authors

A reader left a comment on last night’s infographic post, and I thought it deserved its own post. Mark Williams asked:

The possibilities are endless, but can you point us to any beginner’s guides to actually making these things?

That is a good question; while I know of any number of comprehensive guides to making infographics (The Creative Penn has a good one) I have never been able to find a post that helped me figure out how to make infographics.

I had always had the requisite tools at hand; for example, Canva is free, online, and has dozens of infographic templates you can take apart and modify, thus learning by doing.

But all the tools and all the guides were useless because I struggled with the first step in making anything, which is understanding the concept of the activity.

I made my first infographic in January, and once I did I realized what no one had told me before. I already had the requisite skills and knowledge, but what I lacked was the understanding how to apply them.

In fact, most of those who are reading this post have the skills you need to make an infographic, you just don’t know it yet. Luckily, I can help you make the conceptual leap with a single word.

Are you ready?

Powerpoint.

If you can make a Powerpoint presentation, you can make an infographic. The skills are that similar. (Coincidentally, you can also make an infographic using Powerpoint, but that is not what I am talking about.)

Infographics can look intimidating uninitiated, but the process of making one can be broken down into two simple parts: researching and writing the content, and then laying it out in an interesting manner.

Those are essentially the same steps as making a Powerpoint presentation, only instead of a slide deck, you make one really detailed graphic.

The trick to writing the content for an infographic is to take notes for a 1,000- to 1500-word blog post and then summarize the notes as 15 to 20 tweet-length factoids.

No, seriously, an infographic really is that light on content.

One of my activities over the 2017 holidays was making handouts for Valiant Chicken, my WordPress support business. Those weren’t infographics but what that that project taught me was that if you want to cover 10 to 15 points in a three page handout then you had to be as brief as possible.

One handout consisted of 9 ways to speed up a WordPress site (PDF). The handout’s text consisted of 260 words, which I later expanded into an 800-word blog post.

When you make an infographic, you should take whatever blog post you were thinking of writing, and plan on paring your text down by at least a factor of three. That’s all the room you’ll have in the infographic.

Luckily, you can combine a lot of stats into charts or graphs, reducing your word count while still conveying a lot of information.

But to do that you will need to learn a thing or two about layouts – just not from me.

To be perfectly honest, I am still learning about infographic design myself, which is why I am still using the stock designs at Canva as the basis for my custom infographics.

As someone who is just past the beginner phase, I think you should start there and learn as you go. That’s what I am doing.

Any questions? Did this help?

Infographics are a popular marketing tool in the business world because they are a great way to get a company’s name out in front of potential customers. A popular infographic could be shared widely, giving a company both an SEO boost and adding to its brand recognition.

We don’t see infographics used much in the book world, but they could be a boon for authors who are willing to invest the time and energy. They’re really not that hard to make once you get over the first hurdle.

Here are five ways authors could use infographics. If you have another use for them, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

1. Reveal background details for setting, characters, or events

There’s no better way to keep fans coming back for more than to reveal how a character got their scar, or explain the history of a royal guard, a gang of cutthroats, or a secret society.

JK Rowling, for example, even has a whole site built on background details for the Harry Potter books, and has published several spin off books.

2. Show how your book is similar to popular books

Readers are always looking for books similar to their favorites, If your book shares themes and tropes with popular series like the Foundation, Narnia, or with a famous author’s books, you should point that out.

The more connections the better.

3.  Share what you found while conducting research

If a reader likes your stories, chances are they will enjoy it when you reveal the work that went into the stories but never made it into the text.

If you had to consult with a bladesmith or herbalist in order to write your book, share the more interesting details you learned from the expert.

4. Create a timeline for the events in your book

When fans are reading book eight in a series and you reference events in book three, they’re going to appreciate a timeline that makes it clear the order of events, and what sudden but inevitable betrayal lead to war.

5. Build a relationship graph

If you are writing books with a large cast of characters and multiple plotlines, chances are your readers will appreciate the help in identifying who did what to whom.

You can use a relationship graph to explain details referenced in the text, such as political alliances, familial connections, or dynastic inheritance.

P.S. If you do decide to make an infographic, please let me know.  I am not a good enough artist to charge for making an infographic, but I still get a kick out of them and would be happy to give you feedback on your work.

P.P.S. The infographic is licensed CC-BY, and can be shared freely.

If you have a WordPress site, chances are you have heard of something called Gutenberg. You could have seen one of the posts written about it over the past 18 months (such as mine), or you may have seen the notice when you updated your WordPress site to v4.9.8.

Either way, if you are the average user you are probably wondering what Gutenberg is and how it will affect your site.

The following post is a short explainer that will delve into what Gutenberg is, why it matters, and how it will affect you. I’ll explain the motivations that drove Gutenberg development, lay out your options, and point you to sites where you can learn more.

What

Gutenberg is a new official part of WordPress. It is currently in beta, and is scheduled to launch with the release of WordPress 5.0.

I have been following the development of Gutenberg for over a year, and in that time I have learned that the easiest way to explain what Gutenberg is to ask whether you are familiar with one of the mailing list services like Mailchimp or Mailerlite. Have you used one of their newsletter builders?

If you have used one then you will better understand Gutenberg when you see it for the first time.

Gutenberg replaces the existing post and page editor menu in WordPress with one that behaves more like Mailerlite’s newsletter builder. Where the existing editor resembled old word processor apps (think MS Word, circa 2002) and was designed on the concept of typing out paragraphs of text, the new Gutenberg editor is built on the idea of blocks.

It is not supposed to affect your existing content, but I cannot guarantee that will be true 100% of the time. (A WordPress site is just too complex to make that promise.) What I can say is that Gutenberg is intended to let you make new richer content, not force you go fix your existing content.

It looks like this:

Each paragraph of text,image, quote, or what have you, is treated as a separate block in the Gutenberg editor. This is a concept similar to what you would find in one of the aforementioned newsletter builders, although they do look very different.

Mailerlite and other services give you a limited selection of blocks to build a newsletter, and they usually show you the options in a panel on the right. Gutenberg, on the other hand, has a pop-up menu where you can select a block. You can open that menu by clicking the plus sign icon (see the screenshot above for an example) and then selecting one of the options.

Once you chose the next block, you can style it with settings that only apply to this one block, add content, etc. That custom styling is perhaps the biggest difference between Gutenberg and the existing content editor.

But you don’t have to take my word for it; you can test Gutenberg itself.

If you want to play around with Gutenberg before installing it on your site, there is a public demo over on WordPress.org. If you want to try it on your site, you can install the Gutenberg beta app.

And if you would like to learn more about the options for styling blocks, Kinsta just published a post that goes into this in considerable depth.

Why

The why question I have heard the most in re Gutenberg is why Gutenberg is being added to WordPress.

The answer will vary depending on who you ask, but in my opinion it all comes down to a desire to give users a tool so they can make prettier blog posts and pages.

If we wanted to get into web industry insider gossip, someone would tell you that Gutenberg is a response to WordPress competitors such as Squarespace who already have this type of content editor. That has the ring of truth, but it’s also true that the WordPress editor hasn’t significantly changed since it was released in 2003. It looks and functions like a 20-year-old word processor app, and that outdated design limited what you could write and publish on a WordPress site.

The content editor was sorely in need of an update, but did it need to be replaced? Well, that depends on why you are using WordPress.

The typical blogger is fine with banging out paragraphs of text, but WordPress is much more than a blogging platform. It hosts all kinds of sites which are used for all types of purposes, and designers who are building those sites need the more sophisticated content editor.

While that sounds like a good justification, it is also true that those designers had their choice of sophisticated content editors; this type of tool is called either page builder or site builder, and there are a double dozen different competing tools to choose from. I use one from a company called SiteOrigin to build pages on this blog, and some of the more popular options include Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Divi.

