Simple Steps to an Author Auto-Responder

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

One of the topics I’d heard other independent authors talk about a lot was auto-responders, but for years, I put off actually setting up one of my own.

Being an indie author means we’re constantly juggling demands and having to prioritize. I didn’t understand how valuable an auto-responder could be, so it never seemed to jump to the top of my list.

I was also intimidated. I didn’t know what to write in my auto-responder.

This year, I tackled it.

What to Do When Your Writing Stalls Out

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy
 
Part of The Writer's Life Series

JH: Everyone gets stuck at some point in their writing career. Marcy Kennedy discusses how to get stalled writing moving again. 

There comes a time in every writer’s career when they find themselves stuck. The words and ideas aren’t flowing like they used to. Production stalls out. Panic sets in.

If you’re a career writer like I am, that panic is compounded by the fact that writing pays your bills, and when you aren’t producing new books, your income drops. The best way to make a solid living in the new publishing landscape is to publish often.

For a year and a half, I produced a minimum of one book every other month. And it was easy for me. (Please don’t hate me for saying that.)

Then 2018 hit, and it stopped being easy. While I don’t believe in writer’s block, I do believe we can become stuck or we can stall out.

Cleaning Up Your Mailing List: The Why and the How

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy
 
Part of the Indie Author Series

A key tool that we have as indie authors for keeping in touch with our readers is our newsletter or mailing list. Building and maintaining a mailing list is considered foundational to a strong author business for good reason.

Unlike social media sites—or even our website—email is a direct means of communication. We’re not hoping they come to our site or hoping that our status update shows up in their social media feed. We’re also in control of our list so that, if a particular social media sites dies a dramatic death, our list doesn’t go with it.

But mailing lists still require maintenance. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing my regular “clean up” on my mailing list, which made me think this might be a good time to write about it as well.

Understanding Your Ebook Formatting Options

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Dipping into the archives again today, with a helpful post from Marcy Kennedy on formatting your ebook.

When I first decided to self-publish, one of the decisions that tied my stomach into the most knots was how to format my ebook. I had a meager budget, and I’ll be honest—I’m not exactly a technological wiz kid. I still use an ancient cell phone with no internet capabilities, and I get heart palpitations every time my computer hiccups.

But what I realized was that ebook formatting isn’t nearly as scary as I thought. In fact, I actually fell a little in love with the process. We have a lot of options, which means we can all find the one that works best for us, for our book, and for our budget.

Is Your Amazon Account Secure?

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

As independent authors, one of the challenges we face is that everything lands on us. Even when we hire freelancers to design our covers or edit our work, we make the final decisions. Even when we reach the point where we might hire a personal assistant, we’re still in charge.

That means we have to consider certain things that traditionally published authors never have to think about. One of those things is the security of our retailer accounts.

Our retailer accounts contain the information necessary for us to receive our payments for book sales. If those accounts are hacked, the hacker can change the bank account information so that our money ends up in their bank. Not only that, but we instantly lose access to all our books and we can’t upload new ones. That alone can be disastrous for an indie author.

Understanding Your Print Book Formatting Options

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

In two of my earlier posts for the Indie Author Series, I covered Understanding Your Ebook Formatting Options and Three Quick Tips to Help Your Print Books Look Professional.

Today I want to return to the topic of formatting—specifically formatting our print books. As the marketplace grows more and more crowded, we need every advantage to stand out and to make our books an enjoyable reading experience. That means we need professional-looking, easy-to-read formatting for all versions of our books.

How "Pay-Per" Advertising Works

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Welcome back to my ongoing series on advertising as an indie author.

If you haven’t read all the previous posts in this series, I recommend you start from the beginning. We’ve already looked at a big picture overview of when and what we might want to advertise, and we talked about whether there’s ever a time when it’s okay to lose money on advertising.

Then I threw you into the math deep-end because we needed to figure out whether we’re earning or losing money on our ads and how read-through affects our investment.

Last month we moved on to one of the different options available to us for advertising—newsletter ads.

This month I’m continuing on with “pay-per” ads.

Understanding Newsletter Ads

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Over the past few months, we’ve been talking about advertising our books because one of the biggest hurdles we have to overcome as indie authors is discoverability. Readers can’t buy and enjoy our books unless they know they exist.

I know that talking numbers and marketing isn’t fun for a lot of writers, but I’m so glad you’re sticking with me. Successful indie authors are also successful business people.

Understanding Read-Through and Why It Matters

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

A couple of months ago, I started a series on advertising as an indie author. We’ve already looked at a big picture overview of when and what we might want to advertise, and we talked about whether there’s ever a time when it’s okay to lose money on advertising.

Last month, I started talking about making sure we know whether we’re earning or losing money on our ads. This month, I’ll be continuing on to look at how read-through affects our return on investment.

