Self Publishing Roundup December 15th, 2015

Welcome to the first of our bi-weekly roundup of the best self-publishing content published around the web.

Here are seven blog posts you can use to improve both your writing and marketing efforts.

Be sure to check out each of the following.

#1. Self-Publishing Your NaNoWriMo Book? Don’t Miss These Steps!

Taking your time and publishing a polished novel will make a world of difference for your sales and overall self-publishing experience. Readers know the difference between a clean, professional manuscript and the average low-quality offerings of most self-publishers. There are a number of steps you can follow to ensure your book is up to snuff.

First, you will want to review and revise your manuscript. Second, bring in outside partners to give you advice and critiques. Then repeat steps 1 and 2 to make sure the manuscript is in good shape. At this point, you will want to bring in an editor, and start doing research into your target audience. Then choose a great title, hire a cover designer, and make sure your book is formatted correctly. At this point, you should be close to having a final product. At the very least, you’ll be miles ahead of all the pretenders out there!

#2. Engaging Audiences Through Twitter in 15 Minutes per Day

Guest post from Kirsten Oliphant

Once you have established an audience, it is important that you maintain contact with them and keep them interested and engaged. Don’t let the hard work of enticing readers go to waste by losing them the next week! There are a number of tools and process you can use to keep in touch with your readers on Twitter, and it takes less than 15 minutes of your time. First, create lists. People love lists, so find something interesting and post away. Another strategy is to connect with other influencers in your sphere, and post interesting tidbits from them. You can also connect with the followers of these influencers, and convert them into your own followers. Finally, you should make yourself lists of daily and weekly posts so that you are prepared and always have your Twitter content ready.

#3. November 2015 – the UK report: Author Earnings on Amazon.co.uk

First Author Earnings report on the UK ebook market

Data/analysis on:

  • Market share by publisher type
  • Ebook pricing
  • Ebooks without ISBNs
  • International sales of domestic best sellers

#4. Michaela Kendrick Is Starting Fresh in a Different Genre

Established author Michaela Kendrick is moving into new territory. Best known for her YA fantasy and hard Sci-Fi titles, Kendrick is looking to expand her catalog to include books in the SciFi romance genre. This transition has been carefully planned, and will utilize a number of intentional strategies for success, including launching multiple books at once, choosing covers that the established romance audience can relate to, and asking fellow authors and beta readers for reviews.

As a side note, when campaigning for reviews, one successful strategy is to release a paperback copy of your manuscript through CreateSpace before the ebook launches (and link the paperback to the ebook). Because the paperback is live, it is possible for people to leave reviews, which gets you ahead of the game. Of course, this means that your manuscript has to be finished, but ideally it is already finished if you are sending it out for reviews!

#5. How to Build (and not Build) an Author Site

Original post from Andrew Updegrove: Tales of Adversego

When building an author site, there are four things to take into consideration.

First of all, your site should provide a clear, compelling reason for a visitor to buy each of your books—and make it easy for them to do so. (This can include buttons linking to your book or author page at each of your major distributors.)

Second, your site should help build your brand, and any sub-brands you have established.

Third, it should help you establish a growing number of identified followers who you can communicate with directly, through email and posts. This allows you to keep readers informed of new book releases, and leverage your audience for promotion.

And finally, your site should be easily discoverable. After all, no matter how fancy a website is, if no one can find it, then it’s not going to do you any good.

By ensuring that your author site has all four of these elements in place, you can go a long way towards furthering your readership and the viability of your self-publishing business.

#6. Barnes & Noble Has Been Destroyed by Amazon

Original post from CNN Money

Book and music retailer Barnes & Noble said sales fell again in its most recent quarter. It has also reported larger losses than last year, far surpassing what industry pundits had predicting.

As the brand’s market share continues to fall in the face of ebook giant Amazon, there is speculation as to what Barnes & Noble can do to survive.

#7. Book Bub News Alert

Here is an email that was sent to Authors on BookBub: http://insights.bookbub.com/

I hope you’re doing well! Thanks for recently claiming your BookBub Author Profile. I’m reaching out because I wanted you to be one of the first to know about a new feature BookBub will begin offering authors in 2016: New Release Alerts.

Starting January 4th, BookBub readers will receive an email alert every time an author they follow on BookBub releases a new book or novella in the U.S. These New Release Alerts are dedicated emails that make it easy for readers to purchase the new release immediately or bookmark it on

BookBub to purchase later.

New Release Alerts will be sent to BookBub members, just like Featured Deals. But there are a few important differences:

  • New Release Alerts are free for authors. They will be sent automatically for all books and novellas confirmed as new releases by BookBub.
  • New Release Alerts are not subject to BookBub’s editorial selection process. Any confirmed new release will be sent, which means that any author releasing new books can take advantage of this feature.
  • New Release Alerts are sent to an author’s BookBub followers. The more followers you have on BookBub, the more readers will get your alerts, and the more books you’ll sell. To help you keep track of followers, your follower count is now displayed on the Author Profile page of your BookBub Partner Dashboard.

How to Get a New Release Alert for Your Next Book

Books that are added to your BookBub profile before, on, and up to seven days after their release date will get a New Release Alert. Like all ebooks, new releases can be added to a BookBub Author Profile via an author’s Partner Dashboard. In addition, some titles are automatically added by third-party data providers. We will be sending New Release Alerts for books released Jan. 4, 2016 and later.

Welcome to Episode 02 of the Authority Self-Publishing show. In this podcast we discuss the latest self-publishing news from around the web.