How to write a book
▶️ Brandon Sanderson (yes, THE Brandon Sanderson) teaching at Brigham Young University. Start with lecture 1 (Youtube)
→ has everything, easy to understand, funny, and totally saved one of my books. Good for both planners and pantsers!
📚 Steven King on how he wrote his books and his life story On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Book)
→ more anecdotal, and mainly for patnsers (you are a pantser if you have to write the first draft to know what book you created, or you have a plan and then the book comes out differently. I am a pantser)
* A note on plot (from me): there are two popular overarching structures:
1. The Arc (Alice in Wonderland, Twilight) an inciting incident (Alice meeting the Rabbit) drives the plot all the way to the climax (sentence with the queen) and then everything falls.
2. The W or M (Lord of the Rings) The book has two parts. We meet the characters and then things start to really go bad and rise before the middle (meeting Galadriel). Then in part 2 they they go bad again and only rise toward the ending. This is the W structure. The M is a variation of it that is used for tragedy: in each part things go great and then crash, with the biggest crash being the sad ending.
→ much easier to use and for readers to follow than the Arc, gives the book a strong structure (this works for both the resources above)
How to know what to write – to sell
📚 How to know which topics (not tropes) are ever-green and always sell – 7 FIGURE FICTION by T Taylor (book)
→ easy with lost of examples, teaches you what things people are always keen to read and find inside a book
📚 How to identify trends in your genre – Write to Market by Chris Fox (book)
→ great for learning how to find the bestselling tropes and for writing what the readers in your genre want. For the research part, save time by using KLytics database (service)
Categories and Authors research
🌐 Chrome extension that tells you how each book is doing in: categories and Amazon author pages and book pages – including number of copies sold, how much they make, also has option to download to excel. KDSPY (paid once)
How to publish a book
📚 How to go from manuscript to a published book The Naked Truth About Self Publishing (book) – read chapter 1
→ written by 6 millionaire self published authors this was my go-to getting started. It included listings of editors, cover designers, formaters etc.
* A note on how I currently do it:
I have been with my copy editor and development editor since the beginning, and only outsource editorial jobs of a special nature (for example: I worked with an editor who was a lawyer to rewrite the court scene in Dragon Fire – she’s listed in the copyright credits page, I also had a Jane Austen specialist for Darcy’s Spell – listed in the thank you paragraph).
I currently format my own books by uploading first to Draft2Digital and then making changes in Sigil.
Covers
I now do my own covers (see below), and then use 🌐Coverfixer for their incredible experience and AI tools to do the finish. If I need a cover done from scratch I use 🌐Damonza.com
For all covers!
please use a resource that tracks market trends and lists the best covers for your genre (nobody would buy a romance book with spaceships on the cover, right…) here is my favorite: KLytics database (service) – each genre has a page full of covers of the hottest books of the last year, updated, which you can send to your designer
Do your own covers:
If you want to do covers yourself or save money by ordering the kindle cover and doing the backcover yourself: this is my photoshop teacher: Karin Koala (teacher)
I currently make covers using AI + a designer (see the AI section below)
How to launch a book + Promo Sites
▶️ How to launch a new book as a beginner, including building a website, getting a newsletter started, and how to use promo sites starting from zero by David Gaughran (free course)
→ He also lists very good promo sites in the above course.
🌐 The biggest promo site is Bookbub, and though expensive has brought authors into the USA Today bestselling list (note: if you’re on Kindle Unlimited, the USA list request a certain number of books sold outside of amazon, so either go wide, or sell print): Bookbub featured deal (service)
* I currently use Bookbub New Releases for Less (a different service they offer), when I launch a first book in a series on $0.99. It gets better results than other options. And for a promo where the first book is $0.00 I use the Freebooksy (service) for whole series.
Important!
Generally every time you pay for something (ads, promo sites etc.) the main book you’re advertising (number 1 in a series) needs to be $0.99 or Free, because that’s what you will be competing against.