This has lead some to argue Gutenberg is designed to fill a need that has already been met, but that debate is beyond the scope of this post.

How

The how question has two parts; how do you use Gutenberg, and how to do avoid it and keep using the old editor.

Gutenberg will be a part of WordPress 5.0, which will be released some time in the next few months. But if you want to use it now, you can install the Gutenberg beta plugin. Activating this plugin will replace the current content editor, giving you a chance to play with Gutenberg on your site.

Be sure to back up your site before you install the plugin. I don’t think it will break anything on most sites, but I operate under the assumption that about 1% of the time things will go awry. We have no way to tell who is the 1% this time around.

If you never want to use Gutenberg, ever, you can install a plugin called "Classic Editor". This will guarantee that the current editor will not be replaced when Wordpress 5.0 is released.

O O O

I have installed the Classic editor, and I plan to regard Gutenberg as a project rather than a tool for the time being. I’ll learn how to use it and how to support sites that use it, but I won’t use it on my site. I’ll wait until it is out of beta and is a reliable tool; then it will be safe to use.

image  by NYC Wanderer via Flickr

In my morning coffee link post this morning I included a post on The Book Designer where a so-called "expert" made various claims about PDFs, including that PDFs aren’t ebooks and that PDFs "can’t be uploaded to any of the major ebook commercial retailer sites". 

Sidenote: This guy has a long-running FUD campaign about PDFs. He has been bad-mouthing PDFs for years, and he is just as wrong today as he was two years ago.

My first inclination is to retort that any well-informed publishing industry insider could tell you that neither statement is true, but then I realized that if The Book Designer could publish a post rife with factual errors, maybe it was time for an explainer post that set the record straight.

Yes, you can upload and sell PDF in the major ebookstores – some of them, anyway. Amazon accepts PDFs, and so does Google. Barnes & Noble used to accept PDFs, but according to their current help pages they no longer do so.

And there are even times where you should sell a PDF. For example, there are certain types of non-fiction that just work better in a fixed layout format, and frankly a PDF is still more versatile and accessible than a fixed layout Epub.

Also, there are markets – such as O’Reilly technical manuals – where a sizable part of the audience insists on PDFs. You will need to find a way to provide what the market wants.

Here’s a summary of where and how you can sell PDFs in the major ebookstores.

Google Play Books

Google will let you upload a PDF through its publisher portal. Play Books users can also upload a PDF and read it in the Play Books app for Android or iOS.

It is not clear at this time, however, whether you can sell a PDF in Play Books and have it arrive in that format. (While I was trying to test this, I discovered that the Play Books web app is no longer compatible with Chrome.)

I will investigate further and update this post at a later date.

Nook / B&N Press / Nook Press

At one time B&N was so committed to PDF that they gave their Android app a PDF renderer that had been customized  for B&N’s hardware.

Alas, that was a different time. Now, B&N Press no longer lists PDF as a format you can upload.

Kobo Writing Life

You cannot upload a PDF to Kobo Writing Life; it is not listed as an accepted format.

But even if it were allowed, no one could buy your PDF. Kobo stopped selling and supporting PDFs in November 2017. The PDF would need to be converted before it could be sold, so you might as well submit an Epub instead.

eBooks.com

This is not a major ebookstore, no, but it is one of the best places to find PDFs for sale.

When O’Reilly shut down its ebookstore and found that the market demanded PDFs, their solution was to sell the PDFs through eBooks.com. The O’Reilly PDFs are sold DRM-free, but I have also bought DRMed PDFs from that site. The PDFs came with Adobe Digital Editions DRM at that time.

I do not know how authors can sell their PDFs at ebooks.com, but I am listing the site here so that those who want to sell PDFs can pursue the matter. (I am also hoping that ebooks.com will reach out and give me the details we need.)

Kindle

Here’s something I thought everyone knew: Amazon sells PDFs. Amazon calls their PDFs "Kindle Print Replicas" but that is just a fancy name for a PDF in a proprietary wrapper.

Authors can sell PDFs in the Kindle Store, and Amazon has even provided a couple apps for that purpose.

• Kindle Create
• Kindle Textbook Creator

You will need to use one or the other app to prep your PDF so you can upload it to KDP. Simply load your PDF in either KC or KTC, make your finishing touches, and then save the ebook. The apps will give you a project file that you can upload to KDP.

If you try to upload a PDF itself, Amazon will try to convert it to Mobi.

BTW, you will probably want to use Kindle Textbook Creator; I am told that it makes smaller PDF files than Kindle Create. Since Amazon charges for the delivery of ebooks, reducing file size can significantly increase your earnings.

Apple is notorious for the ridiculously pointless rule that if you want to sell ebooks on their platform, you have to use their app and their hardware to do so (or go through an aggregator). While all the other major platforms will let you use just about any web browser to upload and sell your ebooks in their store, Apple insists that you have to use macOS-only iTunes Producer to upload ebooks to sell, effectively imposing an Apple tax on those who want to deal directly with Apple.

Anyone with the technical skill to install macOS on their existing computer could get around that tax, but there is also a solution for the rest of us.

I was at one of Robin Sullivan’s Meetups yesterday when another attendee mentioned a service called MacInCloud where one could lease a Mac online and run apps on it.

It turns out there are a bunch of online startups that will lease either a Mac or a Mac server to you online. You can access that virtual Mac through your web browser, install apps like iTunes Producer, and even upload ebooks.

Depending on how much time you spend managing your ebooks, this is potentially a cost-effective alternative to buying a Mac or to using an aggregator.

The following list details five of the services I found, and includes info on their prices, quirks, etc. I would include reviews except I could not find any recent ones for most of these companies. (It appears that kind of detail is shared word of mouth rather than via written reviews.)

If you know of a similar service not listed below, please use the comment form at the end of the post to send me an email. We’d also love to hear about your experiences using any of these services.

Name	Cost	Details
MacInCloud	$1 an hour to $49 a month	This is potentially the cheapest option if you know what you’re doing with a Mac. A good solution might be to start with one of its better plans and then scale back to the dollar per hour plan once you are all set up.
MacStadium	$49 to $679 per month	na
vmOSX	$10 to $60	At the lower tiers, this service lets you share a Mac with other users and access it for one or three hours each day. If you opt for the upper tiers you will be renting your own Mac.
Xcloud.me	49 to 329 Swiss francs per month	na
XCodeClub	$25 to $50 a month	This feels very much like a one man band operation. Its site is much less polished than the competition, and there’s no clear definition of the quality of the service it is selling (number of CPUs, RAM, etc)
tbd	tbd	tbd

Most (?all?) of the services mentioned above offer far more computing power that you will need to run iTunes Producer, which is why I’d make my choice based on price and support. You might also consider whether paying for one of these services will cost you more than you would pay to an aggregator to distribute your ebooks for you.

If you know of a similar service not mentioned here, please fill out the form below.

[contact-form][contact-field label=’Email' type=’email' required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Service’s name' type=’text' required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website' type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Cost' type=’text' required=’1’/][/contact-form]

You’ve heard over and over that the best way to promote your author career is a robust mailing list. This is true no matter the product, the business model, or the industry.

A mailing list is important, but have you ever considered whether you are using all the available tools to grow your mailing list?

I was recently inspired to audit the tools I use for my own mailing list, and I found my toolbox sadly deficient. I am doing most of the right things, but some of my tools have never left the toolbox.

The following post lists seven of the dozen or more essential tools you should have in your mailing list tool kit. (If you have a suggestion for a tool to add to this list, I’d love to hear about it.)

Email Marketing Service

While you could manage your mailing list out of your Gmail account, only a masochist would want to do that rather than use one of the companies that offer email marketing services.

