self-publish
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Hachette v. Amazon: Whose Fault Is It, Anyway?
If you’ve paid any attention to the book industry, you’ll know by now that Hachette and Amazon are locked in some kind of pricing battle. The details aren’t that well known, but the strategy is: Amazon disabled the pre-order option for Hachette books, discounts have vanished and some authors have gone completely unlisted. Meanwhile, Hachette…
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Net Neutrality’s Meaning for Bloggers, Writers, and Musicians
Last week, the FCC struck down something called “net neutrality.” You might have seen headlines and decided it was boring. Maybe, for a little while, you were curious about the ruling’s meaning. No one really knows how things are going to work in a post net-neutrality world. But there are a lot of alarm bells…
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How to Use a Blog to Sell Your Book
The government shutdown is over. For now. After so much productive and rigorous hashtagging on Twitter, complaints on Facebook, and half-plagiarised news articles looking for traffic, our representatives had no choice but to start funding things again. And agree to fund the things they passed this year already. During that time – while I was…
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Why You Didn’t Get Any Sales from Your KDP Select Promotion
You wrote the book. You did the research. You got a cover. Finally, you formatted the thing for Amazon Kindle and decided to try KDP Select. Gleefully, you set up the promotion and let ‘er whirl. You scaled your expectations accordingly. “Maybe a dozen sales, not more… but, you know, maybe it’s the next Fifty…
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Forget Facebook, Your Band Needs Email Marketing
Bands have a lot of different attitudes when it comes to how they use Facebook. You’ve got the guys who don’t like to fill out any information. Then the ones who prefer to post vague and mysterious, almost nonsensical blocks of text. You’ve also got overly gracious bands that thank fans for being at shows…
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Keep in Mind: 59% of Readers Don’t Care About eBooks
Ebook sales have slowed down. Flattened. Softened. Whatever word you want to call it. Worldwide sales for the first quarter this year? They declined. Over at Rough Type, Nicholas Carr speculated a little bit about why eBook sales have so abruptly become steady, rather than revolutionary. Specifically, he brought up the iPad. I’ve thought about the indirect…