I’m the author’s assistant (aka husband). My wife’s a great writer, but she hates blogging. She’s finishing up the fifth book (Cover Me) in her Donovan Family series. It’ll be out in April. While she’s focusing on that, I’ll get her blog started.
I retired recently and offered to help with her writing business — getting into bed with her, so to speak. There’s much to learn. My accounting background didn’t help much with the skills we needed — website development, book editing, publishing, book promotions, etc.
We’ve learned a great deal, but still feel like beginners in many areas. When we get stuck, we google things. I’m thankful to all the people who took time to share their knowledge and post things on the internet. We’re also grateful to Novelists Inc (NINC) for the valuable information shared at their conferences.
We’d like to give back to the community. Even though we’re novices, we can still share what we’ve learned. So over the next year, I’ll document my findings on various subjects (examples below). When I’m done, the information will be obsolete, and I can start over.
Book Formatting
- Section breaks vs. page breaks
- Styles
- Font and size
- Converting MS Word to ePub and Mobi formats
- Caliber software
- Atlantis software
- Backmatter
- TOC
- Scene changes
- Start bookmark
- Hard tabs vs. styles
Book Covers
Uploading Books
- iBooks Author vs. iProducer
- ISBN’s and Bowker
- Amzn, Apple, Kobo, Nook, Google
Print on Demand (CreateSpace)
Book Pricing
Promotions
- KDP Select
- BookBub
- Library Thing
- FreeBooksy
- First in Series Free
- Newletters (MailChimp)
- Giveaways (Rafflecopter)
- Book reviews
WebSite
- Content management system (CMS) – WordPress
- Hosting (BlueHost)
- SQL to update WordPress database
- MySQL Workbench
- Favicon
- cPanel
- Caching
- Templates
- FTP (FileZilla)
- Plugins
- Affiliates program
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Analytics (Google Analytics)
Social Media
Automation of sales data collection (Amzn, Apple, Kobo, Nook)