When Amazon announced that indie authors other than Hugh Howey would be allowed to offer their e-books on pre-order, the timing couldn’t have been better for me to give it a try. I was in the midst of planning my next book release. The description was ready, the categories and keywords chosen, and I’d just sent the final draft of the manuscript out for copyediting. Continue reading “What You Need to Know about Amazon Pre-ordering”
Category: Tutorials
How-to articles for writers.
WordPress Categories: are you making the most of them?
I know this sounds boring but categories are excellent little chaps. They can help people find their way around your blog and spend longer reading what interests them. Alexa and Google will approve of this.
People tend to get categories and tags mixed up, and to confuse things further, Kat posted recently about the difference between tags and keywords. She added a screenprint to show how tags appeared at the bottom of an IU post, so readers could find similar articles. Here it is again:
Kat highlighted the tags and keywords. Today I’m going back to the beginning of the same sentence, ‘This entry was posted in…’ because that’s your category. It’s part of the filing system for your posts but this filing cabinet is sort of bigger. Continue reading “WordPress Categories: are you making the most of them?”
How to Buy Book Advertising & Promotion Services
I was once there: afraid to buy book advertising. I almost forgot what that was like. Recently, in the comment thread of my article discussing What My House Taught Me About Selling Books, I was reminded how scary this industry can be. It’s extra-intimidating if you don’t have someone like Martin Crosbie to show you the ropes. I’m extremely fortunate.
So, I thought it might be nice to offer a little hand-holding and some baby steps for those of you who have yet to take the plunge into advertising their books. Here are a few easy steps to take you from Petrified Author to Seasoned Pro. Continue reading “How to Buy Book Advertising & Promotion Services”
A Quick and Dirty eBook with Calibre
Some indie authors are tech savvy and masters at formatting their completed manuscripts into the two most commonly used ebook formats, ePub and Mobi. Some hire someone to format their eBook files. However, the approach taken by many is the simple one, upload a Word document to Amazon and let KDP convert the file. If you’re only publishing through Amazon, this works great. At least until you want to send an eBook to a friend, submit your book to a reviewer who requires an eBook file for submission, or … well, you get the idea.
If your book is already published and you followed my advice to not use DRM, you might consider purchasing a copy of the book from Amazon and copying the file from your Kindle or the Kindle for PC directory to use for these purposes. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to do this.) But if your book has DRM or you want to send an eBook file in advance of publication to reviewers or beta readers, another approach is needed. There are many ways this might be accomplished. The approach I’m going to outline here is using a free program called Calibre. Continue reading “A Quick and Dirty eBook with Calibre”