a year could be a major upheaval in indie publishing as indies have to face more direct competition from the majors.”

Carla Douglas on Beyond Paper Editing
How to Keep Track of Your Elements of Style*
“Most of all, using a style sheet helps you to stay organized. Any piece of writing can generate an unwieldy mass of ideas and information. Recording stylistic preferences gives you a tool both to tame some of this information and to retain control of your writing.”

Gift Certificates Make the Perfect Gift For Authors (Even if that’s You!)

You can now buy gift certificates for your favorite author (wink) at our template site. They start at only $5 and can be used for book templates, our book proposal template bundle, or one of our premium services.

This has got to be the #1 best gift for an author who is planning to publish in 2014. Happy Holidays!

Photo: bigstockphoto.com