This wasn’t a recent milestone. On one of the 25 operating Ford assembly lines, sometime during the day, the one millionth Ford Model T rolled out of the factory and into the light in 1915.
Focus, long term commitment and sheer hard work, every day, are what have enabled Joanna Penn, bestselling author, professional speaker, entrepreneur and UK ALLi advisor, to pack so much into the five years since she entered the sphere of self-publishing. The remarkable achievements of this authorpreneur have just earned her a place among The Guardian’s Top 100 Creative Professionals 2013, so it’s a timely occasion to ask her to share the secrets of her success.
Jeremy Greenfield (Special for USA Today) has posted a new article on the USA Today website about how new firms have sprung up to help writers get their ebooks published:
In the spring of 2010, Amanda Hocking, a social worker from Rochester, Minn., uploaded several books she had been working on to Amazon.com. In the first weeks, she sold a few dozen copies — success for someone who just wanted to have her work read.
In the next few months, she published several more manuscripts, and soon, the sales started piling up. By the end of the summer, Hocking had made enough money to quit her job, and in January 2011, she sold “an insane amount of books,” she said, estimating the total at 100,000.
Mary Isokariari has posted on Young Voices about Lloyd Harry-Davis, 16, who “juggles studies with writing works of fantasy fiction.” She writes:
AN ENTERPRISING teenage author has self-published a series of urban fantasy novels.
Lloyd Harry-Davis, a 16-year-old first year sixth-form student at St Dominic’s Sixth Form College in Harrow, northwest London, wrote his first book Preternatural at the age of 12 and completed the second a year later.
“Having registered that digital is the busy end of the business, I realised I could do more, and faster, on my own”
Anthony Hayward posted on The Guardian today about his adventures in self-publishing. From the article:
Last year, ebook sales in the United Kingdom more than doubled, as did their share of the entire books market – to almost 15%. Despite an understandable reluctance on the part of many readers to join this revolution (and in time it might well prove to be that) ebooks are here to stay – so why not embrace them and discover the advantages?
As a journalist and author myself, I have done just that. After writing more than 20 books, with major publishers behind them, I have found it increasingly difficult to get new ideas accepted. It is also frustrating as a writer to have a non-fiction book that is up-to-the-minute when “completed”, only for it to come out maybe nine months later and seem slightly dated.
