Never has price been a more essential factor in the success or popularity of a particular title. With prices for ebooks ranging from completely free to upwards of £6/$10, ebook pricing is a minefield for the indie author. Read more
Print On Demand - or POD - is exactly that: a service whereby your book is printed only when it has been ordered, either by a bookshop or an online retailer. Read more
Now we've explored how to format your book for Kindle and upload to the Amazon KDP platform, it's time to look at the virtual shelves of other eretailers.
Last time we looked at KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and how self-publishing authors can upload their books to Amazon directly. Now we're going to focus on one key thing: formatting your book for Kindle. Read more
‘My success, I believe, stems from a combination of factors. Firstly, the freedom of self-publishing allowed me to explore and cater to my niche without being constrained by traditional publishing expectations. This direct connexion to readers, without intermediaries, provided invaluable feedback, enabling me to refine and better my work.
For the second in our profiles of bestselling authors, this week we're delighted to speak to Mark Billingham, who was recently presented with three Nielsen Bestseller Awards: gold for selling half a million copies of Sleepyhead, and silver for selling a quarter of a million copies of both Scaredy Cat and Buried, all published by Little, Brown.
My name has always felt, somehow, apart from me. But names, like all words, are approximations. From the day of my birth, I was called Christie, though it wasn't really my name. My real name was Christine. Well, my middle name was Christine. My first name - Miriam - I heard only at the receptionist's window of the dentist's office or on the first day of school. Read more
For the last two years, I've had unexpected success in experimenting with my "chipmunk research method." I was inspired to try this technique after hearing an intriguing comment made by my friend Oriano Belusic, past president of the Canadian Federation of the Blind (CFB).
When book sales spiked in 2020 and 2021, publishers believed one reason for the increase was that more people had turned to reading during the pandemic, and they were hopeful that some of those people would continue to read when things returned to normal. However, a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts seems to dash those hopes.
In early August, after Andrew Lipstein published The Vegan, his sophomore novel, a handful of loved ones asked if he planned to quit his day job in product design at a large financial technology company. Read more
'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages - all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronised, put-down and underpaid person.'