In my post about book pirates and plagiarism, I mentioned that book bloggers and reviewers are now more wary of debut authors, especially those who are self-published. I don’t blame them. Some people out there are willing to do an insane amount of work to fake legitimacy. A book blogger exposed one author who created fake

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When Should We Start Building Our Platform?

Yesterday, Kristen Lamb ran an encore of one of my posts from last year on her blog. We both liked that post because it discusses the importance of leaving the reader room to use their imagination. In the post, I made an aside about the danger of including a teaser excerpt for the next book in

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Book Series: Should We Include a Teaser Excerpt?

For many writers, we long to see our name on a book. Even better is seeing our name on a book in print that we can hold in our hand. I got to have that experience for the first time this past weekend. Sort of. No, I’m not published yet. *smile* But as part of my

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Using CreateSpace as a Learning Experience

I’ve written several posts about how we have to figure out our goals. Do we want to be famous? How can we prioritize fast, cheap, and good? How important are bookstores to us? I touch on the subject a lot because we can’t figure out the right publishing path for us until we know our goals. Recently,

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Need to Decide on a Path? Know Your Goals

A few weeks ago, author David Mamet announced he’ll be self-publishing his next book through his literary agency. Some think this is big news, some don’t, and some wouldn’t call David’s plan self-publishing at all. Regardless, this news means we’re seeing the second wave of self-published authors. While the first wave was comprised of early-adopting,

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Is This the New Breed of Vanity Publishers?

I’m excited to share today’s guest post by author Roz Morris.  After ghostwriting many bestselling books, Roz recently self-published My Memories of a Future Life, her first novel under her own name. Roz’s decision to self-publish came about partly because this novel doesn’t fit into normal genre boxes.  However, even as a self-published author, she still

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Tips for Writing Back Cover Copy — Guest: Roz Morris

How many times in the past week have we heard “Traditional NY publishing is dead.  Barry Eisler has proved it.”  Or “NY publishing isn’t dead.  Amanda Hocking has proved it.” So which is it?  Or does it not matter? If you haven’t heard about the debate, the gist of it is that Barry Eisler turned

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Traditional vs. Self Publishing: How Much Does the Debate Matter?