MailChimp, Aweber, and their competitors will keep track of your subscribers, give you tools to write newsletters, and tell you how many subscribers have opened or clicked each newsletter, all for a low monthly fee. Some are even free to use if you have a small mailing list.

I recently published a list of companies that offer mailing list services; I’m sure you will find one that does what you need.

Plugin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in possession of a website must be in need of a pop-up plugin to promote the authors mailing list.

This is not strictly true – you can build sign-up forms on the email marketing service company’s website, and then embed the form in your site – but the simple fact is, having a mailing list plugin on your site does make it a whole lot easier to create new forms that blend well with the design of your site, update the forms, and generally manage the process of adding names to your mailing list.

Desirable Freebie Content

Thanks to the GDPR, you can no longer trade a free ebook for an email address and then add the address to your mailing list; now you have to actually get someone’s permission to send them emails.

But even though the new rules have put an end to that questionable marketing practice, you can still use free content to attract new subscribers. Think about who you want to subscribe to your mailing list, and then  create a short ebook that will appeal to them. It can be one of your short stories, or a short non-fiction work that ties in to your novels, or it might be an edited collection of the notes you made will doing background research.

Web Hosting Secrets Revealed has a good post on this topic.

Appealing Pitch

You’re probably thinking that you should pitch your mailing list on the landing page (or pop-up), and you’re right – but that isn’t the only place you will need to use a pitch. Before you can get someone to the sing-up page you will first need to get them to click a link. This is why you need to craft several different pitches ranging in length from a tweet to a Facebook update.

Your pitch needs to convey how the reader will benefit from subscribing, and I don’t mean just the free content. Tell them what they will gain from joining your mailing list, and how they can use the info you provide.

Marketing Sherpa can tell you more.

Killer Landing Page

Any indie author serious about growing their mailing list must invest in marketing campaigns with sales and lead generation goals. You have to get your name out there, and after someone clicks a link to learn more about you or your book it is the job of the landing page to clinch the deal.

Where a regular web page may have links to other parts of your site and lots of useful info, a landing page usually only tells visitors enough to get them interested in signing on the bottom line. All distracting info is removed, leaving just a pitch.

Jay Lemming has more detail on the Alli blog.

Attractive Welcome Email

If you thought your task was done once someone had signed up for your mailing list, think again. Your welcome email is your chance to establish a bond with your new subscriber.

You can tell the reader how to connect with you on social media, where you will be holding public events,  what books you are currently working on, and you can link to pages on your author site that share details about the books you write.

Vertical Response has useful tips on crafting a welcome email and examples you can study.

GDPR-Compliant Privacy Page

In mid-2016 Europe enacted new privacy rules that affected how marketers, websites, companies, and others can store a user’s information. Those rules took effect in late May 2018. For the most part the GDPR won’t apply to your author site, but there is one part you should follow if only because it is a good idea (it is also legally required).

Add a privacy policy on your website (or some other place that visitors can find it) that explains what information you collect, how it is gathered, etc. Be sure to tell visitors how they can request their info, and other rights they have under the GDPR.

What do you use to grow your mailing list?

I’d love to know what you’re using to grow your mailing list. Do you think they’re working? Also, what do you think of the tools and services I’ve mentioned in this post?

One of the first – and possibly the most important – things authors learn about developing their writing career is that marketing is not something you can just do once and then forget about. Instead, authors should plan on the need to promote their career on a weekly or monthly basis over the course of years.

This might sound like it will take too much time away from writing your next book, but let’s not forget that writing is a business. If you don’t spend  time promoting your work – or to put it another way, growing your audience – then there won’t be anyone around to buy your next book when it hits the Kindle Store.

All this time spent in self-promotion might sound like too much time wasted on the boring part of an author’s job, but when done right marketing doesn’t have to take more than 20 minutes. Furthermore, marketing is one of those activities that only pays off after consistent effort.

Here are seven ways you can promote your writing career, twenty minutes at a time.

1. Reach out to readers, and ask them to post a review.

If you have already published several books, and fans are emailing you or reaching out on social media, now is a good time to raise the topic of reviews. It is perfectly okay to ask them if they have posted a review; you might also drop a hint in the intro of your next newsletter.

Amazon.com is always the best place for your fan to post a review because a review will be reposted to all of Amazon’s sites, but it might also be deleted for no good reason. Amazon also requires that reviewers spend at least $50 a year on the site, which not everyone does. That’s why you might want to ask fans to post their reviews on GoodReads.

2. Publish a blog post or newsletter.

Blog posts can’t drive sales like they did back before Google killed Google Reader, but they can still be a good way to gain the interest of visitors to your website. A kick-ass evergreen post – one that is insightful and well-argued – can attract visitors even years down the line.

Similarly, a newsletter – while not as useful in the long term – is your chance to get the attention of subscribers where they live: their inbox.

If you are coming up short on ideas, here’s a tip: Take one of the topics you looked into while doing background detail and write it up in a blog post. Explain it in detail, and provide links to additional background information.

Another way to write a great newsletter is to take something that happened to you and explain what can be learned from it. Be sure to focus on lessons that will interest your readers.

I will be honest with you, though; a great blog post will take you more than 20 minutes. For example, this post you are reading right now took me eight hours to plot, research, write, and edit. That is a huge investment in time, but I am hoping that the investment will pay off over the years as the post continues to be shared and read.

3. Update/Refresh your site (this includes the SEO as well as the content).

When was the last time you updated the bookshelf section of your site?If you have recently written new background detail, or just finished answering questions from readers, now would be a good time to add the extra info. An FAQ is a good way to share details about your books, their release dates, and their background.

Remember, the more _interesting_ details you share, the more your fans will like your work and buy your next book.

BTW, when was the last time you changed the free ebook you offer through your mailing list signup form?

4. Schedule a sale, and pre-announce it on social media.

Everyone loves a sale, and we even like to hear about one in advance. Several authors have told me that they will schedule a sale on a backlist title on a given day, and then announced the sale on their mailing list or social media days or weeks in advance. I am told this is an effective way to both engage with fans and to boost sales.

5. Update your book listings on GoodReads.

When was the last time you updated your author account on GoodReads? (Have you claimed it yet? Why not?) Are all the descriptions, covers, and release dates correct?

Most importantly, have you posted your new book yet? GoodReads will let authors list upcoming books as early as several years before publication day. Fans can add those books to their shelves, and anyone who has a book on their shelf can get updates every time you post an update about the book. This can be a good way to generate pre-launch buzz and boost sales on publication day.

6. Read the daily HARO emails.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is an online service that connects journalists with sources. It is free for journalists and costs the sources anywhere from nothing to $150 a month, depending on the service tier.

This can be a great way to get your name mentioned in a news publication, but since you can’t control how you are quoted there is the risk of being quoted out of context.

7. Schedule a book signing, or author reading.

Go in to your inbox and dig out those emails you were ignoring. You know the ones I mean – the emails where a bookstore, school, book fair, etc expressed interest in hearing you speak. Apologize for the delayed response, and tell them that you are interested.

Edit: While we’re at it, don’t forget the bloggers who want to interview you!

If you don’t have any emails like that then go into your outbox and find the emails you sent to event organizers that did not generate a response. Send a polite follow up email telling them you are still interested.

And if you don’t have either type of email then now would be a good time to find events you can attend. Search for writer conferences, book fairs, and author events, and you will find happenings where you can promote yourself.

Finding the right niche / genre / keywords to market your book, and then parsing the sales data once your ebook is on the market, can mean the difference between a best-seller book and one no one has ever heard of.

The following post details a couple lists of tools that authors can use to target their books through market research, and then track ebook sales once the books are for sale.

