TCK Publishing Videos

You’re serious about your writing career. So of course you have an author website! (If you don’t, head over here to learn how to build one in only 30 minutes. We’ll wait.) But is your website running as well as it can? Do you back it up regularly? Do you have critical safety plugins installed? All of this is important for providing the best reader experience possible. After all, you don’t want your fans to land on your website and have it take ages to load—or, worse, fail to load at all. And you certainly don’t want to lose all the work you’ve put into it to a hacking incident! Luckily, it’s not that hard to clean, secure, and maintain your WordPress-based author website. Here’s how! 1. Automate Your Backups No matter where your data is, you have to back it up. We recently talked about how to create great backup systems for your writing, research, and other files —but your website has important stuff on it, too! It’s easy to automate your backup system so that you don’t have t...

Ahh, spring. A time of renewal and new beginnings. A time of budding plants, fragrant flowers, and sunshine. A time of cleaning everything in sight. For many of us, spring means spring cleaning—the one time of year we actually get off our butts and try to make a dent in the mess we’ve made the rest of the year. Something about spring just triggers the desire for a fresh start, and gets us to actually try to tidy up, wash the windows, declutter some stuff, and vacuum that scary space behind the fridge. But as an author, you actually have a more important area to do some spring cleaning: your files. Let’s face it: authors tend to be hoarders. Not necessarily in the Collyer brothers “crushed to death by newspapers” sense, but definitely in the sense that we collect interesting articles that might someday be useful in a book, or 18 versions of the first draft of the book we scrapped six years ago. And although hard drive space is dirt-cheap these days, that’s kind of part of the prob...

Amazon can be an indie author’s best friend. It can also be insanely frustrating and confusing. Take the Amazon bestseller lists, for example. One of the best ways to exponentially increase the momentum of your book is to make it onto a bestseller list—and with hourly updates to the top-selling books in hundreds of categories , becoming an Amazon bestseller is so much easier than becoming a New York Times bestseller. And yet the results in terms of sales can be just as powerful! But Amazon is a giant corporation and things are constantly changing as they try to find new ways to make money; serve shareholders; and get all of us, everywhere, to buy more stuff. It can be exhausting to keep on top of all the changes to policies, algorithms, author opportunities, and more. Recently, Amazon rolled out yet another new feature that affects how indie authors can market or promote their work. It’s called Amazon Charts, and it’s an evolution of the popular hourly bestseller lists—and also ...

Librarians spend  $1.22  billion   on books every year. And that’s in North America alone! But is it possible for indie authors to get a piece of that pie? And is it worth the effort? The answer to both is yes! What One Book in One Library Can Do for You According to  Publishers Weekly,  authors who are able to place their books in libraries can find remarkable success—both in expanded availability and greater awareness of their work. Here are just a few ways this success can work: Word of mouth. If you get a single copy of your book in just one library, that means your book can be checked out about 200 times before it falls apart from wear and tear. Every happy reader tells around five others about what they read. That’s 1,200 potential enthusiasts of your work from just one book! Unexpected opportunities. Every new reader brings new opportunities. One of those enthusiasts could be a movie producer on the lookout for something new—and your book...

You’re a pretty darn good writer. It’s true! Go ahead, pat yourself on the back—you’ve earned it! After all, you’ve written at least one book, you write on social media all the time, and you probably blog pretty regularly. You’ve got plenty of practice and you’re always honing your craft. So why do you feel stuck sometimes? It happens to all of us. In the middle of a manuscript, the words just dry up. Or we can’t find the right topic for our next blog post…or, worse, our next book. Maybe you just don’t feel like writing today. Whether you call it writer’s block, fatigue, mental fog, or a case of the donwannas, it sucks. Fortunately, you don’t have to let the block win! Creativity and creative productivity are both things that you can train yourself for, just like a runner trains for a 5k or a marathon. By exercising your writing muscles, you can boost your creative output to levels you never would’ve thought possible. And freewriting is one of the best exercises you can do whe...

Your desk chair is killing you. Staring at a screen for 8 hours a day will make you go blind. If you don’t get 10,000 steps a day, you’re going to explode. Your laptop has been hardwired so that if you type less than 50 words per minute, you’ll be electrocuted. …okay, so that last one is a little far-fetched (unless you live in a Keanu Reeves movie), but given the sheer quantity of frantic, dire health pronouncements that seem to be aimed squarely at writers these days, it’s not all that hard to believe. And in fact, there’s a grain of truth in most of these. Sitting all day is really bad for your posture and your overall health. Forgetting to look away from your screen and stretch regularly can lead to some nagging repetitive motion injuries and eyestrain. And getting up and walking more surely can’t do bad things for your health, right? But how did we settle on 10,000 steps as the number you need to be healthy? Is it just hype, or is there science backing it up—meaning tha...

Books make an amazing source of passive income—once you’ve written and launched your book, you should always keep up on its marketing, but you don’t have to work eight hours a day at an office to make money from it! But what about other ways to take advantage of all that buzz you’ve built? Think about expanding your product offerings through tie-in products, often known as swag or merch (short for merchandise). Comic book authors learned this secret years ago, and authors who run successful crowdfunding campaigns have also discovered the long-term promotional benefits of tie-in products. Whether you’re giving items away or selling them via an online store, merch can be a great way to get your readers to promote your book for you while also having some fun! In general, your tie-in should feature your book cover (which already includes your title and byline, conveniently enough!), as well as a contact method, like your author website. A call to action (Buy on Amazon!) or your tagli...