Celebrating Independent Authors
Writing advice and insights from the staff of Indies Unlimited.
I hate keywords. “Use keywords,” they say, for your blog post, your KDP book, your website, your AMS ads. Figuring out which keywords to use is harder for me than writing the actual post/book/ad. But I’m learning.
An example: the other day while checking the Amazon rank of one of my books after a sale, I noticed something odd. The rank in three different categories was showing. The first one was: Continue reading “The Importance of Categories and Keywords for Your Books on KDP”
Everything old is new again, if you wait long enough. Every now and then, I run across an author on the internet who says, “I just had an amazing idea! I’m going to use Tarot cards in my next story! I bet nobody’s ever done that before!”
Um, well, actually, lots of people have. Goodreads even has a list of books in which a Tarot reading figures in the plot. And that list is hardly exhaustive. I can think of two books published in the late 1960s whose authors used Tarot, or a variation on Tarot, as a plot device. One is Samuel R. Delany’s Nova, in which the main character, a member of a spaceship crew, palms the Sun card so that a crucial reading cannot be finished – thereby jeopardizing the ship’s mission. The other is actually a series: Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels, in which the characters correspond to certain cards in a Tarot deck. Continue reading “Writing and the Tarot”
Making a superficial scan of the thousands of bloggers, promoters, DIYers and wannabe gurus on the web, we find tons of tried-and-true wisdom about how to be a writer. Even how to make money at it. Some of that advice needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Some of it with a huge, horse-pasture-sized block of salt. Especially if we have illusions about making money at writing.
What Does Everyone Tell Us?
What we want to hear, of course: Continue reading “4 Bits of Bad Advice for Writers”
Authors who have never self-published can be at a loss for what to do with their works if their publisher closes its doors. But, never fear! Indies Unlimited is here to guide you through what do to if that happens to you. (Man, that’s a lot of dope rhyming, isn’t it?)
There are a lot of other “publishers” and “service providers” who are offering “packages” to authors whose publishers have closed their doors. Don’t be surprised if you receive an email that goes something like, “Dear Author, we noticed that [Insert Publisher Name] is no longer in business, and we’d love to provide you with our services to get you back in print…” It’s like they have a list of authors published by those houses, and are contacting them all in hopes of making money off them, isn’t it?
Well, don’t do it. Don’t spend a penny on it. Remember, when it comes to publishers: if you have to pay, run away. Publishers are supposed to make their money from readers, not writers. Learn how to spot a scam here. Continue reading “New Resource Page for Authors Whose Publishers Close Doors”