I’ve decided to move the Webdev category content over to the WordPress Reader issues on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Any traffic-building content I think I’ll start integrated with the Marketing category right here.
Speaking of which, even if you aren’t a WordPress user, you may want to take a periodic casual glance through. There’s stuff in there that can be wordpreneur-beneficial in general.
The latest issue, for example, has links to the following not-necessarily-WordPress-specific stuff:
- 17 Ways to Get Design Inspiration from Other Websites
- 25 bug tracking tools for websites
- How to Get and Install an SSL Certificate for HTTPS ASAP
- Web Design Best Practices for Reviving a Stagnate Website
At any rate, enjoy today’s featured selections!
— EES
Please Share the Love!
Marketing
![1+tip[1]](https://wordpreneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/1tip1-167x130.jpg "1+tip[1]")
“Can’t you give me just 1 tip (for getting book reviews)?” she asked
“The other day a newly published author who had befriended me 5 minutes earlier asked me if I could give her just one tip how to get book reviews from Amazon top reviewers.
I told her to read my book.
She came back with, ‘Can’t you give me just 1 tip?’
Hmm… Apparently this author was not aware how much in demand these reviews are; on average Hall-of-Fame reviewers get 250+ review requests per month.
So, I told her that getting a book reviewed by an Amazon top reviewer isn’t a ‘1-tip thing,’ especially if the book did not have any reviews yet. Getting reviews is a challenging task that encompasses many steps; which is why my book has 100 pages.
She immediately un-friended me.
I guess that says it all. Just another wannabe author who does not really want to learn the trade. The indie author industry is overrun with people like that. The sooner they get out and make room for the people who really hone their craft and all skills, the better for all.
Of course, from experience I know that most indie authors work a lot harder than this one.
So, here is one tip for authors whose books received already a few reviews (including from top reviewers).
‘Like/find helpful’ the reviewers’ reviews!!!”
Continue reading @ Gisela’s Straightforward Blog »
“Self-Made” is a Myth; Here’s the Real Formula for Success
“[T]hat’s what most people get wrong. They never learn how to reach out. You’ve got to be willing to put yourself out there…”
» Medium
$4,344.81 in 40 Days with my Fiction Book Only Spending $30 on Advertising
“I had a plan. A big plan. Heck, I had the plan of the universe — to sell thousands of copies of my new release Science Fiction book, Project Atlantis, during the first month I published it.
This plan started six months before I started writing the book. The plan entailed rapidly finishing three books in a series — Project Atlantis, Destination Atlantis, and Colony Atlantis — and once it had been edited, beta-read, and sent out to my ARC reviewers, I’d release Project Atlantis, then Destination Atlantis seven days later, and Colony Atlantis fourteen days after Destination Atlantis. Additionally, I’d have the fourth book, Beyond Atlantis, almost 100% written. Yet, I’d have Beyond Atlantis’s pre-order already up and running before Colony Atlantis was released, all the while dropping over $1500 dollars in Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, and on Promo Sites, and whatever else I could get my greedy paws on.
Well, I did none of the above.
Here is what happened that led me to only spending $30 on Facebook and Amazon ads and how I was able to make $4,344.81 in 40 Days with my Fiction Book.”
Continue reading @ Medium »
10 Actionable WordPress Security Tips for the Layman
“[T]he more popular something is, the more people want to leverage on it for nefarious means… Fortunately, WordPress is a platform that offers you a multitude of opportunity to defend yourself.”
» WHSR
Free
Writing Doesn’t Have To Be Lonely. How To Find A Community
Writing Doesn’t Have To Be Lonely. How To Find A Community
SOURCE: The Creative Penn
LINK: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2018/05/23/dont-be-lonely-find-a-community/
You are more likely to find a like-minded creative soul online than you are in the next street or even in your town. Let’s face it, writers are weird! We all have our crazy obsessions and strange thoughts and we need people who understand what it’s like to tune in to this inner life.”
peeps: Adam J. Nicolai
Adam J. Nicolai first attempted to write a novel back around 2001 when, while in the middle of a Dungeons & Dragons game with his friends, the story that had developed was so enjoyable to him, Adam wanted to share it. Titled Children of a Broken Sky, he spent a considerable amount of time working on it, including two revisions, and tried shopping it around among various agents to see if he could get representation. Nothing came of it, and Adam set it aside for a while.
