E-books
Lately I have read several comments by other e-book authors saying that they have given up promoting their books because it is too much work and the payoff is just not worth it. Those people are authors. But they are not entrepreneurs. It is okay to just be an author and write your books, if [...]
Nobody was more surprised than I was to learn that my mystery, Big Lake, had risen to number 23 in the Paid Kindle store, number 4 in Bestsellers in Mysteries & Thrillers, and even more amazing, it was listed at number 76 on the New York Times Kindle Bestseller List! The book has been in [...]
I’ve always been a firm believer in setting goals, and then working out a plan to achieve them. And more often than not, if I set realistic goals, plan right, and work that plan, I accomplish them. Sometimes I even exceed them. And once in a while, the results blow me completely away. Last month, [...]
In late August, I wrote a blog post titled The Importance of Setting Goals, in which I said that when I uploaded my first e-books to Amazon’s Kindle bookstore in late May, I had a goal of earning $300 a month from e-book sales within six months. The September sales report is in, and I [...]
This week I received my first electronic payment from Amazon for my Kindle e-book efforts, covering sales made during the last 10 days in May. It was only $107.53, but that’s money I didn’t have before. I now have five e-books available on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, as well as a sixth book, The Step-by-Step Guide [...]
I have made my living as a self-publisher for most of my life, and if I have learned one thing, it is that the writing is only part of the business, and it’s the easiest part. As in any business, self-publishing requires a knowledge of finance, marketing, and customer relations, just to name a few [...]
For years, the big traditional publishing companies had a lock on the industry. If a writer wanted to get published, he had to play the game – first you get an agent (almost impossible), then your agent gets your book read by somebody at a publishing house (again, almost impossible), then your book gets picked [...]
Writing your book is the easy part, in my experience. Marketing is where the real work starts, and most successful self-publishers I know spend more time on their marketing efforts than they do in the writing process. // As you may already know, I sell very few books through traditional bookstores. I use Lightning Source [...]