This list includes all the tools I could find in a thorough search, but if you know of a tool not listed please mention it in the comments.

Market Research

The first step in publishing a best-selling book is finding out what is selling, and the following tools can help you with that.  They can parse Kindle Store rankings and tell you which genres are selling how many copies, what the best-selling books have in their descriptions, and commonly used keywords.

Name	Cost	Review	Details
KDP Analytics	free to $30 per month	na	Analyzes books in the Kindle Store, and tells you what is selling and why. Can use current market data to predict your sales, royalties and profit.
Kindle Spy (KD Spy)	$47	na	See above, can also analyze your competitors.
K-lytics	$37 per month to $497 per year	The Creative Penn	Less a tool than a source of market research reports, KD Spy sells reports and seminars that focus on specific niche genres (clean romance, vigilante justice, female detectives, etc). Individual reports cost $27 and up; the monthly cost is to access multiple reports.
KD Researcher	$17	FreeStyle Author	Desktop app that lets you compile reports using data from Kindle, print, or audiobook categories on Amazon. You can limit the reports by publication year, genre, and price range. Note: It doesn’t appear to do any analytics.
KDP Rocket	$97	AMZ Prof	Starting with a keyword, analyzes books in the Kindle Store, and tells you what is selling and why, and by how many sellers. It will also tell you how many times the keyword has been searched for in Google and Amazon.
Kindle Samurai	$20	Kboards	see KDP Rocket
Keyword Inspector	$39 per month	na	this is a more general Amazon keyword analytics tool. I could not find relevant info on how well it would work in the Kindle Store.

There are of course other tools that are designed to analyze Amazon generally rather than the book sections specifically. If you encounter one that is free to use, you should try it and let us know how well it worked.

Sales Reports

Once your ebooks start selling, you are going to want to start tracking your sales. A shift in sales is often your first clue that the market conditions have changed, and that you might want to change your prices or marketing strategy.

Here are four tools that you can use to track your sales across several retailers and distributors. Most will integrate sales data from Amazon and other retailers into a single interface, saving you the time of checking one retailer at a time. Some will even help you track book reviews left by customers.

NOTE: Several of these programs require that you give them your login credentials for KDP and elsewhere.

Name	Cost	Discussion	Details
AKReport	€8 to €16 per month	KBoards	Browser based, and only works with KDP. Offers a specialized view of KDP dashboard.
Book Report	free to $19 per month	KBoards	Similar in function to AKReport. Based on what I see online, Book Report is widely used.
BookTrakr	varies, generally $1 to $19 per month	KBoards	Collects your sales data from ebook retailers every night, and assembles them into one dashboard. Also tracks your reviews, rankings, and ratings.
Trackerbox	$89	Kboards	Takes all of the sales reports from Amazon, Apple, B&N, and a host of other distributors, and organizes them into a single, manageable set of reports.  Only available for Windows; a macOS app is expected by August 2018.
Readerlinks	$19 per minth	Kboards	This is an author services company, and one of the things it does is let you track sales per book, pages read, free downloads, etc.

 

Authors have to juggle a lot of balls in today’s book industry. Not only do they have to write that next book, they also have to market it, balance the ledgers, woo their fans on social media, do background research on their next project, and make dinner.

In past tech tools for authors posts, I gathered multiple unrelated tools and explained how each one could be useful. This time around I am going to focus on just one niche, and covers tools that fill specific needs.

Today’s topic is automation.

There are only so many hours in the day, and there is always more work to do than we can fit into a single lifetime. Finding ways to automate simple and repetitive tasks will boost your productivity by letting you focus on important activities like writing and interacting with fans.

The following post details five tools I have used to automate my workday and get more stuff done.

If you know of an automation tool not mentioned here, please mention it in the comments.

Google Alerts

Before social media took over and everyone started living their lives on Facebook and Twitter, there were these things called websites. Everyone had one, and it was where they posted their status updates, book reviews, and links to sites they like.

It can be easy to forget in 2018 but there is still a world beyond social media where people post book reviews and discuss topics that matter to them. It is impossible for any single person to follow all of the conversations on the web, which is why you should use Google Alerts.

Just give it the search terms you want and whenever Google’s search engine finds new results, you will get an email  with links. You can create as many alerts as you like, and you can set the emails to arrive daily, hourly, as-it-happens, etc.

It’s almost as if Google is giving you your own virtual search assistant, for free.

IFTTT

If you use Buffer or another service to automate your social media presence, you will also want to start tracking responses and whether anyone mentions your name.

IFTTT can do that, and so much more. This is a general purpose web automation service that lets you connect just about anything. It has a simple, clean interface that takes only minutes to learn, and it can save you hours of work.

Zapier

Zapier is basically IFTTT on steroids. It is ten times more capable and about a hundred times as complex.

Not only can you automate basic tasks in Zapier, you can also apply intermediate filters that add, remove, or change the input before it gets to the output.

I’ve used Zapier to create an automatic Twitter feed by inputting tweets from a Twitter list and then outputting the tweets to Buffer, and that is just the beginning of what it can do.

I don’t know that you will want to use Zapier, though; its interface is so unnecessarily complex that automating a single tasks can take several hours. But it is powerful, though.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Automation is great, but sometimes you just need the human touch. For example, AIs still aren’t great at things like transcribing comment cards from a convention or reading figures off a receipt, which is why this is often outsourced to human workers.

Hiring a virtual assistant (even through Fiverr) for one task can get expensive if you need that task repeated 300 times, but luckily for us Amazon has a cheaper option.

The Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s solution to their need to automate simple tasks. You can use it for everything from deciphering handwriting to finding the contact details for people and businesses. It is designed so that you just have to submit the source data, write out the instructions for the workers, and then let them get to work. Each completed task has to be accepted individually, but once that’s done you can download the results as a spreadsheet containing neatly organized data.

dlvr.it

This service got its start years ago as a simple automated tool that could accept your blog’s RSS feed and auto-post tweets and updates.

I never used it much because IFTTT came along and could match dlvr.it’s paid features for free, and frankly I thought that I was getting better performance by manually posting FB updates.

But I am mentioning dlvr.it today because it offers a lot more tools than when I had last used it (5 or so years ago). This service is now a social media manager on par with Buffer or Hootsuite.

In particular, dlvr.it has a feature where you can fill a queue with social media updates and it will automatically cycle through that queue on schedule until you tell it to stop. This is a feature not found in Hootsuite or Buffer, and it is almost enough to make me switch.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Twitter is a great place to share jokes and engage in debate, but it is also accepted that one’s Twitter timeline exists only to be weaponized by one’s enemies now that we live in an age where good will is dead and no one can conceive that the person they hate has a sense of humor.

As The Verge explains:

We live in an era when alt-right trolls and political operatives will spend hours scanning the online footprint of a smear campaign target, all with the purpose of dredging up past jokes and verbal faux pas to twist into context-less, career-costing hit jobs. Look at what happened to MSNBC contributor Sam Seder in December of last year, when prominent alt-right voices elevated a joke from 2009 into a fervor that cost him his broadcast gig. (MSNBC backpedaled shortly after.) This stuff happens all the time nowadays; the rulebook was codified during Gamergate and has since spread throughout the greater online culture war. Few people are professionally, financially, or mentally equipped to weather such a storm.

You might think no one will notice your jokes, or that they are so banal and obvious that no one could possibly misinterpret them, and you could be right.

But do you really want to take the chance?

The internet in 2018 is a capricious place, and mobs have formed for the most ridiculous reasons. Unless you want to set yourself up as a future target, you need to delete your Twitter timeline. (On the other hand, deleting your timeline might be held against you by someone who is bound and determined to twist your words and actions, so this could be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don’t".)

At the very least it is a good way to erase your tweets about the stupid things your pets were doing a decade ago.

