1. Get funding upfront – big publishers provide this when you sign the rights to your book away to them, you can essentially do it on your own using your circle of friends and ‘crowdsource’ your funding with tools like Kickstarter and RocketHub
2. Package your story – either in print or digitally, you have to figure out the proper way to format and output your work; this includes having someone edit it and someone to design a good cover; the way big publishers do it is they find and outsource to freelance agencies and individuals; you can do the same with sites like Elance and Behance
3. Build a reputation – as companies, big publishers develop a presence; you can do it with your own online presence by using social networks and various community-based platforms like GoodReads and LibraryThing
4. Market your story – as you build your reputation, leverage your social networks, plan out a tour by finding and contacting venues to do readings at, send out review copies, get a table at a convention; the web is a great communication tool for finding these opportunities the same way a big publisher would do it
5. Sell – make sure you have a proper site setup where people can buy your book; big publishers usually outsource this to someone else and you can do the same; you can also use the same online marketplaces big publishers use like Amazon and Barnes & Noble; or get a better cut with Smashwords and Indie Aisle

Start small and build up little by little, repeat the write and promote cycle with every story you release and you’ll get better at it along the way. The publishing process used to be so complex only a big company could handle all its moving parts, but with new tools and communication methods that the web has brought and continues to bring, it’s now possible to do it on your own, and become your own publishing empire.

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.

You’ve probably heard about Google AdWords. Companies use the tool for getting what they call ‘leads’ for their products or services. But you probably never thought about how this can work for selling your book. All you need to know to get start is  the basic concept behind how it works.

Adwords is a small ad in Google search results which consists of a short headline and a sentence. You specify which keywords you want the ad to show up for when people search and set your budget.  That’s it really! The cost for the ad comes in the amount you’re willing to pay for the keywords you want. The tricky part is optimizing your ad and measuring your results to make sure you’re getting ROI, which is a fancy business term for actual sales based on the amount you spend.

Tips for using Google Adwords

There are quite a few options when setting up an ad with Google Adwords. The best way to figure out what they do is by experimenting and fine tuning what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Set a daily budget for your new campaign so it doesn’t exceed that amount, you can start with just 2-3 dollars
• Set a low cost per click limit to get the maximum clicks for your money and give you room to play with
• Make keywords very specific, don’t be afraid to do 3-4 word keywords
• Include ‘book’ or ‘ebook’ in the ad to set proper expectations for people clicking through

The goal of your ad should be to target exactly the kind of people you’d expect to read your book and since you’re paying for each click, you want to get your money’s worth by making sure you get just the right people. The exact way this works is based on how you word your ad and what keywords you decide to target. You probably won’t get it right the first time so make tweaks as you start getting some hits going.

Optimizing your landing page

Once you start getting clicks for your ad, make sure the clicks go to a page that leads people towards your goal, which is selling you book. This page should include the following:

1. A good description of your book
2. An excerpt from the book or link to it
3. Reviews of your book
4. A prominent button to buy the book
5. Links to your other work
6. Info about you, the author and how to keep up with your updates

At this point we’d like to toot our own horn a little and let you know that our story overview page was designed with all these aspects in mind. We also make the order process as painless as possible to encourage return visits.

Now you’re ready to give it a try. The worst that could happen is you lose a few dollars you experiment with, a coffee out of your Starbucks funds. You’ll definitely learn something from having done so though! If do try it out, let us know how goes in the comments below. And for more marketing tips, have a look at our new self-publishing promotion guide.

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!

And that’s the secret to promoting well, having a process for it. To do it yourself, it should be a part of everything else you do. Here are some ideas of ways to integrate some promotion during the writing and publishing process:

1. Write – As you do research or get ideas for your story, explore concepts you come across by talking to people about it, either via online forums or by attending related events. Why not make the whole process a journey and start a blog about it.
2. Talk about it – Before your story is finished, give a sneak peak with a summary of what it’s about and post it to your site or online profiles. Or find blogs and user forums that might be interested in your idea.
3. Publish – Once you have your story ready, send review copies to zines or blogs that would be interested in your kind of story and would post a review about it. Make sure it’s easy to point people to buy it; the Indie Aisle marketplace can help with that.
4. Interact – Setup events either in-person or online on forums or via a live chat to interact with people who want to talk about your story; hold contests; find niche websites that might be interested in your genre and would want to interview you.
5. Repeat

While there are many ways you can promote, you ultimately figure out what works and doesn’t along the way. As you continue to do it, you improve and figure out your own process. And by using tools on the web, you’re on the same playing field as publishing companies. Here are some ways to get started online:

• Start using social media networks
• Keep links of relevant websites you can submit to
• Regularly check and participate on blogs and discussion forums
• Keep track of contacts you make that can help you later on
• Experiment with techniques and keep notes of outcomes

You enjoy writing because it’s a creative process, so use the same formula for promoting: be creative and have fun with it!

