Essentials
Essentials

Essentials

Making an Amazon Ad

To make it as an independent author, you need to bust out of your own social circle and into the wider world. There are millions of readers for your books out there — you just need to get their attention. Advertising, especially on Amazon, is an excellent way to find your readers. Amazon vs. Facebook The only other site with the reach and effectiveness for advertising comparable to Amazon is Facebook. And though FB ads are useful, especially for direct sales and Kickstarter campaigns, the big difference in converting viewers to purchasers is that people are on Amazon to buy....

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Writing Descriptions That Sell

A cover might bring the reader in, but it’s the description that seals the deal. So, how do you write a description that turns browsers to buyers? Discoverability vs. Conversion A good description both makes your book easier to find through good use of keywords and search terms as well as “conversion” — getting someone to buy the book. When writing descriptions, I lean far more toward conversion over discoverability, because if you get eyes on the your book that don’t buy, you’ve wasted ad money and are telling the algorithm that your book doesn’t sell. Booksellers give higher priority...

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What Does ‘Write To Market’ Mean?

You will often hear the phrase “write to market” from independent authors. But what does it really mean? Everyone has different ideas about how exactly to do it, but one thing is clear: writing to market is absolutely essential if you are going to have success publishing your own work.  The Two Pieces Of Writing To Market In order to make money as an independent author, you must sell a significant quantity of books. That means you need two things. A big enough market, meaning enough people who want to read that type of book, and market penetration, meaning that...

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Paths to Success

Before you begin your trek toward self-publishing success, it’s good to know the path you want to take. Even better if you know the path you’re best suited to. Because despite what a lot of people will tell you, there’s more than one way to make it as an indie. The Fast Lane Series and Speed Level of Difficulty:HIGH Chance of Success:HIGH Combines With:EVERYTHING Putting out a lot of books quickly is the simplest and most likely path to success. But it’s certainly not the easiest. The fast lane is for those who want the highest chance of success as...

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Cover Design Basics

Everyone knows that people judge a book by its cover. Why wouldn’t they? It’s the very first thing they see of your book. And it may be the last if you don’t understand these basic cover concepts and draw the potential buyer in. In the video below, Chris covers the basics of cover design. Combining these general skills with good knowledge of the covers in your genre (covered in the genre guides) along with a good blurb, should net you high conversion rates on your titles. Chris Wallace on Cover Design...

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Help! I Need a New Computer

The days of pen and paper are long gone. Don’t even think about it. You might draft a few things with a quill pen to look cool at the coffee shop, but if you’re going to churn out enough words to survive as an independent author, you need a computer. Whether your old computer is just, well, old, or it has died and you need a new one right away so you can get back to that masterpiece you were working on about space zombies invading Kansas, we’re here to help with our guide to buying a word processing machine...

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Series and Speed: The Keys to Self-Publishing Success

Writing fast, and in a series, offers the best chance of success as a self-published author. It isn’t the only chance—there are other paths—but it is the most reliable. Because if you write fast, and in series, you can make a living without ever having a hit book. A hit book—or at least a moderately popular one—is a requirement for the other paths. And a hit book is far more dependent on luck, and hitting the right mark at the right time, than your skills as a writer. Readership trends are notoriously hard to predict. Even if you write a...

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Editing Tools

Editing tools? Like… what does that even mean? Is there something more than my keyboard and an old copy of The Elements Of Style?  Yes, dear reader, technology is amazing. While we hate content writing programs using A.I. (they’re taking our jobs!), there are a ton of intelligent software programs that can make your revision and error-checking process much faster. Some simply find typos or offer minor grammar suggestions, while others can do an in-depth read-through of your work. Try out a few, most of them have a free version. You might find something that saves you hundreds of hours...

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