• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Self-Publishing
  • Author Blogging
  • Sitemap
  • Fonts/Typography

The Book Designer

Practical advice to help build better books

by selfpublishing.com

COACHING


PUBLISHING


WRITING


PRODUCTION


FREELANCE


WRITING JOBS

  • Home
  • About
  • Articles
  • Contact
  • Shop
You are here: Home / Marketing / Welcome to Self-Publishing: The Carnival of the Indies

Welcome to Self-Publishing: The Carnival of the Indies

by Joel Friedlander on October 6, 2010 62 Comments

Table of Contents

  • Marketing With Blog Carnivals
  • Time for Something New


Last year when I started The Book Designer blog, I was looking for ways to find readers. I kept running into the advice to look for blog carnivals to participate in.

I had no idea what a blog carnival was. A gathering of bloggers, like a street fair? It sounded festive, and it turned out to be a great discovery.

When blogging first got started, bloggers would put out a call for entries to get other bloggers in their field to send in their best blog posts.

A compilation of the best posts submitted would be issued as a blog carnival. The links were divided into subject categories, and the carnival would come out weekly, or monthly, or on some schedule that suited the blogger.

Marketing With Blog Carnivals

As the number of blogs proliferated, there were blog carnivals for almost every subject area and niche. And why not? It works for both readers and bloggers:

  1. Readers get a convenient, curated list of articles that are probably going to repay a visit to the contributing blog with good content and value. They are already gathered, vetted and sorted. This is one of the most valuable functions you can perform for the readers in your niche, because otherwise a lot of this content will go unread.
  2. Bloggers get a chance to share their best posts with a wider audience, since all bloggers who participate in the carnival link to the post from their own blogs. Because the best blog carnivals are tightly focused on their niche, there’s a great chance that readers of other blogs will be delighted to find more great content in their area of interest.

If you are a nonfiction author with a blog on your topic, I would encourage you to check and see if there are any blog carnivals in your niche. Participating is an easy way to market your blog, and to find new readers.

Time for Something New

Blog carnivals don’t seem as popular as they once were, but they are still a great idea. While searching for carnivals to participate in, I found a number aimed at writers and writing blogs. And there’s Cathy Stucker’s great blog carnival oriented to book marketing, Selling Books.

But I was disappointed to find no blog carnival for self-publishing. What’s up with that?

Since there are so many more bloggers writing about self-publishing, it seemed like a great time to start one up, so that’s what we’ve done. I call it Self-Publishing: The Carnival of the Indies, and this month will be its premier issue.

I’ve set up a page on the blog that has all the information you need if you’d like to participate. Mostly it involves going to blogcarnival.com and pasting a URL into a form, but if that’s too much trouble you can just email it to me and the carnival sprites will take care of the rest. Check out the Carnival Page for complete details.

The deadline for this month is October 20th, and your post should have been published within the last 90 days. Oh, it should also have something to do with self-publishing. Just go to the Carnival Page where it’s all spelled out.

The Carnival of the Indies will replace my last This Week in the Blogs post for the month on the last Sunday of each month. If you want to make sure not to miss it, subscribe to the Book Designer right now and you’ll get all new posts in your inbox automatically.

If you’re a blogger, I hope you’ll participate. Every blogger whose post appears in the Carnival will get one of our nifty new sidebar badges:

self-publishing blog carnival
And if you’re a reader, I think you’re going to be amazed at the great reading we’ll have for you. Stay tuned, and I’ll see you at the Carnival!

Filed Under: Marketing, Self-Publishing, Social Media Tagged With: author platform, blog carnival, carnival of the indies, Joel Friedlander, self publishing

journal marketing

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Self-Publishing: Carnival of the Indies Issue #38 — The Book Designer says:
    December 20, 2013 at 11:02 pm

    […] The original announcement post […]

    Reply
  2. Self-Publishing: Carnival of the Indies Issue #33 — The Book Designer says:
    December 20, 2013 at 10:18 pm

    […] The original announcement post […]

    Reply
  3. Self-Publishing: Carnival of the Indies Issue #31 — The Book Designer says:
    December 20, 2013 at 10:09 pm

    […] The original announcement post […]

    Reply
  4. Self-Publishing: Carnival of the Indies Issue #32 — The Book Designer says:
    December 20, 2013 at 10:05 pm

    […] The original announcement post […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Get the Advanced Publishing Kit

Topics

  • Audiobooks
  • Author Blogging 101
  • Book Construction Blueprint
  • Book Design
  • Book Printing
  • Book Production
  • Book Reviews
  • Cameras
  • Contributing Writers
  • Cover Design
  • E-Books & Readers
  • Editorial
  • Guest Posts
  • Interior Design
  • Interviews
  • Journey of a Book
  • Legal Issues
  • Marketing
  • Podcasts
  • Project Focus
  • Reports
  • Reviews
  • Samples
  • Self Publishing Basics
  • Self-Publishing
  • Social Media
  • Training
  • Video
  • Webinars
  • Writing
Self Publishing Platform
Self Publishing School

COACHING

Self Publishing

PUBLISHING

The Write Life

WRITING

The Book Designer

PRODUCTION

Make a Living Writing

FREELANCE

Freelance Writers Den

WRITING JOBS

Footer

  • Home
  • About
  • Articles
  • Contact
  • Shop
  • Self-Publishing
  • Author Blogging
  • Sitemap
  • Fonts/Typography
Terms of Service
Privacy Policy
Comment Policy
Guest Author Guidelines
Why?
"Writers change the world one reader at a time. But you can't change the world with a book that's still on your hard drive or in a box under your bed. This blog exists to help you get that book into people's hands."
—Joel Friedlander

Copyright Self Publishing School All Rights Reserved. © 2022