Helpful Software & Sites

Adventures in advertising: Can anyone beat Bookbub? Part I

Posted on March 25, 2013

My forays into advertising my self-published books continue. I know I’m tardy on reporting on many of my ad buys (like, by a few months), but I’ve recently had such success with Bookbub.com that I wanted to tell you about this out of order.

Background
Writer friend Karen Cantwell (of Take the Monkeys and Run fame) heard from other pen-smythe and colleague Scott Nicholson (he of The Red Church, Liquid Fear, and a google of other books) that young upstart book-bargain site Bookbub.com was a great place to advertise for indies. The skinny: Bookbub’s price was steep in comparison to almost all other advertising venues of its kind–maybe the highest–but the returns were worth it.

Since I’m in the “it’s time to advertise or get lost in the shuffle” camp, I checked it out, blanched at the price, but dove in anyway.

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Why WordPress?

Posted on June 14, 2012

The following post began life as a how-to email I sent to a writers’ group I belong to, the Northern Virginia Writers Club, after several non-techy members expressed frustration over trying to get onto the web. It seems a bit redundant to post this bit about WordPress on a WordPress site…but of course any number of people could stumble across this blog via a simple browser search, with no knowledge of why my site is hosted on WP.

This is a very light, quick introduction into why I chose WP for my site and blogging needs. Feel free to ask questions in the Comments section to clarify anything I glossed over.

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Catching the Reader’s Eye: HTML Email

Posted on June 7, 2012

When you’re ready to publish and are thinking about the free and easy-to-access methods of promoting yourself, a few options spring to mind: social media sites, your blog, and, of course, email.

In a strange way, however, email is the most cumbersome of the three. Out-of-the-box, the medium can be plain and un-compelling. Most standard email programs lack anything but basic print formatting and almost nothing in the way of graphic control or enhanced technologies. And without that, you’re sending your recipients the equivalent of a very forgettable piece of junk mail.

The solution is HTML email, a hybrid of web-based technologies and standard email services that allows you to format print and graphics to make compelling emails that encourage (and enable) people to act.

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Keeping Things Straight With Evernote

Posted on June 1, 2012

You wouldn’t think there’d be a new twist in the work-flow/word processing/information-management software arena, but I’m happy to report that Evernote (www.evernote.com) is a new, useful, and fun departure from all of the tired applications you’ve seen over the years…and best of all, it’s free.

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Correcting Mistakes with Errnet

Posted on April 20, 2012

One of the challenges facing indie writers is how to recreate the editorial support that a traditionally published author receives (or is supposed to receive). If you take your writing seriously, having a handful of volunteer readers isn’t enough; you need true editorial help.

There are many types of editors, however: substantive editing, line editing, copy-editing, proofreading. All of these steps and stages are important, but in my own case, I felt that there was no substitute for substantive editing since it requires a high degree of experience, knowledge of the genre I was writing in (crime fiction), and a kind of understanding of the whole project, not just individual pieces. Consequently, I hired my own at considerable cost and it was worth it.

Since I don’t live under a money-tree, however, I hoped to cut a few corners by looking for proofreading alternatives. This is still an important step, but one I hoped I could look for a more automated solution.

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