To celebrate, we’re doing a webcast on November 17th at 8pm pacific time zone. The webcast will be lead by me and include fellow Indie Aisle authors talking about their experiences as indie authors. Our special guests will be:

• Jamie Noguchi - Creator of the Yellow Peril webcomic, now a collected edition
• Daniel M. Davis – Conjurer of monsters such as Klawberry and the Monster Commute webcomic
• Maija Barnett – Author of Black Waters Young Adult series

The webcast is open to everyone but will be on Google Hangouts, so you will need a Google Plus account to join in. You do not need a webcam, you can just chat and watch the webcast.

Mark your calendars for November 17th at 8pm pacific time zone. If you’d like, you can RSVP on Facebook here.

A year isn’t much for a startup company, so keep checking back with us, because we’re just getting started!

UPDATE – 11/17: Watch for the Hangout starting tonight at 8pm pacific on the Indie Aisle page on Google Plus.

There are now four main tabs to start with: Updates – your stream of updates of people you follow; Publish – where you post info about your story and upload when you’re ready; Tools – ways to promote your stories (I’ll talk more about this shortly); Read – your library of titles you’ve bought or started reading; Profile & Settings – your account info. A fifth tab, Stats, is added when you upgrade your account.

Which brings me to our new upgrade options, Author Plus and Author Pro. Here’s how they compare to the basic, free account you get when signing up:

• Author Basic – free account with 80% earnings and a 3 story limit
• Author Plus – $9 per month with 90% earnings and a 5 story limit
• Author Pro – $19 per month with a full 100% earnings and no limit on stories

But there’s more to the Plus and Pro plans. Signing up for either plan gives you stats of how visitors are viewing your story along with access to additional promotion tools. These new tools are specifically designed to help with what is often the hardest part of going indie and self-publishing: the marketing of your story. There are only a few to start with, but we have many more planned.

We think we’re on to something here with the new account options and marketing tools. Figuring out the ins and outs of promoting has its challenges. By providing you with the right tools to work with, you’re able to better focus your promotional efforts which means maintaining the business-side of being an author is easier. And that means you can spend more time on creating your stories.

We’ve cleaned up the layout to focus on the most important aspects of each page.  To start with, we’ve hidden the top orange bar so full attention goes to the author and their stories. We’ve also added a few new features worth highlighting:

Embed widget – We’ve previously announced the download widget authors can use on their site, we’ve updated the design of the widget and brought it to the author page so anyone can freely post it


Sample widget – Along with the download banner widget, we’ve added new widgets including a sample widget which allows anyone to embed an excerpt of your story on their site


Easy to start reading – The cover now links directly to the sample so visitors can easily start reading, they are now also given the option to buy at the end of the excerpt


Other titles by the author – each story page now lists additional titles if the author has them making it easier to see all of an author’s work


We’re now working on a redesign of the author Account area which you can expect to see changes to in the next couple of weeks. The updates will make it easier to use and provide a basis for future updates we have planned. So stay tuned as Indie Aisle continues to get even better!

This month is also National Novel Writing Month which seems like an appropriate time to launch. As I followed some of the tweets from indie writers during their efforts for NaNoWriMo, it made me think about how my experience making the Indie Aisle web app could be a similar experience to writing a novel. Organizing ideas, getting it materialized bit by bit, revising, editing, revising, editing… I also realized that if it took me this long to get this thing done, I don’t think I would ever be able to write my own novel in just a month!

Anyway, it’s now good and ready so go get your indieaisle.com/name reserved by signing up. If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, you’ve now got a place to publish your work, so be sure to do so and we’ll all have something to read over the holidays!

We all enjoy stories. Stories come in many different forms and media, you can see some of them here (refer to slides).

Growing up, I loved reading comics and watching movies. After I finished high school, I also rediscovered reading books as I was able to read ones I wanted, not based on a school reading list! They were a great form of entertainment but they also offered ideas that I never would have thought about before the same way had it not been in the context of a narrative. The more I got into books, comics and movies, I started to see how they impacted and sort of guided my outlook on everything. They helped me learn about myself and my goals in life. I soon realized how important storytelling is to all of us and how it plays a big part of how we think and figure things out for ourselves.

Different forms of storytelling are all around us and as we’ve advanced technology, we’ve also developed various creative ways to tell stories. Let’s go through a little history. At the beginning, we would sit around the campfire talking about our day of hunting and gathering. We soon figure out how to draw on caves which eventually turns into symbols and a written language. From there we develop writing stories in a packaged form on paper and we are able to pass them on to others to read. We also put on live performances for audiences and develop the performing arts. And as modes of transportation evolve, the delivery of both of these forms of storytelling also expands.

Soon comes the revolution of the printing press and we are able to distribute written stories on a mass scale in forms of books and newspapers allowing us to learn about the world around us easier and quicker than ever before. Additional technology soon gives us the ability to take photographs that accompany written stories and are able to even tell their own stories.

And in the further evolution of packaging stories, recorded sound and eventually video creates its own art form for telling stories and brings us to our modern times of film and television. Storytelling with sight and sound makes enjoying a story more accessible, who doesn’t enjoy a good movie or TV show? And with everyone having a TV in their home, the audience is bigger than ever before. It also gives us a greater amount of choice in the kinds of stories we enjoy and has even lead to a form of interactive storytelling through video games.

