by Rafal Reyzer
You’ve heard that to become proficient at any specialized skill, you need at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. This view has been popularized by Malcolm Gladwell through his book The Outliers. The 10k rule has since been debunked, and we intuitively know that improvement doesn’t take so long. However, the meme still lingers in the popular consciousness.
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I recently published a post on how the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be affecting publishing. While that article focused on publishers, we now have some interesting data on how it has affected libraries, thanks to NPR (many thanks to my author friend, Elle Boca, for alerting me to this).
Across the country, libraries have seen demand skyrocket for their electronic offerings, but librarians say they continue to worry about the digital divide and equality in access — not to mention the complicated questions that must be answered before they can reopen for physical lending.
“Since the library closed on March 16, we’ve had about seven thousand people register for library cards,” says Richard Reyes-Gavilan of the District of Columbia Public Libraries. “We’ve had over 300,000 books borrowed since mid-March, which is astounding considering that our collections are limited.”
By…
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by Lauren Sapala
One of the first things a writer learns is about the power—and the challenge—of the rewrite. For those writers who assume that everything Ernest Hemingway wrote flowed perfectly out of his pen on the very first try, the illusion is shattered. The more experience a writer gains, the more they know that rewriting is part of the process for all writers. But that doesn’t mean that rewrites still aren’t confusing, overwhelming, or just plain difficult. They most definitely can be all of those things. What can really be helpful is for writers to back up, look at a map, and make sure they’re not going in the wrong direction.
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Image from ShutterStock.
Following is a monthly breakdown. I’ll update this page monthly to add the latest amount when it becomes available. I won’t be making a new post every month as I have done in the past; I’ll just update this article once per month. Check around the 15th of each month to find the per-page rate for the previous month. For example, July’s per-page rate will be available around August 15.
If you bookmark this page, around the 15th of each month you’ll be able to quickly pull up this page to see what the per-page rate is. (You might need to wait until later in the day or even until the 16th, depending.) By bookmarking this page in your web browser, you’ll have easy access to this page. Remember, I won’t be posting a new article each month like…
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Since March 2020, PublishDrive has been generating digital book sales reports, compiling hard-to-find data from various outlets, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play Books, libraries, regional stores, and more. They have now published their stats for April and May, months that saw much of the world’s population in lockdown.
The graph below presents the increase in sales in April (red bar) and May 2020 (blue bar) compared to the same months last year. One notable conclusion is that sales have increased for every single outlet, in some cases as much as almost 300%.
Not all genres are as successful, though. Specifically, non-fiction, fantasy, science-fiction, and thriller genres are doing great. Surprisingly, perhaps, some popular genres like romance and erotica saw a slight decrease in April (but made it back to the top in May). Here is the complete list:
Interestingly, genre popularity differed…
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One of the trickiest things about freelance copywriting work is confirming to each blog’s or publication’s standards. For example, how to capitalize your titles. I’m sharing here what I’ve learned so far in the hopes that some of you may find it useful. The information here comes from Bruce Spielbauer on Quora.
Before I expand on the subject, here’s an automatic online capitalization tool that capitalizes your titles according to your preferred style: Capitalize My Title. This can be a life savior if you’re ever in capitalization trouble!
The rules for capitalization in titles of articles (and also books, papers, speeches, etc) can vary according to a particular style guide, such as The Associated Press Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Style, and the MLA Handbook. Also, most publications have their own style. For example, this is the Manual of Style and Usage for…
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by Ashlee McNicol
Being a writer is no easy feat. You stay up late, wake up early, and repeat. You spend hours and hours creating fantasy worlds with characters that you love like your family, watching them experience miracles just as easily as pain, and grow like your own kids.
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In my last post, I wrote about some of Dave Chessson’s, aka Kindlepreneur’s, free author resources, including his Free Amazon Book Description Generator.
Today, I have more free author resources that can prove invaluable to your author promos, courtesy of my author friend, Effrosyni Moschoudi. She has compiled a list of free author resources that include two invaluable Word files:
Even better, she keeps the lists regularly updated. These two were only updated last week, so you can rest assured they’re as up-to-date as humanly possible!
Check out Effrosyni’s full post for more author tips and resources!
This is a guest post by my author friend, Effrosyni Moschoudi. She is well versed in all things Indie and an expert in book promos. She kindly agreed to share with us her experience with Story Origin, a newsletter-swapping service that has helped her promote her work. I hope you find her post as interesting as I did!
Let’s face it. Being an indie author is hard work. Anyone who enters the sphere of self-publishing will find out sooner or later that having organizational skills is a must in order to succeed.
Even so, no matter how organized we are, finding time for the mountain of tasks that await us each day is always a challenge. We all could use a little help, but few of us can afford a virtual assistant. This is why for most of us promoting becomes a tedious task.
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