Here are the three steps you should follow to clear your Twitter timeline.

1. Pick a service

There are a number of services out there that can delete your tweets, including:

• TweetDelete
• TwitWipe
• Twitter Archive Eraser
• TweetEraser
• Tweet Deleter

TweetDelete is easily the most popular tool. It works with almost everyone, and can easily remove all your past tweets in a single go. Another free service that works from a desktop app is Twitter Archive Eraser. This didn’t work for me, but it did clear out a friend’s timeline. TwitWipe is another free option, although it has obnoxious advertising and is harder to use.

When it comes to paid options,  TweetDeleter starts at $6 a month and lets you delete up to three thousand tweets per day. It will also let you auto-delete tweets after they reach a certain age. There’s also TweetEraser, which costs $7 for 30 days use. It supports importing Twitter archives, but it doesn’t support automatic deletion so if you want to delete tweets when they get too old then you’ll need to continue to pay for the service.

Any one of these options could work for you. Me, I went with TweetDelete. It scrubbed over 105 thousand tweets, but it didn’t remove all of the the photos and videos I tweeted which is great because I wanted to keep them anyway.

TweetDelete worked its magic in under an hour.  That is both good news and bad news in that I appreciate the promptness but also wish I had thought to download my Twitter archive first.

2. Archive your tweets

Before you go nuclear on your Twitter timeline, wiping it from the face of the internet, you might want to save a copy of your tweets. If you are a user like me then you may have sometimes been using tweets to document events, store cute pet photos, or what have you. All this ephemera will be lost if you don’t backup your archive.

Also, at least one of the services mentioned above (Twitter Archive Eraser) requires your archive before it can do anything, so if you want to use it you will need to download the archive.

To access your archive, visit the Twitter website and open the settings menu. Select the "Your Twitter data" on the left-hand column, enter your password, and scroll down to the bottom where it says "Twitter archive".

If you have the Twitter Android app, there’s an option several levels down under the privacy and settings menu where you can download your data, but I don’t recommend this method because it’s not clear whether this will give you a tweet archive or all the data on your account.

Click the "Request Archive" button to request the archive, and eventually you will get an email from Twitter informing you that you can download your archive in the form of a ZIP file. That ZIP file will contain an index.html file with the text, dates, and other details about your tweets.

Once you have that ZIP file, it’s time to break the cardinal rule of the internet, and make Twitter forger everything you said.

3. Delete your timeline

I would start with the three free services first, and if they don’t work for you then move on to the paid options.

TweetDelete worked great the second time I tried it, and it has worked for just about everyone I know who used it, so try it first. It can delete new tweets when they cross an age threshold, and it can also delete all existing tweets in your account. That second part might take a few minutes, but if you have a hundred thousand tweets like I used to have then TweetDelete might take an hour or more to make them all go to that great recycle bin in the sky.

Some people are reporting that TweetDelete can only delete 3,200 tweets at a time, which is strange because mine all vanished in the space of a few minutes.

Once you’ve deleted your timeline, be sure to set an auto-delete schedule so that your oldest tweets are erased as they age out. I set a threshold of one year, but you might want to set a threshold of 6 months, 90 days, or even 30 days.

It’s up to you.

images by Nico Paix, fung.leo

As everyone knows, an ebook is an author’s best marketing tool. You can trade a free ebook for a mailing list signup, or drop the price and rack up a lot of sales.

But in order to do that, you’ll need to get your ebook in front of potential readers, and that is where paid and free ebook sites come in.

The following lists are a compilation of promotion sites, both free and paid. I have not used them all, but I have filtered out the more disreputable companies (Inkitt, for example) as well as any site that couldn’t pass the smell test. I also skipped sites that offered no info on how you could join and promote your work (you would be surprised how often that happened).

Update: The list was updated on 10 December 2018, 29 February 2020, and on 9 May 2020.  Dead sites were removed at that time, and new links were added.

The sites vary from forums where you can mention an ebook deal to services you can use to trade an ebook for emails. Each site has their own requirements, and so to help you out I did a little digging on each site, wrote a quick description, and then sorted the site into the appropriate list(s).

I initially started with just two lists, much like what Kindlepreneur published several years ago, but once I started classifying the sites I found had at least four different categories:

• sites for building a mailing list
• sites for building/managing an audience, and
• free & paid book promotion sites

I have 80 sites listed in this post, but I would love to add more – especially for the first two categories. So if you have a site you’d like me to add to this list, please fill out the form at the end of this post.

Let’s start with the services that can grow your mailing list. This is a short list, but these sites can be incredibly valuable in the long run because they give you a chance not to just give away an ebook but to connect with readers.

Mailing Lists, Ho!

 

Site	Cost	Erotica allowed?	Details
author’s website	free	yes	An author’s website should be your first choice for giving away a free ebook in exchange for signing up for your mailing list.
Book Funnel	$20 to $250 a year	yes	BookFunnel is a little pricy but on the upside it makes it incredibly easy for a reader to download your ebook.
InstaFreebie (aka Prolific Works)	free to $50 a year	yes	InstaFreebie is a slightly cheaper alternative to BookFunnel. There’s an ongoing debate as to which is better.
StoryOrigin	free	unknown	This site is explicitly designed to help authors grow their mailing list.

Those sites are great if you want to build your mailing list long-term, but what if you want to promote your career and build an audience?

Author Promotion Sites

Site	Cost	Erotica allowed?	Details
eReader Girl	$100	unknown	"Author of the Week" featured post
Indie Author News	unknown	unknown	Site promises author interviews and banner ads but does not give specifics.
Book Praiser	free to $180	unknown	Not a deals site so much as an author and book promotion service.

Do you just want to give away an ebook today?

There are hundreds of sites that can help in a wide variety of ways. Some just list your ebook deal on their site, while others have an email newsletter. Some are free, while others charge fees.

Let’s start with the free sites (in no particular order).

