Celebrating Independent Authors
How-to articles for writers.
Guest Post
by Melinda Clayton
Ask any self-published author about his or her experience with CreateSpace templates and you’re likely to hear something along the lines of, “I can never get my headers right.”
While CreateSpace provides fantastic templates, headers can be finicky. After spending one marathon weekend formatting three novels at once, I learned a few things I’m happy to share. Continue reading “CreateSpace Headers: The Basics”
Personal appearances are great for selling autographed copies of your print books. But if your tour budget is similar to mine, it can be more practical to offer signed books a different way. Say, through your blog.
I have a Blogger blog – that is, one whose URL ends in blogspot.com – and on it, I have a page called, “Buy My Books Here!” I built the page using my own cover images and PayPal “Buy Now” buttons. You can do the same thing with a WordPress blog or site – setting up the PayPal button is the same, regardless. You’ll need a PayPal business account, but that’s easy to set up, and very similar to setting up a personal account. At the top left of the PayPal home screen, click “Business,” and they’ll walk you through it.
Once you’re logged into your business PayPal account, you’re ready to set up your button. Click the “Merchant Services” tab and then click on “Make payment buttons for your website.” Continue reading “How Do You Want That Signed?”
Over the past year, we’ve run a lot of excellent tutorials here at Indies Unlimited. Many times, when dealing with queries, I’ll provide links to these tutorials to help authors who aren’t quite certain how to do things. It seemed to me that New Year’s Eve would be a good time to recap the tutorials which I seem to reference the most. Continue reading “Top 10 Query Problems & the Tutorials That Solve Them”
Okay, so maybe that sounds ridiculously simple, but I have noticed over the past couple of months that when people are trying to share a review, they share a link to their book. Which review on that page did you want people to see? Hopefully there aren’t any one- or two-star reviews on there. You realize this means that the folks you’re trying to impress aren’t seeing what you’re trying to impress them with, right? Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, not all retailers make it simple for folks to share a link that goes just to a specific review. So far, I’ve found that you can share individual reviews from Amazon, Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing. I guess the latter three make a lot of sense since they are, in fact, review sites. I double- and triple-checked – unfortunately, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes, and Smashwords do not have a way to share individual reviews.
So, how does one go about sharing individual reviews for the sites which allow it? Most of them make it pretty easy. Continue reading “How to Share a Review”