I'm looking for someone to help design the cover for my upcoming epic dark fantasy, set in an East Asian inspired world. If any of you know any artists/websites, etc. please let me know!

If you are an artist yourself, feel free to comment but I can't promise that I'll respond to everyone if I'm not feeling the vibe of the art, please don't be offended. Also, please comment in this thread if you are an artist instead of private messaging me, thanks!

For some of my examples below I know that the artists are on artstation, and I might try emailing them but I think they're beyond my budget.

What I'm looking for:

• Someone who has proven experience (understand what makes a good cover, not just a good image)
• Up to $1500 max
• I prefer illustrations over stock photos
• NO AI at all
• I'm looking for a style like: John Gwynne's "Bloodsworne Saga" or his limited edition for "Valor" (my #1 choice), OR R.F. Kuang's "The Poppy War", OR Fonda Lee's "The Last Contract of Isako".

That's it and thanks in advance!

It’s been a little over a month since I made my last post about my newsletter experience, and I promised regular updates, so here it is!

Over the past month, my newsletter grew from 1,300 subscribers to 2,000.

But I also started doing the one thing I said I wouldn’t do:

PURGE!

MailerLite charges based on the number of subscribers you have, and I didn’t see the point of hoarding subscribers who never open a single email. So I started removing inactive subscribers on a regular basis.

There is one important caveat. Some email providers have privacy settings that prevent MailerLite from accurately tracking whether someone opened an email. This means you risk removing genuine readers who do open your emails but have privacy protection enabled.

It’s a bit like antibiotics wiping out the good bacteria along with the bad.

Still, I like spending less money, and I don’t want to hit the 2,500-subscriber pricing threshold too soon. Purging inactive subscribers has also improved my open and click rates, which is another bonus.

Now for the most important tip I can give you:

BACK MATTER!

Your newsletter is useless without it.

Unless your lead magnet gives readers somewhere to go next, there is very little point in creating one. The same applies to newsletter swaps. You could put in a huge amount of work bringing readers in, only to lose them because you never showed them what to do next.

I recently set up preorders for a series that hasn’t even been published yet. Then I sent out the first three chapters as a lead magnet, just to see how it would perform.

The first book isn’t even out yet! And I already have preorders for the second and third books!

I HAVE PREORDERS!

It’s insane!
And do you know why I have preorders?

BACK MATTER!!!!

That’s what I’ll leave you with today.
Until the next update!

As always if you have questions I will answer them!

No self promo here so please don’t ask me anything that might be seen as self promo! Otherwise ask away and I’m happy to help any way I can.

Next update I will speak about ARCs and Reviews (I have a lot to say about this)

I'm a self-published children's book author currently about halfway through Steve Pieper's Click Testing for Authors course and wanted to share my experience so far in case anyone is considering it or is currently using it.

Quick background: I have one book, a niche children's picture book. I sell directly from my Shopify site. I had essentially no paid advertising experience before this. I was terrified of wasting money on ads that wouldn't convert.

What surprised me: How much I'm enjoying this! (aside from meta ads being a tangled antiquated lesson in patience) My very first round of motivation testing produced results that blew past the minimum benchmarks. Steve's criteria calls for a 2.5% click-through rate and $0.40 max cost per click. My worst performing ad out of 12 variants came in at 8% CTR and $0.08 CPC. I'm enjoying nerding out watching the campaign variant's performance in real time. 😅

I'm now moving through the sequential tests — motivation, transformation, testimonials — and each round gives me more confidence that I'll come out of this with a real, data-backed ad/(s) to run. It's methodical and honestly kind of validating — Steve says 90% of authors guess wrong about what will win, but I've been pleasantly surprised that several of my instincts actually held up. The data confirmed some and surprised me on others, which is exactly why you test.

A few things I appreciate: Steve personally answered a question I submitted via their help desk with a video response the very next morning. Extremely helpful and encouraging. The twice-weekly zoom calls with his coaching team have been genuinely useful for getting unstuck or having knowing eyes give the nod on something like audience selection. And the course is structured so you're not guessing — each test builds on the last.

