Information of all kinds for all types of writer!
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published February 1, 2017 · Last modified April 18, 2018
I’ve been talking to people a lot about the new promotional methods out there while we revamp the blog (you’ll notice that all bar a few articles are still up on the site for now – they need updating, to the point that we’re actually setting up some new projects and doing something new for […]
Advice / Community / Featured / help and tutorials / Industry / News and views / self publishing / Self Publishing Step by Step
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published May 25, 2016
We don’t often feature these products on the group blog, but this is one designed for indie authors, and it doesn’t have affiliate links AND you can donate 10% to charity, so we thought we’d see how it went. Storybundle and HumbleBundle feature products in ‘bundles’ at a significant amount of money off, and if you’re looking to study or intake information, this bundle is a great one for at least one or two perspectives...
Pronoun announced today that they were merging with MacMillan, in a move that is probably going to be quite surprising to many. There have been a lot of changes recently in the indie author community, so what is clear is that people are trying to forge the best of their platforms for various needs – it’s just a question of finding the ones that work best for you. Here’s what they said: That’s why we’re...
All of our Indie Author groups are no spam, so people can enjoy the discussions. We feature our subgroups regularly, so please join us for some great conversations, and to hang out with other writers that enjoy the same genres. Readers can join us to see who is discussing the things that interest them and click through to the writers that offer the most interesting talking points. Head on over to the discussions and join...
As many authors are trying to gain traction, one of the major things I recommend is a perfect press pack. And they’re EASY! What’s in a press pack Your ‘press pack’ should be a two part thing – one zipped package with everything in it so that you can add it to an email if […]
Advice / Featured / help and tutorials / News and views / social media
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published January 19, 2015
This year, the Indie Author Group is launching some classes to support writers. We’re doing two trial ones in February, which you can read about below, and then if all goes well, we’ll run other classes as needed. We’re charging under $10 for each class to ensure that people actually take part in the classes, and there will be resources and lessons, chats and a forum. Everything runs on Moodle. The nitty gritty of the...
Advice / Articles of note / Featured
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published December 8, 2014 · Last modified January 16, 2015
The Indie Author Community is a great place to be right now. There’s never been a better time to be a writer, in my opinion, and there are some really smart and engaged people out there. Unfortunately, there’s also a dark side. And there are four things from the ‘dark side’ that I’m here to […]
Advice / Articles of note / Featured / social media
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published December 6, 2014
Editor’s note – if you’ve got a ‘stuff to try’ article, we’d love to see it. Just hit the contact page. This blog is already distributed to several groups on Facebook for writers, and as I co-founded and look after the blog, the biggest indie writer’s discussion group on Facebook’s blog, Indieauthorgroup.com. It was […]
Mailchimp is an incredibly powerful tool – whether you’re using it as the free version, or the paid version, you can do a couple of really neat things with it. One of the most powerful is welcoming new subscribers. Paid Mailchimp subscribers can set up auto responders to send out an email to subscribers as […]
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published December 2, 2014 · Last modified January 13, 2015
Facebook recently announced an update to the Facebook algorithm, which triggered lots of complaints in various places. One of the most interesting articles (and one of the pieces with the most discussion on this in various places ) was “New Facebook Rules will Sting Entrepreneurs“. What was interesting though was that not everyone actually saw […]
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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...
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...
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...
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 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...
D Kai Wilson-Viola
Valerie Douglas