Being an author isn’t just about writing anymore. Authors — both independently and traditionally published — have to wear a lot of hats: writer, marketer, administrator, content creator, personnel manager, and operations manager, among others. With so many roles to juggle, how do they balance the time it takes to actually write books with the business of reaching readers? What do writers do on a daily and weekly basis?

BookBub surveyed more than 500 authors in the BookBub audience to ask about how they actually spend their time — see what they had to say.

The post What Does a Writer Actually Do? BookBub Surveyed 500+ Authors appeared first on ePubGuru.com.

Your author newsletter is a crucial tool for building a strong, direct connection with readers, even before your first book is out. But it’s a good idea to think strategically about encouraging readers to sign up. When we get so many emails already, many of us ask ourselves: What’s in it for me?

EDITORIAL NOTE: AWeber‘s Subscriber Automations help you automate subscription incentives that are offered every time someone clicks into one of your ads or lead generators. Usually this takes the form of a digital freebie such as a mind map image or short ebook in PDF. Upload the freebie to aWeber, link to it in your subscription automation and the automation takes over once you activate it, running 24/7. Here’s an example. At this landing page, you can either just Register on the website for WordPress notifications of new blog posts, etc., or you can Subscribe via aWeber to the newsletter and for access to the freebie. Even if you just Register, you can still change your mind at the last minute and check the box to also Subscribe.

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The post 22 Ways to Grow Your Author Email List — BookBub appeared first on ePubGuru.com.

If you’ve used Google or other search engines lately, you’ve probably noticed that the results, and the way books and authors appear in them, are changing. Searches no longer return just a long list of links — they include rich data, FAQs, AI summaries, and other new answer formats.

These changes are both a challenge and an opportunity — authors who adapt and earn placement in the new, richer results stand to sell more books and grow their audience. Meanwhile, authors who don’t adjust could see declines in their search-driven traffic and sales.

What do you need to do to make sure you benefit from these changes?

This article aims to answer that question by looking at the key ways search is changing, and the steps you can take to prepare.

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The post Search Is Changing. Here’s How Authors Can Benefit — BookBub appeared first on ePubGuru.com.

Squirrels don’t talk much but have a lot to teach us about protecting our data. Their compulsive scatter hoarding behaviors don’t seem to accomplish much because they don’t, really. Their value is in what they prevent. Just as no squirrel ever went hungry for lack of midwinter snacks, so no one who keeps media discipline need ever sit alone with a blank stare for having lost all their data.

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Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have developed rapidly in the last few years, and now represent one of the most controversial topics in the publishing world. We regularly survey our partners to understand how they’re using different platforms and technology and to share those insights with our audience, and we recently did the same for AI. We heard from over 1,200 authors who told us how they’re currently thinking about AI in relation to their work.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Most critics of AI, including creator platforms who are taking steps to suppress the use of AI, are responding to the emotional backlash without having taken it upon themselves to consider the various uses of AI.

• Many unscrupulous creators use AI to deceive their audience.
• This can take the form of deepfake political news.
• Others use AI to generate fictional stories as though they were true, such as short-form interspecies animal stories, whose conventional counterparts have attracted more than their share of views and likes. Many of these conventional stories are either true or they are untrue. We are given only the word of the storyteller to suggest they are true. The use of AI at the present state of the art to tell these stories only makes it obvious to most that they are untrue.

• Generative AI is also used, on the other hand, by storytellers of fiction or nonfiction who would rather not spend a small fortune on paid artistry services to illustrate their stories.
• This includes me, for example, at GoYrOwnWay.com in my use of generative AI to illustrate historical accounts such as Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, better known as Plato’s Atlantis, which unfortunately did not come down to the modern era with original illustrations.
• Many, many other nonfiction creators use generative AI occasionally to dress up their narratives with engaging illustrations or animations. In general, there is no suggestion nor reason to believe that these uses of AI are deceptive. This includes illustrations in eBooks, such as those in the second edition of Back Up Your Data!, soon to be available on this site.

Critics and creator platforms, however, riding the momentum of the emotional backlash against AI and unknowingly captured by the transparent groupthink bubble that surrounds it, continue to disparage and restrict its use without considering its perfectly legitimate uses.

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The post How Authors are Thinking About AI (Survey of 1,200+ Authors) — BookBub appeared first on ePubGuru.com.

A large, engaged email list is a valuable asset for any author. It’s an audience of readers that you control — unlike audiences you might be able to reach on social platforms or retailers. And it can be deployed any way you want: to grow reviews for a new release, to drive sales of your backlist books, to help out an author friend, and more. The beauty of your email list is that you decide.

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The post 6 Types of Reader Magnets to Attract New Email Subscribers — BookBub appeared first on ePubGuru.com.

Book awards are not only a wonderful honor for an author or publisher, but for self-published and traditionally published books alike, they can also stir up media attention, influence reviewers, and support promotional efforts. Below, we’ve compiled a list of well-regarded book awards that authors and publishers should know about (and can submit to!) — but first, let’s talk data.

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The post 32 Book Awards You Should Know About (Traditional & Self-Pub!) — BookBub appeared first on ePubGuru.com.

Display advertising can be an incredibly effective way to reach new readers and sell more books. But you only have a couple of seconds once a reader sees your ad to capture their attention — which is why your ad needs a compelling hook that will catch their eye and get them to click.

We’ve gathered 14 ideas for hooks you can use in your ad images and examples from advertisers who used them well — which of these hooks can you use in your own ads?

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The post 14 Creative Hooks That Drive More Ad Clicks — BookBub appeared first on ePubGuru.com.

EDITORIAL NOTES

This BookBub article is a round-about advertisement for their author-centric website builder tool Author Websites. As exemplified by the one I built at author.ePubGuru.com (linked at the bottom of my BookShelf page), this tool makes building an author website a breeze, regardless of your experience. While Author Websites really does work well on both desktop and mobile devices, the same is true for a typical WordPress site, as exemplified by my main site here at ePubGuru.com.

The main advantage of WordPress is in its expansibility and sophistication, and in the universality of WordPress as a website builder, around which a universe of themes, plugins and support infrastructure have grown over many years.

The main advantage of Author Websites is how smart it is about finding your published titles online, and on the consistent manner in which it helps you build up the ecosystem surrounding each title, such as where to find the same title in different formats and on different digital publishing platforms.

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The post 13 Author Websites That Look Great on Mobile Devices — BookBub appeared first on ePubGuru.com.

A well-optimized author website is an important marketing tool that provides readers, publishing professionals, and the media vital information about you and your books, in a space that you own and control. But designing a good website can be overwhelming — and on top of writing and other marketing activities, remembering to update a website regularly can seem like a chore.

When you pick a platform to host and design your author website, make sure it’s intuitive and easy to update, optimized for mobile devices, and supports the content and features you need.

So what are the most important elements that every author website should include?

• Information about your books
• Example on this site
• Your author bio
• Example on this site
• A custom domain
• Root domain of this site
• Author Websites* subdomain of this site
• A way to build your mailing list
• WordPress registration on this site
• aWeber integration
• A way to get in touch with you
• Example on this site

*Author Websites by BookBub includes SSL and email marketing integration.

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