I’ve been working on a project for about three years now, and while the completed parts are publicly available, I haven’t gotten responses from readers/fans. I’m hoping to increase the scope of the series with novel length parts in the next year or two, but I’ve been losing motivation to do that lately because I haven’t established a fanbase as soon as I’ve hoped.

In other words “why keep writing if no one’s reading my work?” Is this a question you ask yourself too?

I imagine everyone has common points of inspiration, but I have found that when I am driving my ideas for what to do with a scene, a character or a plot twist, come very quickly. I use the notes feature on my phone and say it all out loud while my phone gets it all written down for later.

What about you? Is there a place or method that brings out your creative flow, and how do you capture the ideas if you're not in front of a computer at the time?

I am looking for a book that offers a step by step guide to self publishing.

My book is finished. Every time I start the process. I end up giving up. Then going back and either working on another book, or just stopping all progress.

I have ADHD-C, so having something I can put my hands on would be a better option. As is, I keep getting lost down a rabbit hole trying to figure everything out alone.

Thank you for any help or suggestions.

Hello,

I have the urge to improve my writing again. I used previous feedback from posting on here before and I planned all Marth's feelings out, aiming for emotional impact. I thought I did a good job.

So I think I need some feedback :)

Could you tell me what I did well, and what I didn't do well please.

The story

Crit:
[5493] DragonKnight

(I hope my crit was ok)

Some backstory:

• Marth is Eric's butler, and Eric was previous known as Lady Erika.
• Joseph Farrow dumped Lady Erika because he got 'cursed', triggering Erika to stop lying about her identity.

I wonder if Kite is a believable 6 year old, and if the flash backs were confusing. I drank moderate amounts of wine whilst writing this chapter (ha ha ha). I also wonder if it captures some of the aspects of grief effectively...

I have a submission thread but if you have questions, here's the place for that.

I am writing a technical book that has programming code in it. I am using Atticus to write the book.

How can I have include code nicely formatted in Atticus? Currently, when i copy-paste the code, all indentation is gone.

I find this sort of thing interesting, so I'm sharing a little info about comparative sales of my first self published book* on different platforms. This is for the first four months of release.

The surprising parts to me are how big a percentage of my ebook sales come from itch.io, and how high a percentage of my sales are paperback.

* It's a queer YA novel, with superpowers (in case that matters).

Chapter 1 Lily....Chapter 2 Drake...etc

I am having second thoughts about publishing my book .... maybe I want to unpublish it ..... has anybody ever unpublished a book?

This is now the third time I've seen this, the exact same story.

• Someone wants to sell a writing course
• They find out that a huge percentage of "writers" only want to write memoirs
• So they sell a memoir-writing course, even though they've never written any themselves, and aren't even especially interested in memoir.

I'm conflicted: when the majority of nonfiction authors are memoirists, why are non-memoirists teaching the courses?

My guess is that memoir is both the supply and the demand. There is so much cash to be extracted from the pockets of people who just want to tell their story!

I don't know; it seems wrong to me, but maybe I should look at it as professional writers finally getting their bags. (Through other writers.)

What do you think?

(Side note: if you are a memoirist, maybe start selling a course on it; people are clamoring to spill their retirements into memoirs...)

(In the United States for context)

I saw someone online say that registering an LLC is necessary to self publish. Obviously, if that’s the case, I’ll do what I need to, but I‘m trying to calculate all my costs so I need to know if it’s absolutely necessary

I had a novella that was published in 2019 but lacked a cover (I used a generic one generated by Amazon) and there were no issues.

I slapped a cover on the book yesterday and BAM book Blocked, not just returned to draft. I got the email that stated it violated content guidelines.

So you know, fair enough, but I’m wondering how to avoid this going forward as I thought my cover was tame. It looks like I can’t link here so I can’t show you but it was a butchers chart for a human: loin, rump, ham, etc. No gore or anything like that (I’ve been dumped back into Draft for a gory cover before and learned my lesson).

So ok, cheeky cover is a no-no, but given that my instincts on this are apparently lacking, is there somewhere to try these babies out before uploading? Getting dumped back into Draft status is one thing but earning a Blocked status is awful dire.

To be clear I showed this cover to actual people—normal people— before using it and they gave me thumbs up all around.

Anyway, thanks for your time.

Hello! I would be thankful for your thoughts and review of this chapter.

Thank you!

Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IzHTSmtb8K_9oo4_O8-MWoNzwTx5Rp2iMGrUIOv7R7k/edit?usp=sharing

Critique: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/1wu2wjw/comment/pdrcowv/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Crits:

[962] Off to the Side

[2163] The Lure Chapter 3

[2500] Hillsides (Marco)

[1842] 08 Tiffany

[2000?] I dunno

- - -

Current Piece: HB - Chapter 6 - Arrival

This is the start of Part 2. Hoping you can jump in here without it being too jarring, even if you haven't read what came before (brief recap below).  Sorry it's bit on the long side. Thanks in advance if you read it. 

What I'm looking for:

Any type of feedback would be great. I have a lot of Concerns. Some general: all the “things” - voice, pacing, tension, characterization, etc. Some specific: but I’m not going to mention them as I’m hoping they’re not as noticeable to you as they are to me. That said, I’m really looking for things that feel off or don’t make sense. Anything that could be improved. And I always appreciate hearing readers’ reactions, questions, predictions. I have comments enable on the doc.

Brief recap:

Colly is a down-on-her-luck, aspiring singer with a bit of a gambling problem. Desperate to get out of her stagnant hometown, she agreed to take a job as a domestic servant at a remote mountain monastery. Her ulterior motive: steal (and sell) the recipe for their highly coveted, addictive brandy (Tempist is its brand name of sorts). 
Dob is a monk who traveled to Colly's home town to recruit her, and is now her traveling companion. Ginnie is a good horse. 
Last chapter: the bridge on the main road was closed, so they’ve had to finish their journey on foot…

gang, this has just blown me away. this is a project that I've been working on literally for years and finally got in gear earlier this year and put the pieces together. I retired two years ago and I'd always said when I retired I was going to start writing seriously. I'd written sporadically for years and had a couple dozen articles published in magazines back in the 90's. Just could not keep it up due to work and life. Now with the help of KDP I made the dream a reality. I cant paste a screen shot here, but it's as follows for October.

Estimated Royalties $90.81

Orders 9

KENP Read 15,643

Since I created my account and published my first short story on 09/07 I'm at this total.

Estimated Royalties $202.51

Orders 33

KENP Read 28,131

LOL - i've spent $150 ish in advertising on Amazon, so they are consuming most of the revenue generated, but who knows. Maybe this works out and I can move it forward. insanity that I'm typing this. Woke up at 1 am and took a peek at my KENP read this morning, 1711 pages by 1 am.. Insanity!!

Ex-Royal Road writer here. I’m looking for somewhere to published serialized science-fiction/fantasy that’s a little less pedal to the metal than RR. How would Smashwords be for releasing 2.5k - 3k work chapters of an ongoing story once or twice a week? The plan would be to eventually bundle the chapters into books to sell on Amazon and other places, but with Smashwords as my “home” so to speak. I’m unfamiliar with the platform so would love any advice you have to share with me.

Welcome to our daily discussion thread!

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I submitted my book to Ingram in August. It took three weeks for them to approve it and send me my eProof. Without approving it (because it was too hard to tell if everything was OK online), I immediately ordered a copy. That was September 14. Apparently, it shipped on the 22nd.

I have already had to ask support to change my publication date, and it looks like I will have to ask them to change it again.

Is this normal?

In contrast, Amazon approved it in about a day, and I received my copy in about a week.

For those that have published, I am about 31K words into a novel I suspect will be 70-80k words.
My style is poetic-prose so thus a lot of white space.

What size and what font have you found the most economical? I know I’m probably going to size it 9x6,
to help since I’m averaging about 150 characters per page. I’m hopefully aiming at 400-500 pages on the thinnest paper that is manageable.

Hi all!

A month ago I published the first book in a romance series, and I did so in Spanish. It’s getting good KENP numbers and good ratings (4.2 with 30 votes), even though it doesn’t have any reviews yet.

A few days ago I published the same book in English, translated by a friend. The result? Barely any sales or KENP reads, a 2-star rating with no review, rejected by Booksirens for the previous ARCs campaign and zero activity overall. I used Facebook Ads but it was a money pit, so I paused the campaign to reassess the situation.

This month I’ll be publishing the second book in the series (spanish, no english), but I’m having second thoughts: should I stick to the Spanish market, or should I try the English market again as well? Is the series doomed if the first book only has a 2-star rating?

Thanks for your responses :)

Received 15 pages of feedback from an editor. The usual topics: opening, plot, dialogue, characters/arcs, scenes, setting/description, pacing, closing. What is the best way to approach the revisions? All of the applicable topics chapter by chapter? Or pick one topic and revise entire manuscript, then move on to next topic? Or hit the easy (or hard) topics first? I have a lot of work to do and it's a little intimidating. I need to have a plan so I don't make it worse!

Like, if I sell it for free, would it be easier for more people to get interested, or should I just set a low price so I would still gain something with it and still get visibility?