When you’re just getting started with self-publishing, you’re faced with a lot of decisions all at once. Do you want to publish exclusively on Amazon? What formats do you want to publish your book in? How much do you budget for all of this? etc. It can be overwhelming, so I’m going to try to […]

Book covers are undoubtedly the most important part of a book, second only to the writing. Cliché as it sounds, everyone does judge a book by its cover. Which is fine, because that’s literally what it’s there for! The cover doesn’t just exist to physically cover the pages of a book, it figuratively covers the

Short answer: no. Long answer: usually not, although it depends. Piracy is a loaded topic for many of us in the self-publishing industry. The reason is obvious: every time a reader downloads an illegal copy of one of our books we have lost out on a royalty payment. But, is it really that simple? Probably

This is possibly one of the most divisive topics in the self-publishing community, so this is going to be another long post. As with most complex topics, it’s best to start at the beginning. What even is KU? If you’re an avid reader of ebooks, and your Amazon Kindle is your ereader of choice, you’ll already

Coming into this, you probably already have a goal in mind. You have this manuscript sitting on your hard drive, and you crave to see it made into a book which you can hold in your own two hands. A physical manifestation of all the hard work you’ve poured into it. And that’s great! A

As an author looking to publish your books, you’ll come across a plethora of options. Some sound more enticing than others, depending on what your goals and expectations are. The 21st Century Author is all about self-publishing, so I may be a little biased. Still, there are a lot of potential pitfalls out there which

It’s tough being a new self-published author. There are a ton of things out there which experienced publishers take for granted, but which don’t seem all that obvious to a newcomer. Other articles of this sort tend to focus on really practical aspects of publishing (having an amateurish book cover, for example), but I wanted

A lot of the people who come to me for advice or publishing services are first-time authors looking to publish their first book. I remember how overwhelming this experience can be, merely from a practical standpoint. Of course, when I had to figure all of this out back in 2012, I was doing it to

Welcome to the 21st Century Author Blog! For this very first post, I wanted to introduce my vision for what this site means to me, and what I hope to achieve here. Please bear with me 🙂 The publishing industry has changed tremendously during the 20th Century. Especially the invention of computers and the internet