Following: A Marketing Guide To Author Platform

By
Indie writer David Gaughran published the ebook Following: A Marketing Guide To Author Platform. It’s a free bonus you can download by subscribing to David’s weekly book marketing newsletter.

David Gaughran’s Following ebook in Google Play Books on a Pixel 2 XL phone
David Gaughran’s Following ebook in Google Play Books on my Pixel 2 XL phone.

The book brings clarity on the confusing issue of building an author platform writers and authors face, especially when going indie and self-publishing. Its greatest value is a concise and clear definition of what an author platform is and what it's supposed to do, along with a prioritized roadmap.

Although you’ll find practical advice in Following, the book comes with an online resource section David keeps up to date with how-tos, step-by-step guides, videos, lists of service providers, and more.

David presents a framework grounded on two pillars, an author website and a newsletter. You can add other activities and online presences modularly on top of those as your time and resources allow.

David recommends setting up an author website with self-hosted WordPress. I disagree.

WordPress is an outstanding, infinitely customizable tool with limitless learning resources and supported by a vast community. But there's a compelling reason to prefer hosted platforms or website builders like Squarespace and Wix over self-hosted WordPress, especially for non tech savvy users.

With website builders you get a team of experienced engineers working for you 24/7 to fix technical issues or vulnerabilities and enforce security. While you sleep. You'll realize how valuable this is when — not if — your self-hosted WordPress installation is compromised and you must fix the mess on your own. Maybe deep at night while you're on vacation and have limited Internet connectivity.

David makes available other free ebooks for authors, including a guide to the basics of self-publishing.

Popular posts from this blog

Using a Bluetooth Keyboard on Android

By
Image
Two years ago I bought a cheap Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon.it. At €14, it was mostly an impulse buy for exploring mobile typing on the go and in similar settings , such as workstations with reduced desk space. My FREALL 7INKEYBD-BK Bluetooth keyboard. I initially used the keyboard with the Android tablet and smartphone I had, a 7” Lenovo Tab E7 and a Pixel 2 XL. I later repurposed the keyboard for the devices I replaced those with, a Lenovo Tab M8 HD 8” tablet and a Pixel 4 XL smartphone. Despite the simplicity of operation, it took me some trial and error to figure out how to pair the keyboard with an Android device and what keystrokes insert the characters I need, such as accented letters when writing in Italian. Moreover, I realized I never blogged about my experience with the unit. So I’m posting these notes in case you come across the same or similar keyboards. The keyboard The keyboard is a cheap, compact, plastic chiclet unit that comes with a small foldable stand for a ta
Read more

Reading PDF Ebooks with Google Play Books

By
Image
Large tablets and desktop screens are the best for reading PDF ebooks and files. However, in my experience, using a medium-size Android tablet and turning on two options of the Google Play Books reading settings provides an acceptable experience . Under these conditions, Google Play Books works better with PDFs than Kindle for Android. The reading options for PDF ebooks of the Google Play Books Android app. This setup is helping me read more PDF ebooks, unlike with my previous tablet, a 7” Lenovo Tab E7. On its small screen, the text of nearly all PDF ebooks and files was still too small no matter what reading options I set. Landscape mode helped little. Let’s see why PDFs require specific reading tools, what my setup is, and how I read PDFs. Reflowable vs fixed-layout ebooks With reflowable ebook file formats, such as ePub and Mobi, reading apps rearrange the text and other content to fit any screen size, much like web browsers do with HTML pages. Text fills the viewing area with a co
Read more

Lenovo Tab M8 HD Review

By
Image
I bought a Lenovo Tab M8 HD , an 8” Android tablet. It comes with a MediaTek Helio A22 SoC, an IPS panel, 2 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of storage. I ordered the device from Lenovo’s Italian online store for €134. In this post I’ll share my early impressions on the device. The packaging box of the Lenovo Tab M8 HD tablet. Motivation The Lenovo Tab M8 HD replaces the Lenovo Tab E7 7” tablet I bought almost a year and a half earlier. After enjoying the Google Nexus 7 2012 and 2013 tablets I left Android slates for several years. My return to tablets with the November 2019 purchase of the cheap Lenovo Tab E7 was a sort of impulse buy. I wanted an affordable Android slate small enough to be compact but with a large enough screen to help productivity . I also figured it would double as an ebook reading device and let me explore the Android ecosystem. The Tab E7 was nice but limited. The screen didn’t have good touch sensitivity, performance was poor, there was a lot of lag, and the screen was no
Read more