Lessons from Kickstarter Part 4: Promotion

March 1, 2012

This is Part 4 in my series of blog posts looking at the lessons I learnt doing a Kickstarter project. See also Part 1: Don’t Go Off Half-Cocked, Part 2: Rewards, Part 3: Budgeting. Whilst there is, for me at least, some pleasure to be derived from working out reward levels and toying with Excel spreadsheets in […]

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Lessons from Kickstarter Part 3: Budgeting

February 28, 2012

This is Part 3 in my series of blog posts looking at the lessons I learnt doing a Kickstarter project. See also Part 1: Don’t Go Off Half-Cocked and Part 2: Rewards. Budgeting. For many people, budgeting is the worst part of any project. The tedium of researching suppliers, figuring out numbers, minimum runs, working out […]

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How do people discover new books and authors?

February 24, 2012

Last month I put together a brief survey to find out how people find new books and authors. One of the biggest challenges facing new authors, regardless of whether they are self-published or going with a traditional publisher, is getting the word out about their work. Increasingly, authors are having to do a significant amount […]

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Lessons from Kickstarter Part 2: Rewards

February 16, 2012

This is Part 2 in my series of blog posts looking at the lessons I learnt doing a Kickstarter project. See also Part 1: Don’t Go Off Half-Cocked. Rewards. These are one of the most important aspects of your crowdfunded project and getting them right is essential to your success. Getting them wrong, on the […]

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Do faeries have sex?

February 13, 2012

WARNING! This post might contain spoilers for my next novelette… or it might not. I’m not sure yet. But if you’re spoiler-sensitive, you might want to look away now. Queen of the May is the story of a young woman stolen away by faeries who has to find her way back to the human world. […]

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Taleist 2012 self-publishing survey

February 8, 2012

Taleist is running a self-publishing survey to get some more information on how (and what) the community is doing, so if you are a self-published author no matter how early in your career you are, do go over and fill it in. This is their first year running this survey so some of the questions need […]

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Just how long is a piece of string?

February 8, 2012

I’m in the process of planning my next Kickstarter project, which I’m hoping to have up early in March. This time, I’m trying to make sure that I really nail down my costs before I settle on my reward levels but this is proving to be trickier than anticipated! I want this time to offer […]

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Amazing visualisations of earthquakes in Japan and worldwide

February 6, 2012

In a change from your scheduled programming, I bring you these two awe-inspiring videos created by StoryMonoroch showing first the earthquakes over M3 experienced by Japan during 2011, and then worldwide earthquakes over M4.5, to put things in a little perspective. The two videos will leave you in no doubt as to the astonishing power of […]

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Planning my next novelette: Queen of the May

February 3, 2012

It’s amazing how much you can achieve through creative procrastination. I finished up the first draft of my next novelette, currently titled Queen of the May although that might change. The transcription from my handwriting wasn’t too bad, but it has resulted in a lot of errors because my writing has a tendency to get […]

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Device for putting holes in book signatures

January 27, 2012

Whilst watching this video of John Carrera’s project to reprint the Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary, I spotted that he had a nifty little device for putting holes into his book signatures, making sewing large numbers of books much quicker and easier. Does anyone know if it’s possible to buy a jig like this? Is this standard […]

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Four Corners: With the sun on my skin

January 27, 2012

Further to my post from the other day about my lost Four Corners post, recovered through the power of Twitter, I have dug up another of the essays I wrote for them. I had thought I’d written more, but it turns out there were only two posts, so from rom 26 April 2004, here it is […]

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Four Corners: A little piece of history

January 24, 2012

In 2004, I was invited to write for a site called Four Corners. It was one of those blogs that aimed to be an international source of food for thought. Today a friend of mine asked about an old blog post that he remembered about me talking about history, almost as if the country was […]

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The best advice for writers, bar none

January 21, 2012

Nick Mamatas says it better than I ever could: Ten Bits of Advice Writers Should Stop Giving Aspiring Writers.

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To free or not to free, that is the question

January 19, 2012

I was fascinated by this post from Tyler Nichols about his experience providing a freemium Letter from Santa service before Christmas. In short, Tyler had found that few people upgraded from the free version to the paid, and that those who did use the free version were much more likely to send him support queries. […]

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The tragedy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

January 17, 2012

I’m reminded by Simon Goode of the the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a collection of translated poems by Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyám. In 1912, a version of the book was bound by London bookbinder Francis Sangorski, who had a bit of a thing for shiny. Simon summarises: The book took more than two years […]

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