#selfpublishing

[jjjackalope]

"INKED" by J.J. Jackalope out now!!

Have you guys considered what the world might've be like if sometime a century ago, people started being born with ink embedded into their skin, and powers at their fingertips? No? Well you should start, because I have the new-age queer book for you.

Think X-Men meets coming-of-age meets a bit of Percy Jackson action.

My goal is to give a sense of belong to anyone whose eyes grace my work. I know how important rep is to every minority and I want to do everything I can to give that representation.

Check out my website to learn more and buy!

Here's the book blurb :)

After being in online school for the last four years, Scottlin Vincino starts his Junior year at a new private boarding school an hour from home. It should have been similar to any other in-person school-- but alas, they had everything Scottlin didn’t. 

A mark. 

He'll have to keep it a secret, but it gets tricky when you have a knack for ending up in the infirmary… Whether it be for the hot boy you just met, or you're swept up in one of the freak accidents at the school that seem to just keep happening. 

Scott will have to juggle his sexuality, his grades, and his new friends all while solving the mystery of what is happening to his new academy.

#books #book #author #writing #writer #selfpublishing #self publish #YA novel #YA novels #lgbt #lgbt literature #trans literature #gay literature #gay PEOPLE OKAY??? #poc characters #lgbt characters #oc #ofc #oc art #original character #ocs #my ocs #publishing #ad #gay romance #mlm #wlw #all #just all of them #poly

[copperbadge]

I'm finally getting around to editing my fanfic for actual publishing. Any warnings for Kindle Direct Publishing?

Aside from, you know, "It's Amazon and they'll fuck you out of every penny they can on principle," I can't really speak to it -- I've never used Kindle Direct. My only real experience with pub/sales through Amazon is the fact that when I allowed them to sell my books via Lulu, they artificially inflated my prices because they take such a massive cut of your profits. I have a little more discussion of how that works at this post (look for the paragraph just after "wait, what?").

Now, that said, Amazon is a much, much larger platform for your work than Lulu and unless you are marketing from a platform where you already have a readership (like my blog) then Amazon will probably get more eyeballs on your work. Especially if you are marketing primarily to people who aren't familiar with you, they'd much rather buy from somewhere known, like Kindle, than from a random website they've never encountered like Lulu.

You might peruse @thebibliosphere for more useful information than I can give -- Joy has a lot more experience with Amazon's various fuckeries and has spoken to them pretty extensively. I don't know what the tag is offhand but Joy's tumblr is fun reading anyway, so if you browse around you will also get entertained :D

Readers, if you have info to share, please feel free! Remember to comment or reblog, as I don't repost asks sent in response to other asks.

#selfpublishing #selfpub #amazon publishing

[vamichaelalaws]

This holiday season, Innocence will finally be released! If you loved Seduce Me the Otome, you may find your heart swell for Diana and Saero once again in this prequel!

#seducemeask #seducemeotome #seduce me #michaela laws #seduce me the otome #seduce me otome #seduce me 2 #seduce me 2 the demon war #book #fiction #writing #author #selfpublishing #innocence #saero #diana #diana succubus #ezaeur #SaeroxDiana #SaeroxEzaeur

[cmoroneybooks]

When seeking commercial success with writing you need to be realistic. Just because something shouldn’t be the way it is doesn’t mean you can ignore that reality.

What I mean: 

People do judge a book by it’s cover, unless you’re talented and have done your research it will negatively impact you not to pay a professional.

Marketing a book isn’t about how good your book is. It’s an entirely different skillset you’ll need to pick up whether you get indie published or traditionally published. 

If you’re writing something niche you can’t expect the marketing advice of people writing and selling something with wide scale appeal to work for you. You’ll need to find a way to advertise directly to the communities that surround your niche. 

Bigots read and buy books.

Publishing a book is fucking expensive but cutting corners is quickly noticeable. 

Publishers don’t take as many risks as they should, they’re increasingly letting indie authors take risks and prove that certain types of story can make it. You might have to wait for someone else to prove your kind of story works in the indie space to get any traction in the trad space.

I doubt any of these really surprise anyone. But anytime something is unfair or wrong in publishing whether indie or trad I see a lot of writers say something like ‘well people shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover so I’m making my own anyway’ as if saying that somehow changes reality. Let’s be realistic but hopeful and defiant as we head into 2023. Like the pragmatic side character who’s with the hero till the bitter end.

(Also how else are we meant to judge your book in a sea of others, when there’s so many that picking one off the shelf or clicking on to see the blurb is a decision of itself??) 

