Celebrating Independent Authors
Last week, Google announced that they have launched a new search algorithm. In fact, it’s been out for about a month. Did you notice? The new algorithm, called Hummingbird, is the biggest overhaul of their search engine in four years. Of course, four years in the Internet world is like decades for everything else.
How does this affect us? Continue reading “Introducing Hummingbird – Google Changes its Algorithm”
A Whisper to a Scream
by Karen Wojcik Berner
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
She could be your sister, best friend, wife, daughter, neighbor. An overwhelmed stay-at-home mom whose husband is too preoccupied with work to spend time with his family. A PR executive scared to death she waited too long to have the baby she has always wanted. When they meet through a Classics Book Club, each thinks the other one’s life is so much better than her own. But, is the grass truly greener on the other side of the fence? A vivid portrayal of contemporary marriage and its problems, A Whisper to a Scream speaks to a longing in all of us, a yearning that might start as a vague notion, but eventually grows into an unbearable, vociferous cry. This is the first installment of six novels exploring the lives of The Bibliophiles, a fictional suburban book club.
Well that would be a neat trick to hold all those Ones and Zeroes without dropping any of them. I’m about to hold almost five times that amount, but they will be print versions.
I am in the process of using Amazon’s CreateSpace (CS) to publish all five of my existing eBooks into print versions. Originally I looked into CS and there was a fee involved. Recently, I asked an author friend, who had published his novel on CS, whether he spent a considerable sum. I was very surprised to hear that he didn’t spend any money. Maybe there are other authors who have existing eBooks who were considering printed versions, but were unaware as to how to accomplish this without incurring major expense. What follows is an overview of the CS publishing process I used. Continue reading “Trick Question – How can you hold an eBook in your hand without a device?”
UK research company Netcraft estimates the global number of active websites sites is 187 million. Alexa is the leading provider of free, global web metrics. As I write this, the Alexa global rank of Indies Unlimited is 66,349. That number is a little meaningless without some context. Imagine a bar that shows the total number of websites, ranked in order of their page views and visitors. At the very top of the bar would be Google, in the number one spot. Indies Unlimited would appear in a position 99.96% of the distance from the bottom of the bar and 0.04% away from Google.
We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. In fact, we are within the top one-half percent of websites worldwide. Visitors to Indies Unlimited spend an average of 17:55 minutes daily here and view an average of 10.70 pages. On Amazon, people spend 6.26 minutes on site and view an average of 8.25 pages.
Two years ago I launched Indies Unlimited into this cyber-ocean. We have come a long way in a short time, and we did it by providing quality content. No smoke and mirrors. No fancy SEO tricks. No marketing budget.
I want to express my deep gratitude to the readers of Indies Unlimited, not only for spending part of your precious time with us, but also for helping spread the word.
I also want to thank the scrappy band of lovable rebels who are responsible for the excellent content that has helped make this site a valuable resource and a real global presence:
K.S. Brooks, co-administrator
Laurie Boris, associate editor
And evil minions: A.C. Flory, Big Al, Carol Wyer, Carolyn Steele, Cathy Speight, Chris James, D.V. Berkom, Dick C. Waters, Jim Devitt, Kathy Rowe, Krista Tibbs, L. A. Lewandowski, Lynne Cantwell, Mark Jacobs, Martin Crosbie, Melissa Bowersock, Melissa Pearl, Rich Meyer, T.D. McKinnon, and Yvonne Hertzberger.