The UK photo book software developer, Taopix, has announced its new collaboration with Silicon Valley’s on-line self-publishing engine, FastPencil. This will offer an opportunity to picture book self-published authors to have a real choice about illustrations in their books instead of the difficult price sacrifices needed on the mainstream suppliers, such as Amazon’s Createspace. Self-publishing [...]

  When I started research on my book about the morals of bullfighting I traveled to Seville, the capital of Andalusia in Spain, where I met a wonderful American self-published author, Kitty Witwer. She wrote a book about being a female bullfighting fan, “Divine Addiction“, which is basically hailed as the “Almost Famous” of the [...]

The most trusted form of criticism for consumers on the internet is now the consumer review. Hailed as SEO gold by Google, these reviews are popping up all over the joint due to rich snippets, which I will explain in my next post in more detail. In fact, 63% of consumers now buy products not [...]

Self-published author Catherine Tosko on why Amazon should write a story of their own before publishing other people’s. Someone I know has just published their second book on Amazon and due to formatting issues has completely given up on selling any more books due to bad reviews, not about the book but about the formatting. [...]

Recently in this space, I came down pretty hard with the advice that you should make sure your writing is as smooth and error free as possible before you publish it. Now that I’ve made that point, I want to add the corollary: Don’t obsess. Well, maybe obsess a little, but not too much. The [...]

When I was thirteen I bought a lot of CD’s. I would spend hours flicking through the alphabetically lined racks on the hunt for Madonna, Guns and Roses, or the soundtrack for “Days of Thunder.” I would turn it over and take in the pictures. I would pull out the little booklet and pray that [...]

It was natural for me to want to write mysteries.  My parents loved to read them and I became one of those kids who hid with an apple and a book to get out of something more responsible I was supposed to be doing. For a number of years I wrote and occasionally submitted, trying [...]

I never suspected as I researched and wrote my book what further stages of the process were yet to come. I’m probably preaching to the choir a bit here, addressing a lot of people who won’t be surprised by what came next. Self-publishing with CreateSpace without going for any of their paid services was one [...]

Hi everybody, I promised my writer’s group I would do a quick ScreenFlow demonstration to see what all the fuss is about when it comes to writing in Scrivener. So once it was done, I thought I might as well share it. Click on the image below to view video.

It seems to me that self-published writers are looked down on – that they’re just using up space in the market; that if their work was good enough to get a proper publishing deal it would have done; that they’re putting out any kind of rubbish just because technology allows them to. All of this [...]