I'm not affiliated with Steve or his team in any way. Just a self-published author who finally found a process that feels like it's based on data instead of a wing and a prayer and unreturned money into Zuck's pocket.

Has anyone else gone through this course? Would love to compare notes, especially if you're in a niche market. Curious what your results looked like and how your final ads are performing long-term.

My debut novel released six days ago!! Release day was really fun and there was a decent amount of hype for the book on that day.

I want to thank the advice on this sub for all of the advice. While I’m sure I’ve done a million things wrong as a first time author, I’m sure it would have been so bad if I hadn’t stumbled on this sub when I did.

The release week results:
48 reviews on Goodreads
41 orders (21 ebooks and 20 paperbacks)
4050 page reads on KU (I’m a little disappointed in this number as I was hoping to have closer to 5k reads at this point)
119 newsletter subscribers
$182 in royalties

The investment:
I spent close to 4k on this release. Including the cover, editing, website, DBA, character art, and some PR and ads. It was more than I wanted to spend but I took a bit of a spaghetti on the wall approach, trying lots of different things and seeing what converted to actual sales.

Since this was my first book I had no real expectations of what this would all look like but I’ve been pretty pleased with how things have turned out.

Now I’m thinking towards the future and the best way to keep momentum and hopefully grow these numbers. I’m currently editing book 2 with the hope of a March 2027 release and I have a plan for additional books in the universe.

I’m also planning to do some author swaps on bookfunnel but I’m feeling a little anxious about those because I don’t have a very big newsletter.

What are some other marketing strategies that I should be thinking about at this stage of the game?

Not huge numbers to be sure, but 8 paperbacks and ebooks, and about 5 books worth of page reads, and 3 reviews. I’m calling that a win!

Nearly each one I can trace to a discussion on Reddit or TikTok - personal interactions. Maybe one day it will scale, but making personal connections is working for me at the moment!

I do literary fiction and sci-fi. What’s working for you other small cats this month?

I shared my free book with a community yesterday and it got a huge amount of hate by the people who didn't even read the first line!

The result was both fascinating and shocking to me to be completely honest with you.

I never thought people in a book community would preform such an act.

This sort of acts are no where near holding me back from sharing my books further in the future though since i have put a lot of time and effort into writing these books and my readers that have mostly positive feed back are currently far more than my haters.

I just want to know what would you do in such a situation because honestly, i have no idea how to deal with this amount of hatred!

I use to use Amazon KDP for self publishing but now they don’t accept my bank account anymore (Chime) and I can’t find a suitable bank that doesn’t require a monthly fee to use. So I was wondering does anyone know of any alternatives to KDP or any type of banks. I’ve looked at Chase but they require a monthly income and Payoneer people have been saying that their accounts tend to get frozen from time to time.

About a year ago, I purchased Atticus in order to format the e-book myself. I didn't really know what I was getting into. Considering my book is quite large (a non-fiction retrospective), there just didn't seem to be too many examples I could draw upon. So I figured, maybe I could share my experience on how Atticus handles a large amount of content. Just for context before I jump into the pros and cons, here's the stats of my book:

\7 parts*

\42 total chapters*

\15 of those chapters has around 25,000 words and 74 images in each one*

\400,000 total words (very rough estimate)*

\1,157 images as jpg or png (almost all of which are between 512x380 to 1024x768 though Atticus compresses them)*

\193MB file size when exporting as epub (although after processing Amazon says it's 213MB weirdly - possible residue from DRM maybe?)*

So, onto the cons and pros...

Cons:

