Author: Carolyn Steele

Carolyn writes websites, copy and nonsense about emigrating. She also occasionally ambles off to do something daft in case it’s interesting enough to write about. Her latest book grew from the blog Trucking in English, and you can learn more at her blog and her Amazon author page.

Planning to prepare to begin…

keep-calm-and-do-it-tomorrow-38I am writing two books just now. Well, no I’m not, I am brewing two books just now. They are percolating, as it were. Not actually writing them, ever, would be fine if I hadn’t started calling myself a writer but the trouble is, well the trouble is Indies Unlimited.

When I first started reading this pesky blog I had one book to my name, written way back in the mists of time when Author Solutions was the brilliant new alternative to ‘real publishers’. It languished way down at the bottom of the Amazon sales figures and my Mum kinda liked it. I thought of myself as a bit of a diarist, life amused me and I wrote little tales of derring do for entertainment. When blogging was invented I was cock-a-hoop…the interwebs had made a thing just for me. I posted tales here and there with ambitions, nay pretentions to a spot of website writing and ghost blogging.

Then this bloke called Hise put out a call for guest posts in some Facebook group I’d stumbled into. That was the start of the trouble. Three guest posts later and The Big Email came. Would I like to be an IU staff writer? Would I? You bet! That made me a real writer. Continue reading “Planning to prepare to begin…”

KDP Select Freebies Revisited, Yes, Again

Free BeeI kinda missed the freebie boat. I hadn’t got to marketing Trucking in English when the KDP Select model changed and the overnight successes weren’t happening any more. I’d not have been one of those anyway, you need a pukka novel for that, but reading what experts such as Martin Crosbie had to say, it seemed as though the era of nice sales spikes might have gone as well. Martin’s article How I run my KDP Select Promotions, concluded that freebies can still help but it’s more of a lottery than it once was.

I decided to try it anyway, not so much for sales but because I was struggling to get the review numbers I needed for some of the bigger marketing sites. I thought maybe people who downloaded a freebie would be more likely to write a review in return. I also had a more existential question to answer. My stuff isn’t obviously interesting to most people until they get stuck in. When you do mad things in case they’re amusing, and then write about them when they are, your titles can feel so niche as to appeal to almost nobody. I knew that once I persuade someone to try one, they love it and buy the other, so maybe if all it took was a click rather than the untrousering of a dollar or few, more people would dip toe in water.

So, I planned my freebie. I opted to run all my five days together, to give the book the best chance of gaining some traction. I used the excellent list of free book promo sites that Martin compiled for IU, giving each site a month’s notice of the full five days, to maximise the chances they’d list my book. I only used free listings, assuming I’d not recoup any outlay. I did not tweet or Facebook it (I’ve spammed my friends enough) but I did list it here on IU.

I took careful notes and learned some things. Here they are. Continue reading “KDP Select Freebies Revisited, Yes, Again”

Wave Hello to ReadWave

A few weeks ago I was cold-emailed by a charming chap called Rob Tucker who wanted me to check out his website for writers. He’d been reading my blog, he said, and had enjoyed it. My writing might be a good fit for ReadWave. I very nearly put it in the ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ pile, I get these emails from time to time. Don’t we all? But something about his tone made me read it again; it actually sounded as though it came from a real person. He wrote, ‘ReadWave is a place where you can write about anything – an idea, a life experience, a travel adventure or a moment of inspiration – as long as it’s under 800 words.’

Well Rob couldn’t have known but the 800 word thing hooked me in. Before blogging was invented (and before I knew whether I was a writer or not) I used to pretend that I had a humour column in some fancy newspaper or other and I’d write regular snippets about things that amused me. Back then I’d given myself an arbitrary length of 800 words, just for the sake of self-discipline. The pieces had never seen the light of day, apart from the occasional guest blog, and I wondered if this could finally be somewhere to give them an airing. So I checked out the website. Continue reading “Wave Hello to ReadWave”

Snooping Around the Engine Room – Web Source Code

We looked last time at how to assess the traffic a website receives when deciding whether it’s worth your attention and/or hard-earned cash. But suppose the idea is so new that the website hasn’t been around long. Or maybe traffic isn’t vital for you; perhaps you’re happy in a niche where the right people will find you, even if that’s not very many of them. In that case it’s handy know how SEO-savvy the website you’re considering advertising with, or writing for, really is. And yes, there’s a dirty little snooping tool.

When you look at any website, you have access to its source code and here’s how to find and assess it.

To get into the code you need to right-click somewhere on the web page. Make sure you’re clicking on the body of the page and not a picture. Right-clicking on the picture will give you a completely different menu. When you click on the actual site, you’ll see these options: Continue reading “Snooping Around the Engine Room – Web Source Code”