This Week in the Blogs, November 12 – 18, 2016

by Shelley Sturgeon | Nov 20, 2016

More helpful tips and great information about self-publishing for you this week. And, be sure not to miss our latest e-Book Cover Design Awards here tomorrow!

Nate Hoffelder on The Digital Reader
Amazon Allows Paid Advertising for eBooks in KDP – KDP Select No Longer Required
“Starting in January 2015 Amazon offered authors and publishers the opportunity to buy ads on its site.”

Chris Syme on Smart Marketing for Authors
How to Choose the Right Social Media Channel to Sell More Books
“All social media channels are not created equal. There are three basic criteria you need to consider when choosing a social media channel (or site) to build a fan base: channel audience, cultural behavior of the audience, and the channel’s selling ability. Each social media channel has its own rules of engagement. The right channel can help you sell more books.”

Molly Greene on Molly Greene: Writer
Schedule Bulk Messages With Hootsuite
“Over the years, I’ve used several different WordPress plugins to auto-tweet my blog’s past posts, eventually discarding each because the developer stopped updating the software.”

Russell Phillips on Self-Publishing Advice Center
Practical Self-Publishing Tips: How to Back Up Your Book Manuscripts and Marketing Files
“If you’ve ever lost a piece of work thanks to a computer problem, you need to read indie author Russell Phillips’ simple back-up strategy that will help any self-published writer banish that particular nightmare.”

Jane Friedman on Jane Friedman
Marketing and Publishing Checklists for Writers
“I’ll start with a confession: I don’t use checklists. I like them in theory, and I collect a wide range as part of my work—so I can share them with writers—and I even know that checklists can be critical in improving performance in certain professions”

Self-Publishing News You Can Use

By Amy Collins

KDP has been quietly testing a program that is currently known as KDP Print since last summer. CreateSpace has long offered print book producers to create Kindle books from the files uploaded and now it looks like KDP is going to follow suit with a reverse offer. KDP Author/Publishers are soon going to be able to access a service that will take the KINDLE file uploaded to KDP and have it turned into a print book. This is big news for the thousands of authors who only have an ebook.

It looks like the beta testing has been happening to a small group of authors in the US and more overseas in countries such as Germany.

According to THE DIGITAL READER:

We know from the KDP Support Forum discussion that the new feature is less about tying a publisher’s existing POD and Kindle books into one interface than about getting KDP users to create print editions of their existing titles. There’s no mention in the public discussions of importing data from Createspace or tying in an existing account, but KDP users are invited to upload a new file which will be turned into a POD book. PDF is preferred, but doc, docx, html, and rtf are also accepted.