What Every Author Needs to Know About Microsoft Word “Styles”
Microsoft Word “Styles” is the single most powerful tool in an author’s toolbox, yet most writers haven’t even heard of it. How about you? Do you make manual changes to paragraphs and fonts? Do you select each chapter title in your book to change the font size or to style it in bold or italics, […]
Using Microsoft Word's Sidebar to Navigate Your Book
If you’re writing a book, you know how hard it is to find your place sometimes, scrolling up and down through the document, squinting at text, trying to find a chapter head, a subtitle, or the phrase that your looking for. If you’ve applied Microsoft Word Styles to your chapter headings and subheadings, you can […]
Canva’s new free, ready-to-edit ebook cover designs
Canva announced their ready-to-edit ebook cover designs this month. Take a look and you’ll find a bunch of templates pre-filled with images, fonts, and graphics. You can switch out the image with your own (or stock photo or royalty-free image), and change the font color and sizes.
How to Give Others Access to Your Web Accounts
Your website, MailChimp newsletters and automatic responses, Google Analytics, WordPress website, and GoDaddy web hosting accounts are all interconnected. If you’re like me, you probably hire an expert to help you manage all this. Did you know that you can allow access to others on all these accounts without giving them your username and secret password? Here’s a detailed […]
Self-Publishing Authors: Use an EIN instead of an SSN
Your social security number is “you central” to the government, creditors, and identity thieves. And now you’re asked to give it out to online publishers and other entities when setting up your self-publishing business? Yeeks! But don’t worry. There’s an alternative. It’s called the EIN, or Employer Identifier Number, and you don’t have to have employees […]
How to Compare and Choose a Self-Publishing Service
On Wednesday, June 24, 2015, I’m teaching an online course on how to choose between self-publishing services. The web conference is presented by DigitalEd @ PBS MediaShift. It costs $39.00 and by the end of it you should have all the knowledge to make an educated decision and move forward with your book publishing project. If you […]
Make Pre-Orders Part of Your Book Launch Marketing Strategy
This week, Smashwords announced what they say is its most ambitious feature ever, assetless preorders. I always encourage authors to use Smashwords, the largest ebookseller in the world, to publish and distribute their ebooks to the widest network possible. If you’ve got Smashwords and Kindle, then you’ve got the ebook market covered. Not to mention app stores and libraries. […]
Finesse Your Book Launch with this Great Author Marketing Bundle
I grew up in the self-publishing industry with a few key people you have probably already heard of. Joel Friedlander is one of them, and he’s gone from book designer to designer of a suite of amazing products that help indie authors succeed in everything from book formatting to blog templates to creating a media kit. […]
At the San Francisco Writers Conference
It’s just great to be at the San Francisco Writers Conference, over a decade old, I think it’s actually in its 12th year now. Even though I’ve moved to San Diego and Baja, California, I still feel a part of the writers community here in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s rich and vibrant and diverse […]
PressBooks for Preparing and Selling Your Ebook and Print Book
PressBooks’ Hugh McGuire just sent out a handy guide to preparing and selling a book with this cloud publishing system. I’ve used the tool three times now and love it. Have distributed using my own site, BookBaby and CreateSpace. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! Here’s what he had to say in his newsletter. PressBooks was invented to help writers and […]