As soon as you start learning how to market your books, you trip over a lot of earnest advice about improving the SEO on your site. There are gurus, books, courses and very expensive plug-ins out there designed to boost your SEO rankings. And you should ignore all of it. What is SEO? Just in […]
Why Indie Fiction Writers Should Ignore SEO Read More »
Slightly off the beaten track today. At Stories Rule Press, we offer a formatting service to authors: Give us your manuscript and we will produce validated ePub and Mobi files that you can upload to the retail sites without issue. We’ll also do print layouts. But recently there’s been a rash of manuscripts come in
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One of the more interesting things about searching anything on Google is the auto-complete function. When you start typing in the phrase you want to search, Google suggests variations of what it thinks you might be searching on, so that you can just click on the full phrase, instead of finishing typing it. Google picks
Indie Publishing Success is Rigged Read More »
I try to avoid making predictions about where the indie publishing world will go in the future. I’ve seen futurists get things very wrong indeed, because some disruptive factor they could not possibly have predicted comes along to blow everyone’s expectations out of the water. AI-anything has done that to us in the last year
Why UX Will be the Critical Factor for Indies in the Years Ahead Read More »
Marketing is often seen as the necessary evil of the writing world. It’s the part that many authors dread, and for good reason. K.M. Wellard recently outlined “5 Reasons Marketing Is Hard for Writers” that acknowledges why that dread is so common. Marketing doesn’t have to be as daunting as it seems. There are strategies
Making Marketing Easier Read More »
Writing to Market isn’t quite as divisive as Wide versus KU, but it comes close. Mention Writing to Market to a group of indie authors, and you’ll witness a heated debate spring to life almost immediately. Sometimes full-blown arguments can break out. For the record, I’ve never written to market. Not because I’ve ignored the
Why Writing to Market Won’t Serve You Anymore Read More »
The Fine Art of Schedule Compromises: How to Eat Your Cake and Have It, Too. In The Productive Indie Fiction Writer, when I spoke about writing schedules, I made the observation that you can do anything you want…you just can’t do everything you want. In order to keep your daily routine from blowing out, to
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One of my terrible tendencies is that I’m a relapsing/remitting Perfectionist. So, writing about planning for the new year, in the New Year, instead of December 2023, makes me itchy and uncomfortable. Because planning now, my perfectionist brain argues, ruins the year. The year has already started, and now it’s already a mess because the
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Very rarely do I need to calculate the number of pages in an eBook. Most of the time, indie authors only care about the size of the file, and the number of words in the story itself (sans front and back matter). Besides, calculating pages in an eBook is an exercise in frustration; depending on
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Take Advantage of This Fantastic Discoverability Tool Do you do BookFunnel? If you do, are you participating in the BookFunnel (BF) promos? You should—they’re one of the most effective tools for discoverability, and they can build up your email list quickly, if that is a priority for you. If you are not yet using BookFunnel,
8 Industrial-Weight Tips to Maximize Your BookFunnel Promos Read More »