#amwriting #writing community #writers community #writers #writing #writers corner #writing advice #writers advice #writing tips #writers tips #lgbt writers #fantasy writers #indie writers #selfpublishing #self publishing #publishing #trad publishing #traditional publishing #writing rants #mywritingadvice

[inesvazquezart]

Hello there! I´m opening my online shop for a few days. You can find some prints ( Ahsoka, Spy x Family and Inuyasha stuff), alongside a self pubished 150 page Star wars comic book, satirical of course.

And, this 16 page Pride and Prejudice zine I put together last summer. It was an experiment to play with style and go back to traditional inking. It follows the characters after what happens in the 2005 book adaptation.So if you are into regency England nonsense, you now know where to grab it:

link

#pride and prejudice #darcy x elizabeth #jane austen #2005 is the version I like the most #deal with it 1990 adaptation apologists #Dario marianelli soundtrack for the win #selfpublishing #zine #prints #drawing #artists on tumblr #style experiment #Elizabeth does indeed like to walk around Pemberley #She enjoys eating grass too #tag madness #aweful marketing

[mostlyghostie]

A commission for @yvesdot of a collection of their own work!

This was a fun one to draw, especially as most of these don’t yet exist in physical form.

You can read some of these books on their blog, check it out!

#my art #artists on tumblr #booklr #books #bookstack #yvesdot #selfpublishing #indie author

[brownieandbarebones]

Illustrations from my children's book 'The Moth and the Dragonfly' 🌙⭐

#digital art #digital drawing #fantasy illustration #illustration #original character #cute #magical illustration #fantasy #magical #moth #dragonflies #asthetic #kawaii #love #friendship #selfpublishing #childrens books #book #book blog

[ligiawrites]

Looking for a free Romance with Lesbians, Magic, and Dragons? Here it is! New chapters starting on March 29th!

#indieauthors #lesbian #writingcommunity #selfpublishing #writer #indiebooks #wattpad #queer #dragon #magic #writeblr

[dededos]

#selfpublishing #coverart #fine art photography #35mm #fujifilm #moon #night tree

[pretensesoup]

How to Publish a Book, pt 1

I told @tryxyhijinks I was gonna turn this into a shitpost, so here we go: how to publish an ebook in ten easy steps.

Write the book. This is, believe it or not, the fun part.

Edit the book. Slightly less easy, but you have to do this, no matter what anyone else has told you about "minimum viable product" or what have you. You can force your friends to read it, you can have a program read it aloud to you, you can read it backwards, you can hire someone to line edit your work, you can do some or most of the above, just get it edited. (Additional point: when hiring a professional, if you're happy with the plot, ask for line or copyediting; if you're not sure about plot points, ask for developmental editing; if you just need guidance, you may want to start with an editorial letter.)

Get a cover. You can make one yourself or pay someone to do it. You're going to want it to be about 1600x2500 pixels and 72 dpi. It's good to have a really nice cover, because covers sell books.

Typeset the book. I use Atticus to create an epub file. If you are also doing a print version or you are a control freak, I recommend it. Vellum and Reedsy are about the same, I think. If you have a lot of illustrations--big ones, I mean, not just an author photo--you should beg, borrow, or steal a copy of InDesign. You can use Calibre to compress your output epub file if you want to make sure you earn every available penny. However, my book is 6mb and it is about 8 cents to download. Also, if you're trying to do this on the cheap, you really can just do it in Word. The layout won't be as fancy, but you can do it. (Layout granularity, from least to most granular, is probably Word->Atticus->InDesign.)

If you want to publish under a press name that is not your name, you will need to start a business. Laws around taxes and registration may vary depending on where you are, but in general, you will want to register your name with your state or county registrar (for me, this cost $30 and I had to get a piece of paper notarized). Then you can get a business checking account (for me this part was free--I went through the bank I already have accounts with). In the US, sole proprietorships like this are taxed as pass-through entities, so you will pay personal income taxes on whatever money you make, but you don't have to pay corporate income taxes. If you are publishing books that could possibly get you sued (e.g., The Big Book of Welding While Juggling or Now You're Cooking with Napalm) you may want to form an LLC. Talk to a lawyer.

Open a KDP account. If you hate the Zon and want to only publish somewhere else (Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, whatever), that's fine--the process is about the same. If you think you previously had a KDP account and then didn't use it, search your emails etc. to try to find out, because if they figure that out, they'll close both accounts and then you won't get paid.