Free Book Promotion Sites

Site	Cost	Erotica allowed?	Details
Free Books and More	free	yes	The ebooks can be either free or paid, but they must have at least 10 reviews, a minimum 3.5 star rating, and be at least 100 pages long.
MobileRead Forums	free	yes	This is less a book promotion site than an online community that keeps a section just for ebook deals
Awesome Gang	free or $10	yes	AG promotes ebook deals to its 55,200 FB and its 14,500 Twitter followers. It also has a newsletter, and for $10 you can be featured for two days.
Reading Deals	free or $29	no	Content quality standards, and at least 5 reviews with a 4 star average.
The Book Circle	free to $19	no	At the free tier, you might get your ebook listed on their deals page and promoted on social media. The paid tiers guarantee promotion.
eBook Stage	free to $50	unknown	Must have a quality book cover, and a an average review of 0.0 stars or higher.
Ask David	free to $10	unknown	Newsletter promotion is free, but if you want Tweets that will cost $10.
Free Today on Kindle & Beyond	free	unknown	Facebook group only
Book Hippo	free	unknown	UK-focused service, free account is required
Free Kindle Books	free*	unknown	No restrictions on price or free book, but placement is only guaranteed with a donation.
Totally Free Stuff	free	unknown	A site with links to lots of free stuff, including ebooks.
Zwoodle Books	free	no	Hate, religious, and sexual books discouraged. 4+ star ratings preferred
I Crave Freebies	free (paid?)	unknown	Free books only. There may be a paid tier but you will have to inquire.
eReaderIQ	free to $40	yes	This site scrapes the Kindle Store, and will find your ebook when it goes on sale. You can also pay for extra promotion.
New Free Kindle Books	free, $5	unknown	Free and discounted ebooks. Placement is a crap shoot. The $5 guarantees the book will be listed.
Deal Seeking Mom	free	unknown	A site with links to lots of free stuff and great deals, including ebooks.
eBook Korner Kafe	free	yes	appears to be FB only
Book Angel	free	no	Free or cheap books. Must be PG13. Appears to be UK-only.
Free Books	free	yes	There’s a section for permafree.
Frugal Tips and Freebies	free	no	free ebooks only
The eReader Cafe	free, or $40	no	Three review, 4+ star rating  minimum.
Armadillo eBooks	free, or $20	unknown	No restrictions stated
Indie Book of the Day	free	unknown	eBooks reviews for quality and ratings.
One Hundred Free Books	free	unknown	acceptance not guaranteed
Content Mo	free to $30	yes*	Initial listings are free. Paid tiers include social media shares, featured blog post.
It’s Write Now	free to $20	no	Must cost under $1.
Topless Cowboy	free	yes	Focused on cowboy romance.
Lovely Books	free to $10	yes	Five day lead time required. $10 gets your ebook shared in 60 FB groups.
eBooks Habit	free to $15	no	Acceptance not guaranteed on free tier
Kindle Book Review	free to $20	unknown	see above
eReader Girl	free to $20	unknown	free listings only for free ebooks. Acceptance not guaranteed.
Kindle Book Promos	free to $40	unknown	No restrictions stated
Book Bongo	free to $50	unknown	Acceptance not guaranteed on free tier
Discount Book Man	free to $15	yes	No restrictions stated
Pretty Hot Books	free,  $25	yes	$25 guarantees social media promotion as well as a featured spot on the site’s  home page for 7 days.
DigitalBookToday.com	free to $20	no	The ebooks at least 18 reviews and a minimum 4.0 star rating. Will list for up to 4 consecutive days if free that long.
AllAuthor	Free to $59	yes	AllAuthor provides various marketing tools and promotions to author on their website. Most popular tools provided by allauthor are a magic tool, review gif maker, instant mockup, tweet scheduler and many more. they also conduct cover of the month contest every month which helps the author in their book promotion and. allauthor provides both free and paid membership with memebrship author can list upto 4 books. Pro memebrs can utilize all the marketing tools provided by allauthors.
Indies Today	$free to $9	no	Free books are promoted for free. Discounted books are promoted for $9. Books are promoted on website, email newsletter blast, and social media.
your site here	$??	??	???

 

Paid Book Promotion Sites

The following sites don’t offer a free tier.

 

 

Site	Cost	Erotica allowed?	Details
Book Raid	up to $10	yes	BR has quality standards ad charges per click to promote your book on its site and newsletter.
Planet eBooks	$20 to $60	unknown	eBooks will be promoted in the newsletter and on social media.
The Fussy Librarian	$9 to $18	yes	Ten reviews, 4-star rating. TFL tailors its newsletter to a reader’s preferences, and only recommends books in genres a reader expresses interest in.
BookBub	varies	yes	Selective on what they will accept. Good track record.
eReader News Today	$35 to $120	no	Free or cheap ebooks accepted. Checks books for quality.
Free Kindle Books and Tips	$25 to $60	no	4-star average, and 8 reviews minimum.
Hot Zippy	$23 to $337	unknown	Free, discounted, and regularly priced ebooks accepted.
Many Books	$29	unknown	Ten reviews required. eBook must be free or deeply discounted.
Good Kindles	$25 to $45	yes	No restrictions stated
Kindle Nation Daily	$30 to $120	unknown	Free or deeply discounted books recommended but not required
Book Goodies	$7.50 tp $40	yes	Only free ebooks accepted
FreeBooksy	$40 to $150	yes	Targeted genre mailing lists.  Only free ebooks accepted.
Book Gorilla	$50 to $100	yes*	eBooks must have 5 reviews  and a 4 stars average.  100 pages plus length required.
Book Lemur	$25 to $35	unknown	More expensive books will cost more to promote.
Book Barbarian	$30 to $50	no	SF&F only. Discounted or free books. Minimum 3.5 star rating. Cost varies by cover price.
Red Roses Romance	$15 to $30	yes	Erotica and Romance only. Discounted or free books. Minimum 3.5 star rating. Cost varies by cover price.
Book Adrenaline	$10 to $20	no	Thriller only. Discounted or free books. Minimum 3.5 star rating. Cost varies by cover price.
eBook Hounds	$10 to $45	yes	Cost varies by genre
Whizbuzz Books	$49	no explicit cover images	na
Bargain Booksy	$25 and up	yes	Books priced $3.99 and below, no minimum review requirements,
Red Feather Romance	$100 and up	no	Free and discounted steamy contemporary romance. Must be rated 3.5 or higher.
NewInBooks	$299 and up	no	For new releases in Mystery, Romance, Literary Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy and Biography
Early Bird Books/Open Road Media	$75 to $300	no	Reach consumers looking for ebook deals via Early Bird Books, or genre readers via one of other sites: The Lineup for readers of true crime and horror; The Portalist for fans of science fiction and fantasy; Murder & Mayhem for lovers of crime fiction and thrillers; A Love So True covering romance and relationships; and The Archive for readers of history and non-fiction.
BookDeal.io	$70 to $250	no	Bookdealio is an ebook deals newsletter designed with authors in mind. Along with an ebook deal promotion, authors may add a link to their website or email newsletter sign-up form. The cost to run a 1-day ebook deal promotion is $70, weeklong promotion or full-price book promotion costs $250.
WordLikes	$15 to $250	yes	Book promotion through LinkedIn recommendations and Email marketing.
BooksShelf	Free / Paid	yes	Bookshelf is also a place where authors can promote their work for Free. We also have Paid options for extra promotion which start from $5.99. We offer a variety of services as well (design, marketing, etc.).
HumanMade	Free to $4.99	no	humanmade.net offers a variety of free and paid book promotion services. We offer: Regular Listing (Free), Powered Listing ($4.99), Free Books & Deals (for free and discounted books) ($3.99) in addition to Advertise with Us (open for authors) ($5 – $50). We accept most of fiction and non fiction genres. We don’t require reviews, ratings or proven sales record on Amazon or other vendors as a condition for accepting books. Services are available for published, self published and indie authors. All book formats are accepted.
BookDoggy	$18	yes (some)	We link free books to Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Barnes and Noble, or Bookfunnel, Story Origin and Prolific Works. For Amazon submissions, your book must be available on the Amazon US site. If your goal is to gain subscribers submit Bookfunnel, Story Origin, and/or Prolific Works links only. If you’re trying to improve your rankings submit Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Barnes and Noble links.
Social Reads	$29.99 – 39.99	yes	My website encourages organic sharing of discounted books by holding a weekly social media sharing contest. Authors benefit by having their books shared organically through social media. Readers benefit from access to a growing section and a chance to win prizes for sharing content. Special note: As I’m still building content, all book submissions prior to 01 October 2020 will be absolutely free!
Unlimited Readers	$9	yes	Kindle Unlimited books only. Books are promoted specifically to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. Pricing is $9 for one genre or $15 for two.

Disclaimer

One problem with this type of post is that sites like the ones listed above are changing every day. New ones open every so often while (thanks to Amazon) existing sites sometimes go out of business or just disappear. The links listed above were valid when I published this post, but I can’t guarantee that the sites will still be there when you click on the link.

Please do let me know if any of these sites go dark (or if a new one launches), and I will be sure to update this list.

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Authors have to juggle a lot of balls in today’s book industry. Not only do they have to write that next book, they also have to market it, balance the ledgers, woo their fans on social media, do background research on their next project, and make dinner.

With all this work piling up, everyone is always looking for ways to get more done in less time. The following post details a few tools authors can use on to stay ahead of the game.

