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  • Nearly Ready for the Winter Season

    The winter season is nearly here, which means this week I’m putting the final touches on getting ready for Heavy Broadcast Mode, which starts November 1. Believe it or not, a lot of planning and organizing goes into making books and comics for public consumption. It’s not just me writing a story and sending it out all willy nilly. Every creator works their own way, but on my end, I need to have certain mechanisms in place so I can publish a story and get it into your hands properly. This ranges from the actual publishing machine itself to the promotion side of it to even making sure I have copies here at the Central for you. Then add on the need to make and have all those systems in place all the while keeping a roof over my head and, well, yeah. Busy times.

    This isn’t over-complicating it. It’s just planning things out so, once all is up and running, I have the greatest resource of all when it comes to creating stories and sharing them: Time.

    Everything takes time. Some things take a mere minute, other things take hours or days, and the only way to have that time is do all that I’ve been doing behind the scenes here at the Central. (Speaking of behind the scenes, a new behind-the-scenes entry is going up on my Patreon this Friday. Join the journey to check it out.)

    To find out more of what it takes to keep the creative machine running, please join my free weekly newsletter, The Canister X Transmission. It’s a letter from me to you week after week. It’s a chance for all subscribers to have a common meeting point each week to take a load off, escape the stress of the world, have a read (maybe even a laugh), and just breathe after busting butt all week. It’s also a chance to bring you up to speed on all that’s happened here at the Central, things not always covered on this blog. Pull up a chair. We always have room for one more.


  • Canister X Book Review #6: 1001 Ways to Market Your Books: For Authors and Publishers, 5th Edition by John Kremer

    1001 Ways to Market Your Books by John Kremer

    1001 Ways to Market Your Books: For Authors and Publishers, 5th Edition
    by John Kremer

    5 out of 5

    This review is for the fifth edition of this book, though I suspect that the fifth and sixth editions are virtually the same save for a bit of info here or there.

    Writing a book is easy. Getting it out there is hard. It’s a challenge for both the big, small and self-publisher alike. 10% of your time and energy goes into creating your masterpiece, 90% goes into bringing it to the masses.

    In 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, author and publisher John Kremer walks you through step-by-step 1001 effective methods to market your book.

    This doesn’t read like a manual or some textbook. Kremer’s professional yet personable writing style keeps you interested and forces you to pay attention to everything he has to say.

    This book is so dense that you can’t just read it once then call it good. It’s a resource, which means it’s meant to be visited each time you publish a book so you can pull out some of the 1001 marketing methods offered.

    Don’t try doing all 1001 things suggested in this book all for one title. It won’t work. Kremer even says so in the opening pages. The idea is to cater to your particular book’s needs and find the marketing methods that work for that specific title.

    Kremer backs up his info with industry stats, gives examples of what’s worked for some publishers and what’s failed for others.

    Take notes while you read it. Even jot down in separate columns on a loose sheet of paper what ideas would work for the titles in your company’s catalogue and mark down the page number in Kremer’s book for each.

    This is a book every serious publisher needs to have on their shelf. More importantly, it’s a book they need to use.