Add your new title to the catalog (you will need to add metadata, like your name, series name if there is one, and a description of the book) and set the prices. Unless your book is super big, you'll probably earn more if you select the 70% option. For some reason, I changed a few of the prices. If you're planning to publish on several platforms, I don't recommend this--just set your price in one place and then let it convert those. Otherwise, you'll have to reinput everything over and over, because it's in the terms of service that you need to price things the same on Kobo as you do on Amazon (and so on).

Set the day of publication and tell people about it. Like your mom. Your weird aunt who's always so supportive. Your friend who has been listening to you bitch about how hard writing is for the past six months.

???

Profit.

Q: Hey, I want my book in several online stores, not just Amazon.

A: You have a few options. Draft2Digital/Smashwords and IngramSpark both distribute digitally to various places so you only have to set things up once. But they take a cut of the profit for this service. You can also set up independent accounts with each store and upload your stuff.

Q: What happens in step 9?

A: You know. Meet other indie writers and try to gain their trust. Read a lot. Work on the sequel. Get some sleep, because deadlines are exhausting, even self-imposed ones. Learn about advertising. That sort of thing.

Next time, I'll do the paper side of things.

#selfpublishing #self publishing #indie authors #indie publishing #how to #how to publish a book

[furiouslywriting]

Writing tips: formatting

One of the great things about indie publishing is that you can do things yourself. But please know that just because you can, doesn't mean you should! Things like editing and cover design MUST be done by professionals. But the cool thing is that formatting is fairly accessible to the average person, but you'll be swapping out spending money for spending time.

So here are some basic formatting tips:

Learn industry and genre standards

Every new paragraph except for the first in the chapter and scene must be indented

Use drop caps, lead in small caps or both for the first sentence of each chapter

Chapter should start at least a third of the way down the page. But usually about half

Page numbers typically go in the footer

In the header have your name on one page and your book title on the other (alternate the whole way through). These do not go in the front matter or on the first page of each chapter

Make sure your formatting is consistent the whole way through!

Front matter is everything before the first chapter, back matter is everything after the actual book (acknowledgments etc)

Justify text to both sides (so it's even). You can use hyphens to help with this

Check what the minimal requirements for margins are with your publisher (Ingram, kdp etc)

Use a normal, easy to read font. Times New Roman is the standard.

Use hyperlinks in your ebooks! Link directly to your other books, author socials and website. List them in your print copies

I'm using Atticus to format my debut and it's been fantastic so far.

#writingtips #authortips #indiepublishing #selfpublishing #formatting #writing #writers on tumblr #writertips #writerhelp #writer

[stolendiamonds]

#Dolly #Run With the Hunted #I do think she tends to leave the gun out of the shower #cyberpunk #scifi #selfpublishing #she even has a shower beer in RWTH6

[copperbadge]

hey sam! i was just ruminating that it's a fantastic time for authors to do dvd commentaries, and other 'ask the author' memes. it's additional material and feedback all in one package! (after we explain what a dvd extra is)

I suppose I'm of two minds about it. My immediate thought was that authors have always done Q&As, but it's true that they used to be less accessible both to readers and to the authors if they weren't big names, because they required travel (and in the reader's case, knowing the author would be traveling, plus having to go out to wherever they were doing the reading). Authors still do book tours and signings for that kind of purpose, but being able to do that kind of thing online as well now makes it easier and cheaper. Although I wonder whether there's less sense of connection because it's not face-to-face. But yeah, I would imagine it's pretty great for gauging what the overall readership is interested in. Certainly in dialogue with readers when I put my books up for review, I always learn a lot.

The idea of a DVD commentary is kind of interesting because I was like "How would that work with a book, though?" and I guess you could annotate an ebook -- like, offer a version with little widgets where if you clicked them you'd get the author adding notes about the book. I've never been a fan of actual DVD commentaries -- I don't like filmed interviews because they take so fucking long to actually say anything, and with a DVD commentary you've now got the addition of "talking over the story". But I could see how if you loved a book you might like having a version where you've got extra notes.

I struggle with the idea of "additional material" somewhat. I suppose that's ironic given how much I discuss outside-of-book on this blog, but that's just....I don't know, it's answering questions, it's not like "building the canon outside of the canon", and if I think something is good enough, it always goes into the books. The whole "They speak English with a Welsh accent" thing was amusing, but then I was like "Yeah let's actually put that in the text, why should it live on Tumblr alone?"

