“At times, our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted
the flame within us.”
– Albert Schweitzer

2019 has been a year of growth and renewal for New Shelves. We have expanded our staff and services and Best Seller Builders, our partner company with Daniel Hall and John Rhodes has exploded. We have so much to be grateful for.

When thinking back over the past year, however, what tops our list of things we are thankful for wasn’t the success or the growth. What our team agrees we are most thankful for is our community. From co-workers and fellow industry professionals, to clients who trust us to market their books and those who join us on the New Shelves blog or follow along on social media – we are thankful for you. Your support and contribution to our community has “lighted the flame within us” and inspired passion, creativity and friendships within our business.

We didn’t know how we could properly thank you all for making 2019 an amazing year – so we turned to what we know best: books. As the smallest sign of our gratitude to you for being part of our community, we have lowered the price of The Bestselling Author as far as we could on all platforms – making it free on many sites. (Use this link to find your preferred retailer: http://books2read.com/u/bzvRgL.) This book was written by the Best Seller Builders team to help and support the writing community with a step-by-step plan to building a successful author platform. Our sincerest hope is that The Bestselling Author will be a valuable tool in guiding you to bestseller status. You are a Rock Star and you deserve to shine.

From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU for making 2019 a year worth writing about.

Let me start with a confession: I’m weak. When I learn of a new software solution that promises to save me time and sounds easy to use, I can’t resist taking it for a spin. The industry attempts to dress up consumers like me, by calling us ‘early adopters,’ but I know what they mean. I am and always have been a technology junkie.

I’ll never forget my first dealer. In 1971, Texas Instruments introduced to the public a gadget so outlandish it could add, subtract, multiply AND divide. The hit to my ego from being the first in my neighborhood to own a personal electronic calculator was worth the hefty price of $149, and I still recall the faces of my incredulous colleagues in the Teachers’ Lounge, as they witnessed me effortlessly average my students’ semester grades.

Jumping in early isn’t always pretty. A decade later, I bought and quickly ditched one of IBM’s first personal computers (and its dot matrix printer!) after acknowledging I would not live long enough to learn DOS.

For the bulk of my adult career, I was an ad guy. It was a perfect fit for a tech junkie, because in every shop I worked, the digital toolboxes were arsenals of applications. While I still use Adobe Suite and a few of the other giants for projects that require heavy lifting, for my needs as an indie author, I prefer newer, less bulky applications for their simplicity and ease of use. I’d like to share a few with you here.

Novels aren’t normal documents.

I think it’s a given that most authors use Microsoft Word to compose their manuscripts. I use the application for my novels, too, but not in the way you may think. My manuscripts don’t go near Word until I’ve finished writing them. I’ll explain.

To pen anything other than an email, I’ve always used Word. But in spite of its staggering features, writing my first novel revealed its limitations, and along the way I hit a wall. As my manuscript approached twenty thousand words, navigating the document became cumbersome. At sixty thousand I was spending as much time scrolling as writing, and I grew weary of the inefficiencies of slogging back and forth to search for something I wanted to tweak or move. I’m convinced I could have finished The Dead of Winter in half the time had I known about Scrivener, the program I used for my next three novels.

Scrivener is designed specifically for long writing projects, such as books and screenplays, and its powerful organizational tools make it ideal for authors, no matter their writing style. Whether you fuss with details and structure or forge on ahead, Scrivener lets you write in any order and assemble later. My preference is to follow an outline, and with this program I can set up a three-act structure with twenty-seven chapters in minutes. Before I begin writing, I can sketch out and label the chapters to guide me through my planned story arc and remind me where I am. And, since characters often like to direct the action, Scrivener makes it simple to drag a scene that once worked in Chapter Seven and drop it in Chapter Twelve, where it makes more sense. Like many powerful programs, Scrivener is not easy to use without instruction, but video tutorials are plentiful and free. As of this writing, Scrivener at is still inexpensive at $49. Visit http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview to learn more.

When I’ve completed writing my novel in Scrivener, I export the manuscript to Word for robust editing, which I explain next.

It takes more than a spell checker to strengthen and polish a masterpiece.

I’m not here to dispute the value of a real live editor or proofreader. Instead, I encourage you to check out two reasonably priced editing applications that are easy to use and can make dramatic improvements to your manuscript, whether or not you later choose to send it to a human.

In addition to providing a comprehensive spelling and grammar check, AutoCrit and ProWritingAid scour your text and provide recommendations for strengthening and polishing your writing in over 20 areas, (ProWritingAid offers 25). Both identify repetitive words and phrases and call out overused dialogue tags and pesky adverbs, but they do much more. Each one tackles pacing and momentum by analyzing sentence and paragraph length to help keep you from boring your readers and pinpoints areas where you might be losing them. Both suggest areas where showing might be better than telling. As you might expect, the use of passive voice doesn’t stand a chance against these two.

It’s important to understand that you are still in charge of your work, and you’re not in danger of losing your voice. These programs simple highlight what they see as potential pitfalls. You decide how to use the information.