Since the launch of Indie Aisle, we’ve been getting a lot of feedback. Our recent improvements to the tool have been made with that feedback in mind. And today we’re announcing a feature we think will be a perfect tool for authors to get their eBooks to their fans. Our new eBook download widget allows an author to post a button for anyone to download their eBook, directly on their own website. Indie Aisle takes care of the rest, making the order process quick and easy.

You can see an example of the widget in action on the right. There is also a square size available as an option. The eBook Widget is now available in the account area under ‘My Stories’ and the title of the eBook you’ve published.

If you’re interested about some of the other updates we’ve made, here’s a brief overview:

• Whole lotta fixin’ and tweakin’ – functionality is cleaner and more responsive, including on the online Reader for reading stories across mobile devices
• Improved interface – layout adjustments, a simplified download/order process
• Upgraded publishing process – option to convert your ePub to Mobi/Kindle and PDF automatically or to upload only specific file types
• Easier to sign up – You can use your Twitter or Facebook accounts to sign up

The way traditional publishing companies find people to read their books is based on flooding the market for a certain time period. They get the book in a bunch of bookstores and push marketing strategies for it, trying to grab for people’s attention and reach as wide an audience as possible from the get-go. It however depends on the publisher deciding what makes a good book. They have to predict how a book would sell to a certain group of people. Because this is so hard to do with any degree of accuracy, it essentially becomes a guessing game. It also singles out a lot of books that may not fit well into predefined categories.

Image Source: Google Code

So how about finding an audience by focusing on one person at a time. The internet is the perfect environment for doing just that. We’ve all heard about viral videos that spread online. The concept of being viral is just passing on something from one person to the next, branching out to a potentially large audience. Let’s take a book you’ve just published as an example. Your initial first few readers like your story, some of them tell someone else about it. Some of them Tweet about it. One of them may be a blogger with their own followers who posts a review of your story. At this point you have people talking about it and more reviews get posted in different forms. Eventually, depending on who it reaches and who the story connects with, who knows where it can go from there.

This may seem like an oversimplified example, but the process is becoming more common. With the internet becoming a bigger part of people’s everyday lives it’s turning into the standard way to decide how people spend their free-time. Which includes what book to read. Is yours available?

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!

• Writing Process – Write and revise, work with an editor for polish and get feedback from people you know
• Illustration – Work with a graphic designer for a good cover and/or a more stylized layout, and/or an illustrator for accompanying visuals
• Publishing – Work with someone to meet certain technical preparations required for printing and digital output
• Sales and Distribution – Work with brick and mortar book shops for print, and online marketplaces for eBooks
• Promotion – Work with someone knowledgeable of marketing, get reviewed by professional critics and get interviewed in various publications

Besides the writing part, it’s everything else that can make going with a traditional publisher still a viable choice. However, technology and the internet have given us tools that change the entire process. It’s paved the way for the independent self-published writer. But going the indie route isn’t necessarily about doing it all yourself. Even though you could, collaborating with other people can give you an edge to compete with books still published by big companies. In fact there are services available that offer different approaches to doing this.

But beyond all the tools, the one greatest asset, the internet, allows you to choose how you want to do things every step of the way. As companies try to reinvent the publishing model, ultimately it’ll be the writers that will be in control of the process. Because that’s the best part of being indie, doing things your own way!

Photo by JohnKit on Flickr

I went to this year’s Phoenix Comicon which was much bigger compared to last year’s and better organized. Besides having a great time talking about comics and stories, I noticed that for indie comic creators and book authors being part of the Con was a great way to promote themselves.

Even from all the panels I went to, the common advice successful comic creators and authors had for promotion was to go to various conventions and talk to people in person. From getting a booth to participating in panels, being active at various events is one of the best ways to interact with fans.

It’s all part of the community-building process. It’s the same reason using various tools like Blogs, Twitter and Facebook, works well. Simply put, to let people know about what you do, interact with them.

Here some other tips I kept hearing discussed during panels:

• To get your work talked about, put effort into getting reviews, even if it means tracking down bloggers who might be interested in your work and sending them review copies
• Making your work a series released on a shorter-term basis could be an easier investment with some quicker results versus spending years on the perfect novel
• Think of ways to create merchandise around your work since that’s what can sometimes make you more money than the story itself

Comicons and other conventions revolving around stories and the worlds they create are everywhere now and there’s more of them starting up than ever before. If you haven’t been to one, you’re missing out on some great fun!