Sigil

This is the leading open-source Epub editor. It is free, and available on both Windows, Linux, and macOS. Authors can use it to produce an Epub ebook that meets the Epub2 standard (it only has limited Epub3 support, which is okay given that there’s only limited reasons to use Epub3). And yes, it does have a compliance checker.

It offers both a text-editing mode and a code editor, and authors can use either option to format their book. The code editor is also a great way to fix errors identified by the compliance checker.

OneLook

Google has indexed virtually the entire web and made it possible to find most of the world’s websites through its search engine, but sometimes a more narrow focus is required.

Take definitions, for example. Google is great if you just need a simple definition for a common word, but if you want to search all the dictionaries and look for a specific nuanced meaning of an obscure 17th century word then you’re better off with a site like OneLook.

OneLook automatically searches over a thousand dictionary websites, including Websters, the Urban Dictionary, multiple Oxford dictionaries, and more. It has almost 19 million words in its index in a couple dozen languages.

KDP Rocket

Book sales are how authors put food on the table, and KDP Rocket is the secret weapon for increasing sales. It is a complete book marketing tool that authors can use when selling their books in the Kindle Store.

Authors can use it for everything from validating a concept, finding the best keywords and categories, identifying a title and subtitle that resonates with an audience, write better book descriptions that convert browsers into buyers, and more.

BookGig

Best described as the Meetup for author and publisher events, BookGig is owned by HarperCollins. The site features a curated schedule of publishing and author events across the UK, including book signings, literary festivals, readings, and related events like the British Library’s upcoming Harry Potter themed exhibit on magic.

This is a service that is so obviously useful and desperately needed that it’s a tragedy that BookGig is currently limited to the UK.

Kintrospect

If you take lots of notes in your Kindle ebooks then chances are you will need a tool for managing notes and highlights. Kintrospect is one such tool (here are a dozen others). Connect it with your Kindle account and you can use it to import your notes and then remix them into a study guide or a draft for a paper.

You can also export the notes to Evernote, or Markdown.

Kintrospect is currently free, and is available for macOS and Windows.

Noisli

This is a free background noise generator that you can use to help boost your productivity. It runs in Chrome, on iOS or Android, and there’s also a website. Noisli offers over a dozen options ranging from the sound of a fan to tides, rainstorm, the buzz of a coffee shop, and the crackling of a fire. You can mix and match two or more of the noise makers, setting the volume of each part to create your perfect blend of noise.

I find the rain storm option very soothing; it’s playing right now, giving me just enough of a distraction that I can focus all my attention on this post.

* * *

There you have it; six great tools you can use to get stuff done.

So tell me, what are your favorite tools?

There are a hundred and one different sites on the web where authors can give away an ebook. They can use services like InstaFreebie, forums like MobileRead, or blogging platforms like BookLikes.

I was just working on a list post on the topic (stay tuned) when I was reminded of one option that almost never makes this type of list.

An author’s website.

An author’s website is both the most common place for an author to give away an ebook and the most overlooked. While the site won’t get as much attention as, say, a free ebook link shared in Facebook, offering free content on your site is still a good way to build your fan base and mailing list.

I have helped a lot of authors set up their site so they could give away an ebook, and setting this up is really not all that difficult once you know the steps involved. Here’s the what, the why, the where, and the how of giving ebooks away on an author website.

What (are you giving away)

Let’s start with the point that is frequently overlooked: You don’t have to give away an excerpt, a story, or one of the books you are selling.

Instead, you can offer a freebie that is related to your books. I know of one author who writes Prohibition-era novels and gives away a PDF of drink recipes from that period. Or, an SF or fantasy author might give away a compendium ebook that explains the background details referenced in the author’s stories.

So, are you giving away an excerpt? A complete story? A non-fiction book? This question is important because the content decides the type of file you use as a freebie.

For example, you can give away a non-fiction book as a PDF – in fact, it might work better than giving away an Epub because an ebook with charts, diagrams, or other complex formatting often works better as a PDF than an Epub.

You can also use a PDF if you are giving away an excerpt from your novel. Most readers will only read enough to decide if they want to buy the ebook, and then they will replace the PDF with the complete book.

But if you are giving away a complete story, whether it is a novella, novel, or even longer, you should give away an ebook that a reader can add to their library. That means offering both Kindle and Epub.

Why (are you giving it away)

Before you give away that ebook, you’ll need to ask yourself why you’re giving away the ebook. Do you just want to give something to your fans? Do you want to build your mailing list?

A lot of authors use a freebie to encourage readers to sign up to their mailing list, but others give away some of their work just to build a fanbase. And for a while there, some authors gave away ebooks on their site to see if it would lead to donations (the experiment was not a success).

Your motivations are going to drive where you put the download link, or links.

Where (should you put the download link on your site)

In the words of engineers, it depends.

The ebook file (or files) can be uploaded to Dropbox or another cloud storage service in a publicly accessible folder. You will link to those files from your website, but where does that link go on your site?

That depends. If you want to promote your mailing list, the link will have to go on the “successful subscription” page (more on this later).

On the other hand, if the freebie is an excerpt from a book then it should go on the page for that book. If you are giving away background info on a series, put the link on the page for the series as well as for each book in the series.

When the freebie has nothing to do with any of your other books, you can put the link on your about page – or, if you have a bunch of free downloads, you can create a page just for the free downloads.

Just be sure that when you do insert the link, you also add a brief text description (including file format) and then use a few of the words as the anchor for the link.

Offering a no-strings-attached download is as easy as inserting the link; anyone with basic web skills can do it. The real trick is in knowing how to integrate a freebie with a mailing list form.

How (I trade a freebie for a mailing list sign-up)

There are many mailing list providers, and almost as many companies that make sign-up form apps and plugins. It would be impossible to explain how to set up all of them, so let me explain what I do. This will give the beginners a place to start, and the more advanced users will be able to adapt a few ideas.

When I build author websites, I use MailMunch to make sign-up forms.

The great thing about MailMunch is that it integrates with most mailing list services, including MailChimp. The other great thing about MailMunch is that it gives you two places where you can thank new subscribers with a link to your free content.

• When setting up a form, you have the opportunity to create a “thank you” message. Mine usually read something like “Thank you for subscribing! Here’s that ebook you wanted”, with the underlined words as the link.
• MailMunch also lets you send an auto-responder email to new subscribers. You can thank them for signing up, share info about your next book, and give the new subscriber a link to the free download.

As a rule, I like to give away the ebook in the auto-responder email rather than the thank you message because the email can sit in the subscriber’s inbox. If they ever misplace the ebook file, they can find the email and click the link to download the ebook again.

* * *

Giving away an ebook on your author website is a simple process – once you know how to start. I hope this post has helped you find ways that a freebie can help you in your marketing endeavors.

Any questions?

image by docoverachi via Flickr

Publishing a book can get quite expensive. A good cover designer can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, and the editorial costs alone can set you back even more.

While there are many important expenses, there are also many ways to spend money and get nothing useful back. For example, take the Bowker SAN. This costs $150, and is basically a way for you to list your physical address in a Bowker database – something you can do with your website, or  dozen other services, at no cost to yourself.

I recently polled a number of experts, including David Gaughran, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Joel Friedlander, Victoria Strauss,  Jane Friedman, and Hugh Howey. The following post lists a few of the things they thought were a waste of money.

The first items was suggested by Robin Sullivan, business manager and wife of author Michael Sullivan.

Promoting an Author’s First Book

Robin gives monthly seminars in book publishing, and a couple months back she revealed that authors should not start marketing their books until after they have published the third book.

She based this on the observation that readers don’t just buy a book by an author they like, they buy as many of that author’s books as they can afford. If an author only a single book out, they can only make one sale per reader, which is why they should wait until they have several books to sell.

