Indie author group roundup, week ending 26th January

Pen names

Pen names are an effective way to separate out your different genres and your writings. It is also a good way to build up different fan bases for different genres of writing (but only if you need to separate them). … Continued

What is Kindle Unlimited?

Kindle Unlimited, if you are a reader or writer is a scheme that has been designed to give another way to enjoy books as a reader, and as an author, another possible stream of income.If you’d like to sign up … Continued

What is the KENP?

The KENP is the pool available and the worth of each page read on any books registered AND read in the Kindle Unlimited pool of reads.Reads can make up a substantial amount of your income or it can be nothing. … Continued

What is an ASIN?

An ASIN is an Amazon Standard Identification Number and in many cases, it’s what most people use to publish their books, rather than an ISBN, as it’s free. The ASIN is the main way Ebooks are catalogued on Amazon. A … Continued

What is an ISBN?

An ISBN is a unique identifier attached to your books, which you purchase from Bowker. This unique identifier is most often seen on print books and is how your barcode is formed, though it also allows listing, purchase in shops … Continued

What is DRM?

DRM or Digital Rights Management is an item that many platforms might offer to ‘protect’ your eBooks. In reality, DRM often only frustrates readers, and is easy to break by pirates. DRM is not recommended as it’s not a good … Continued

What is KDP Select?

KDP Select is Amazon’s exclusive publishing platform. In exchange for making your book exclusively available to only Amazon in Ebook format, you get the right to promote and use other exclusive tools – it is the only way to access … Continued

What is Createspace?

CreateSpace has been discontinued and rolled into the same dashboard as your ebooks, and is now called KDP Print.CreateSpace used to distribute Amazon-printed books, so that’s now been integrated into the same board as Kindle Direct Publishing, which you can … Continued

What is X-Ray? (Amazon)

Amazon’s X-Ray uses the power of the net, and crowdsources (usually from Wikipedia or you can write your own custom descriptions) the answers to terms and difficult points in your book.  X-Ray can be found in the KDP dashboard, and … Continued

How do I change two spaces to one space in my document?

One of the last prep things that most people ask to do is how they should remove two spaces and have only one between sentences.  While people will sometimes say it doesn’t matter, if you want to, in Word, you use … Continued

To brand or not to brand…it’s not even a question.

Recently, a new author approached us and told us that they were completely lost after being told they needed to establish a brand – they’d spent months and months looking at all of the studies of how to be an author. It talked about leveraging thousands of people on a list, pre-launching your pre-orders and propelling them into the charts using your following, and only using social media to buy advertising. Your brand is how...

To goal or not to goal?

Hi guys! It’s a whole new year, and we’re planning all sorts of good things for you, but today, I wanted to touch on goals. Back to… Today seems to be the day for us to all be back at ‘work/writing/life’. The holidays, however, they were, are over and I’m on the fence about whether to goal or not to goal. I do, but I know others on the team don’t, so I thought I’d...

We’re back… :)

Well, the team have spoken, we’re updating the site, and there’s a lot of fun changes coming up.I thought today though, I’d share some of our best bits on the site. Resources for miles At the core of things at the Indie Author Group is our mission statement. Both Valerie Douglas and I felt, early on, supported by the rest of the team, that a safe space to get advice as an indie author. We...

Happy Birthday, Valerie!

I’m not sure if many of you know, but one of our driving forces, a founder, and an amazing indie writer, is celebrating her birthday, during lockdown. She’s not able to be with the people that care for her, so I thought, well, we’re a community that wouldn’t exist without her, so why don’t we stand in for her family.Please join me in wishing the AMAZING Valerie Douglas a very happy birthday. If you like,...

Happy 9th Birthday IAG!

Happy birthday to the Indie Author Group. Founded just as the trend of self-publishing took off by Valerie Douglas, and her co-founder Kai Viola, we are a vibrant team of writers and artists that look after one of the oldest communities for self-publishing and hybrid publishing on the Facebook.It’s our birthday today! We’ll be celebrating next week though, so watch the blog, group and page! (or the blog page!)To celebrate our 9th birthday, we’ll be...