Indie News Beat: Cashing in on ICANN

Sometimes it feels like the publishing industry is besieged with scam artists and con merchants, eager to part the unwary storyteller from their cash with promises of quality and exposure. Crafted with not an once of substance, these promises seduce the writer into believing that their novel is special, and that against all evidence to the contrary, their novel will sell by the bucket-load. Once an Indie Author has been around the block, however, it becomes easy to go too far down the road of cynicism, and respond to every new opportunity with the worn refrain: “What’s the catch?” Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Cashing in on ICANN”

Indie News Beat: Special Report

Is Amazon about to create a used e-book market?

If you enjoyed giving your books away on free days in KDP Select, then you’re going to love Amazon’s next idea: to allow copies of “used” e-books to be bought and sold second hand, as with physical books. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Special Report”

Helping You Stay a #1 Bestselling Author on Amazon … or … Part II of Helping you become a #1 Bestselling Author

A year ago, I wrote about Amazon categories in this space. It has gone on to be one of my most viewed posts over the past year. A recent conversation has led me to resurrect the post. If you didn’t see it, you can find it here.

To summarize that article, I laid out a step-by-step procedure to develop the best category for your book on Amazon that will help it show up on the bestseller lists. You have control over that process. It takes a little bit of time and research, but, in the end, it will help you become more recognizable and (I hope) sell more books. Continue reading “Helping You Stay a #1 Bestselling Author on Amazon … or … Part II of Helping you become a #1 Bestselling Author”

My Take-Away on Tardif

When I picked up this book (on a KDP Select free day), I was sure I was going to hate it. I figured it would be another rehash of all the information that’s available on the web for free to any indie author with the brains to parse a Google search.

But then I read the first couple of chapters, and realized that maybe Tardif knew what she was talking about. Like many of us, she got burned by a vanity publisher; she got burned again by a badly-managed small press; she spent years schlepping her paperbacks from one personal appearance to another; and then she found KDP Select. Lucky for her, she hit Select in January 2012, when it was in its glory days; the $42,000 month she refers to in her title is March 2012, before Amazon instituted the big algorithm change that made KDP Select much less of a cash cow for indies. Continue reading “My Take-Away on Tardif”