Publicists

Of all the suggestions made by the experts, publicists topped the list, with several experts saying that publicists just weren’t worth the cost. "They don’t do much you can’t do on your own, and what they do, they do poorly," I was told."They also cost tens of thousands of dollars."

It would cost less to learn how to do the work yourself (or at least get a virtual assistant to do it), and you’ll get better results.

Email & Social Media Blast Services

Another great way for an author to waste their money would be to pay a service to tweet about the author’s book to a service’s million robofollowers on Twitter and Facebook, or pay to have a press release sent to 10,000+ news  outlets.

Here’s the thing about spam. Whether you send it by email or social media, hardly any real people see it, and most don’t want to get the spam. It is immediately deleted (or worse, dumped in the spam folder before it is ever seen).

So there’s no value is spamming everyone.

The better way is to take the personal approach. Identify the sites and bloggers you want to work with, learn what they are interested in, and pitch them one at a time.

Buying Followers – Newsletter, Twitter, or Facebook

If there is one thing that is just as worthless as spamming people who don’t want to see your message, it’s paying to add followers to your social media accounts or newsletter.

It might look like a worthwhile shortcut, but in reality the followers are all going to either be (in the case of social media) bots or (if we’re talking about email addresses) random people whose emails were sold to mailing lists without their consent.

So if you do buy followers you will end up with followers who either don’t exist or have no real interest in hearing from you.

That’s why you should save your money, and accept the fact that followers have to be recruited one at a time.

Classes on the "Secrets" of Millions Sales

Like most professions, it takes a lot of learning to be a successful author, and you have to keep picking up new tricks all the time. And there are many experts out there who can teach you what you need to know, but there are also a lot of scammers who promise more than they can deliver.

Authors would be wise to avoid any course that promise to show you "the secret" to getting millions of sales. Before you sign up, you should check to see if the "guru" has actually written and sold a lot of books or just teaches marketing courses for a living.

Many of these million "sellers" have either given away most of their copies or sold the copies of their fiction books at a loss. Other have sold hardly any books at all, and are making money from their marketing tips, not from their writing.

Anti-Piracy Services

Piracy is a scourge, right? Not according to Neil Gaiman, who regards it as free marketing, or Baen Books, a publisher that gives ebooks away and sells the rest DRM-free, or The Authors Guild, whose data shows that piracy isn’t a serious problem.

There are many companies that promise to scour the web and remove pirated copies of your books, but before you hire one I will let you in on a secret. Most "pirate" sites are pretending to have a copy of  pirated book. They’re usually running some type of scam (it varies) but they are not committing piracy so it makes little sense to pay a service to go after them.

Any Service that Promises to Get Your Book on a Best-Seller List

A quick Google search will turn up a dozen services that will get you on the New York Times, Amazon, or other bestseller lists. In a lot of cases, they can get you on that list, but only at a cost.

When it comes to the NYTimes list, you’re going to end up buying thousands of copies of your own book – a five-digit expense. It has been done, but some have also been caught out as frauds for using this trick, permanently marring their reputations.

And even if you’re not publicly exposed, buying your way on to a lot can have negative consequences. If Amazon catches you gaming their best-seller list they will punish you. At a minimum they will remove the ebook from their list, and for particularly egregious or repeat offenders Amazon has been known to remove  the ebook in question or even ban suspected offenders – permanently.

Is it really worth the risks or costs?

* * *

There you have it; eight services and products that can cost you upwards of thousands of dollars and deliver nothing of value.

While these services are expensive and worthless, they are really just a few of the many ways that authors can waste money.

Have you found a worthless service not mentioned above?

If so, why don’t we crowd-source a more complete list in the comments.

featured image by LifeSupercharger, from Flickr

Everyone agrees that authors should be blogging to promote their carers, but no one can agree on exactly how or why one should go about it.

There’s loads of outdated and bad advice out there, including posts telling authors to writie to SEO keywords as a way of selling books, counterproductive and just plain bad advice on how to find sites for your guest post, and even posts that are long since out of date but still rank high in search results for “author guest blog”. (And then there is all the great advice intended for bloggers, advice that doesn’t quite mesh with authors’ goals.)

I was reading some of that bad advice recently when I realized there was very little good advice on this topic. (You can find links to several good posts in the comments of this blog.)

So how exactly is an author supposed to go about guest blogging?

I can’t speak for other experts, but I have been blogging for 8 years and guest blogging for 18 months. Here is a distillation of the what, the why, the how, and the when of my guest blogging philosophy.

What (Your Goals Should Be)

The goal for writing a guest blog post is to write a great post. That’s it.

Some people will tell you that you should use a guest blog post to promote yourself, or that you should sell your book, but they could not be more wrong. A guest post needs to be entertaining, or useful and informative, or thought-provoking – or all three, if you are up to it.

Ideally you should be just as serious and professional about your guest blog posts as you are with your books. They’re not how you pay your bills, so I can understand why you might have a lower regard for a blog post, but those posts will matter to the bloggers you want to work with.

The folks who run the blogs you want to write for care about the quality of the posts they publish. A half-assed blog post will be declined, a blatant advertorial will be rejected, and any self-serving post will alienate readers and thus fail to accomplish your goals.

Why (You Are Doing This)

Guest blogging is about the long game. It’s not about selling books, or promoting yourself. It’s about establishing your credibility and becoming more widely known. You’re not out to find new book buyers, or new book readers; this is about growing your audience (hence the no self-promotion rule).

You don’t want to sell a book to the person reading your post; what you want is for that person to share your post online, and keep an eye out for your next post, and share that one as well (this is why each blog post deserves your best effort).

The thing is, you will have no luck getting the person reading the post to buy your books if they only read SF and you only write fantasy, which is why you shouldn’t even try. But if they like your blog posts they will share it and eventually that will end up in front of fantasy readers.

How (You Go About Guest Blogging)

Okay, now this is the hard part.

There are many experts that will explain how to find guest posting opportunities by searching for the relevant keywords in Google. Or, they might direct you to sites where blog owners create listings to ask for guest bloggers.

Either of these approaches will help you find opportunities, yes, but they are absolutely the wrong approach for authors. Remember, the long term goal is to find readers and fans, and you can’t accomplish that goal if the post never ends up in front of the right audience. That’s why you should not use a scattershot technique and submit a guest blog post just anywhere; the more effective technique is to only submit posts to sites where your potential audience will find them.

Finding the right site, and then figuring out what they want you to write, now that is the hard part. (As soon as I have this nailed down, I will tell you.)

What you’re going to have to do is, in the words of one marketer I know, “lovingly stalk” your readers.

You need to find out what sites they visit, where they get their news, and generally what they are doing online. Twitter is a great way to find this info – if you have a lot of followers. Or, if you read the same types of books as your audience, you can examine your web activities (this type of introspection is not easy).

If all else fails, you can always invite one of your beta readers out for coffee and ask them what they’ve been reading online lately.

Once you have that list of sites, cull all the sites that don’t accept guest posts, and then start lovingly stalking the sites you want to work with. You need to identify where your abilities and their needs intersect so you can craft a killer blog post and get it accepted.

When (Your Post Has Been Published)

Congratulations on getting published; that was quite the accomplishment, but your work isn’t done.

After your guest post is published, you need to hang out in the comment section and answer questions from readers. You should also help promote your guest post by sharing it on social media.

If the post does well and brings you a lot of new readers, you should talk about future guest posting opportunities with that blogger. If you have the time and energy, you should develop ongoing relationships with the more popular sites.

Further Reading

• Why You Suck at Guest Blogging (and What The Pros Do Differently) (Smart Blogger)
• How to Use Guest Blogging to Promote Your Book (Jane Friedman)
• 8 Old-School Blogging Tactics That No Longer Work (Smart Blogger)

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