I joined the ranks of indie authors almost three years ago now, and I can’t begin to count the number of things I’ve had to learn in order to make it happen. I made quite a few mistakes with my first book, learned from them, and got better at writing, editing, formatting, marketing…the list goes…
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Recently, a reader posted a very nice review of Strictly Analog at Amazon, commenting on how the book had a tighter plot than most indie novels and that it was better than most books published by the Big 5 publishers. What remarkable praise. It feels great to read something like that about one of my…
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There’s a LOT of marketing advice out there for indie writers, and I’ve read a lot of it. Many of the posts and pages that promise to let you in on the Secret to Making the Bestseller Lists are just rehashes of the same ol’ same ol’ advice–have a platform, use social media, be giving,…
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We’re at that point in the semester where my students are getting ready to submit their first essays. I work a lot with college students who are placed in the composition class one level below Freshman Writing; they are, for many reasons, a bit under-prepared for academic discourse, and my main goal is to get…
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So there I was, sitting in the lobby at the Upland Martial Arts Center, watching my daughter (a green belt at the time), go through her forms when the karate-dad sitting next to me mentioned that he’d just put a novel up on Lulu. He’d had a couple of mysteries he’d written years before that…
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This week I’m celebrating the second anniversary of my foray into indie publishing. I hit the “publish” button on my first novel, Take Back Tomorrow, on January 24, 2012. While the venture hasn’t been a whirlwind success, it’s been extremely rewarding. I’ve followed that first book with two other full-length novels and two novellas, and…
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I’ve been reading Guy Kawasaki’s excellent book, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book. Kawasaki does a very nice job of describing and explaining each part of the process, stressing that an independent writer in today’s market needs to be all three of those things if he or she is going to succeed while…
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The semester is coming to an end, and I’m watching my Developmental Writing students take their final exams after sixteen weeks of struggling through increasingly difficult reading and writing assignments. Some of them come up to me at the end of the exam to thank me for being an “awesome” teacher–which I have my doubts…
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Like a lot of people, when I jumped into the world of indie publishing, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I knew how to write and edit, and I’d gotten a lot of positive feedback from people who knew what they were talking about. Publishing an e-book through Amazon’s KDP program and setting…
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