Amazon Kindle now has another option for writers, “Kindle Singles,” particularly aimed at short stories, novellas and other shorter works. I admit to being unaware of this program until I saw a post on Facebook last week. I couldn’t find a way to contact Kindle Singles, so I had to send my questions to Kindle customer service instead. But they were prompt with a reply. Continue reading “Kindle Singles: Love It or Leave It?”
Tag: self-publishing
Ed’s Casual Friday: August and Everything After…
Yes, I totally stole this post title from a Counting Crows album. I’m an old guy, so sue me. No wait, please don’t.
All last month, my Ed’s Casual Friday column here at IU consisted of a four-part look at one-star reviews on a hundred novels regarded as the “best” literature has to offer. The astute among you may have noticed that doing those four articles allowed me to write a full month of posts all at once, and then basically not show up for the rest of July. My lack of presence was not exclusive to IU, but to all the “social media outlets” around which us writerly types tend to congregate. Facebook pages, boards, groups, sites, lists, on and on, ad nauseum. I largely stayed off line for all of July, and I didn’t really do any writing, either. After finishing the fourth book in a series and releasing it at the end of June, before launching into book five I took a couple Mental Health days that turned into a week, and then the full month. Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: August and Everything After…”
Learning the Ropes by Jen Smith
Learning the ropes as a new Indie author is not easy. There is endless information on the web to sort through and countless people and companies offering a wide variety of services for a broad range of prices. I feel compelled to tell folks about an unpleasant experience (to say the least) I had with a company that I overpaid to format my book for Kindle, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble in hopes to save someone from making the same mistake I did. After the blood sweat and tears of actually completing my book and the good fortune of having a close friend that is an amazing editor I made the soul searching decision to publish independently. I’m pretty tech savvy and thought that I might be able to figure out the formatting myself but wanted to make sure it was done correctly so I hired a company out west. The women that ran this company did speaking engagements about the ebook industry and had written a few books herself about writing books to develop your brand. Her website was equally impressive. I went ahead and paid her what I know now is way beyond the going rate for formatting. Continue reading “Learning the Ropes by Jen Smith”
An Analysis of Best Practices for Social Media Marketing
I attended a webinar this week that provided some interesting stats. The data came from one of the leaders in social media marketing, Hubspot. The data came from their rather large database so the sample size was extensive. The results provided some surprises, both with what did happen and what didn’t happen. Continue reading “An Analysis of Best Practices for Social Media Marketing”