Celebrating Independent Authors
Writing advice and insights from the staff of Indies Unlimited.
You may have recently received an email from Draft2Digital telling you that they’ve added a new marketing tool for authors. I’m always curious to try new marketing tools, so I decided to take a look.
I initially had a hard time finding where to go but, after a few tries, discovered that once signed in, you need to go to My Account and select Universal Book Links (see screenshot below). Continue reading “Draft2Digital’s Reading List Carousel: A Tutorial”
It’s tough enough to write an eye-catching blurb for your book on Amazon, especially so when you consider how many millions of books are there to compete with. It’s something we all struggle with, believe me. So how do we make our blurb pop? How do we draw eyes to it on our sales page?
A very quick and easy way, and a very effective way, is to use italics and/or bold in your book’s description. If you’ve published through KDP, I’m guessing your first reaction to this is, “Huh? There’s no option for that in KDP.”
You’re right; there’s not. Continue reading “Making Your Book’s Description POP on Amazon”
Okay, this isn’t supposed to be a downer of a post. But, it’s something writers might have to face. It happened to me March 21-24 this year. Some of you may remember that every year for the last three years I’ve had a booth at our local comic con. This year was no exception. I share a booth with my artist friend and we have a lot of fun.
Last year was a dream come true. Our sales were huge! We each made more than enough to cover our portion of the booth fee for the next year (something of a benchmark we’ve come up with). And this year we were expecting the same. Except, that’s not what happened. Continue reading “When Author Events Don’t Work out as Planned”
Many authors make public appearances, or outings, in an effort to connect with more people. For those who have never done it and are interested, I thought I’d put together some pro tips for authors who would like to do a public event.
The first thing I want to say is that participating in an event, as a speaker or as an author vendor, normally won’t propel you to endless fame or thousands of book sales. Generally, the people whose appearances drive attendance and sales already have a large platform. People come to events involving relative unknowns generally because of the event itself or the information gained at the event.
Keeping this in mind, let’s talk about the kinds of events new authors can participate in, and how to do it. There are generally a few types of events authors appear at: festivals, conferences, and special programs. Continue reading “So, You Want to do Author Events? Tips to Get You Started”