Five years ago, I was knocking around in a Facebook group that no longer exists, talking about self-publishing with some authors who wrote for this new website called Indies Unlimited. I really didn’t know what to think about it all then. My first novel had just been published, and I was considering putting out the next one myself, but the whole process sounded terrifying. Continue reading “Happy Fifth Birthday, Indies Unlimited”
Author: Laurie Boris
Laurie Boris is a freelance writer, editor, proofreader, and former graphic designer. She has been writing fiction for over twenty-five years and is the award-winning author of four novels. She lives in New York’s lovely Hudson Valley. Learn more about Laurie at her website and her Amazon author page.
Getting Your EBook into Libraries
One of my marketing goals for this year was to find new readers by trying to get a few of my titles into libraries. Oh, was I naïve. I thought it would be so easy, like that Kevin Costner baseball movie — build it and they will come. I thought I could just sign up with a few distributors and let them do the work. I was wrong.
See, libraries first need to actually purchase your book from those distributors. But they have limited resources. They often have small budgets and few hands on deck. A lot like small bookstores. They want to know that whatever titles they decide to shelve will be read. They want to know that they’re spending those limited budget dollars on quality products. They don’t want to take Aunt Ida’s unedited memoir about her trip to Yellowstone. (No offense to Aunt Ida, of course.) Continue reading “Getting Your EBook into Libraries”
What’s Smashwords Good For?
Recently, for a number of reasons that will take too long to explain here, I decided to pull a few of my titles from the KDPS (Kindle Direct Publishing Select) program and make them available for other retailers as well as Amazon.
But this left me with another choice: I could publish with each of the big retailers individually, I could pay a company like BookBaby to do it for me, or I could publish through an eBook aggregator like Smashwords, Draft2Digital, or Pronoun (formerly Vook and now owned by MacMillan Publishers).
The idea of publishing vendor by vendor gave me a headache; Continue reading “What’s Smashwords Good For?”
Why I Still Won’t Follow You on Twitter
I joined Twitter in 2008. It looked like a fun way to connect with people and share blog posts. I made a lot of mistakes at first — I got spammed, I got hacked, I got suspended…and then I got smarter. I stopped automatically following anyone who followed me. I learned how to recognize the red flags that pretty much guaranteed the person behind the avatar (if it was indeed a person) had no interest in two-way communication. Many things about Twitter have changed since then. A lot of users have gotten savvier about Twitter etiquette since 2012 when I first posted about this topic, but I continue to heed a few basic signs (and a few new ones) before hitting the “follow” button. Here’s why I’m still not following you: Continue reading “Why I Still Won’t Follow You on Twitter”