How to grow your newsletter + Giveaways
▶️ I can’t find the original link but I think this is the same video on youtube: Nick Stephenson – building your author email list (youtube)
What’s there in a nutshell:
You will need a reader’s magnet – this is a free book that you write and offer for people who subscribe to your newsletter. You put the link as a popup on your website and at the end of every book. Best method to deliver the book is bookfunnel. There, you also join promos with other authors in your genre, which dramatically grows your list. And you can meet author buddies to promote each other’s books personally in your newsletters to get exposure. You also run giveaways yourself, listing them on something that makes it go viral like Kingsumo or Rafflecopter and promote them on Giveaway Frenzy (all links are services). When you list the giveaway use a different email list than your subscribers. Thank everyone who joins with a link to join your subscribers list and get your free book; also list the free book on one of the extra credits of the giveaway (like join my facebook page, instagram etc.) as a link to click and call it “get a free book”.
Some authors have found success with Goodreads Giveaways, but in my experience, that didn’t go beyond Goodreads own website (feel free to correct me on this one)
You can get subscribers lists from providers where you and other authors each give one free book and you all get the list of everyone who subscribed for the giveaway. I got far better results advertising the free book myself on Facebook (very cheap results per download and I got readers who are really interested in what I write and not just the generic genre). What I did: ad on facebook – leads to my ads-only website where facebook pixel is installed and tells facebook who clicked to download and who didn’t – download link redirects to the download page on bookfunnel.
* My current newsletter provider is Sendfox, because it’s FREE! I paid once $250, and got up to 250,000 addresses. I choose to pay for a monthly add-on of $10/month which is nothing in comparison to market prices. It also integrates with Kingsumo
How to get reviews
🌐 Get a review team started and managed for you: Booksprout (service)
→ best and least expensive among their competitors for my main genre (Urban Fantasy). I go for the mid-range plan and always list older books every time I have a launch. My reviewers list keeps growing with people who like my specific style and I normally launch with a few high quality 4-5 star reviews. They do the chase up so I never have to manage anything. I always thank 5 star reviews personally.
Other options include: booksirens and Netgalley
🌐 Cheap way to try out Netgalley: Netgalley co-op (service)
How to do ads
Disclaimer: I’m still testing this. These are recommendations from 7-figure authors I follow
Warnings:
1. Profitable ads are very hard to do as a beginner. They work mostly for long series with thousands of ratings for book 1 where you make the money back when people read through the series, or for large bundles on Kindle Unlimited where the page count is high. You’re competing with free or 0.99 books with thousands of star ratings by established authors who can afford high ad spend.
2. Big Problem with facebook ads is how to feed back to facebook what is working! Facebook doesn’t know what ads get you sales. Only what ads people like to click.
Optional solution: Facebook pixel (a code facebook gives you to install on a website/online shop that feeds back to facebook). If you’re only using Amazon Attribution tags (Google this thing, or read below book by Ricardo Fayet) you will know which ads are selling, but facebook will still have no information and won’t “learn” over time how to help you. For selling direct: I a pixel on Payhip store (see Sell Direct below); for Amazon books: I trained facebook but getting a new website just for ads and put another pixel there. The cost was high, but it “trained” my account.
For things like blurb testing I still use different landing pages on my website, without the pixel- that’s how I know they actually read the blurb and didn’t just click the picture and all saw the same blurb on Amazon.
📚 How to do Amazon ads and how to set up Amazon Attribution:
Amazon Ads for Authors by Ricardo Fayet (book),
(Almost) Everything You Need to Know About Amazon Ads (for Romance), by Nicholas Eric– pdf of class transcript
Author Unleashed: by Robert J. Ryan (book)
🌐 Free Amazon ads course on Kindlepreneur with Janet Margot
▶️ How to do facebook ads by Nicholas Erik, the man who got Lee Savino and Renee Rose to the millions – (Almost) Everything You Need to Know About Facebook Ads for Books in 2025 (free course)
And also his how to test audiences in 2025
▶️ How to find winning facebook ads by competitors How To Use The Facebook Ad Library To Find Winning Ads (Step By Step Tutorial)
▶️ Facebook maths in 5 miutes (free – I posted this inside a facebook group)
Amazon Attribution Tags
Important Note! For ongoing Facebook campaigns (after the initial test phase): consider listing in each campaign all the books in the series (I also list related books if two series are linked) – to track read-through and know how much your ad/promotion is really selling.