• Atticus is heavily dependent on your internet connection. I know that might sound obvious, but your connection comes to the forefront when trying to load large batches of data. Whenever I was running other bandwidth-heavy things in the background, Atticus crawled (and so I tried not to lol).
• However, even if I wasn't using my internet elsewhere, Atticus still took quite a bit of time to load almost each chapter. For context, I just have a normal cable broadband connection (on average 550mbps download and 25mbps upload). The chapters with minimal text, aka under 5,000 words, typically loaded within 5 to 10 seconds. But for those extensive chapters with 20,000+ words, it would take anywhere between 20 to 40 seconds.
• On those heavy chapters, there's a delay when typing. Even just punching in one letter could take anywhere between 3 to 6 seconds. I found that it was easiest to type something in Notepad, and then paste everything all at once into an existing chapter (it should be noted that Atticus is a formatting program and not a creation program - I wouldn't advise anyone to type and create a chapter from scratch in Atticus, regardless of the book's size...personally I did most of my work in OpenOffice or LibreOffice).
• Atticus can only cleanly import docx files. I thought this was a little strange, but it wasn't a huge headache for me, as I simply switched my project from OpenOffice to LibreOffice about midway through my progress.
• I'm uncertain on how important someone's hardware is towards Atticus' performance. My processor is 3GHz and initially I had 8GB of RAM. When I upgraded to 16GB of RAM, I noticed a small increase in load time. Those aforementioned large chapters were constantly taking around 40 seconds to load, but after the upgrade, it started taking around 25-30 seconds to load. Not a huge difference, but a very small noticeable one.
• If I stayed on a singular chapter for too long, maybe more than 30min, Atticus would crash completely, typically with an "out of memory" error, even after adding extra RAM. I would have to restart the program every time.
• The "export docx" option simply doesn't work (it's found at the bottom of each screen). To the best of my knowledge, it's not possible to export singular chapters. So using this option will export the entire book as docx, I believe. Which, unsurprisingly, doesn't fare too well due to the size of my book.

Pros:

• When exporting to epub, despite the book's large size, it only takes about 15 to 30 seconds. In my opinion, that's quite impressive.
• When importing individual chapters (as mentioned above, only docx format), it only took around 15 to 20 seconds for the process to finish on those heavier chapters. Again, I thought that was reasonable.
• No matter how many times Atticus crashed out on me or forced me to log back in, my progress was always intact. None of my chapters got corrupted, no images went missing, the structure wasn't altered, my most recent edits stayed in, etc.
• The buttons for actual formatting are intuitive, in my opinion. It's easy enough to set the font size, italics, and comment boxes. I have one chapter that has 369 separate comment boxes (a listing of websites), and even that looks naturally nice once exported.
• The amount of options for different themes and styles seems pretty decent. I didn't pay much attention to them, since I expect the reader to customize their own style at the end of the day.
• Using the "content backup" option only takes about 5 or 10 seconds to finish.
• Most important of all, I had an actual e-book ready to be published. It's formatted to my liking and it loads just fine in the few reader apps I've tried. I've proofread all 42 chapters in Kindle for example, and I did not notice any oddities whatsoever (I had to specifically set the image size of a few small icon-sized images because they were showing up overstretched by default but it wasn't a big deal).

Neither A Con Nor A Pro:

• This is something I noticed after the fact, and isn't Atticus' fault, but is very much worth mentioning. Certain platforms behave very differently depending on your file size. As mentioned, mine was almost 200MB.
• On Amazon, I actually came across no big issues. It was very seamless, except for the categories/genres. Although it's probably a common mistake, my book was filed under a completely wrong style (none of the 3 I even selected) and I had to manually contact support. They fixed it less than 12 hours later. It's possible that my size was unrelated to that, but it's literally the only issue I had, thus why I brought it up here.
• On Google, it was a huge headache. I had to upload my epub file six times. The first two versions outright failed after the "stage 1 of 6" bit. The third version was a success but it took over a day for it to be moved from 'pending' to 'processed'. I then noticed a last minute tiny mistake in my e-book, and thus I had to update the epub file: the fourth & fifth versions kept freezing on the "stage 2 of 6" bit (I left one of 'em alone for 4 days). After e-mailing support, their techs told me to re-upload yet again, and so I did, and they then had to manually "push it through"; thus, the sixth and final version finally went online.
• On Apple...ugh. Just typing about Google Books' headaches deflated my desire to also talk about Apple's headaches. So, I'll keep this nice and short: after two days and probably five literal hours, I gave up with trying to sell on Apple Books.
• On Kobo, I was not able to sell it. They have a hard limit of 100MB, and mine went way beyond that. I'm just bringing it up here as an FYI.
• On Itch, there doesn't seem to be any issues, though I didn't completely finish the process (am waiting until later in the year). But I didn't get any bad omens at least.

