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Advice / Articles of note / Community / writing / Writing tips and tricks
by
by · Published December 7, 2014
Dear reading writer, A while ago I had a very interesting and eye-opening talk with someone. Before I go into this, let me ask you a question. How many of you look at yourself as a real author/writer? With this I mean a writer like Stephen King, Agatha Christie, George R.R. Martin, Jackie Collins and others in that range of fame? If you do then you can stop reading here, there’s nothing new for you then....
Articles of note / Community / Quick Guides / self publishing / Self Publishing Step by Step / social media / writing / Writing tips and tricks
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published January 26, 2014
Welcome to this weeks’ ‘weekly round up’. Featured moderator of the week is Valerie – please pop on over to her profile and say hiya, ask a question, let her know about your favorite book of hers. She loves to talk to other writers and readers! It’s been a busy week here at IAG HQ, with blog updates and new features for writers that blog for us regularly. Now your profile can include your Amazon...
Advice / help and tutorials / self publishing / Two Midlist Indies
by Valerie Douglas · Published January 8, 2013
Midnight, eyes shoot open… oh what a wonderful idea! Seeing the castle, and the flames, hearing the shouts of the fighters, the clash and clangor of swords and shields. Slips out of bed to keep from waking significant other and hurries to the computer, tripping over cat in the dark. Whispers, ‘sorry, sorry’, pats cat, and sits down at keyboard. Pours a glass of wine. Music, I need music in the background. Cues up one album. No...
Advice / op-eds / self publishing / Two Midlist Indies
by Valerie Douglas · Published October 23, 2012
It’s important that someone celebrate our existence… People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.Lois McMaster Bujold, “Mirror Dance”, 1994 US science fiction author Just bear with me while I work this out in my own head. I started this post after seeing...
Advice / op-eds / self publishing / Two Midlist Indies
by Valerie Douglas · Published October 16, 2012 · Last modified July 31, 2019
I was contacted recently by a writer trying to get out of their contract, a service person working with a writer but frustrated by the seemingly unreasonable demands of a ‘publisher’, and responded to a post by a writer who thought they were working with an agent who really wasn’t. The rapid explosion of Indie writers has led to an equally rapid rise of scammers willing to part eager, desperate writers from their money –...
help and tutorials / op-eds / self publishing / Two Midlist Indies
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published September 9, 2012 · Last modified May 19, 2017
Indies have to work their butts off. We have to cover everything (which isn’t exactly different from working as a traditionally published writer, other than the idea that we also source our editors and other stuff), and we have to do it, plus stand up against the idea that indies are somehow deficient. Many indie authors ask how my day works out – so I thought I’d share. 7am – up with the kids. Both...
What does it mean to me to be a mid-list Indie? In the days when traditional publishers were the only way to go, mid-list writers were the mainstays of the industry – the mostly unsung and unheralded writers who weren’t at the top of the charts but consistently wrote good, and sometimes even great, books. They weren’t the Kings, the Clancys, the Roberts, the Grishams, the Koontzs or even the E.L. James (Fifty Shades of...
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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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...
Today is National Sci-Fi day, and while we’re not on Sci-fi this month (that’s later in the year) as our featured support genre, for advice Mondays, I thought I’d share a bit of a thought experiment. First though… We’re a nation – or half of one – proud of our ignorance https://t.co/3I5AMHu7Ia — Valerie Douglas #fantasy #thriller #romance (@ValerieDouglasA) January 2, 2020 Today would be Issac’s 100th birthday, and there’s little denying the impact he...
D Kai Wilson-Viola
Valerie Douglas