There's so much media now where it feels like if you aren't spending every waking moment interacting with every aspect of it, you just don't get to...be a fan, in an active sense. There are podcasts I follow where if you want to do anything other than listen to the episodes, even if you just want to attend a live show or buy merchandise, you have to dedicate significant time weekly to following them on all the social media and actively read their Patreon. And I just can't. I really like that creators can put that kind of thing out there, I think overall that's to the good, but it feels like something I'm blocked from participating in.

So, I keep all my shit here. I've had it suggested that I'd benefit as a writer from having a newsletter, which I actually agree with, and it seems like it could be entertaining to do. But I get caught up in this dichotomy of "Well, won't people be mad that they have to go subscribe to this thing instead of just reading my tumblr?" and/or "Won't subscribers be aware they can just find all this on my tumblr?" and I get real in my head about it. Because I'd struggle with having to go two separate places for stuff like that.

Uh, to circle back to your actual ask, however, because all that was just like...IDK, weird anxiety digression, I do think it's a great era for extra-canonical material, and while it does mean creators have to be much better at boundary-setting than they used to be, I like that they can adjust their level of interaction as they see fit.

Oh and uh. It's felt awkward to actually talk about it, but if you guys do want more material I do have a sideblog, @shivadh, which is where I stash everything I want to make note of for the books -- research, imagery, stuff I've talked about here that hasn't got a place to go in googledocs yet, that kind of thing. It's not extra material per se, it's just me shoving shit into a filing cabinet, and I don't do image IDs like I do here because it's more for me, plus I do delete posts once I've made use of them. But folks are welcome to follow if they want to.

#writing #books #selfpublishing #indy publishing #rpfreiwaphase

[luv-stargazer]

ATYD BOOK FORMATTED

hi so i haven’t used this account in several years, but i hope the people looking for this happen to find it through the search tags or from others sharing it around

anyways, i was really bored the last week (yes i did 1700 pages in a week, yes i am insane), but i really wanted to format All The Young Dudes in the same way the Harry Potter books were formatted. i wanted a nice copy for myself, and because i'm picky i wanted it to look like a real book, Harry Potter style. i’ve got the same fonts, headers, page numbers, little diamond checkered background for the title page, etc. basically everything but those stupid little corner stars that i was too lazy to add in. 

i also added the 2016 scenes with grant as an epilogue of sorts to the end of the third volume because he is so important to me so if u don't want that there ... my condolences.

in the folder below, i also resized covers by Brianna Bell that fit my version of the text. i’ve credited her, the artist of the title page, mskingbean89, and myself on the second page of each version so i ask that you don’t remove that.

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/3/folders/11VaVZJphF2jmuM0t_ZGKJkCV3vQP3rz8

i hope all that were looking for something like this enjoy :) happy pride month loves <3

#all the young dudes #atyd #wolfstar #atyd wolfstar #atyd book #marauders #remus lupin #sirius black #harry potter #selfpublishing #all the young dudes book #fanfiction #mskingbean89 #james potter #lily evans #marlene mckinnon #peter pettigrew #mary macdonald #grant chapman

[rexdraco]

Racial sheet for the Pixiu Bloodline which starts with the Pixiu

#nxc #xverse #mythic #mycutevampir #design #art #books #ebook #selfpublishing #monster #supernatural #digitalart #charactersheet #rexdraco #patreon #furry #anthro #characterdesign #adventure #anthromorph

[windywallflower]

Hey hi hello folks!

Its that TIME of year again where we RUN a fantastic spooky little sale on our shop for those looking to pick up gifts and support indies like us through the holiday season!

>>Take a Peep Here<<

Here's some of the things you might recognize us for:

[Paint The Town Red, our noir vampire x werewolf drama. In the city of Merlot some strange things are afoot the moment a vampire shows up on the doorstep of the local werewolf shelter... hmm~]

[Prism Knights, a series of short stories that utilise fairytales and knights to explore themes of trauma and grief and mental illness through queer relationships.]

[Extinction, a zine that explores themes of 'what ifs' and grief through the lens of speculative prehistory.]

[The Magic Word, a funny little 18+ comic about a hypnotist and the things she does with her assistant ;>]

And MANY MORE of our pins and merch are also on sale this month! Exciting!

As always, sharing and boosting means a lot to us and getting our stories out there! We're both working busily to create more works this coming year and every little push helps us do that!

I hope you are all having a fantastic spooky season so far ehehehehe~~~

#independent #selfpublishing #selfpub #stories #comics #queer