But Adam kept busy, writing two more novels: Alex — which hit #13 on the Kindle Horror Bestseller list and #1 in Ghost Horror, not to mention managing to peak at #3 top-rated in overall Kindle fiction — and Rebecca, where he tackles the more difficult subjects of sexuality and religion. And he’s done well. So much so that he has resumed work on Children, doing even more revisions, and getting it ready for publication.
On a more personal note, Adam shares why in both Alex and Rebecca (and in Children too, he reveals) he likes to “explore the idea of people questioning their own [religious and spiritual] beliefs” — he was raised a Christian Fundamentalist. “Early in life I was extremely religious, a hardcore Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian,” he says. Now an atheist, he finds the transition fascinating and intriguing, and with it, it looks like his writing and work goes considerably further than basic entertainment.
I don’t know about you, but the books suddenly got a whole lot more interesting to me.
How Adam Got Started Self-Publishing
The time Adam spent trying to find an agent for Children of a Broken Sky was, understandably, extremely frustrating to him. “Every agent had their own preferred format for query letters. The Internet was full of contradicting advice on how to approach them. The response rate was abysmal and slow.”
While he was still sending out Children‘s queries, he began work on Alex, which ended up becoming a totally different experience for him. “The words just flowed like they never did with Children,” he remembers, with the first novel being a complex epic fantasy and the new book having just “one main character with one POV that had one main conflict.” Adam had heard the advice that writers would be better served to start with something simple. “[N]othing really drove home the truth of this advice like seeing the difference in writing these two novels.”
The writing process wasn’t the only thing that was going to be different. “I was loving writing it, I was loving revising it, I was loving the whole experience. But when I thought about going through that query process again, I wanted to curl up and die.” So he started exploring his publishing options, and looked into Kindle Direct Publishing.
“I was amazed to find that the self-publishing market had changed a ton. It sounded easy and rewarding. Risky, yeah, but not ‘plop down $10,000 in advance for paperbacks to sell from your basement’ risky. More like, ‘Maybe you could have gotten a giant advance on this book and now you won’t’ risky, which honestly, is pretty much, ‘Maybe that Powerball ticket you threw away was worth something!’ risky.”
Spot on.
Of course, Adam’s professional background did give him a measure of confidence that he could take on the project with relative ease — “I was a project manager at a major medical insurance company for 6+ years, I taught myself computer programming when I was 21 and know my way around HTML and several programming languages, and I used to edit documentation for a living” — so good bet the prospects of him doing it all by his lonesome wasn’t all that worrisome.
But he still had to take that step, that first all-important move away from what we’ve all been taught and conditioned to expect as “the way things are,” a step into — quite frankly — one heck of an experiment.
Don’t think too hard trying to guess how it all works out. “I opted to give it a shot, and it went fantastically!”
Self-Publishing Tips and Observations
- “I never cease to be amazed what authors can do today on their own.”
- “You can upload a text file and an image from your basement and sell print-on-demand paperbacks. The first time I heard about that, I was just flabbergasted.”
- “You can create your own audiobooks.”
- “You can write a book and get enough recognition for it that publishers start contacting you. (This has happened to me no less than 5 times, and every time, I’m amazed. Hey world: the movie rights for Alex are still available!)”
- “eBooks are not going away. I think eventually they’ll be at least 90% – 95% of the way people read. I don’t think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I just think it’s what’s going to happen.”
- “Self-publishing will continue to be a viable option. Even if Amazon decides to up and close shop on KDP tomorrow, someone will be smart enough to cash in on that market. It is too large and too lucrative for someone not to.”
