10 Tips for: Selling Wider than Wide
Plenty of authors these days talk about new opportunities beyond the major retailers. As indie publishing expands into new territories and readers are searching out new ways of interacting with the stories they love, authors are moving to take advantage of how we can sell our books wider than wide, looking for places where we […]
Trope Talks
The Fascination with the ‘Final Girl’ in Horror As writers, we often walk a fine line between tropes and clichés. Sure, tropes may echo other books in the genre or feel predictable as you read them—but as Jennifer Hilt, author of the Trope Thesaurus series, writes, “a skillful application of tropes sells stories.” In her […]
Putting Your Purpose on the Page
Guest Author Megan Haskell Offers Her Advice on Strategizing Better Reader Relationships Seasoned indie authors understand: for your business’s long-term growth, quality often outranks quantity when it comes to reader relationships. But how do you ensure you’re connecting with the right audience? In the second part of her series on finding your ideal author business […]
From the Editor
Blame it on how invested I am in superhero movies, but I am paranoid about spoilers. If I’m worried about encountering a leaked plot twist from a movie, book, or game, I will take a social media hiatus and resort to childhood playground levels of avoidance: plugging my ears and shouting “la, la, la” until […]
From the Stacks
Book: An Author’s Legacy Craig Martelle and Audrey Hughey https://tinyurl.com/3a3sfuz8 One of the smartest financial decisions a creative can make isn’t one that will affect anything during their lifetime. An Author’s Legacy: A Planner to Ensure An Author Lives On, Long After Death, a newly released workbook by 20BooksTo50K® co-founder Craig Martelle and Author Transformation […]
ALLi Exclusive: What’s Your Mindset around Money?
There is a common belief that artists, including authors, make very little money. To explore that assumption, in 2023, the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) commissioned the world’s first Indie Author Income Survey, focused specifically on self-published authors. We found that indie authors earn more than those who are traditionally published, and this data was […]
IAM’s 2024 Indie Author Gift Guide
The holiday shopping season is just around the corner, and whether you’re shopping for the caffeine-fueled novelist who hasn’t seen sunlight in weeks or the writer in the middle of their worst block, we’ve got you covered with the author’s ideal gift guide for 2024. Prepare to discover gifts that will make any indie author’s […]
Readercon 33 an Intimate Escape from Typical Sci-Fi Conventions
Readercon 33 this past July was a standout Science Fiction convention, but it looked different and felt more intimate than any other typical Sci-Fi convention I’ve attended. There were no flashy costumes, sprawling vendor halls, or multimedia displays vying for attention. Instead, I was surrounded by people deeply engaged in conversations about character development, world-building, […]
Worldcon 2024 Immerses Attendees in Science, Scottish Culture, and a Celebration of Speculative Fiction
I’ve always dreamed of going to Scotland. I am half Scottish yet have never visited the country, even though I’ve longed to see Edinburgh and Glasgow for myself. Both cities are rich in the celebration of the arts. Not to mention, many world-renowned poets and writers are from the area. This summer, I finally realized […]
May the Cash Flow Be with You
The Money-Managing Instruments to Master for Your Business to Take to the Skies The Force is strong in indie authors! Given a single worst-case scenario, we can probably spin up a story world in the throes of conflict. Unfortunately, that same imaginative bias can wreak more havoc on your business than a sandcrawler swarming with […]