Self Publishing Your Books

To you, aspiring self-publishers, I have three words for you: Dont. Use. Calibre. Sorry Calibre developers; your software is amazing and I love it so so much. You're all so generous to offer it to us struggling people and I respect that more than I can express. Unfortunately, the amount of time I spent trying to make graphics, headers, TOCs, and everything to work on all three major book platforms (Kindle, Kobo, Nook)... I spent 40+ hours in agony trying to make it all work. Over Christmas at my in-laws. I was on Google, I looked in blogs, I went into the coding of the ebooks and tried to edit the HTML... all to no avail. Finally someone responded to one of my desperate pleas in a forum and told me what I was looking for just wasn't ideal. Thank you, whoever you are. In walks Vellum . Oh my gosh. One of the few pieces of software that I don't  have a love-hate relationship with. Naw, it's all love for Vellum. The down side is that, Vellum is only avai

Here are some marketing tips to get you ahead of the game when you're promoting yourself as a published author. I've left the juiciest tip until the end. Read on. Pick a style. Do you use primary colours or do you use secondary or tertiary colours? Are your graphics dark, are they light? Are they faded or are they harsh? Are you modern or rustic? Have a look at my Instagram feed for an example: The answers for me are: tertiary colours, light graphics, faded, and rustic. Partially because that's my natural style, and doing something forced long-term isn't ideal. But partially because my books are set in a medieval setting, and old wood, rusty nails, and faded photos speak of the past. Edit these graphics from your phone. Get good at lowering and increasing your black point: it's what makes your images more harsh vs. more faded. Toggle the contrast and brightness to, again, make the image more harsh vs. more faded. Play with the shadows to add depth and int

Well, here I am, one year after publishing my first book. What's changed? I'm going throw you the candy and then the broccoli in the next two paragraphs; hold onto your seatbelt. What makes me feel qualified for writing this blog is that, since publishing my book, I've gotten a full-time job in marketing. I've been getting on-on-one, customised advice from my colleagues. Since publishing my first book, Elemental Links, I've read dozens of blogs on how to market my book. In this blog, I'm putting that information together for you. As for the broccoli, my book hasn't taken off yet. The reviews are promising. One professional reviewer loved my sequel so much that she asked if she could let her thirteen-year-old son read it. Out of all the books she's read, she wanted to pass along mine. It was very flattering. However, publishing your book is a three-year haul. At least. Be prepared. I've given out hundreds of free copies of my books. Some blo

I don't believe in blog posts that bash one company or another: they're biased and not particularly trustworthy. While looking into signing up and publishing with ACX, I've done my research, checked other blogs, checked forums, and looked at Reddit. Not one source had a collection of all the resources and information that I'm throwing together in this blog. So, have a read! What is ACX? ACX is the one and only platform that you can directly  use to get your audiobook into Audible and Amazon. I use the word "directly" on purpose. Read on. It's owned by Amazon, and so too is Audible. Just like KDP, Amazon's book publishing platform, ACX is pretty basic. It doesn't have Kobo's crisp UI and doesn't have a whole lot of options for promos. ACX will publish your audiobook to Amazon, Audible, and "iTunes" (which is now Apple Books, but they don't seem to have bothered updating that). Here's the catch. If you sign on to p