- “None of this matters if you don’t write a good book. That means it has to be edited, it has to have a sharp cover, it needs to be quality work. There is plenty of bad self-published stuff out there, but in fairness, there is plenty of stuff published by the big houses that could use some work too. The bottom line is and always will be: write a good book, sell a quality product.”
Learn more about Adam and his work by visiting his Amazon author page and his website. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Originally published: June 18, 2013
How Writers/Photographers Can Market and Monetize Successfully Today
The Gradual Empowerment of Modern Writers/Authors: How Writers/Photographers Can Market and Monetize Successfully Today
SOURCE: Foster Travel Publishing
With the rise of print-on-demand technology for printed books and with the prominence of inexpensive ebooks, replicated at no manufacturing cost, all the aspiring writers/authors in the audience could publish their own books. I use ‘books’ here to suggest broadly their specialized content, whatever that might be.”
![cropped-Vagabonds-2720-960-1024x361[1]](https://wordpreneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cropped-Vagabonds-2720-960-1024x3611-167x130.jpg "cropped-Vagabonds-2720-960-1024x361[1]")
Children’s Books Sell Online: Data Guy on Juvenile Sales
“…
Online v Brick & Mortar – Children’s Books
Data Guy asserts that the real question for the coming years is the difference in online sales versus offline sales in a real store. For adult books the shift is clear. But it’s not quite as clear for juvenile fiction. One reason for this is that Data Guy is looking mostly at Amazon’s data obtained by spidering the site with a bot. He doesn’t look at sales from educational distributors like Follett, Mackin, Permabound and so on. That’s a huge market just by itself, and isn’t counted in the data here. However, going just with Data Guy’s data, we’ll look at trends.
For the data below, ONLINE means online print sales, audiobooks and ebooks. Indie means self-published.
For traditionally published books only:
- 41% of children’s non-fiction book sales are online
- 40% of children’s fiction books are online.
You can almost ignore these figures because it ignores the impact of indie sales. Instead, look at the combined sales below.
For traditional, Indie, and Amazon-imprint:
- 5% juvenile non-fiction are Indie.
- 14% juvenile fiction are Indie.
For traditional, Indie, and Amazon-imprint:
- 45% juvenile non-fiction are bought online
- 48% juvenile fiction are bought online
In other words, indie publishers of juvenile materials have an incredible opportunity right now. Just under half the books are sold online, where indies can compete easier. With only 5% and 14% of juvenile non-fiction and fiction sales, respectively, coming from Indies, there’s tremendous possibility for growth.”
Continue reading @ Indie Kids Books »
Social Media
“Can’t you give me just 1 tip (for getting book reviews)?” she asked
“The other day a newly published author who had befriended me 5 minutes earlier asked me if I could give her just one tip how to get book reviews from Amazon top reviewers.
I told her to read my book.
She came back with, ‘Can’t you give me just 1 tip?’
Hmm… Apparently this author was not aware how much in demand these reviews are; on average Hall-of-Fame reviewers get 250+ review requests per month.
So, I told her that getting a book reviewed by an Amazon top reviewer isn’t a ‘1-tip thing,’ especially if the book did not have any reviews yet. Getting reviews is a challenging task that encompasses many steps; which is why my book has 100 pages.
She immediately un-friended me.
I guess that says it all. Just another wannabe author who does not really want to learn the trade. The indie author industry is overrun with people like that. The sooner they get out and make room for the people who really hone their craft and all skills, the better for all.
Of course, from experience I know that most indie authors work a lot harder than this one.
So, here is one tip for authors whose books received already a few reviews (including from top reviewers).
‘Like/find helpful’ the reviewers’ reviews!!!”
Continue reading @ Gisela’s Straightforward Blog »
“Self-Made” is a Myth; Here’s the Real Formula for Success
“[T]hat’s what most people get wrong. They never learn how to reach out. You’ve got to be willing to put yourself out there…”
» Medium
Content & Ideas
“Can’t you give me just 1 tip (for getting book reviews)?” she asked
“The other day a newly published author who had befriended me 5 minutes earlier asked me if I could give her just one tip how to get book reviews from Amazon top reviewers.