As technology shapes the way we tell stories, it really seems like our need for storytelling is what develops these technologies. Now we are going through the biggest technology shift that affects nearly all previous forms of media for telling stories before it. With digital media and the Internet, nearly all forms of packaged storytelling before now are all available in an instant, at your fingertips. From reading news and books, listening to audio broadcasts, watching movies and TV shows, and so on. It’s all available on our computers, our TVs, our mobile phones or new forms of devices we’re inventing, like a Kindle or an iPad.

Tools for creating and sharing stories are also becoming easier to use. Anyone can tell their stories online and share them with the world very easily. Either on their own personal website, a blog or on Twitter. Everyone is now their own publisher. And with everything being digital, there’s new potential creative ways of storytelling like mixed media storytelling where, for example, a written story can now have videos you can play that go along with it. It’s already being done and will no doubt go even further in the future.

So all of this has lead me to developing Indie Aisle, a platform specifically designed for storytelling in the digital / internet age. Authors publish and promote their stories using various tools and the sales and distribution is all handled online. And all of us that enjoy new original stories can read them on various devices.

I’ve been working on the project for about a year and half now and it’s almost ready for release this November. For more info, visit indieaisle.com. And sign up for the beta if you’re interested in indie publishing by going to indieaisle.com/signup.

What’s involved in being a part of beta testing? Basically, you’ll be doing what you’d normally be able to do with the final version but you may run into certain bugs that we missed in our own testing. By sending us information about the issues you run into, we can fix them for others.

Everyone who’s part of the testing will also get a special offer on our Unlimited Reading feature. Of course the only to find out what the offer is or what the feature even does is to sign up! So if you’d like to participate and be one of the first to try out Indie Aisle, click here to sign up!

We’ve gone over the focus on the narrative and the forms stories come in, now let’s talk about sharing stories on Indie Aisle. One of the things that makes the internet so great is how we are able to communicate in a variety of ways and quickly share ideas with other people. Indie Aisle has been designed with this in mind, by offering two ways to connect with people:

Find and follow

Authors can keep their fans updated, and everyone can find and keep track of great indie authors on Indie Aisle. This is done by posting short updates and choosing to follow other people’s updates. Additionally, you can keep a personalized library of stories and let people get an idea of the kinds of stories you enjoy as well as see what other people are reading.

Share with the web

To take the experience even further, Indie Aisle integrates with the openness of the web by allowing you to share with other web services that you’re already familiar with by connecting them with Indie Aisle. Starting with Twitter and Facebook, in the future they’ll be many different services to pick from with different options for how to integrate each into your Indie Aisle profile.

The combination of the people you connect with, the stories you share, and how you customize your settings, makes your Indie Aisle profile unique to your personality. And how you interact with the tool allows you to connect with people from across the web and across the world!

Going along with the previous post on the kinds of stories you can expect to see on Indie Aisle, this time I’ll talk about how the tool will allow you to publish your story. While mainly focused on digital stories, Indie Aisle is designed to ultimately let you decide the form you want your story to be in:

• eBook – Upload your file and it is converted to a number of standard formats, set your own price for purchase through the website and earn 85% of all digital sales
• Physical Book – Use various service providers for print versions of your story
• Work in Progress – Post information on a story before you release it with options for fans to follow your updates on when it becomes available
• Series – Ability to add multiple eBooks or physical books under the same story

Additionally, stories will also be categorized based on content format:

• Primarily Text – Basic text formatting with or without accompanying illustrations
• Styled Layout – Mainly text but with specific formatting and illustrations
• Illustration-based – Full-page artwork with text being layed out around it
• Comics – Artwork with specific areas for text

With each format there will be tips for how to lay out your story for outputting it as an eBook. It will also allow Indie Aisle to figure out how your story can be distributed and promoted in other venues outside the site. I will talk more about how that will be done in a future post!

So what will Indie Aisle be all about and what will make it unique from other online marketplaces? Well, for a start, it will only have narratives. No textbooks or guides or anything not based on a sequence of events. Non fiction is fine, but should be in the form of a story.

The main reason for this is because one of the goals of Indie Aisle is to show the power of storytelling and how important it is to each of us. How personal a story can be, or how interactive and social. How a story impacts the way we see ourselves and the world.

And with the focus on the story itself, I hope to allow for exploring stories across all formats, from the written word, to illustration-based, to comics and beyond. Each format is its own artform, creating a different kind of experience for its audience.

This also allows for organizing stories in new ways based on specific interests and tastes, making it easier to find the kind of story you’re looking for, or to provide the right context for others to find your own story.

And that’s just the beginning. The core design for Indie Aisle is complete and as the under-the-hood development work takes place, I will go over other aspects of what Indie Aisle has to offer. Stay tuned!

I originally had the idea for Indie Aisle when I noticed that there were people I knew who wanted to do something creative from starting a band to having their own online comic, but didn’t know how to get their work seen by other people. As a web designer, I’ve worked with small businesses in helping them setup an online presence for getting their potential customers interested in the work that they do. Indie Aisle to me is a way to do more of that for artists and writers who ultimately want to make their passion into a business that they can make a living from.

This blog will serve as a discussion about distributing and promoting in the digital world and offer tips for utilizing tools to connect to fans. A lot of information is available online but it’s pretty scattered and can often be confusing. Articles posted will often be from people who are independent artists and writers themselves.

If there’s an article about a specific topic you’d like see here or are interested in writing one yourself, send me an email.