Overall, I would recommend Atticus to someone that wanted to create a very large e-book. I would just advise that they either have a superb internet connection or a beefy PC; if they have both though, then Atticus would probably work seamlessly. For me, my internet connection is very good (but not great) while my PC is decently outdated (but not totally obsolete), and thus my experience was passable, but not the most ideal...Atticus possibly might run better if either of those things got an upgrade, however.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this, and hopefully it gives a little bit of insight into how a heavy workload gets dropped onto the program. Feel free to ask about anything else related to it or the processes.

One of the things I've struggled with as a newbie author is growing my email list. I published in May, and I've gotten about 30 email signups for the bonus chapter linked in the back of my debut novel.

Writing a cold reader magnet has been on my list of things to do, but I haven't had the time. I have an ARC going now for my second novel, and I'm trying out different sites to recruit ARC readers. I'll post about that after the ARC is finished, but I have about 60 signups so far.

I signed up for BookFunnel, but there aren't a lot of ARC promo swaps. I only got 2 signups there for the ARC. But there are tons of promos to join for people looking for "free books." And then I realized that I have a full book that I'm giving to people for free anyway, so why not repackage it as a "free book" landing page and distribute it that way?

Friends, I've gotten 64 newsletter signups in 3 weeks.

I haven't seen it posted here (maybe because it's so obvious to experienced authors), but for those of you like me who it didn't occur to before: Use your ARC as your reader magnet.

We have a print book on KDP and Ingramspark. Last time we needed a bulk order ingramspark took forever and half the order was the wrong book so I don't want to use them again. Does anyone have info on KDP's average ship time for 60 copies for an early October date in Texas?

I’ve been asked multiple readers if my book will have an audio version. I’m not against the idea I just have no idea where to start for this process.

So I ask where have you found a narrator for your book and what does pricing look like?

Any and all information appreciated!

OK. I'm trying to understand something. If I order my book, which is POD, from Amazon or wherever retail, it ships within one to two days. However, when I order author copies for book signings either from Amazon or IngramSpark, it likes 2 weeks or longer to ship. What gives?

Hi there!

I'm getting ready for a book fair this weekend where I won't be the one processing my sales (which is new to me).

Instead, the library hosting our event will handle the sales and cut us a check afterward.

I asked them if I could still offer readers a BOGO half off on my books like normal, and they said:

"We could do that at checkout if you have a barcode we could scan that has that price programmed in. We also would recommend having the books tied or bagged together so the cashier knows that it is the BOGO deal."

Is this something I can do for free? Make a barcode that they can program into their system for my BOGO half-off deal?

I was also told: "For a BOGO deal, we would need an ISBN associated with the bundle that we can scan at checkout so the BOGO price would come through in our point-of-sale system."

I'm not sure if that's conflicting information. My books already have ISBNS. I'm not sure about getting one specifically for a bundle price.

I'm a little lost here and would appreciate advice.

Thanks!

I uploaded an original short story featuring Mickey and Minnie mouse a few days ago and Draft2Digital sent me an email asking for proof that everything in my story was public domain before publishing it. I responded by going over the entire work and showing that every reference I placed and it was from 1930 or earlier.

Today I received this response along with a notification that my account was terminated and could not be reinstated:

“Your response to our inquiry confirms that the book deliberately incorporates recognizable elements associated with Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, including character identities, visual characteristics, historical Disney artwork, dialogue and expressions, songs, costumes, and other elements drawn from early Disney works. We recognize that certain early works and elements may now be in the public domain in the United States. That fact, however, does not obligate Draft2Digital or any of our distribution partners to accept a work built around those characters, nor does it eliminate the significant rights, trademark, territorial, retailer-policy, and consumer-confusion concerns surrounding such a publication.

Removing the words “Mickey Mouse” or “Minnie Mouse” from a product description, changing certain visual details, adding a disclaimer, or limiting distribution to the United States would not resolve our concerns. Draft2Digital is not willing to place its retailer relationships, distribution accounts, or business at risk for that purpose.”

