Last year, Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson ran a Kickstarter project that raised $42 million USD. $42 million is a very nice payday, but it’s an outlier, not a common outcome of publishing Kickstarter projects. However, Brandon Sanderson’s success drew attention to crowd funding in a way that made most of the indie publishing industry sit […]
You Can’t Afford to Ignore Crowdfunding Read More »
A somewhat new indie author said to me recently, “I know either Draft2Digital or Smashwords can distribute my books. Is there any other big distributors I should consider instead?” I’ve never tackled on this blog the various distribution options indie authors have. At first glance it doesn’t have anything to do with productivity. In fact,
Who Gets to Distribute Your Books? Read More »
In January, I generally like to post about goals for the coming year, goal-setting, and motivation. But I’ve come across a bunch of articles and reports lately that speculate on what 2023 and onward might look like for indie authors, and realized that goal setting is useless, if you don’t have a good idea of
What Your 2023 Business Year will Look Like…Maybe Read More »
This is Part 4 of an informal series about Pen Names. See Part 1 or Part 2 or Part 3 or Part 4. A PIFW reader reached out to me a couple of days ago, asking questions about pen names, branding and genres, and in particular, how they impact the Amazon algorithms. My response to him
Pen Names – 2022 Update. Read More »
Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch call life derailing events “life rolls”. It’s a useful name for a whole host of troubles: Sickness, death of loved ones, disasters, accidents, divorces, getting fired… We’re writers of fiction; we can easily imagine what life rolls might look like. When you’re hit by a serious life roll,
How to Get Back to Writing when Life Has Completely Derailed You Read More »
If you only read this blog of mine, and not any of my author blogs or social media, then it might have seemed like everything was ticking along nicely here. In actual fact, for several weeks now I have been working through a personal health crisis, utterly unable to spare any attention to The Productive
Slowing…but not stopping. Read More »
Indie Authors Take Note: NOW is the time to prioritize your health! Don’t leave it until tomorrow, the way I did. I’ve been having a few health challenges lately. I’ve murmured in public once or twice over the last year about pinched nerves and back issues, in particular, my neck, which was giving me a
Indie Authors Take Note: NOW is the time to prioritize your health! Read More »
Okay, Already, I’ll Try Obsidian! Because I CAN Listen. A while ago, I wrote about my disappointing live trial of Notion, and how I happily returned to OneNote. Buried in the text as a throwaway line was the fact that I did try to use Obsidian, but found it counter-intuitive and too difficult to quickly
Okay, Already, I’ll Try Obsidian! Read More »
Actually, I lied. This hack is simple in concept. But it’s not simple to execute. But, man, is it worth the effort! This hack will energize your writing and let you float through the day, no slogging, no groaning, no fighting to keep yourself at the desk. My story Three years ago, my DH was
Ramp Up Your Creativity and Write Lots More With One Simple Hack Read More »
Following these suggestions will give you a “clean” MS Word file that compiles to ePub and Mobi without mysterious blank pages and extra lines in it, and with chapter headings properly formatted. If you use compilers such as Jutoh, Atticus or Vellum, the clean file will also reduce bad results when you import to those
How to Prep Your Microsoft Word files for flawless ebook conversions Read More »