How to sell direct
🌐 easy set up of online store for selling your ebooks and audiobooks directly to readers: Payhip (service)
Social media
I am currently testing the Kate Hall method on Tiktok – look for the hooks course (paid)
I’m also contemplating my return to Youtube, which is where I feel comfortable interacting because it’s where people see my face.
🌐 For everything else: scheduling and managing posts, I use sociamonials.com (service) – which I bought once for $69 and never paid again (far better than the competitors) – I mainly use these sites as message boards.
Dispelling Limiting Beliefs
Since this one comes up A LOT in authors and other entrepreneurship groups.
📚 How to dig deep and get rid of limiting beliefs as a woman Rich as F**k by Amanda Frances “everything that says I can’t have what I want needs to be regarded as a big, fat lie.”
📚Removing limiting beliefs about making money from books Write to Riches by Renee Rose
🌐 How do challenge thoughts and remove any limiting belief from the root – The Work by Katie Byron
AI
Left this last because I believe no machine can ever replace a human, and this is a tool to complement knowledge and skill and not to replace it:
🌐Descript AI – for editing videos, voice and avatars, image generation, description, and creating shorts out of full videos based on what’s hot on social. Paid subscription. Contains various AI modules like sora2, nono banana, chatgpt2, etc. ▶️Video on how to us it by millionaire Venassa Lau
🌐 ChatGPT – I use this for asking questions and creating prompts for other AI programs like Descript AI. For reports and analyzing data (but always checking and correcting its work)
🌐Gemini – image to text when I need it (because Chat GPT sometimes fails)
🌐Claude – if I’m not sure about a strategic advice I got from ChatGPT for example “should I keep certain ad targets that do x% if they also do…”
🌐Bing AI Image generator – disclaimer: for covers (mentioned above) I use coverfixer.com to have a human designer clean up my cover to reach market level. For imgaes it uses GPT-4o and Dall-E. If you need a short video, it uses sora2.
🌐Hedra – for making avatars speak and lip-sync. I use it to create my bat kitty
How I make covers with AI help + a designer:
- 🌐 KLytics database (service) I study my genre—checking top covers and blurbs to make sure I’m hitting the right subgenre and visual trends.
- AI tools to generate images: I have 🌐 Descript AI for editing my videos which gives me a bunch of external tools. I analyze covers I like with ChatGPT, then ask it which of the Descript tools to use and to write me prompts (this can take 1-2 hours to get images sometimes, but there is minimal editing afterward)
- 🌐 Photopea (free) or Photoshop – I build a rough draft from the images I created. For text, I use a template I created before.
- 🌐Coverfixer – once I have a solid draft, I send it to a designer for a professional finish.
PR
I am currently looking for an equivalent in my genre, but other authors in romance recommended Valentine PR for launches (service)
Everything else you need to know
🎧 The creative Penn podcast, with over 1M subscribers, bringing up to date information on how to succeed in self publishing, including AI resources Podcast, her resource page (webpage)
🎧 older podcast by millionaire authors who interviewed industry professionals and shared their own methods Six Figure Authors (podcast)
🇫facebook group for authors where 6-7 figure authors answer beginner questions: Millionaire Author Mastermind – managed by Lee Savino and Renee Rose (Facebook group)
▶️ older vids, but great teacher for business online: explains in easy to understand way everything techy like facebook ads, google ads, how to do youtube. Kevin David (youtube)
▶️ teaches how to launch and manage internet business from a perspective of funnels (when one page leads to another) and pages that convert – Russell Brunson founder of Clickfunnels (youtube)