Celebrating Independent Authors
To mark the 1st anniversary of Indies Unlimited, the Evil Mastermind allowed some previously sealed records from the IU bunker to be released to historians. Among them, this rare transcript of the first ever IU meeting…
Stephen: Right, settle down, I’m calling this meeting of the Writers Unlimited Finding Force to order.
Ed: Hang on, who are you to call us to order? Why can’t I call us to order?
Stephen: Because I’m the Evil Mastermind, so I’m in charge. Continue reading “How It All Began”
We left off last time exploring the wacky world of Google searches, and what people actually look for. Your homework (Did you notice it was homework? That’s ok, I forgot to mention it.) was to play around and find half a dozen kickass key words that would help people find you.
I’m going to suppose that an avid Indies reader, Candy McFancy—who writes fantasy—has done just that and we’re going to build her website. She’s read the great tutorials from Kat and from Jen on downloading seo plugins for WordPress and devising titles and descriptions, so in this post I’m going to concentrate on how her key words are going to build a better site. Continue reading “Keys, Tags and Penguins Part 2”
“What are you up to this week?” a pal enquired.
“Catching up on all the stuff I didn’t do last week,” I replied, compiling the list in my head. “Uploading clones of the website I’ve just had approved, putting up a blog post, editing a podcast and writing a load of advance pieces for Indies to send in before I leave.” I was preparing to take off on another book research jaunt and attempting to get ahead of myself.
“Cool, do they pay well?”
“We do this one for love,” is what I said. I should of course have said that we also do it for kudos, backlinks and kickass exposure but if I had, I wouldn’t have had the conversation that followed.
We spent a while ruminating on the point of free writing. I kept on using that word ‘branding’ and the eyebrow raisings began to look like the sort of facial exercises you see in ads for fabulous secret alternatives to cosmetic surgery. Now we’ve had a good few articles on the subject here at Indies and the consensus seems to be that, um, you should get your little self out there and make sure the interwebs know who you are and also that marketing is a time sink and everybody hates you for doing it anyway. They put it kinda better than that (here and here for example) but we mostly seem to conclude that the writing is your brand, if only you can get it out there. Continue reading “Back to Branding”
When I mentioned yet another post about SEO to the fellow minions they suggested, relatively politely, that I might explain why anyone should care. We have already had splendid examples of great SEO advice, here for example, but it bugs me that most writers still aren’t playing the SEO game to its full advantage. And I care, so there.
I know that most of us are on Amazon, Goodreads etc and people who like books find us that way. We have lively blogs, they gain loyal fans and your fame spreads by word of mouth…but people Google for books too. If they already know your name or your book title they can usually find your website but suppose they just want ‘fantasy fiction’? I just Googled it, not a single author on page 1. And yet 165,000 people Google for fantasy books per month. Book Reviews? 1,500,000 searches per month, and not a single reviewer’s blog on page 1. People are looking for you and they can’t find you. How do I know? I’ll show you later.
Why say it again though? And why now? Everyone’s read loads of articles on SEO and they all disagree with each other. Here are a few secrets: Continue reading “Keys, Tags and Penguins (Part 1)”