The brains behind AutoCrit designed their program specifically for fiction, and the analysis compares your work to other published works in your genre. ProWritingAid claims over a million authors, editors and other users, and is not limited to fiction. You have probably encountered the platform in the form of those edit suggestions you can’t avoid when filling out forms online, but don’t hold those annoying intrusions against them. The full program I advocate is enlightening.

At the time of this writing, ProWritingAid costs $50 per year. Autocrit has both an adequate free version, as well as paid premium versions which offer more thorough analyses and online courses.

It’s time for another confession: I use them both.

Help, I’m not a graphic artist!

For many indie authors the nightmare scenario begins like this. The process was daunting, but you’ve just published a book and you’re feeling accomplished, even euphoric. Before you’ve had time to bask in the glory, you learn that no one will see your masterpiece unless you have visibility on social media, and to achieve that presence, you need to run frequent posts and ads. Creating them sounds overwhelming, and then it gets worse. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter need you to upload something called a header for your page. Oh, and each platform requires a different format and size, both for the headers and for the posts. It’s enough to rethink your marketing strategy and ask your family and friends to buy a second or third book.

Fortunately, smart people had the good sense to invent BookBrush and Canva, two applications that help you design high quality ads, social media images and a lot more. You can believe Canva’s ‘Design Anything’ slogan. Need to make a postcard, flyer, poster or brochure? Canva has over 8,000 templates. As the name implies, BookBrush is geared for books and can generate things like 3-D book covers and boxed set images. Though I’ve not counted, BookBrush boasts over a million background images. You can incorporate video in your designs with BookBrush and not with Canva, but both are built for flexibility and allow you to upload your own images and start from scratch, if you choose.

Neither program comes with a sharp learning curve, so creating those headers or posts for specific social media platforms are as easy as selecting them from a drop-down menu. In Canva, once you’re happy with the header you made for one platform, you can convert your design to fit the specs of another platform with one click.

Unless you hire someone to do the work for you, creating ads and posts using either of these tools couldn’t be easier.

Both Canva and BookBrush are free to use with a basic account and are powerful enough to create anything required by social media in limited quantities. Upgraded subscriptions give you extras like increased storage for your work and abilities to upload custom fonts and collaborate with a team. Spoiler alert: I use both.

Alan Gibson, who writes as A. B. Gibson, is a frequent speaker at writers conferences, and is the director of Manuscript to Marketplace, the Writers Conference at Shepherd University. He’s a co-founder of a video chat technology company, OneClick.chat and a film producer. Oh, and still an ad guy.

While I used to suggest 30 day pre-order campaigns to my authors, I no longer suggest a preorder campaign for Amazon, and here’s why:  It used to be that when you pre-ordered with Amazon, they would count all of your orders as sales on the release day.  Your orders stacked up so that on the day it released, they counted all of these orders at once, and you could make bestseller lists.  It was awesome!  Unfortunately, that’s not how it works anymore. 

Now, on Amazon, pre-orders count in the sales numbers as they come in.

If you set your book up for pre-order, and only get a few orders a week, then Amazon’s computer thinks no one wants that book.  It starts dropping down in the pile in the search engines and gets harder to find.  It’s no longer a good strategy for most authors to orchestrate a launch to do the preorder on Amazon. However, there are a few exceptions.

If you know that you can hit about 8,000-10,000 copies sold for preorder, that’s a smart move IF you get them all ordered in 30 days or less.  If you’re doing a blog tour, and you want to get your book up for preorder because the blog tour starts three days before your actual launch date, you can either launch a little bit earlier or you can do a preorder for about three days.  It’s not advisable to do it for a longer period of time, unless you’re trying to do preorders on Ingram because you know that bookstores will order it in advance.

If I decide to put the book up for preorder months in advance anyway, can I just put my book cover up on Amazon and pre-sell my book while I complete it, or does the full book need to be up before the pre-release date?

A lot of people do put their book on pre-sale months and months ahead of time, and it makes you wonder if they’ve really finished it yet.  Most of the time, they haven’t.  If it’s a book published by a big publishing house, sometimes the book has been finished way in advance because they are sending it out for reviews.  The truth is, however, that a lot of people will put a book up on Amazon for pre-sale, and all they’re using is the front cover, especially if it’s an eBook.  They upload the cover, or a working cover, and Amazon doesn’t know what files they’re using.

You can use dummy files, or ARC files, and upload them in place of the manuscript itself.  You just have to make sure to change them out with the correct files before your book goes live. 

But remember, if you want to do this, Amazon is going to think your book is “live” when it comes to sales and if you don’t get regular orders, it’s going to be pushed to the bottom. 

The bottom line is this, it’s not like it used to be.  You used to be able to put your book up on Amazon and work for your preorders.  On your release day, your preorders would hit, and you’d get a big splash.  Amazon caught on to this, and they didn’t like that.  So, it changed its policies.  I’d create a launch week/month campaign for Amazon and hit everyone that way.  Put the book up on a particular date and announce the pub date for 3 days later. Then start marketing!