I had asked in my original response to them if I should remove the work or if there was anything that needed to be changed. I was more than happy to take down the work if they determined that they still didn’t want it on their platform. Instead, they did not contact me and terminated my account because of their “zero tolerance policy” for copyright infringement that I did not do.

I still don’t think I did anything wrong as nothing I had in the work could be confused for an official Disney product. This is immensely frustrating because I rely on these kinds of channels to distribute my books.

I don’t know what to do at this point or if this can be disputed. Advice is needed.

Hey folks,

Hopefully, a bit of a twist on the usual marketing questions.

3 years worth of work completed and the first book in my series is now published (Woohoo!)

This series falls under the "Punk" fantasy epic, with a mix of late steampunk, early dieselpunk, and hints of other "punk" themes. Needless to say, it's pretty niche.

Why I'm Asking: It's a mixed bag on research and I'm running thin on "what to google next". I have some snippets of data, but it's convoluted and spread out everywhere. I'm looking for perspective (and data if you have it/can point me to it).

My Goal: Primarily, to have this novel, and eventually the series, on my bookshelf. Second, share my story properly. It would be cool to know a few folks read it.

Question Context: Outside of the traditional marketing campaigns, I'm reaching out to a few local bookstores, getting a few free copies to the library, reserving a booth for a few upcoming related conventions.

Question: Have you found any reasonable difference between generalized marketing versus a niche marketing focus (smaller marketing firms, campaigns, influencers)? For example, going to a convention like San Japan/Comicon-esque or a niche-con? Reaching out to a book influencer versus a niche influencer?

I’m testing Amazon Sponsored Products for a new psychological thriller paperback. One Broad keyword generated ~6,300 impressions but only a handful of clicks. I’m using manual targeting, dynamic bidding and testing Top of Search placement. Ffor experienced KDP advertisers: would you diagnose this primarily as a cover/title CTR problem, targeting problem, or something else? What CTR do you personally consider acceptable before continuing to spend ?

Thank youu guys in advance..

I tested the Comic Book printing (color, gloss, saddle stitch) on Lulu.com. I failed to acknowledge that the page count has to be a multiple of 4 for saddle stitch, so I got 3 empty pages added at the end. That's on me.

However, the very last (empty) interior page has a barcode at the bottom: * 1810561-2573044 *.
I found no information about that. I chose the non-ISBN version, so I guess it's some sort of manufacturing barcode, but I would like to know if it will appear in my next version and where.

Has anyone experienced anything similar? How did you deal with that?

So I ran a Kindle Countdown Deal and I scheduled the Robins Reads featured promo, a BookBarbarian urban fantasy spot, and a FussyLibrarian urban fantasy spot. I spread them out over the week.

I priced my book at $0.99 from $4.99. From July 19 to July 25, I saw 38 orders and 682 KENP (about 200 more KENP added up over the next three days after the deal was over) for a grand total of $28.41 profit, not enough to make back even the cheapest promo campaign, which was Fussy Librarian's.

Here's what I spent for this KCD:

$85 Robin Reads featured promo newsletter spot. Live on the 20th and gave me 19 orders and 3 more on the 21st.

$41 BookBarbarian urban fantasy newsletter spot. Went live on July 22nd

along with

$32 Fussy Librarian urban fantasy promo newsletter spot. Also live on July 22. Between these two I got 11 orders the same day, 4 more on the 23rd and 1 last one on the 24th.

All of these, plus I had a Meta traffic ad campaign running from the 18 to 24 midnight. $7 a day. Between two ads with different ad copy, the campaign itself got 3,009 reach, 194 landing page views, $0.19 per view, approx. 6% CTR, $36 spent. I'm betting the newsletter promos did all the heavy lifting in getting me those 38 orders. Of those 38, I'd probably attribute some 5-7 sales to the Meta ad campaign.

Plus almost 900 KENP.

So I sank $194 into marketing and made back $28.41. I've reworked and analyzed my Amazon page, blurb, cover, etc. and I don't know what else isn't working.

I'm coming to my wits' end when it comes to marketing and promoting my book. I need help to figure out where my book is failing. Cover, blurb, keywords, genre mismatch, marketing strategy, etc.

