Category Archives for Self Publishing

How Can I Launch A Book With No Audience?

Few weeks back I sent out a survey asking whether you had any questions about launching and marketing a book. I happened to be traveling the day the email went out. Heh. Pro-tip: Don’t ask your list for replies when you’ll be away from your computer. Took me *days* to dig out from that. But […]

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8 Ways to Profit From Low-Priced Products

Wendy is an author who writes and publishes indie fiction on Amazon. Her husband Josh, a loyal reader, is giving her a hand with marketing. Over the last year they’ve built up a healthy email list—and now Josh finds himself at a crossroads. Because selling Kindle books for $2.99 isn’t the path to a sustainable […]

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Is Publishing A Book Just A Waste of Time?

The other day I was on a call with my business partner John, scheming about the upcoming launch of his second book. As an aside I asked him how much revenue he was earning from his first book, “Soft Skills: A Software Developer’s Life Manual.” I won’t disclose the details here, since that revenue is […]

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Why You’ll Never Make Money Writing Kindle Books

Comes a question from a fellow Josh: Love your emails and I occasionally listen to the Entreprogrammers podcast. I’m actually in a mastermind group with Wes Bos too 🙂 I’ve been working on my wife’s marketing, she writes and indie publishes fiction books on Amazon (http://wendyowensbooks.com). I’ve been using drip for the past two months […]

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Stop the “bucket brigade”—and start building pipelines

Ever heard of the book, “The Richest Man in Babylon”? One of the key takeaways in that book is this: “Don’t carry buckets, build pipelines.” In other words, build a machine that generates results without your direct involvement. Most people hear that and jump right to the idea of creating products to generate “passive income” […]

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How a 5 minute conversation saved me from a $4,416.22 mistake

I lost my nerve. That’s it, plain and simple. I’d spent hundreds of hours researching, outlining, writing and editing my second book. And the more time I spent on the project, the less confident I felt that anyone would buy it. After all, I hadn’t done much research with my audience to confirm that this […]

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An outline is not a checklist

My outlines used to be a mess. I’d sit down to write something, and I’d feel like I had to outline first, because that’s what writers do, you know? So I’d throw a few bullet points down on a piece of paper. No, not even bullet points. They were more like a collection of random […]

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Focusing on my writing process is paying off

It’s been close to a month since I decided to get serious about my writing and set a goal for myself of publishing four ebooks in the next 12 months. So how is it going? Although it’s hard to tell on a day-to-day basis, when I look back at the past month it’s clear I’m […]

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Why “just write” is stupid advice

A golfer sighs in frustration as yet another ball slices hard and disappears into the woods. An old timer, who’s spent the last few minutes observing the young hacker’s herky-jerky swing, smiles and offers his sage advice: “Just hit the ball, son.” A programmer glowers at his screen as his app coughs up exception after […]

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Breakthrough: Writing 2,000 words in less than two hours

Yesterday something inside me clicked, and I just wrote. The last couple of weeks have been a mental struggle. I’m ripping out long-time habits and replacing them with better ones. My old writing process was broken and slow—but it was comfortable. And overcoming lifelong habits is never easy. But I’m determined to make it work, […]

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Why I’m writing a book no one will buy

I have no idea if anyone will ever buy the book I’m working on right now. This is entirely my own doing. And you know what? I’m fine with that. There’s a right way and a wrong way to find book topics. The right way involves picking an audience, then studying that audience to discover […]

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The dangers of faking your outline

Writer’s block isn’t something I usually struggle with, but I ran smack into a wall yesterday. It was pretty unexpected, and working around it taught me a valuable lesson about outlining. I’d cranked through my daily practice writing session in record time, and when I cracked open Scrivener to work on my book, I had […]

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Two strategies I’m using to improve my outlining skills

I used to hate outlining. It was frustrating and didn’t seem to help my writing at all. When I’d sit down to write, I’d scribble out a few bullet points that were related to what I wanted to write about. These points were usually a loose collection of thoughts that centered around a single theme […]

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The real reason I write slowly

In college, I spent a semester in Washington, D.C. as an intern at the Washington Times. The department I worked with covered cultural trends, which gave me the opportunity to do my favorite kind of writing—in-depth features. I loved the newspaper atmosphere and I enjoyed my assignments. But looking back, I wasn’t very productive. I […]

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My writing practice plan

To meet my ambitious publishing goals for the year, I’m going to have to step up my game. By this time next year, I plan to publish four non-fiction books in the 20,000- to 30,000-word range. Last year I spent about six months working on a book to get to around 15,000 to 18,000 words, […]

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How to set realistic writing goals

I’ve set big writing goals for myself several times in the past. This year, my goal was to publish 100,000 words between books and blog posts. Prior to that, I’d tried setting daily word count goals, like writing 500 words a day, and time-based goals, like writing for one hour every morning. But I’d never […]

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How I’m going to write four books in 12 months

If you search DuckDuckGo for “how to write a book,” you might be tempted to just give up on the whole idea. The top-ranking results are littered with words and phrases like “torture,” “horrible experience,” “didn’t make any money.” The conventional wisdom is that writing books is an arduous process and one that’s not really […]

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Why I’m publishing my ebook 100 words at a time

I’m writing my ebook in the least efficient way possible: Every day, I publish an update of at least 100 words. And you know what? It’s working great. Publishing 100-word chunks throws the “writing process” out the window Writing involves several discrete steps: organization and outlining, research, writing the first draft, editing the final draft, […]

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How I made $2,000 in 7 days launching my ebook

August, 2012: I’m pounding out pages for an ebook about Sublime Text. The book is growing steadily, and with it, a sense of panic: What happens when I’m done? My entire promotional strategy consists of pushing the publish button! I’m a programmer, not a sales wizard. Marketing seems like black magic. The thought of my […]

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