Self-Publishing Roundtable

Thank you to all of our listeners, viewers and guests. You have made this podcast truly memorable. We hope you learned something from SPRT and enjoyed yourself along the way. We certainly did!   Three podcasts shall rise from SPRT’s ashes… Chrishaun Keller-Hanna presents Mind da Gap, a podcast where we talk to freshman writers […]

Bob Mayer is a former Green Beret and traditionally published author turned indie. He has a long backlist (and frontlist) that includes military fiction, military science fiction and historical as well as a handful of collaborations with popular romantic comedy author Jennifer Crusie. We talked with Bob about how writing military fiction, co-write with an author from a completely different genre and how to be a self-published author. This was certainly an interesting show!

On December 7th 1941, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes carried out a devastating surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and changed the face of World War II. Last month eight authors published the anthology: Pearl Harbor and More: Stories of WWII-December 1941. We invited some of those authors on to talk about writing World War II fiction and the diverse stories they included in the anthology.

Everyone’s favourite Romance author, Zoe York joined us on the News Roundtable Roundup to discuss: - Didn't Amazon do well this Thanksgiving? - Facebook has been exaggerating the truth... - Barnes & Noble still exists and they're trying really hard! - Vulnerability to WordPress has been fixed - ZOMG The end is nigh! SPRT to end!

Unfortunately Bob Mayer was unable to make it this week but we will be rescheduling with him. In the meantime... The US election results are in, and just in time for NaNoWriMo! Join us as we talk about how we’re dealing with our writing when all it seems everyone wants to talk about is politics. Does this political controversy bring out a myriad of post-apocalyptic ideas for your next dystopian novel? Or do you find yourself too lost in the aftermath too find the words to even express yourself?

Earlier in the year Amazon created a new romance category called: Clean and Wholesome. This was great news for authors of fade-to-black romances as Inspirational Romance was not working for them and they were being overwhelmed in Contemporary Romance genres. This new category helps readers who want the romance and emotion without details of intimate bedroom–kitchen / car / outdoor  / etc–gymnastics to find exactly what they're looking for. It also means those who do want the details won't accidentally buy a book without it. But what exactly is this new category and how does one write in it? We asked contemporary romantic comedy author Susan C. Daffron to come on the show and answer our questions.

Welcome to the Roundtable Roundup, our monthly podcast (first Thursday of the month) where we invite a guest or two to join us live to discuss the previous month's news and views from the self-publishing and indie industry. This week Zoe York joined us to discuss: - Author Earnings: Indie eBook Market Share is down! - Will the real Stephen King please stand up - Reedsy launches free publishing courses - Changes to the Kindle Publishing Guidelines - Changes to the Amazon pre-order rules

Did that headline catch your attention? Good, that was the plan. No, you haven't been scammed but a lot of authors have. This episode we talked about a devious way for how an author, such as yourself, can be scammed. You're probably familiar with some of the more common ways, like: vanity presses wanting all of your money, people pretending to be editors / proofreaders / cover artists and taking all of your money–and perhaps your precious writing!

Crime fiction is not merely about crimes and their detection, or criminals and their motives. This genre is about readers’ fascination with human wrong-doing, what causes it, and how it is solved. Readers are beguiled by criminal intent and the aims to subvert it. They want to read about compelling characters (both perpetrators and the crime-fighters), find out why they do it, how they think and also about their private lives. We wanted to find out how the genre works and how to write it effectively so, we invited crime fiction author Rosanne Dingli to answer our questions

In October 2014 Lindsay Buroker dipped her toe into science fiction romance under the pen name Ruby Lionsdrake before returning to her name to publish an eight novel science fiction series. So far she has an impressive 10 series under her belt but what is even more interesting is that each time she launches something new her audience expands in leaps and bounds. So, of course we wanted her (back) on the show to pick her brain about her latest series, Fallen Empire. Audio available for download or watch on youtube

Welcome to the Roundtable Roundup, our monthly podcast (first Thursday of the month) where we invite a guest or two to join us live to discuss the previous month's news and views from the self-publishing and indie industry. We were joined by Supernatural Thriller and Post-Apoc author, John L. Monk and discussed: - Amazon bans incentivised reviews - KU page reads missing - Harlequin Lawsuit finally sorted - Ellora’s Cave is closing, but... Audio available for download or watch on youtube :D

Jessica McHugh isn't just an author of speculative, absurdist and young adult fiction. She's a huge personality who gives of herself online, especially on her YouTube channel the McHughniverse as well as teaching children how to write fiction. Jessica's hair is also way better than Erica's! Audio available for download or watch on youtube :D

Bonus half-hour episode! Audio available for download or watch on youtube :D You don't have to be a fan of Dave or his comics to appreciate this special mini episode. He is a font of information that will benefit any writer.

