The talented and underfed staff at Indies Unlimited cuts a wide swath through subjects of interest to our readers, but that doesn’t mean we have covered every topic imaginable or of interest to you.
Sure, we could continue to use our amazing mental powers to divine your areas of interest; or we could just ask you what you’d like to see addressed. That’s the whole point of our reader request feature, You Asked For It.
What’s on your mind? What issues, areas, controversies, tutorials, surveys would you like to see IU undertake? Our staff will divvy up the requests and hand-craft posts to tackle the questions asked.
OK, I hope it’s all right to pervert this topic to different goals a little, but I’ve been wondering if anybody but me has had trouble with sites (especially wordpress sites) getting hacked, phished, or otherwise compromised.
It’s hell, and I’ve picked up some tips on it, but have no idea if anybody else wants to hear about it. Let me know.
They’re getting /hacked/???? I’d be interested in that too.
I would be interested in that one, Lin; I had so much trouble with WordPress that I deleted it altogether (that in itself was quite a task!). There are some difficulties associated with running a blogsite without WordPress but not nearly as many as having that very invasive organism in my computer.
So I’m not alone! I’ve reverted two sites to straight HTML. Unfortunately, I still have a few blogs up, and they still cause me emergency headaches.
The biggest concern for me as an author is coming up with new and effective methods for reaching readers.
Lin, I have faced the same problem on WP and definitely could use some help. I was wondering how to start an Indie Book Collective to promote our works to readers. Like Jeffrey, I would like to find a way to help all of us reach our market(s). IU has been, and still is very informative about our to do list, however, there must be a way to link with readers in a new way.
I would like to know how to get every newspaper to publish a book review, and every radio station to interview me. In other words, how to catch the ear and interest of the General public.
Jacob, we’ve had posts about doing press and news releases, managing interviews and so forth. I think you’ll be able to find some good info in the archives. However, if you’ve tried all that and it didn’t work, I can only suggest dating a Kardashian or co-authoring a book with Snookie.
That Snooki thing didn’t work out so well for me. She’s a biter.
You’re too funny, Laurie! 🙂
It’s called “money”. 🙂
I’d love to see a survey on whether social media marketing actually works. I’ve read of two authors who think it doesn’t. I know this wouldn’t be a double blind scientific experiment but… a tally of anecdotes for and against would still be interesting.
I do much of my marketing (politely of course) on social media. I also make sure my books have tags and hope for SEO hits. So far, I haven’t spent a dime on advertising and my monthly sales average about $100 for the sites I publish on. No, it’s not a huge amount, but in this business, it takes time to get those readers to find and follow you. FB and Twitter are my two main ones. I can say social media marketing does work, maybe not resulting in billions of sales, but it works.
I would like all of the above, especially opinions about social media marketing – need it or don’t need it.
I am on four social media sites but still don’t operate them effectively. I’ve even asked my young grandchildren to help me set up certain pages, but it never happened. I’ve attended seminars and am really computer-literate, but social media gets to me. How to overcome this?
Ester, here at Indies Unlimited we offer step-by-step tutorials with screen captures designed to help authors use social media and other online tools – scroll down in the right sidebar to “Tutorials” and click on that and you’ll find 62 helpful articles – all for free.