Features | Self-Publishing Review

How Indie Authors Can Make Two Categories Count On Amazon

Amazon made a decision sometime in the last two months or so to cut off new indie books to the five plus two categories allowed to all indie/self-published authors who had both paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon. Why could this decision have been made, and how can authors make the most of the measly two categories now allowed when publishing on Kindle?

Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us

What happened? Maybe the mounting problems for authors who had trad-published, or had genre books in the last couple of years with categories forced a change. Publishing companies and […]

Cate Baum2019-02-03T09:36:19+02:00May 20th, 2015|Categories: Features|Tags: Amazon News and Tips, Book Promotion Articles|

Non-Native English Authors And Self-Publishing – Seven Challenges For Editors

As non-native English speaking authors are enticed to the self-publishing industry, what are the challenges for writing a book in English, and how can authors enter the market successfully?

Recently, as an editor, I have noticed a real upturn in the number of non-native authors that ask me for editing services. Many tell me they have been turned away by other editors.

The thing is, because I have been an English teacher in Spain, I speak three languages, and have a qualification in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) it doesn’t scare me (maybe also growing up next to the […]

Cate Baum2015-05-14T05:05:22+02:00May 14th, 2015|Categories: Features|Tags: Book Editing Tips|

Sharing Without Reading – How Authors Can Find Readers For Their Online Content

We’re faced with a huge social pressure of being ‘engaged online’ to sell our books as self-publishers, but is our carefully-crafted content being absorbed?

As authors are encouraged to guest blog, interview, and post on all possible outlets online, is this just throwing it all at the wall when the evidence shows people share to look cool, erudite, and popular, rather that sharing what they have read?

In a world where “RIP *insert really ancient and intriguingly cool famous person’s name I never heard of before today here*” is a way to make your Facebook page pop, and picture quotes […]

Cate Baum2020-02-21T06:49:19+02:00May 13th, 2015|Categories: Features, Resources|Tags: Author Blogging, Social Media|

Seven Reasons Why you Shouldn’t Ask Your Book Editor To Sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement

Choosing a book editor should be based on whether the editor is a sound and clean worker with knowledge and experience in the language you have written in, using curated or affiliated professionals (I’m with the EFA and listed on Blurb, Reedsy, and ALLi – I think these are good places to start). Despite this transparency in my trade, there seems to be a new wave of paranoia. I keep being asked to sign NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) to edit your books. An an editor, I’m not happy about this. Why? Well, here are seven reasons.

1. Amateurs are starting fires […]

Cate Baum2015-05-07T03:32:37+02:00May 5th, 2015|Categories: Features|

Amazon’s Age Restrictions, Look Inside, And All These Pesky X-Rated Titles

I made a pretty shocking discovery on Amazon the other day.

Anyone, including your kid, can use the Look Inside feature, without logging in, to access books containing violent rape, incest, animal torture, pornographic scenes, erotica, terrorism, and murder.

Your kid doesn’t even need an account to read the first 10% of any book on Amazon. Here’s my (fictional) 9-year-old kid, looking at Amazon (not logged into an account), curiously typing in the word “porn”:

Now let’s see what happens if he or she clicks “Look Inside” – Oh, great! They can read the book! Not logged in, not trying […]

Cate Baum2015-04-20T07:40:35+02:00April 20th, 2015|Categories: Features|Tags: Amazon News and Tips|

How to Write a Book Blurb

By far, the weakest part of many self-published books is the synopsis found on Amazon and elsewhere. Worse than the cover, worse than the writing in the book itself, there are a lot of blurbs on Amazon that are pretty near atrocious. I include my own books in this category. Writing a decent blurb is an artform totally separate from writing a book.

Authors are also on record saying this is their least favorite part of the process. It can make you feel icky writing superlatives about your own book. At the same time, too many superlatives can literally be […]

Henry Baum2015-04-13T13:05:43+02:00April 13th, 2015|Categories: Features, Resources|

Why Clean Reader Doesn’t Matter

Unpopular, minority opinion: Clean Reader doesn’t matter. In brief: an app called Clean Reader aimed to remove swear words from books, replacing then with freaking and crap, etc. Cue the outrage of authors who claimed this as censorship. Smashwords and others then removed titles from the app.

To begin, I write books with profanity. I’ve had a number of reviews calling out the profanity, some saying I use it “every other word” (I don’t). My writing never struck me as all that profane, but the profanity had a purpose. Bad words are just words, an arrangement of letters. There’s […]

Henry Baum2015-03-30T08:44:05+02:00March 30th, 2015|Categories: Features|

Being an Indie Author [AUDIO]

I’m an indie author and shortly after I self-published my first novel, Inside the Outside, I wrote my first article for Self-Publishing Review, which was called “A Self-Publisher’s Manifesto” (I published an extended version of that article on my website, which I re-titled “An Indie Author’s Manifesto”). As I prepared to self-publish my second novel, The Vampire, the Hunter, and the Girl, I found myself thinking a lot about what it means to be an indie author and how I feel about it. So, I decided to talk about it on my podcast in “Episode 60: […]