Steve Scott and Barrie Davenport from the Authority Self-Publishing podcast join us this week to help us form good habits and banish those pesky and soul-destroying negative thoughts that we sometimes–often–have as writers. We hope that they can teach us how to declutter our minds of the evil phunk so we can fill it up with what's important and more helpful to us as indie authors and publishers. Audio available for download or watch on youtube :D

Audio available for download or watch on youtube :D Lucas Flint does not exist. Well, not really. He's the pen name of author Timothy L. Cerepaka. By day Timothy writes fantasy novels but at night his alter-ego writes and publishes Young Adult Superhero fiction. Why did Timothy decide to take on an alias? What inspired him to write superheroes and why YA? Is the combination a market worth writing in? We found out all that and more on this episode!

Audio available for download or watch on youtube :D Justin Sloan's writing credits are a little eclectic. He's written video games including Game of Thrones and Minecraft. He also writes children's fantasy and supernatural stories as well as military fantasy. Then there's the screenplay he wrote that one time. And last, but by no means least, the non fiction series on creative writing–a number of them with an emphasis on military veterans breaking into the creative industries. Obviously the man has a lot to talk about and we're going to pick that large brain of his on the podcast.

Welcome to the Roundtable Roundup, our monthly podcast (first Thursday of the month) where we invite a guest or two to join us live to discuss the previous month's news and views from the self-publishing and indie industry. Romance author Zoe York joined us tonight to discuss: - Penguin Random House still claiming that subscription services are hurting authors - Joanna Penn's strategy for getting on a bestseller list - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies author taken to court by Hachette

Audio available for download or watch on youtube

Audio available for download or watch on youtube :) Once upon a time a hard-working trucker picked up a pen and started his writing journey. That trucker was Wayne Stinnett and now two years later, he's become a bestselling author of several action adventure novels. He's also recently released a non fiction book Blue Collar to No Collar: From Trucker to Bestselling Novelist in Two Years (Self Publishing as a Business Book 1) to share his story and how you too can do it!

Audio available for download or watch on youtube

Unfortunately due to technical difficulties and link confusion our guest was unable to join us this week. Instead the SPRT gang covered beautifully by having a discussion about indie publishing stuff. Our apologies for not having the expected guest but huge thumbs up to Wade, Robert and Chrishaun for saving the day :)

Audio available for download or watch on youtube

Probably the most well-known male Urban Fantasy hero is Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden–an unwilling hero in a contemporary urban setting with a lot of supernatural elements. Think John McClane (from Die Hard) but wielding magical powers instead of a conventional weapon. Sadly, we were not able to interview Jim Butcher (he's not indie) but we did have the next best thing! Domino Finn, author of the Black Magic Outlaw and Sycamore Moons series talked with us about Urban Fantasy, its tropes and how to write the tough guy protagonist–without making him an asshole.

Robert Chazz Chute, Chrishaun Keller-Hanna and Erica Conroy to discuss the below topics: - Data Guy presents insane Romance data at the RWA conference - Canadian author committed to the traditional route makes Robert sad :( - Harlequin's reading app could be a game changer!

Remember when we interviewed Honorée Corder? Well she's coming back and this time she's bringing Hal Elrod and Steve Scott with her. Together they'll be talking to us about their recently released non fiction book, The Miracle Morning for Writers: How to Build a Writing Ritual That Increases Your Impact and Your Income (Before 8AM). It combines Hal Elrod's global phenomenon with Steve Scott's writing habit techniques (which helped him get on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list). You'll learn how to take charge of your morning and maximize "the rest of the day" for your writing efforts.

Audio available for download or watch on youtube :) New Adult is a genre that only emerged within the last few years. It's a genre where the protagonists and targeted audience are college-aged and, like Young Adult, is being crossed with many other genres. Jasmine Walt is a new author who writes Fantasy married with New Adult and doing extremely well at it! She's currently ranked within the top 100 authors in Sci-Fi & Fantasy and Fantasy on Amazon. Did I mention she's a new author?

Audio available as well as Youtube recording. We were surprised at how much of an introvert our guest was. He's very down to earth, with a practical and motivated mind when it comes to making money in publishing. There's no doubt that romance is the most popular genre. The readers are voracious and will follow their favourite authors with a passion. Quite a number of those readers are currently enamoured with Chance Carter. A man writing Bad Boy Romances for women. While male romance authors aren't unusual, they're more likely to write under a female pen name. But not Chance, he's flaunting his gender on social media and the fans love it. How much do they love it? Well, a recent release netted him 400 reviews in a week! So of course we invited him on to find out how he does it.