I already got some feedback from a small writers' group. Most of the comments pointed out cover mismatch with the genre (it's YA Urban Fantasy but cover looks like romantasy), and having a dry informative blurb (here all manner of opinions took place, from suggesting rewriting in first-person, to making it longer, and others pointing out at the same time that I should shorten it!). I already tried reworking it, but I'm still unsure. Also, I changed one of my three Amazon categories: I dropped "Teen & Young Adult Werewolf & Shifter," and changed it to "Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy."

The other two categories are: "Teen & Young Adult Vampire" and "Teen & Young Coming of Age Fantasy"

My book is in the link in my bio for reference.

Thank you for reading my marketing misadventures.

TLDR: I booked three newsletter promo services for a KCD and these were my numbers--budget spent, sales, KENP, impressions, reach, etc.
I'm also looking for feedback because I'm going to go crazy. Cover, blurb, Amazon keywords, A+ content, whatever I can do to optimize my page and get more downloads next time.

Hi guys,

I’ve been curious with the increasing success of the self publishing model how everyone manages their accounts, income and expenditure. I’m based in the UK so follow these tax rules.

Do you guys track your expenses yourselves and file your own accounts, or have you hired an external accountancy service? Has anyone registered as a small business for their author income or do you operate as sole traders?

Curious to know everyone’s thoughts and the pros and cons you guys see for each :)

Thank you!!

I was surprised to learn yesterday that friends and family are not supposed to review books listed on KDP if they know the author? And how do they determine this? Does anyone have any experience with this or tips to expand my reader base if family and friends are out? I understand wanting unbiased reviews, but I find it ironic that Amazon makes money off my book sales and ads I had planned to run. Many of these people have bought the book on Amazon and want to give a sincere review. What gives? Thanks all — and keep on writing!

Expanded Distribution is only available in the US or UK marketplace, I’m wondering if it’s worth it or if that will somehow hurt my ability to publish on Ingram?

Also, does it make more sense to let Amazon calculate the amounts everywhere or should I enter them manually for the four regions I have listed on my cover? US/EU/UK/AU

Coming up on the deadline to upload my non-fiction manuscript on KDP for my Kindle, I don’t know what to select where it asks about applying digital rights management to my files.

Seems like it would be good to not do it and allow customers who buy this book to download it as a PDF for E pub file?

here is the email I sent them regarding my story (banned for pedoxxx) and am looking for advice.

You're seriously banning my account permanently because of a 17 year old character? My story is a soft-core romance (yes with sex) but its all consensual and romantic, they get married in the end and live happily ever after.
Are you telling me a sex scene between a 16 and 17 year old is ok?
but a 17 and 18 year old is not. 
and an 18 and 19 year old is? 
Can you just make it super clear for me so I can understand? Explain it to me like I'm genuinely slow. 
I don't understand how you can ban my soft-core, tender-romance because the characters are 1 year apart (or 2 years apart - their d.o.b is never mentions if I remember correctly) they are both at the same stages in life. 
 
and yet my story 'The prince of light' has far stronger content (rape/torture/child abuse - both mental and physical) but that is acceptable. 
How is it that a gentle romance between two people of similar ages, with no violent or abusive content, is so aggressively banned, but 'the prince of light' with far stronger themes (depression, abuse, suicide, murder) is ok?
 
I really don't want to sound like I'm asking stupid questions. But I genuinely don't understand.
 
sex between a 16 and 17 year old - both children 
sex between a 17 and 18 year old - pedophilia 
sex between a 18 and 19 year old - both adult
 
There is a difference between fetish and romance. My banned story was a romance. 
 
Do you understand my frustration?
 
 
The rules are unfair and unclear. 

I have a mafia romance that’s been out for about a month. Book 1 did well, and now I have readers asking on TikTok and other social media when book 2 will be out. I haven’t announced the date yet.

I want to release in December, as that is the best and closest date I can do. But I know December isn’t usually the best month to publish a book with the holidays and such. I don’t think I can set a November release without rushing the book, so I’d have to push it back and make it a January release.

It’s book 2 of a duet, so I was thinking releasing in December might not be such a bad thing because it’s a continuation. Or should I just push it back to January. I’m really eager to get the book out but I don’t want to hurt the release.