Summary: Before you start reading, I (Johnny) would like to let you know that my brand-spankin' new book Fat Vampire 4 is available now and will be free on Amazon on March 14-15. Go here to check out Fat Vampire 4. (Side note - the first three Fat Vampire books are available in a buy-2-get-1 bundle here.) -- This episode was our attempt to get to a bunch of little odds and ends that we've been wanting to mention but that don't warrant an entire show on their own. We also wanted to answer your listener questions. We got to most of them. Yay, us! This shit takes time Sean and I started off by recapping our numbers for the Unicorn Western series (check out our handy and inexpensive UW three-pack!) and spent some time underscoring the idea that this brand-new series is not raking in the bucks yet. One of the most important things you can do for your publishing career is to be patient and give your books time on the market to find an audience. Gareth asked about using and selling stock photography Dave's wet dream, Gareth from England, said that he was interested in selling his photographs for authors to use and also kind of asked about where one would buy stock photography. We recommended Shutterstock for both. Bathtub Girl asked about selling a cookbook -- publish, blog, or what? We thought that Bathtub Girl's idea to self-publish a photography-rich cookbook sounded fraught with peril and difficult to pull off due mainly to issues having to do with the photos themselves and the nature of selling cookbooks, but saw some promise in the idea of blogging as a method of promotion and becoming known as a Cookbook Bathtub Girl. An anonymous caller asked about knowing how big her sub-niche is Because Anonymous Girl says she's writing in a specific sub-niche of romance/erotica, Dave felt the need to declare publicly that he thinks that werewolf erotica is just for people who want to fuck animals in such a way that indicated that it had been on his mind a LOT lately. We then actually answered the question about determining the size or popularity of a niche. Seemingly. Kirk asked about outlining and story beats Sean elaborated some here on the "beating" process he talked about in our earlier episode on outlining and story structure. So we talked about that a lot. Dave said that he loves Scrapple Dave pretended that he was talking about this and not this, but I think we know what the real score is. Suffice to say that it's a cool visual organizational tool for writers. Steve asked about costs for building and running a website Our recommendations for writers' websites are these: FOR THE DIY'er: You can set up and run a site for less than $10 a month for the site and under $20 a month for the mailing list. Here are links showing you how to handle the website setup and installation and how to set up and use a mailing list, including our recommendations on service providers. FOR SOMEONE WHO JUST WANTS IT HANDLED: Sean recommended outstandingSETUP, which will do it all for you. Then, to close out the show, I railed a bit more about how the changes in free and KDP Select are really starting to piss me off. To view the video version of this episode, go to: Self Publishing Podcast #46 - Q&A, Progress, and the Catch-Up Show
