Information of all kinds for all types of writer!
Advice / Featured / Features and interviews / help and tutorials / News and views / Quick Guides / self publishing / Uncategorized / writing / Writing tips and tricks
by Valerie Douglas · Published April 27, 2017 · Last modified January 5, 2021
Spelling – Even the best spellers make mistakes. Use a software program like Grammarly or WordWeb (both of which have free versions.) Both may catch other errors in word usage – like affect vs. effect – and both do offer a thesaurus so you can find a better word or correct one that’s overused. One of the first things they may or may not tell you in writing classes or seminars is that in a...
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...
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...
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 / Articles of note / Community / Featured / Features and interviews / Two Midlist Indies / writing
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 / 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 […]
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...
Advice / Community / Featured / help and tutorials / social media
by Indie Author Group Guest Posts
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...
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
More
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