What is a fair but competitive price for audible books?
Recently I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog, mostly because I am furiously writing away on my sequel to Maids of Misfortune. The title of the sequel is Uneasy Spirits, and I have over 90,000 words written. My goal is to finish the first draft by the time of the Historical Novel Society Convention, which is meeting mid June in San Diego. (If you are going to be there let me know, I would love a chance to meet you.) But, today I read about a new service Amazon is providing with its subsidiary Audible called Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) where it is going to make it easier for self-published authors to produce audio books. For the year and a half that Maids of Misfortune has been out, I’ve kept saying to myself that I should produce an audio book. Read more…
Seven Tips on how to sell books on Kindle
This post was originally a guest post over on Patty Henderson’s blog, The Henderson Files, entitled 7 Tips on how to sell books on Kindle. I am reprinting it here. First of all, why should you listen to me, an unknown author, tell you how to sell your book on Kindle? A little more than a year ago, I was a semi-retired professor of U.S. Women’s history who, besides a few academic articles, had never published a thing. What I did have was a manuscript of an historical mystery I had written 20 years earlier, based on my doctoral research on working women in the late nineteenth century. In the 20 years after writing the first draft, while I pursued my teaching career, I found an agent, collected rejections, lost an agent, published briefly with a small Print on Demand (POD) Read more…
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers: To an Indie Author, what do they mean?
9,093; 2.99; 2,049; 99; 15,570; 440; 7135; 4,882, 10,281; 1517; 94; 54; 18; 89; 229; 28; 18; 5; 10.264; 539; 20,505; 1577 For a writer, supposedly dominated by my right-brain, I seem to have become obsessed with a left-brained fixation on numbers. On reflection, I think this obsession with numbers may be related to the important role marketing (or selling-depending on how you define it) plays for me as an indie author. L. J. Sellers had an interesting blog post on Publetariat the other day, where she argued that one of the reasons that self-published authors seemed more motivated to get out there and sell their books than traditionally published authors is because the “…steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases.” I tend to agree. Read more…
The First Year of a New Born and a Newbie Published Author
Last year I rang in the New Year with my daughter, who had just had her first baby. I was exhausted (she had had a difficult delivery) and elated at being a grandmother. This New Year’s day, as I look back at the wonderful year of watching that sweet grandson grow and develop, I can’t help but notice some of the parallels between my experiences as a newly published independent author and that of my grandson. Last New Year as my grandson was trying to figure out how to nurse, when I added up my first month of sales of Maids of Misfortune, the historical mystery I had self-published in both ebook and print form, I discovered I had sold only 47 books, mostly to friends and family. I had a author website (but no reviews), and a blog (where Read more…
Outlining: Straight-jacket or Lifeline?
One of the arguments I had with my father when I was in grade-school was over the necessity of outlining when writing. He was for it, I didn’t see the need. By college I had a better understanding of the importance of having a clear organization for essays. However, what I tended to do was sketch out a very short outline, then write a quick rough draft–getting all my ideas down, then I would go back and write a new outline (now that I knew what I really wanted to say), and finally I cut and pasted the material into the right sections of this new outline. By the time I was working on my doctorate, I had become committed to outlining, and my first outlines became more and more detailed. The work I was doing was simply too complicated–particularly Read more…
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