Morning Coffee – 10 May 2021

Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning. The bots are getting better at writing.  David Gaughran shared his list of Amazon category hacks.  If you’re in need of marketing ideas, here are 17 ways you can market your books on Instagram.  Peter Derk shared the mistakes he made with the covers of his self-published books.  Dr Naomi Baron...

May 2021

Nate’s Rules of Social Media Marketing

Everyone tells authors they have to be on social media, but how exactly are you supposed to go about marketing yourself on social media? I am not really sure, but lately I have come to beleive that approaching social media from the viewpoint that you should be engaging in “marketing” is a mistake. That’s why my first rule of social media marketing...

May 2021

Ingram Sold Off Its Digital Textbook Platform

Ingram is a publishing services company which will produce, distribute, or sell books for just about everyone in almost every industry or niche, so when they sold off VitalSource last month, it really said something about the future of digital textbooks. Ingram today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to sell VitalSource Technologies LLC...

May 2021

Morning Coffee – 26 April 2021

Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning. The founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society has died. Here are ten tips to avoid when naming fictional characters.  Edith Wharton’s dogs topped this list of famous writers and their sartorial trademarks. Why blockchain won’t solve copyright problems (or any problems, really). There’s a...

May 2021

Free Download: The Perfect Lead Magnet (PDF)

I don’t know if I have mentioned this here recently, but one of my current projects is helping to launch a book expo. That project was the inspiration for the book fair website template I debuted last month, and the media kit template I released a few days ago. Today I would like to show you a third spin-off of that project. It is a sample lead magnet...

May 2021

Kindle Unlimited Funding Pool Fluctuated in February, March 2021

Kindle Unlimited saw the usual annual fluctuation in funding over the past two months. Funding fell in February to $33.5 million from $36 million in January,  but then rose again to $35.4 million in March. At the same time, the per-page rate actually rose in February and March from January’s $0.004216. Here are the per-page rates for the past three...

May 2021

Free Download: Author Media Kit Template

About a month ago I released a website template for book fairs and conferences.  Today I want to share something which will make it easier to run that conference or book fair. It’s a DOC file which is designed to gather all of an author’s media kit into one place so that if the author is asked for this info, they can just send the one file. Or, you...

May 2021

Morning Coffee – 19 April 2021

Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning. Scholarly Kitchen found a nifty video on A4 and other metric paper sizes.  You can now display a book cover on the screen of a sleeping Kindle.  Dave Chesson has a great guide to building out an author profile on Amazon Author Central.  This fool thinks you should publish a full-length novel...

May 2021

Google is Sunsetting FeedBurner Email Subscriptions in July 2021

If you haven’t heard the news yet, Google announced on Wednesday that they are retiring one of FeedBurner’s features: Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features,...

May 2021

Amazon Brings Serial eBooks to KDP as Kindle Vella

About 8 years back Amazon started selling ebook serials in the Kindle Store.  Dozens of titles were produced in the first few years before that section of the Kindle Store withered away, but now it is back under a new name and with a new purpose. There’s been no formal announcement of the launch, but Amazon has recently added new pages to the KDP help...

May 2021