Many authors have a love-hate relationship with shipping books from home. They love getting the instant income, they hate trekking to the post office, waiting in line, having to painstakingly write out all the different addresses. But you can have your...
Marketing Tips
Managing a Reviewer Mailing List
We've spent a few blog posts talking about newsletters, book reviewers, and street teams. Today, we'd like to talk about a combination of both of them--your reviewer mailing list. For self-publishers looking to make a bigger splash on release day,...
Marketing Tips
Newsletter Swaps: An Easy, Free* Way To Market Your Book
In 2018, one of the hot, new ways to market your book is by building your newsletter email lists. The idea being email is far from dead, and is in fact one of the most effective ways to market. And...
Business Tips
Conventions, Events, and Sales Tax
We consider ourselves old pros at attending conventions. We can schpiel with the best of them, schmooze and deal, and have big book-carrying muscles. While we've got a really great blog post on conventions, today, we're going to focus on...
Business Tips
Becoming an Authorprenuer
Many self-published authors are perfectly content uploading their book, doing a little promotion, getting a few bucks, and that's that. But for the rest of us, we find ourselves becoming business owners. And while we don't recommend starting your own...
Marketing Tips
Running a Book Kickstarter – Tips For Success
In January 2016, we ran our very first Kickstarter to fund the publication of the first book in our fantasy romance. Where we expected a meager $400, we ended up with $1600! Along the way, we learned a few things,...
Formatting Tips
Common Book Formatting Issues
Having formatted a number of books (and published a number more), we've seen a lot of book formatting issues along the way. Sometimes, it's a simple derp error on our part, other times it's a bit more complex. Many times,...
Formatting Tips
Formatting with Scrivener 3.0
Murphy's Law says that when we went live with our Scrivener blog series, the folks over at Literature and Latte would release 3.0. And they did! But we're ga-ga over the changes, so we're not complaining too much. Today we'd like...
Formatting Tips
Formatting Books with Vellum
Many authors find themselves ready to format books, and then cross-eyed. If our blog series on Scrivener and Word doesn't help, you might try a more all-in-one solution, one that will help with version control and pretty-pretties. That solution might be...
Formatting Tips
How to Format a Book in Word (Simply)
Book formatting is probably the easiest part of the self-publishing process. Even still, for those who haven't used Microsoft Word's formatting features, it can be daunting to figure out how it all works. We've listed the top few tricks for...