Author: Melinda Clayton

Melinda Clayton is the author of the Cedar Hollow series, as well as a self-publishing guide. Clayton has published numerous articles and short stories in various print and online magazines. She has an Ed.D. in Special Education Administration and is a licensed psychotherapist in the states of Florida and Colorado. Lear more about Melinda at her Amazon author page

Free Resources for Writers

FreeSelf-publishing involves so much more than simply writing a book. Whether you contract with various experts for help or go it alone, once you make the decision to self-publish you’re responsible for graphic design, accounting, marketing, formatting, and so much more. A person could go broke wearing all those hats.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post outlining several places to obtain free music and photographs under a Creative Commons license. Today, I want to introduce a few more sites that offer free resources for writers. As always, it’s good practice to give proper attribution even if the site doesn’t require it. See the aforementioned post on ways to do this. Continue reading “Free Resources for Writers”

Manuscript Formatting and the Nuclear Option

Do your paragraph indentations look like this?
Do your paragraph indentations look like this?

This past fall I published a self-publishing book. It looked great on my computer screen. The formatting was perfect; my spacing, indents, page breaks, etc., were all exactly where they needed to be, so I uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing feeling pretty confident my preview in their online previewer would be error-free.

Boy, was I wrong. My paragraph indents were completely off. Some were indented too far, some not enough, and some just plain missing.

pilcrowI went back to my manuscript and clicked on the pilcrow (the little paragraph symbol on the tool bar that shows all the formatting in your manuscript).  Everything looked fine. Telling myself it must have been an issue on KDP’s end, I uploaded again.

I clicked through the various preview screens. On some devices, the formatting was good. On others, it was clearly off. I couldn’t possibly upload a book that was going to have lousy formatting on half the devices that downloaded it.

I knew what needed to be done; I’d even written about it in the book. I needed to go nuclear. Continue reading “Manuscript Formatting and the Nuclear Option”

Advertising on Goodreads

goodreads logoGoodreads has been in the news quite a bit the past year, first for joining up with Amazon, and second for the well-publicized tension between authors and reviewers. All this discord has frightened some authors away from Goodreads. This is unfortunate, because Goodreads offers a variety of opportunities for authors.

One of those opportunities is their paid advertising option. You can access the paid advertising option midway down on your dashboard:

goodreads advertise your bookClicking will take you to their “Advertise With Us” page, where over on the right you’ll see a “Self-serve advertising” link: Continue reading “Advertising on Goodreads”

Marketing with Freado and BookBuzzr

BookBuzzr LogoThere’s no shortage of websites and services purporting to assist self-published authors with gaining exposure and increasing sales, but as an extremely frugal self-published author, I prefer the ones that give me the most bang for my buck. Free with a bang is even better.

Freado.com and BookBuzzr.com are websites owned by BookBuzzr Book Marketing Technologies Pvt. Ltd., and I think of them as two sides of the same coin. According to the Freado.com FAQs page, “Freado is a website where you can win prizes while discovering interesting books. We also conduct occasional online festivals, fairs and carnivals around themes (such as Hunger Games, Summer Romance or Halloween).” Continue reading “Marketing with Freado and BookBuzzr”