How-To

I recently had a pretty nasty website crash, and I'm only just tech-literate enough to know how to install drupal and wordpress under my own domain name. The end result was that I learned much more about databases than I ever wanted to (which, really, is actually not all that much). As a result of all the technical drama though, I seriously considered migrating my books to one of the developing weblit platforms.

So Guts and Sass has been on its feet for a couple of months now, and now that I've got the website doing mostly everything I want it to I'd like to ask for some outside perspective on design.

I have one main concern, that related but pertinent non-story content distracts from the story content (such as in the sidebars and between the header image and the posts). I want to draw focus to the story, but there's little features or announcements I want to be easily available to readers. And they tend to clutter.

Greetings all,

I'm looking at starting the audiobook version of Guts and Sass, and I was wondering if anyone had any experience/opinions about podcast distributors. The only one I'm vaguely familiar with is Podomatic. I also plan to put the audio files up for direct download on my site, but it would be great to have it in more places. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

Hey, guys,

For those of you that are not yourselves artists of the beautiful art, when you're making e-book or print-book covers, how do you find artists for/finance your artworks? Do you pay out of pocket and hope the book makes back the money? MeiLin, I know you did presales for the Lovers and Beloveds book; is that what you do for all of them?

Any artists you lovelovelove and want to recommend?

~Lyn

Eseme has been guest-blogging in my journal a series on Getting Your Self-Published Book into a Library.

The posts can be found here:

Intro

Part One, How Libraries Buy Books

Part Two, Donating Your Book to a Library

Part Three, Ebooks in Libraries

Hi,

Recent thread re: AdWords leads me to ask these related but divergent questions:

1) How much traffic does a site need to draw before seeing meaningful ad revenue from, say, Google AdSense?

2) Are there other ad networks that are equally or more productive?

Thanks,

LRP

Anybody have any experience with Google Adwords? My friend keeps getting these $x.00 in free advertising cards and doesn't want them. I'm specifically wondering if anyone knows of anything nefarious (Google scares me. I'll be reading the fine print).

Thanks!

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a great print-to-ebook conversion service?

Any advise on formats?

Many thanks,

LRP

Hello,

I'm interested in possibly serializing one of my novels. I note that a number of contributors to this forum are doing so successfully.

Three questions:

1) How do you attract readers to your site?
2) What techniques do you use to convert your readers to print or e-book sales?
3) Is this a viable way to generate income from your writing?

Many thanks,

LRP

All ye Drupal6-users...

For those of you who have (or want) a block with support options after your updates (donate, vote, rate, review, etc) I just found a really clear and simple tutorial for putting blocks above the comments section. This way the 'please support the author' info is immediately after the content, and doesn't get lost below the comment form or comments. I saw MeiLin had her site set up that way, and so I was digging around for a solution.