Welcome to the Roundtable Roundup, our fortnightly podcast where we invite a guest or two to join us live to discuss the latest news and views from the self-publishing and indie industry. Author Zoe York returned! She joined Robert Chazz Chute, Xavier Granville and Erica Conroy to discuss the below topics: - Amazon is cracking down on advertising sites - KDP Accounts being shut down without warning! - Author Earnings May Report

Audio available! Australian author Demelza Carlton joined us to talk about building her mailing list from very low to over 15,000 in just six months! We asked her to share with us exactly how she did it, how much it cost and how one would maintain a list that size once you've attracted oodles of subscribers. We also talked about her writing, publishing but not her fear of swimming with fish :P

We interviewed the founder of JuNoWriMo, Becca J. Campbell and learned how the challenge started, the effort that goes into running an event of this scale, about her own writing and a lot of other interesting things along the way. JuNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That's 1667 words a day! It's also a community of writers and aspiring writers to get together and offer support, motivation and friendship. It's almost like NaNoWriMo except it's in June instead. Interview is available on both audio download and youtube.

TS Paul published his first eBook mid-February of this year. It was the first in his Athena Lee Chronicles, a short form sci-fi serial, which he followed up with a second book just two weeks later. Since then he has released one eBook every two weeks. The length of each instalment varies wildly from 34 - 148 pages and he's charging $2.99 a pop! What's even more interesting is that they sell! So of course we invited him over to the podcast to tell us how he does it, why he does it and what he plans to do next.

Welcome to the Roundtable Roundup, our fortnightly podcast where we invite a guest or two to join us live to discuss the latest news and views from the self-publishing and indie industry. Author Zoe York returned! She joined Chrishuan Keller Hanna and Erica Conroy to discuss the below topics: - Ellora's Cave are at it again... - Trad published authors are afraid we're devaluing their beautiful books! - Bookbub Ads coming soon - Another trad pub acquires self-pub company - Then this from Zoe...

Boyd Craven has penned over 20 books over the last two years, only recently deciding to take the plunge into publishing. His "The World Burns" Series has hit the top 10 in the Dystopian Genre in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia. He joined us this week to talk about his journey, the post apocalyptic genre as well as breaking into mysteries.

Michael Anderle is the author of the Kurtherian Gambit series. His first book, Death Becomes Her, was released in November 2015 and the series has so far sold a little under 20,000 books and has 9.5 Million KENPC read in the last six months. His first five books earned him 10,000 in just 90 days! With the help of others, he has formed a group called 20booksto50k to find what story ideas authors have that will sell better and allow writing to become our main occupation. And that is why we invited him on the show.

Author Zoe York returned! She joined Chrishuan Keller Hanna and Erica Conroy to discuss the below topics: - Amazon Marketing Services for all! - Computer algorithms picking books for publishing - Booktrope closes its doors - Goodreads introduces Kindle giveaway program

Amanda M. Lee recently bought and moved into a four bedroom house, which she paid for with her writing. This prolific Amazon bestselling author currently has five series—with a sixth on the way—30 novels, 7 novellas, 8 bundles, 33 paperbacks, 21 audiobooks and 4 pre-orders out. Her release schedule is insane, alternating between four ongoing series and publishing at least one or two books a month. She's both daunting and an inspiration to many authors and we got to interview her!

There are more places to publish than just at Amazon. Draft2Digital is one of the ways you can get your ebook out into the world. What is Draft2Digital? Well, think Smashwords but with a pretty website and no meatgrinder. They're an ebook distributor which is handy for writers/publishers who can't or choose not to go direct. Want to hear more? Good, that's why we invited Dan Wood, Draft2Digital's Director of Operations and Author Relations to the podcast.

Author Chris Fox returned again, this time to talk about his 21 Day Book Challenge. He decided to write to market in Science Fiction, nutted out the plot, wrote the book, had it edited and published all within 21 days. Not only that but he took it one step further and decided to launch to market as well (marketing book coming soon) with the lofty goal of having the book stay under 10,000 in the paid rankings for 30 days. As of writing this post it is currently sitting at #677! Not only that but he decided to document the whole challenge via vlog, explaining what he did and his reasons for doing so.

