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by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published January 27, 2021
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...
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by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published May 12, 2020 · Last modified January 5, 2021
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...
Advice / Articles of note / Community / Promotion / Quick Guides / writing
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published October 1, 2018 · Last modified October 31, 2018
We are now taking guest posts for three of our blogs, and we’d love to see our readers and members join in. If you’d like to guest post with us, all of the details are here! The main rule of submitting to the blogs are that they CANNOT be fluff, no use posts that promote you. We are very keen to keep the quality of the blog high, therefore all posts should be your original...
Advice / Featured / help and tutorials / Promotion / Quick Guides / social media
by Valerie Douglas · Published July 20, 2018
For those who aren’t familiar with Paper.li it’s essentially a ‘newspaper’ about whatever you want to share and it’s easy to use. Simply go to the site and sign up. There are two versions – free and paid. (More on that later.) Give it a title but think long and hard before choosing one. Don’t make the common mistake of naming it ‘YourName, Author‘ or ‘RomanticTitle Series‘, because using your author name is a giveaway for ‘buy my book’...
Advice / help and tutorials / Promotion / social media
by Valerie Douglas · Published December 23, 2015
First, remember that Pinterest is not a promotion or sale site, it’s simply another social media site except that it’s geared around pictures. For a writer, a Pinterest page allows readers to get to know the writer as a person, as well as your work. Your goal with Pinterest is to engage readers. So, with that in mind: Create a Pinterest page for you as a writer. Not your book or books, but something like John...
Advice / Community / Featured / help and tutorials / Promotion / self publishing / Self Publishing Step by Step / Uncategorized / writing / Writing tips and tricks
by Valerie Douglas · Published July 3, 2015
I n all honesty I suspect that Scribd found the path of least resistance in their romance/erotica decision. (Witness the petitions to Jeff Bezos/Amazon asking him to change the review policy.) The truth of the matter is likely to be a more harsh reality – a lot of romance/erotica readers were downloading books, finding them to be dreck and so they didn’t finish them, they just deleted them off their e-readers and went onto the next....
Advice / Featured / help and tutorials / News and views / op-eds / Promotion / self publishing / Self Publishing Step by Step / social media / Uncategorized / Writing tips and tricks
by Valerie Douglas · Published September 10, 2014 · Last modified May 7, 2017
Yes, it really did need two posts! There was a LOT of information! I was getting overwhelmed, so if I misrepresent things, forgive me! Hunter Boyle spoke about using e-mail to keep in contact with your fans and to build your fan base. He also advocated setting higher expectations, creating e-mail connections with the offer of a freebie. Create a compelling call to action – i.e. Sign up now to receive a free excerpt or...
News and views / op-eds / Promotion / self publishing / social media / Uncategorized
by Valerie Douglas · Published September 10, 2014
I’ll be honest, I was half afraid that the seminar would be nothing more than a sales pitch, but it wasn’t. Even the sponsors didn’t promote, which was refreshing. (And made it more likely for someone like me to recommend their services.) The speakers were by and large very informative and sometimes funny. Some of it was more geared toward non-fiction than fiction, but even that had some value to indie/self-published writers. For me, the...
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