For the vast majority of people, the magic doesn’t lie at the sentence level. Good sentences simply communicate meaning. Once they do that (and they *must*), they add little extra value.

It’s mostly also not about the overarching plot. A lot of beginning writers worry about writing similar plots to existing books, or they sweat over the big reveal or the hat trick at the end. Most boo...

You know the routine: a writers organisation reports on a survey of writers. It concludes that authors make [insert absurdly low income] per year and they couldn’t be expected to live off that amount.

Why does it make me angry?

Two things: journalistic incompetence (from writers, no less) and the utter stench of entitlement dripping off articles like this.

Let’s deal with those issues.

What is a writer?

Som...

It’s interesting how my sales are shifting to international venues. Kobo and Google Play are doing well, but the best is my own website. I had a sales record last month.

Overall, of course, sales are down and this is a kind o...

I’ve had a rather good month selling on my own site. It’s not easy because you have to provide your own traffic and audience, but it’s very rewarding.

The post

So what is back matter?

Simply put, it’s the stuff that comes *after* the main body of the book. Stuff like About the Author and lists of other published books, and links to places where people can contact you.

Why is it so important?

Because when a reader gets to the end of the book, they have just invested hours in your work. If they ...

I also just made live the . It’s available in ebook, audio, paperback and hardcover. Both the paperback and hardcover have colour illustrations as chapter headers. These are exclusive to the campaign. Even if you buy them later from my website, it may be that you get a version with black and white illustrations.

The last thing Steven remembers was waiting in a prison cell for the results of an appeals trial. His crime: spea...

Hang on, I can hear people say, giving books away is easy. People always want free books. Tell me how to sell them instead.

Well, yes, yes, and no.

Giving away books is not as easy as people might think. Making a book free is absolutely no guarantee that people will download it. It can, in fact, be surprisingly hard to give books away.

It’s even harder to give books away in a manner where the act of giving them out is beneficial to you.

It’s like clockwor...

The days of selling purely on Amazon are over.

It used to be that you could put up a book, choose KU or wide, advertise a bit and work your way up.

That model has been dying for a while, but it’s dead.

It’s not about the Amazon ban, or about how bad economics (or tbh for many people simply being afraid they might be kicked out of their fucking job), although it is also about those things.

By my estimate, the world reached...

Every now and then we post something on social media that blows up. It’s never about our books, of course.

Seriously, if you’re on social media hoping that a “Buy my book” post of yours will go viral, STOP IT.

No one wants your book spam.

I’ll put it a bit more clearly:

NO ONE WANTS TO SEE YOUR FUCKING BOOK SPAM

Should you stop posting about your books? No one says that. But you should stop expecting it to lead immediately to great sales.

Sales on social media are like t...

“It’s the Amazon boycott!” people will say. “People don’t realise they’re not hurting Bezos, they’re hurting us poor indies!”

I’m rather ho-humbug about this. Sales are crap *everywhere*. This is not unexpected. If you as much as point at people’s financial security, their jobs, their house, their debts, their investments, you’re going to get a fearful reaction. People cut back on things they don’t *need* right now. Eating out, an expensive holiday, a new car, and yes, ...