Celebrating Independent Authors
Exposure: that dreadful word that signifies potentially wasted time. Its evil stench lingers on the writing world like a hobo at a back alley dumpster behind an Italian restaurant. You wish it wasn’t real, but it is.
Here’s the thing, exposure isn’t going to kill you anymore than watching hobos eat out of a dumpster. Should you take every little thing that comes your way and do it for free? Continue reading “Exposure Doesn’t Have to be a Dirty Word for Authors”
Createspace, for the uninitiated, is a paperback creation and distribution platform – currently owned by Amazon. With little understanding, and as cheap as free, you can design and publish paperbacks. By free I mean they will even provide you with ISBN numbers. Which is something, as far as I know, no other company currently does. They do provide a rather basic cover creator if you’re in a pinch, but I’d recommend finding other means for a cover. There are plenty of premade covers out there for cheap. Many of them will come in correct dimensions, including spine depth. This is an important thing to consider when publishing a paperback for the first time, because it’s also the single most difficult part of the process. Continue reading “Createspace: One Author’s Opinion”
There are a lot of articles out there on doing conventions. How-tos, tips, tricks, puppy tails, and horse whips. Well, guess what? Here comes another article on the subject. Except, I’m here to tell you can do it on the cheap, because there’s no reason to do it any other way.
We’re writers, titans of the ink and lead, masters of the backspace button and the dead stare at the bright screen of emptiness. We can turn the voices in our heads into stories on the internet – it just doesn’t pay that well. So, we have to pinch those pennies like so many piggies. Reeet reet.
Let’s start with the items you’ll need: Continue reading “Conventions on an Author’s Budget – Tips and Tricks of a Battle-Hardened Con Man”
Happy Tuesday! The strange journey known as Kickstarter is now over, and I still have so much to share. You can read the previous articles in my Kickstarter adventure series here. This part will cover advertising, advice, and avoidances. Trust me, you’ll want to read this even if your plan is to never run a Kickstarter.
Advertising:
I hope to see this change over the years, but for now there is nowhere that truly supports a book Kickstarter. Video games, gadgets, films, even comic books have Facebook groups, special advertising websites, Twitter accounts, and all the things we tend to utilize outside of Kickstarter for promoting our books. Novelists have none of that. The websites you normally post your free/discounted books on? Most of them ask for an ASIN number, which you don’t have because your project hasn’t been published yet. Because of the strangeness of the terrain, I found myself performing guerilla advertising. Is that a real term? Don’t know, but it defines this madness fairly well. Continue reading “Creative Book Promotion Ideas Courtesy of a Failed Kickstarter”