I told her to read my book.
She came back with, ‘Can’t you give me just 1 tip?’
Hmm… Apparently this author was not aware how much in demand these reviews are; on average Hall-of-Fame reviewers get 250+ review requests per month.
So, I told her that getting a book reviewed by an Amazon top reviewer isn’t a ‘1-tip thing,’ especially if the book did not have any reviews yet. Getting reviews is a challenging task that encompasses many steps; which is why my book has 100 pages.
She immediately un-friended me.
I guess that says it all. Just another wannabe author who does not really want to learn the trade. The indie author industry is overrun with people like that. The sooner they get out and make room for the people who really hone their craft and all skills, the better for all.
Of course, from experience I know that most indie authors work a lot harder than this one.
So, here is one tip for authors whose books received already a few reviews (including from top reviewers).
‘Like/find helpful’ the reviewers’ reviews!!!”
Continue reading @ Gisela’s Straightforward Blog »
“Self-Made” is a Myth; Here’s the Real Formula for Success
“[T]hat’s what most people get wrong. They never learn how to reach out. You’ve got to be willing to put yourself out there…”
» Medium
Indie Author/Publishing
“Can’t you give me just 1 tip (for getting book reviews)?” she asked
“The other day a newly published author who had befriended me 5 minutes earlier asked me if I could give her just one tip how to get book reviews from Amazon top reviewers.
I told her to read my book.
She came back with, ‘Can’t you give me just 1 tip?’
Hmm… Apparently this author was not aware how much in demand these reviews are; on average Hall-of-Fame reviewers get 250+ review requests per month.
So, I told her that getting a book reviewed by an Amazon top reviewer isn’t a ‘1-tip thing,’ especially if the book did not have any reviews yet. Getting reviews is a challenging task that encompasses many steps; which is why my book has 100 pages.
She immediately un-friended me.
I guess that says it all. Just another wannabe author who does not really want to learn the trade. The indie author industry is overrun with people like that. The sooner they get out and make room for the people who really hone their craft and all skills, the better for all.
Of course, from experience I know that most indie authors work a lot harder than this one.
So, here is one tip for authors whose books received already a few reviews (including from top reviewers).
‘Like/find helpful’ the reviewers’ reviews!!!”
Continue reading @ Gisela’s Straightforward Blog »
“Self-Made” is a Myth; Here’s the Real Formula for Success
“[T]hat’s what most people get wrong. They never learn how to reach out. You’ve got to be willing to put yourself out there…”
» Medium
$4,344.81 in 40 Days with my Fiction Book Only Spending $30 on Advertising
“I had a plan. A big plan. Heck, I had the plan of the universe — to sell thousands of copies of my new release Science Fiction book, Project Atlantis, during the first month I published it.
This plan started six months before I started writing the book. The plan entailed rapidly finishing three books in a series — Project Atlantis, Destination Atlantis, and Colony Atlantis — and once it had been edited, beta-read, and sent out to my ARC reviewers, I’d release Project Atlantis, then Destination Atlantis seven days later, and Colony Atlantis fourteen days after Destination Atlantis. Additionally, I’d have the fourth book, Beyond Atlantis, almost 100% written. Yet, I’d have Beyond Atlantis’s pre-order already up and running before Colony Atlantis was released, all the while dropping over $1500 dollars in Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, and on Promo Sites, and whatever else I could get my greedy paws on.
Well, I did none of the above.
Here is what happened that led me to only spending $30 on Facebook and Amazon ads and how I was able to make $4,344.81 in 40 Days with my Fiction Book.”
Continue reading @ Medium »
10 Actionable WordPress Security Tips for the Layman
“[T]he more popular something is, the more people want to leverage on it for nefarious means… Fortunately, WordPress is a platform that offers you a multitude of opportunity to defend yourself.”
