Our guest blogger is Australian crime writer Melissa Pouliot. Melissa’s books are inspired by the disappearance of her cousin Ursula Barwick and the publicity from her debut Amazon bestseller Write About Me, resulted in a new investigation into Ursula’s disappearance. As part of the release of her fifth novel FOUND, Melissa has offered to share a few of her book publishing experiences, some marketing tips and the things she’s learnt along the way:   In 2013 I attended a writer’s workshop in my beautiful coastal hometown of Merimbula, Australia, and met an author who was at the forefront of self-publishing
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Have you ever had the experience of having some free time where you know you can write, thinking “great, I can finally get a lot of work done on my book today,” and then reaching the end of the day and realizing you haven’t written a single word? For some reason doing the dishes, the laundry, or even just watching cat videos on YouTube end up distracting us from doing the writing we had planned to do. Not only do you not have any more words on your manuscript, but often at the end of it you feel disappointed or
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If you took part in NaNoWriMo, whether you reached the 50k goal and “won” or not, at the end of the month there can be a feeling of uncertainty and even loss. You’ve had this big, month-long project that has been your sole focus of attention, but now everything is over. What on earth are you supposed to do now? Read on to find out 🙂 Keep The Writing Habit The goal of NaNoWriMo isn’t to write 50k words in a month.Sure, it’s what everyone talks about since it’s nice to say “I’m going to write a novel in a
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When it comes to editing, it’s important to realize that there are several different levels of editing you can get for your book. Unfortunately, there is no clear set of terms that everyone agrees on – two people may use the same term to mean totally different things! In this article, I’ll try to make things as clear as possible, and lay out the terminology we use at Polgarus Studio. The Types of Editing Proofreading (also called Word Level Editing) – This is the lightest form of editing, and is intended to be the final pass over your manuscript to
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Imagine this: your new book is finished, and ready for upload to Amazon! You have several other books already available, so you put in the Amazon links so readers can easily buy them. You send your book off to a friend, just for a final check. She writes back and says the book looks great on her iPhone, but why don’t the links to your other books work? You check – they do. But your friend is adamant that they don’t. What on earth is going on? Unfortunately, your book is a casualty from a fight Amazon and Apple had
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“There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying.” – Robert Evans A trap that some books can fall into is presenting one set of information as the “truth” of the world, or what has happened. Everyone knows this truth, and everyone believes this truth. But as we all know, the real world is never so clear-cut. Two people can see the same event, and come away with totally different “truths” about what happened. Two people can read a book or watch a movie, and have a different “truth” about
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When I’ve been talking with authors about options for section breaks, there have been a few times where I’ve had an author comment that they read somewhere that you can’t use blank lines for section breaks in an ebook. The first time I heard that comment, I must admit I was very confused. A blank line is just like any other line of text in a book. A blank line displays perfectly fine – why would some people think you couldn’t you use it? But the idea that you couldn’t use blank lines kept coming up now and then with
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The easiest way to explain what I mean by “links suddenly appearing in an ebook” is to show you. Imagine I’m writing a book on the evacuation of Dunkirk during World War II, and I have this paragraph in it: (Yes, I know it wouldn’t make sense as part of a book 🙂 You’ll see why I used it in a moment). I finish my book, get it edited, and then send it off to my formatter (perhaps those super-talented people over at Polgarus Studio 😉 ). I start looking at the initial Kindle version I receive back, but suddenly
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The great thing about self-publishing these days is that there is a huge amount of advice available for authors on how to do things. But for some people, that huge pool of advice can be a detriment. Start reading up on self-publishing, and it won’t take long for you to find all sorts of articles listing the things you should do if you want to sell more books Heck, you’ll probably find such articles on this site! You’ll find advice like: start a website, start blogging, start a mailing list, start a Facebook page, start a Facebook group, make accounts
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Whenever we start work formatting an ebook, one of the first things we ask for is the front cover image. And now and then, after we have asked for the cover the response we get is “Amazon say you shouldn’t include the cover in your book.” And the author is correct 🙂 . If you hunt around on the Amazon site, you will find the sentence “When you publish or republish your book, we will automatically add your cover image to the inside. Do not include your cover image in your manuscript file.” This section is often quoted on forums
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