Matthew Iden's Blog, page 9

I’ve embarked on a number of low-cost, (hopefully) high-impact advertising ventures to boost my book sales. Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll examine what I’ve done and try to draw lessons and conclusions from the experience. First up…Goodreads! Basics Goodreads advertising currently comes in two flavors: tiny, highly-affordable self-service ads and large-scale page [...]

Successful paranormal author Ilona Andrews recently had her short story “Questing Beast”–offered free on her website for fans–swiped and re-posted to Amazon, where some unscrupulous magsman was selling it for $5.99. Since it reached a rank of 60,000, quite a few poor folks were rooked. Ilona was able to get Amazon to take it down, [...]

After less than scintillating results on, well, every e-book retail outlet except Amazon, I was inspired to create what is quite possibly the worst drawn cartoon in the world. I would be more charitable to Amazon’s competition if: Smashwords could assure me that they’d actually ship the e-books I ask them to. Barnes & Noble [...]

Friends - I’m today’s feature on Kindle Nation Daily, which means you can read a whopping 20,000 word excerpt of A Reason to Live* plus enter for a chance to win a Kindle Fire! Please share with friends, family, and strangers on the street: http://bit.ly/T8iWFE. * Also, please overlook the fact that KND got my book’s [...]

Some interesting things afoot here in Matt Iden Land. To wit: I’m guest blogging on Omnimystery News today about the inspiration for my protagonist, Marty Singer. If you said Spenser, Reacher, or Pike…you’re way off. Check out the blog to find out why! Omnimystery is also kindly holding a contest for Blueblood, the second in my [...]

As an indie author, I’ve increasingly found Goodreads to be one of the best places to reach readers but–maybe even better–I’ve found it to be a great place to relax and just be a reader, as well. But since the focus of this blog is writing and the indie life, I’d like to share three [...]

Friends - Pardon the light post today. I’m in a race to finish my third Marty Singer mystery, Signs, before next week when one of my redoubtable beta-readers has asked for it. But I’ve recently stumbled across three interesting links and services that deserve a gander. 1. KB Resource List The Writers Cafe over at [...]

I recently read a blog post about an author who screwed up 17, 500 free downloads of her debut novel by publishing to KDP using a .pdf version of her manuscript. In short, the conversion to a Kindle-friendly version didn’t quite take and she had to scramble big time to salvage the situation, soothing the [...]

After participating on a recent panel with three other authors (Karen Cantwell, Scott Nicholson, and Michael J. Sullivan), the topic of profanity came up. We’d just finished lunch at a family restaurant and it was only later that I wondered what the teenage waiters and nearby patrons thought when one of us said, “The chapter [...]

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to both organize and participate on an amazing self-publishing panel (though it’s over, see my original announcement for more details). For those of you who couldn’t make it, you  missed a 90-minute, crash course on self-publishing success, failure, resilience, and prediction. In retrospect, it feels like we covered [...]