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 […]
Taking the Mask off Classic Horror Tropes
How Three Horror Story Staples Can Appear in Every Genre When a writer approaches the Horror genre, deciding to leap into the deepest pits of despair and crawl out of it dragging a kicking and screaming manuscript, they often use popular movies and television shows as inspiration. They try to add jump scares and visual […]
Indie Author Training
Since indie publishing got its start, authors have been seemingly at the whims of our biggest distributors—that is, until recently. As more authors explore outlets like direct sales platforms and alternative publishing platforms for their books, the options for greater royalties and better interactions with readers have been broadening. And this month, Indie Author Training […]
Dear Indie Annie,
I’m still in the “side hustle” stage of my career, and I sometimes struggle with deciding whether larger costs—platform subscriptions, conference tickets, a specific editor or cover designer, ads—are a good investment or something that should wait until I’m earning more from my books. Any tips? Trying to Be a Smart Spender Dear Trying to […]
The Rhythm of Resilience
The Key to Remaining Creatively Flexible in a Chaotic World Births and deaths, sickness and weddings, holidays and emergencies—life keeps throwing curve balls, whether we are ready for them or not. Maybe your air conditioning goes out, and you can’t write at home in a heat wave. Or an event creeps into your calendar a […]
Pigeonhole Publishing Finds New Audiences with Pocket-Sized Promotions
Marketing is a challenge that’s hard to get right. You want to attract as many readers as you can, but you also want to attract only the right readers, who will love your book and want to share it with their friends. To boot, you need to get your book into reader spaces, places where […]
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 […]