Shamelessly (& Endlessly) Promote Your Blog/Website/Review site

[basschick]

i've rated 300 books, but that's apparently not enough for good recommendations so far...

[nownewstrue]

http://alchemyofscrawl.wordpress.com...age-on-amazon/

Great stuff I learned from the IBC and IBB.

[J. Strnad]

It's interesting, but I got basically the same recs for Crime, Thriller and Mystery. Maybe the genres are too similar to distinguish among them.

Nice concept, though.

[simonroyle]

Originally Posted by GraceKrispy

Great IndieView, Simon and Frida!

Thanks Grace!

[jersysman]

Yes, I do believe that the more granular your shelves are, the better the recommendations. If they are too general, I think you will get very general recommendations. I have mine broken down quite a bit and have received decent results. At least different ones than the ones I picked up from being on their forums.

[RainingLemur]

This sounds like it'd be a helpful way to get some more books in the library.

[simonroyle]

Toni is the author of, Badwater. An eco-thriller.

She talks here about her book, writing and indie publishing.

[JuniperPearl]

My recommendations have been pretty spot-on so far. I have 414 books rated on Goodreads, and my shelves are fairly general - 2010 books, 2011 books, library, borrowed, etc - not separated by genre or anything fancy.

I'm always looking for recommendations, so I love this.

[anamardoll]

For indie authors with a $2.99-or-under ebook, I'm always taking interview submissions to put up on my website for my Wednesday Indie Author interviews. I have ~130 regular subscribers, so it's not a huge audience, but it's free and only takes about an hour or so to fill out and email the interview to me.

Link here.

[Ravensknight]

I tend to separate my books by year, then by genre. So far, the recommendations based on the years suck. Haven't tried the genre shelves yet.
And I've got over 1100 books for their "super" algorithm to play with. Color me not impressed...

[Steve Anderson]

I'm not much of a blogger, I admit — my site's more of a home for my work more than anything. But this week I've written about the true events that inspired my historical espionage novel, The Losing Role. In the last winter of WWII, Hitler had a plan to send English-speaking commandos behind the US lines and impersonate American soldiers:

http://www.stephenfanderson.com/Auth...sing_Role.html

[David Gaughran]

The opening of Amazon Spain on Wednesday and a planned Kindle Store for later this year, as well as widely rumored expansions into France, Italy, and India, has many writers thinking about international markets.

In my blog post on Friday, I discussed the opportunities that present themselves in Spain for self-publishers who aren’t hamstrung by territorial restrictions and whose competition will be high-priced books from local publishers, which Amazon are legally prevented from discounting by more than 5% for the first two years of publication.

Several commenters pointed out that for most writers the cost of a professional translation is prohibitive (running to several thousand dollars per book). And you really need a professional to do the job – automated software will make an unholy mess of your book, and someone without the requisite experience and qualifications can do just as badly.

I knew that Scott Nicholson had been pursuing a creative solution, and when he appeared in the comments hinting at that again, I emailed him for details, which he kindly agreed to share. In short, his idea is to pay no upfront fee to translators, instead sharing the profits with them.

It’s like a foreign language deal except there is no agent involved and no publisher. Which means more money for the writer and the translator, and cheaper books for the reader. Sounds a lot like indie publishing, right?

And it’s not just talk. Scott has struck deals in six languages to translate his books, and one of them – the German version of The Skull Ring, translated by Christa Polkinhorn, who Scott speaks very highly of - has already been a Top 100 smash there (until an Amazon snafu caused the book to be unpublished and lose all momentum).

I asked about the specifics, and Scott said:

I originally started out paying a 10 percent royalty but have increased it to 20 percent, even for translators who did the work for 10 percent (a retro raise). The 20 percent is off the net revenues of the translated edition. I pay quarterly, unless the payment is less than $20, in which case I roll it to the next quarter.

Every quarter I have to sit down and crunch the numbers, but I expect it to be the bulk of my income in a few years–and I suspect I will be way better off than those who sell their foreign rights through an agent.

Scott also agreed to let me reprint the relevant chapter from his superb book The Indie Journey: Secrets To Writing Success.

For obvious reasons, I can't reprint that excerpt here. But to read that, and to get more information on how we are putting together a list of interested translators, and a great discussion on how it will all work, please see my blog post:

http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2...slation-costs/

[avantman42]

I've improved my tool for finding your books on Apple's iBookstore. Now, when you enter an ISBN, it gives you links for all the bookstores at once, instead of having to choose the country.

Also, there is the option to save the ISBN in a cookie. If you do that, next time you visit the page, the ISBN will be entered for you and the links will be displayed.

http://www.russellphillipsbooks.co.uk/pages/tools.php

[joycedb]

Hello, everyone.

I just want to let you all know that I'm the featured interviewee at Dames of Dialogue today. I'd love for you to stop by if you can find a few extra minutes. Yeah, I know--that's the hard part. Anyway here is the link:

http://damesofdialogue.wordpress.com/

Thanks.

Joyce

[Frida Fantastic]

I just had a pretty neat interview with indie fantasy author Andrea K. Host. http://adarnasf.com/2011/09/21/inter...andrea-k-host/ It's an interview about ebooks & publishing, epic fantasy tropes, and gender in fantasy literature. It's meaty stuff! Check it out Oh yeah, I really liked her book too, and will be reading the sequel.