Those of you who have Facebook pages or read Jim Devitt’s posts probably know that the social media giant is showing a ridiculously small percentage of your fan page posts to your readers, and that this percentage has been dropping lately. Right now, going by an average of my last few posts, I’m reaching about 4% of my fans. Which is pretty sucky. Continue reading “How to Increase Facebook Visibility”
Category: Tutorials
How-to articles for writers.
Video Trailer Nuts and Bolts
Many people are intimidated by the thought of making video trailers for their books. I used to be. Then Carol Wyer taught me how to use Animoto, and I became a video trailer-making junkie.
A lot of people just take their book’s description, type it into frames, and then show those as a slideshow with music. That really isn’t going to draw the interest that could be garnered by this visual media.
You need very little to make an effective book trailer video. And, depending upon what platform(s) you use to create your video, everything you need may be at your fingertips. Here are a few tips I use which you may find helpful: Continue reading “Video Trailer Nuts and Bolts”
Registering a HashTag
The other day, I was chatting with an author who had registered the title of her book as a hashtag. She really had it together – mentioning the hashtag in her book, and even in her book’s description. I was wowed by this level of planning and technology.
“How did you know to register the hashtag?” I asked.
“It was in an article on Indies Unlimited,” she answered.
Well, I’ll be. And it sure was. Lynne Cantwell interviewed Kriss Morton and wrote Hashtags 501 – and I must have been so dazzled by the amazing amount of hashtag knowledge that I missed that part.
I kind of liked the idea of registering a hashtag, so I decided to give it a shot. I went to Twubs.com and entered “MrPish” in the big “enter a hashtag” box. A little wheel spun for a moment, but there were no results. Cool! This hashtag was mine, all mine! *rubbing hands together in an evil manner* Continue reading “Registering a HashTag”
Amazon’s New Series Pages
Last year, Smashwords introduced a neat tool called Series Manager which allows authors to link books in the same series together for better discoverability. Well guess what? Amazon has now done the same thing. Supposedly. But not quite. Frankly – not at all.
To be perfectly honest, Smashwords outguns Amazon with this feature – by a longshot. I’ll explain why in a minute. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty first.
Unfortunately, there is a catch, the same as with Smashwords. If you have books that are in a series which are both self-published and published through a press (which uses a different KDP account), you cannot link those together yourself. You can only link the books under your control through your KDP account. To do that, go to your KDP Bookshelf (dashboard) Continue reading “Amazon’s New Series Pages”