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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....
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by Valerie Douglas · Published February 9, 2015 · Last modified January 5, 2021
EXTRA, EXTRA! The Indie Author Group has won a Preditors and Editors award! We were voted BEST DISCUSSION FORUM, 2014! (we’ve since gone on to win, or place in the top three every year). And while we’re here – would you like to join some new writer’s groups? Our main writers groups are our closed one – Indie Author Group Our open group is smaller, but just as friendly – Indie Author Writing Group On...
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....
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by Indie Author Group Guest Posts · Published May 28, 2014
Many of you, I have seen, post questions regarding Facebook Boosts/Ads, how to use them properly, are they worth it, etc. I did an experiment using two different forms. Number one was paying $10 to Facebook Ads, number two was offering two $5 Amazon gift cards to fans (again, only $10). Here is what I came up with: Experiment One (Using a Facebook Boost) On 5/13 I paid the $10 to reach potentially 850 to...
Many of my life successes I attribute to my ability to focus. I’ve written before (http://theotherstephenkingonwriting.blogspot.com/2012/08/two-lessons-about-goal-setting.html) about the focus on a physical fitness goal that earned me admission to West Point, for example. Focus earned me graduation from there with dual majors, and focus later helped me finish all the way to a PhD. Focus in my day job has carried me through a great many hurdles that seemed impossible at first. As an indie...
Advice / Community / Featured / self publishing / social media / Two Midlist Indies
by Valerie Douglas · Published January 29, 2014
A picture is worth a thousand words, especially with Pinterest. This is where having a great cover makes a tremendous difference. An intriguing cover will draw the interest of Pinterest viewers As with all social media, though, it is social media. It’s not just about promoting your books, but about getting to know you, the author, so you need to post more than just your covers. Post about you. What inspires you as a person or what inspired your...
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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...
Articles of note / Community / Featured / self publishing / Self Publishing Step by Step / social media / writing / Writing tips and tricks
by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published January 19, 2014
Last week’s roundup Every week, one of the IAG moderators will round up what’s gone on, on the group and in the Indie community as a broader view. If you’ve been busy writing, editing, or promoting, let us catch you up and find conversations and blog posts that should interest you and dive into the information you’re really keen to see. On the group Nikki Broadwell started a conversation about Createspace versus LSI last month, which concluded...
As many of you are probably aware, we’ve got an active and bustling twitter list, that we keep up to date and retweet indie authors worth reading, along with posts from our members. Ordinarily, we’d keep the list in the Facebook group, but we thought we’d try something else. Would you like to be listed on our Indie author list? Follow the instructions below. 1. Log into twitter. 2. Follow http://twitter.com/IAGtweets, http://twitter.com/Kaiberie and http://twitter.com/ValerieDouglasA ....
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by D Kai Wilson-Viola · Published January 16, 2014
There are four e’s to indie publishing – four elements that just can’t be skimped on, or you’ll destroy yourself. That destruction will come from poor reviews, and your image, once damaged, is really difficult to repair. Once you’re known as a writer that doesn’t care about his/her product, though you’ll still gain readers, there will eventually be a barrier to your evolution as a writer, or even your ability to reach the next level....
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