Author Cate Morgan joined Chrishuan Keller Hanna and Robert Chazz Chute to discuss the below topics: - Do Presales work for New Authors? - The Ripped Bodice - Amazon recruiting publishing companies for Kindle Unlimited - Smashword’s Annual Survey

We thought we'd add a little spice to the podcast this week by inviting bestselling and award-winning author of erotica and erotic romance, Selena Kitt. Not only does this lovely lady have a successful career writing about the pleasures of the flesh, she's been very savvy at carving a place for herself in the wider industry. Selena owns and runs a publishing company, an online erotic romance bookstore and two advertising sites. Other notable achievements include: surviving a couple of Amazon pornocalypses and cheekily marketed the affected books elsewhere as being Banned by Amazon, selling the movie rights to a book Babysitting the Baumgartners (it's being made into an adult movie) as well as receiving many awards for her writing (see her site).

Author Michael Anderle joined Chrishuan Keller Hanna to discuss the below topics: - Gaming the ebook?! - Follow up on one the Amazon plagiarism story from last week - New KOBO Author Services

Because no one wanted to be on the show this week we thought we'd go crazy drunk on air! But none of us wanted to do that so we got together and decided we'd discuss the state of SPRT, the recent changes and additions we've made, as well as the multi-author cross promo giveaway. We also decided to torture you further by talking about our individual writing and publishing. Maybe you'll get to find out what happened to FLOOD--or not :P

Author Jim Johnson joined Chrishuan Keller, X and Erica to discuss the below topics: - Oh B&N you've done it again... - New paying platform for internet content publishers - Is the Facebook ads 20% text rule on the way out? - Audible is branching out with podcasts and news - Value Added Tax (VAT) on eBooks in Europe may be changing! - Taming the Amazon sales algorithm

Some of us take awhile to write the next book in the series but for crime novelist Libby Hellmann it was ten year between book four and five in her Ellie Foreman Mystery series. It's not as simple as just writing the next book in the series, there are lots of things Libby needed to consider from if she should to how to bring Ellie to present day. Libby joined us this week to talk about both the benefits and the challenges of reviving a series after a ten year hiatus and what impact would that time have on the character.

Science Fiction author Jamie Dodge joined Erica today to discuss the below topics: - Author should tear this plagiarist to shreds - When original content creators feel sorry for the plagiarist - James Patterson presents... - Today an AI writes a novel, tomorrow... the world! - 22% of eBooks sold in UK are self-pubbed... or are they? - Colour me crazy!

Pulp Speed isn't a new concept but the name might well be. It was coined by Dean Wesley Smith and essentially means: sitting down and writing lots of words and stories. Also known as putting your arse in the chair and writing. Dean went a little bit further with his definition and created pulp speeds -- similar to Star Trek's warp speeds -- so people can say they're at pulp speed one or whatever. This is a popular yet controversial topic but considering all of the hype around 21 day / monthly challenges (Chris Fox, etc) that are currently circulating we thought we should dedicate a podcast episode to it. So we invited two authors Jim Johnson who runs a Google+ Group called Pulp Speeders and is currently completing a 3 Novels in 3 Months Challenge; and Ivy Sinclair who wrote: How I wrote 28,000 words in two days. Two authors who are definitely writing at pulp speeds and we asked them what pulp speed is, how to achieved it and how to get to the next speed...

Kevin Tumlinson is at a point in his life where he doesn't need a house. Instead he and his wife are downsizing everything to live the life of gypsies--travelling around in an RV while Kevin writes his books. Not only is Kevin a self-publisher and a podcaster, he's also the founder of a company that provides author services. Happy Pants Books provides authors with: copywriting and design services, web development, ghostwriting, translation, transcription, and marketing strategy! This week we asked Kevin what the little voices in his head actually said to get him to pack up his life and move into an RV? As well as the services his company provides to authors and about his fiction writing.

Romance author Trish McCallan joined Erica and Robert Chute Chazz to discuss the below topics: - Revisiting Kindle Reselling Ebooks - Audible hopes to go viral - B&N makes an attempt... - CNET is publishing short fiction - Dollar Photo to close

Chrishaun Keller played host today because Blab hated Erica for some strange reason! She was joined by Cate Morgan and D. R. Yurkas to discuss the below topics: - Amazon aims for scammers but smacks innocent authors too! - Apple is denied! - Gdocs / Drive has a neat new trick! - Something interesting about Kobo's reader audience

In a perfect world every author would have at least one best-seller... This week we talked with Patty Jansen, a sci fi and fantasy author who knows this isn't a perfect world and has planned accordingly. We discussed the three year long-term plan she has put in place in order to earn a decent living off her writing. As well as that we also found out about one of the weapons Patty has in her marketing arsenal--multi-author cross promos--and how to use them.