Book Cover Stories

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Now that I have come to terms with the idea to self-publish the novel, I’ve got to make a few decisions. One of the most exciting ones, I feel, has to be deciding what goes on the cover. As I reflected on the cover designs for all my books so far, I can see that all my ideas, rationale and experiences have also evolved.

What does ‘cover’ mean?

I still remember that when I approached my first printer, I told him I needed help to create a ‘cover’. He had no clue what I meant. I had to take out a book from my bag and show him what I wanted help with.

“Oh, you mean cover design,” he said, nodding. “That, my designer can help you with.”

The moment I returned from that meeting, I researched the meaning of these words. I learnt that ‘bookcover’ was a term often used for ‘book cover

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Read This Before Publishing Your First E-Book!

By Rohi Shetty

Most writers are clueless about how to publish their first e-book and where and how?

Here are the definitive answers to the nine top questions about publishing your first e-book.

Q1. Where should you publish your first e-book?

You have four choices:

Your own site E-book retail sites like Amazon, iTunes, Nook, and Kobo. Aggregator sites that allow you to upload and distribute to the e-book retail sites mentioned above and other e-book retailers and libraries. They save you time and effort but take a larger share of the revenue. Other sites like Gumroad, Clickbank, e-junkie, Leanpub, Kickstarter, and Unbound. Q2. Should I publish my e-book on my own site?

If you publish on your own site, you retain full control of your e-book and can get 100% of the revenue. However, if you are a new author with little or no audience, very few of your prospective audience are likely to know

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Editors: what makes them the way they are

By Sreelata Menon
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Are your articles being subjected to unnecessary editorial changes?

Are you beginning to think your writing’s at fault?

Have you felt like committing hara-kiri? Giving it all up? Packing it all in?

Don’t! Hang on! It’s not what you think!

Read on and discover why editors are the way they are, what could possibly make them the way they are and feel better…

A promising theory
I have a theory! It’s a theory no self-righteous editor is going to accept. But it’s one I believe that all writers will lovingly embrace! And that is that most editors are a jealous lot! A lazy bunch! And how have I reached these preposterous conclusions? If you are a writer, you will undoubtedly agree; and if you are an editor, you might well want to dump me and the articles I might send you the next time into the ubiquitous bin that sits next to

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Trials and Tribulations of the Edi-Mission Process

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During the opening monologue of the 2018 Oscars, Jimmy Kimmel spoke about the discrepancy in the payments made to Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams in a movie. The fee for the actress was paltry while the actor received a huge sum of money. They had the same agent and Kimmel said, “”f we can’t trust agents, who can we trust?” This reminded me of what I call the ‘Edi-Mission Process’ which involves interactions with agents, editors and commissioning publishers. Today, I laugh, but there was a time I did nothing but cry.

There are also two reasons why I choose to share these stories with you now. First, is that a subscriber wanted a recommendation for an editor he could work with. Second, I’m ready to venture back into self-publishing ‘the novel’.

Broadly speaking, the editing process can be divided into three parts which are writing and preparing the manuscript for editors,

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The Foolproof Guide to Publish Your First E-book on Amazon

By Rohi Shetty

Once you have done the incredibly difficult task of completing your first book, you need to decide where to publish it. Let us assume that you have decided to save yourself the time, money, energy, and stress of trying to persuade a traditional publisher to publish your book. Instead, you take the first definitive step to name, fame, and gain and publish it yourself. Kudos! Onward.

Since this is your first book and you don’t have much of a fan following yet, other than family and friends (if that), it’s best to rely on Amazon to publish and distribute your book. Amazon is the world’s biggest bookstore and it’s open 24×7 worldwide. More importantly, you can publish your e-book (Kindle book) for free. You can also update your book as many times as you like, again for free.

And

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25 Reasons Why I Prefer E-books to Print Books

By Rohi Shetty

A few years ago, I wanted to read Illusions by Richard Bach. Much to my disappointment, the book was not available in any of the local bookstores. It took me hours to visit every bookstore in town and then browse the entire store in a vain attempt to find the book. Finally, I borrowed it from my friend who had bought a used copy from a pavement seller.

Today if I want to read Illusions, all I have to do is to go online, search for the Kindle book in Amazon and buy it with just a few clicks. I can download it and start reading the book within a few minutes.

So, though I still enjoy reading print books, I prefer to read e-books. E-books have many advantages over print books, both as a reader and as a digital publisher.

A.   Here are some ways e-books score over printed books

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Why I Prefer Print to E-book/Electronic

With the advent of Industry 4.0, there are no limits to the options available for consumers. Is this a good thing, though? Especially for writers and readers? Is there still a need for books, journals, newspapers and magazines? The stories below show that we still need physical reading material to make life worth living.

Disaster, luxury and skills
Here’s what happened when I started writing for the papers. Delighted to see my words in print, I cut that page out and glued it into a scrapbook. As the number of my published articles increased, so did the space in this scrapbook. When I mentioned this to the editor, she told me off and said I should ‘just keep the links and go digital.’

I am glad I didn’t listen to her. Instead, I bought more scrapbooks and kept physical copies of every single one of the 280-odd articles that were published. You

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The Magic Five-Word Formula to Boost Your Writing in 2018

By Rohi Shetty

Two men were chopping wood in the forest. One man worked continuously but the second man rested for a few minutes every hour. At the end of the day, the first man was surprised to see that the other had a much bigger pile of chopped wood.

“How did you manage to chop more wood than me, though you rested every hour?” he asked.

“While I was resting,” replied the other, “I was sharpening my axe.”

That’s why Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said, “Give me six hours to cut a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

In the modern world, we hardly use axes. So what is our most powerful tool?
Think about it for a moment…

When schoolchildren are asked which is the most powerful tool, they gave answers like power drills, rockets, robots, nuclear weapons, internet, computers, supercomputers, and so on. They are all

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Industry 4.Perfection

In the last quarter of 2017, I had to learn something new fast and write about it – Industry 4.0. Wikipedia says that, essentially, ‘it’s the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies’. Yes. At first glance, it all sounds like gobbledygook.

As I worked on the article, though, I began to wonder how this trend would affect the publishing industry. Would we writers and storytellers respond favourably to it? How could we automate the writing process? Could robots write our stories for us? What if they started writing their own stories? What would they say about humans? Ah… the many questions, permutations and combinations.

Let’s see if I can narrow all this down a little. For a start, the term Industry 4.0 refers to the fourth industrial revolution. The steam engine marked the first industrial revolution which had the largest impact on the transportation industry. Then came electricity

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Are You a Writer Without an Email Sequence?

By Rohi Shetty

An email sequence is a series of email marketing messages that you send to your subscribers in a pre-determined order and frequency. An autoresponder could be a single message like a welcome message or a series of messages like a five-part email course on a specific topic.

Your sequence of email messages is sent out automatically one by one depending on when people sign up. Every subscriber receives the same email messages in the same sequence. On the other hand, blog updates or broadcast emails, like this newsletter, are sent at a specific time to the whole list.

Email sequences are also called autoresponder series or follow-up emails. You can use email providers like MailChimp, GetResponse, AWeber, Drip, and ConvertKit to send email sequences. Some examples of email autoresponders are:

Henneke Duistermaat’s Snackable Writing Course My Copyblogger membership

Why every writer should have an email sequence

Once you create an

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