Writer Resources

In March 2011, I finally decided to self publish my future novels.  With that in mind, I journeyed through the great internet to research and snoop around for information to aid me on my quest.  These are the resources I’ve come up with, my gems.  I hope they help you as much as they’ve helped me.

This page will be updated regularly.  If there are any broken links, please comment or email me, and I’ll fix or remove them.

If you have any suggestions, anyone or anything you feel is a great and valuable resource to add to the lists, comment or email the link to me and I’ll consider putting them up.

Ebook

Ebook Conversion Services Directory: Literally a list of the businesses that provide ebook conversions.  Great for shopping around and comparing prices.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing: Again, a great author resource.  This is where you go to upload your ebook onto Amazon’s Kindle store.  There, an individual author can get the full royalties that come with selling an ebook (30-70%).  Need help formatting an ebook?  See the conversion directory above.

Barnes and Noble’s PubIt!: Like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), PubIt! allows an author to upload their ebooks and get a nice chunk of the royalties (40-60%).  The ideal option would be to upload your ebook onto all three sites, Amazon, BN, and Smashwords (though Smashwords is the least useful).  Many do that.

Smashwords: distributes ebooks for authors and small presses and publishers. Your royalties will be anywhere from 60-85%, according to their FAQ. This link directs to their About page.

Blog

JA Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Probably the best place to get solid, factual numbers about the sales of one JA Konrath.  Who is he?  Honestly, he’s a horror-thriller writer who went indie.  He has guest posts from indie writers, most who are successfully making money, some who aren’t and why that might potentially be.  It’s a great way to find others in the indie world as well as get an understanding of what’s going on in the indie-verse.

Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn: Her website is what started me down the rabbit hole of self publishing.  She’s got a lot of great information in all areas, marketing, how to make a great novel, formatting tips.  The works.  It’s a great staring point, one that I highly recommend.

Jane Friedman’s Twitter page: Not quite a blog, but the links she provides are awesome, and most are to blog posts, so that’s how this technically counts.  She does have a blog.  She used to work for Writer’s Digest and has many useful tools for any and every writer.

Jody Hedlund’s blog: for writers section: A traditionally published author, yes, but her posts are great for learning about marketing.  She doesn’t discriminate and gives great, simple, bullet-point tips on how to establish your author platform (or, sometimes more importantly, what to avoid doing).  To me, she’s been extremely polite and helpful. Her for writers section of her blog lists all her posts with writer tips, which are good for both traditional and self published authors.

Kristen Lamb’s blog: Kristen’s blog is mostly about marketing but she does give lots of writing advice from an editing standpoint.  Her expertise is in sales and promotion, so take good advantage of her willingness to be awesome and share such experience. Her posts are wonderful.

Nathan Bransford’s blog: Interesting perspective.  His blog has given me a lot to chew on in terms of traditional and self publishing pros and cons.  He knows a lot about the traditional sphere because he used to be (or still is, I’m not sure) a literary agent.  A lot of his posts are witty, humorous, and completely revealing about the mechanics of the book reality.

Reviews

Step-by-Step Self-Publishing’s Book Reviewer List: Has an ebook of listing for 1.99 as well as a basic listing of reviewers who accept both ebooks and normal print books. Very valuable if properly researched. Don’t just pick five off the list and send them a query. Pick the ones from the blurbs that might review your genre and then check out their sites to be sure. If it’s not a good fit, go on. There’s plenty more on that list and way more out there on the web.

Post about getting reviews: How to Get Reviews for Self-Published Books by Joel Frielander on Jane Friedman’s There Are No Rules blog: Follow the blog while you’re at it; there are great guest posts by people like Joel all the time.