Category: E-Books

Julien Smith on Methods for Becoming a Bestselling Author

I believe many writers don’t publish their work out of fear. Fear of failure, and fear of success. Thus, when I read Julien Smith’s latest book, The Flinch, which he published as a free ebook with Seth Godin’s Domino Project, I was quite taken by both the topic and by the writer. I would describe [...]

Wednesday February 1st, 2012 in Book Marketing, Creating a Bestselling Book, E-Books, Promotion and Publicity, Writing Tips | No Comments »

Should You Add Bells and Whistles (like Apps) to Your Books?

I read this recent post by Seth Godin, and it got me thinking about all the different possible things we authors can now do with our content.  Then I thought of an ebook recently published by Julien Smith, The Flinch. It’s free and there’s not much to it but great content. There’s so much great [...]

Wednesday December 28th, 2011 in Book Marketing, E-Books, publishing | No Comments »

How to Write a Good Short Book Fast

Often writers and bloggers have an abundance of ideas. They may hit a stumbling block to actually producing a book, however, when they think about writing and publishing a 150-250 page book. In fact, this stops many an aspiring writer in his or her tracks. No worries. Instead, consider writing a short book – a [...]

Wednesday September 28th, 2011 in Author Coaching, Blogging, Blogging a Book, E-Books, How to Write a Book Fast, Writing Books, Writing Coaching, Writing Tips | 1 Comment »

1 Reason You Should Consider Publishing an Ebook

Last night I was at my local chapter meeting of the California Writer’s Club. I made an announcement about a great workshop we have coming up about writing, publishing and promoting ebooks. It features founder and CEO of Smashwords.com Mark Coker speaking for four hours–for the first time ever!–about the ebook revolution and how to [...]

Wednesday September 14th, 2011 in E-Books | No Comments »

I Did It! I Published on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle!

Yes, indeed, I did! I took one of my short books–a condensed version of what will one day be a full-length book, revised it, had a cover made for it, and formatted it. I then uploaded it to Smashwords and Amazon, and it is now available as an e-book in all e-reader formats. Whoo hoo. [...]

Wednesday April 27th, 2011 in E-Books, Self-Publishing | No Comments »

Don’t Forget the Essentials of Indie Success

I have read more articles and blog posts about why writers should become indie authors lately. I’ve written my share as well. (You can read them by looking in the self-publishing and e-book categories of this blog.) However, it strikes me that while these articles and posts, even the one I wrote yesterday that features [...]

Wednesday April 20th, 2011 in Author Coaching, Creating a Bestselling Book, E-Books, Platform, Self-Publishing, The Business of Writing | No Comments »

Multi-Media Course Offers Help for Newbie E-book Publishers

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m in the process of converting some of my short books, which have been available only on my websites as both print books and PDF-type e-book, into e-books that can be distributed more widely via Smashwords.com and the Kindle bookstore. I have one document converted and a cover almost finished by [...]

Monday April 18th, 2011 in E-Books, Self-Publishing | No Comments »

Amanda Hocking and Barry Eisler Chat about Publishing

Literary agent Ted Weinstein, who I have the pleasure of seeing each year at the San Francisco Writers Conference, has done us all a favor and gotten Amanda Hocking and Barry Eisler together to chat about publishing and their recent decision about how to publish their own books. They’ve compared indie publishing to traditional publishing–of [...]

Thursday March 31st, 2011 in E-Books, publishing, Publishing Industry, Self-Publishing, Traditional Publishing | No Comments »

Hocking signs 4-book deal so she can be a writer

After I published this post yesterday, today I saw this article announcing that Amanda Hocking had, indeed, signed a four-book deal with St. Martin’s Press in New York, reportedly for $2 million. As she said in her blog, she’s a writer: “I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling emails, formatting covers, [...]

Friday March 25th, 2011 in E-Books, publishing, Publishing Industry, Self-Publishing, The Business of Writing | No Comments »

Self-Publishing E-books Takes Time Away from Writing

I said it yesterday, unless you have a huge platform, are paying someone to do your promotion for you, have hired a design team (an editorial team is assumed), and use some sort of support service for your publishing process, as an indie publisher–e-books or print books–you will not necessarily have more time to write. [...]

Thursday March 24th, 2011 in Author Coaching, E-Books, publishing, Publishing Industry, Self-Publishing | 1 Comment »