(If you’re writing only standalone books that aren’t part of a series, you might still be able to get something from this post, but it’s mainly geared to series books. Sorry!)

Are Your Book’s Ads Earning or Losing You Money?

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

A couple of months ago, I started a series on advertising as an indie author. We’ve already looked at a big picture overview of when and what we might want to advertise, and last month we talked about whether there’s ever a time when it’s okay to lose money on advertising.

From this point on, we’ll be looking at advertising where we earn back at least as much money as we invested in the ad. But there’s something we need to do before we can go any further talking about ads. We have to figure out how to measure whether our ads are earning us money or not. It’s fine to say we want them to earn us money, and another thing entirely to know how to tell if they are. That’s what I’m going to walk you through this month and next month.

Is It Ever Okay to Lose Money on Advertising?

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Last month I started a series on advertising as an independent author. (If you missed it, I suggest you read The Basics of Advertising for Indie Authors first.)

In that post, I said that my basic premise for the series was that we wanted to earn back at least as much as we invest in our advertising. There are times, though, when it is okay to lose money on our ads (at least in my opinion). The key to losing money while still considering the ad a success is to have a strategy. We want to lose money in the short term in order to make a long-term gain.

The Basics of Advertising for Indie Authors

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

As independent authors, we’re in charge of everything, including marketing our books. There are a lot of ways to spread the word, but today I’m starting into a mini-series on advertising for indie authors.

I think this is an important topic for us to understand because it can either help our sales or lose us a lot of money. The more we know, the better our chances are of making money off our ads.

Building a Mailing List through Reader Magnets

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

One of the almost universal pieces of advice we hear as indie authors is that we need to build a newsletter mailing list. A mailing list allows us to keep in touch with readers and let them know when our next book releases. Theoretically, they’ll be excited to buy our book, sending it up in the rankings.

The tricky part is how do we convince people to give us their email addresses?

One solution is the reader magnet.

The Benefits of Ebook Pre-Orders

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

In the past few years, independent authors have been gaining access to tools and techniques that were once available only to traditional publishers. One of those tools is ebook pre-orders.

Ebook pre-orders are exactly what they sound like. Your ebook is listed for sale at an online retailer, and readers can purchase it in advance of the release date. Once the book releases, they receive their copy.

Kindle Unlimited: Is It Worth It?

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Back in June I wrote a post where I outlined the pros and cons of Kindle Select, a program where you’re required to make a book exclusive to Amazon for 90 days in exchange for certain perks.

One of those “perks” is that the book we enroll in KDP Select is also placed into Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited is a subscription-based service where readers pay a flat monthly fee for the ability to read the books in KU without paying anything additional for them. Authors whose books are in KU are paid based on how many pages of their books are read. The per-page payout varies per month, and Amazon announces what it will be on the 15th day of the following month. (In other words, you find out on March 15 what the payout will be for page reads from February.)

Creating Multi-Author Box Sets

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Over the past few months, we’ve talked about why we might want to create a box set of our books, how to create a single-author ebook box set, and our options for creating a print book box set.

Today I’ll be closing out the mini-series by looking at multi-author box sets.

A multi-author box set is a collection of short stories, novellas, or novels by different authors. By definition, these works are also sold independently.

Creating a Print Book Box Set

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

The last two months we’ve looked at why we might want to create a box set of our books and how to create a single-author ebook box set. This month I wanted to look at one of the most challenging questions for indie authors when it comes to box sets: Is there a way to create a print book box set for our books?

The short answer is yes. Whether or not we’ll feel the options are workable for us, though, requires examining them carefully.

Creating Single-Author Box Sets: Part Two

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Last time we looked at the benefits of putting together a box set. This time I want to dig down into what we need to think about on a practical level once we’ve decided that a box set is a good idea.

So here are the most important items when creating a box set…

Decide how many books (and what books) to include.

Single-author box sets tend to be the most successful when we’re bundling up books from the same series in chronological order.

Creating Single-Author Box Sets: Part One

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy  

Part of the Indie Author Series

One of the important elements of a successful indie author career is putting as many products as possible out into the world. The more items we have for sale, the better our chances that someone will stumble upon one of them or find one that interests them. Box sets are a great way to increase the number of products we have for sale without too much additional work.

Before I dive into the nitty-gritty, let’s make sure we all understand what I mean when I say box set.

Indie Choices: To Pen Name or Not to Pen Name

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy
 
Part of the Indie Author Series

In traditional publishing, many of the choices are taken out of our hands, including sometimes whether or not to use a pen name. As independent authors, this becomes another choice we’re able to make ourselves based on what we think is best for our situation and our business.

Authors use pen names in a few different ways, so this month I wanted to walk through some of our options and the pros and cons of each.