Category: Tutorials

How-to articles for writers.

The Blurb Doctor Is In

The Doctor Is In.
Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.

In my last post, I grumbled about mistakes commonly made in book descriptions/synopses. If you missed that phenomenal piece of curmudgeonly brilliance, you can read it here. This week, I pony up and come through as promised – the Blurb Doctor is in. Trust me, this is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you.

Writing a book description or “book blurb” can be the most difficult part of the process for some authors. I don’t know why I have a knack for it. I also don’t know how some people have figured that out (before I came out of the closet with it just now) and have approached me to help them with theirs.

If you’re just getting started, you should check out our Book Description Basics article.

I tried to devise a formula that could be used by anyone for any book of any subject. Would you like to know how that went? Well, it looked something like this:  Continue reading “The Blurb Doctor Is In”

Goodreads: Good, Great, or Necessary Evil?

goodreads logoIf your book is on Amazon.com, there’s a good chance it’s already on Goodreads. Here at Indies Unlimited, we have lots of great articles explaining how to best use what Goodreads has to offer. These include advertising, give-aways, Listopia, a Goodreads for Beginners article (running October 13, 2014) and more. Have a question about Goodreads? Drop us a line through the contact form and we’ll have one of our experienced staff authors check it out. Thanks for visiting Indies Unlimited.

Preparing for Your KDP Select Free Days by Rex Jameson

[Editor Note: This step-by-step list is a great guide for promoting your free book through KDP Select. We used Rex’s methods to promote BAD BOOK at the end of June and had good success.]

Back when I first started using KDP Select, I used the Squidoo list by theinformationlady to promote my KDP Select promotion periods. I have had some pretty lousy results from Select recently, and I decided to revisit this and try to ferret out the proper way to do this. Here is my current process for promoting KDP Select titles:

Step 1: Make sure you have reviews BEFORE you settle on your promotion dates

Shortly after I published The Goblin Rebellion, I scheduled a KDP Select 2-day promotion over a month later and informed all the major sites without having any reviews for the book in place. I didn’t receive any emails back from ENT or POI, but I was in conversations with 2 book bloggers and had given away 50 copies at LibraryThing to try to garner some reviews. There were at least five people, counting the book bloggers, who told me they should be able to hit the promotion deadline.

None of them came through. Continue reading “Preparing for Your KDP Select Free Days by Rex Jameson”

Tuesday Tutorial – Facebook URLs For Your Pleasure

Facebook Author PageSince this is still running rampant amongst author pages, I felt it was a good time to re-run this post. One of the most common…flubs, for lack of a better word…that I see is a Facebook author page with a discombobulated URL. I must see at least one or two a day. “Come check out my page!” they’ll say to me, presenting me with a link that looks like http://www.facebook.com/pages/Judy-the-author/260458930631195. Hey, Judy, guess what? No one’s going to remember how to get to your author page with a link like that. Continue reading “Tuesday Tutorial – Facebook URLs For Your Pleasure”